The Revolutionary Kant: A Commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason

The Revolutionary Kant A Commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason

Graham Bird

The Revolutionary Kant A Commentary on the

Critique of Pure Reason GRAHAM BIRD

OPEN C O U R T Chicago and La Salle, Illinois

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bird, Graham, 1930The revolutionary Kant : a commentary on the Critique of pure reason / Graham Bird, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8126-9590-8 (trade pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8126-9590-9 (trade pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804. 2. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. I. Title B2798.B57 2006 121—dc22 2005036614

Contents

xi

Preface

1. Introduction

1

1. Contemporary Commentators 2. A Cartesian Idealist Framework 3. Aims and Methods

8 10 13

PARTI T H E PRELIMINARY APPARATUS: PREFACES AND INTRODUCTION

19

Introduction to the Preliminary

21

Apparatus

25

2. The Two Prefaces 1. 2. 3. 4.

The A Preface: Three Interrelated Themes The B Preface Comments on the Two Prefaces Explicit Changes in the Two Editions

3. The Introduction

26 29 34 46 49

1. The Central Claims 2. Comments on Kant's Analytic Apparatus v

49 53

Contents

VI

4 . Synthetic A Priori Judgments 1. A Posteriori/A Priori

63 64

2. The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction

69

3. Synthetic A Priori Truth

71

4. Kant and Kripke

77

5. The Transcendental/Empirical Distinction 1. Transcendent and Transcendental

83 88

2. Empirical and A Posteriori

89

3. Kant and Carnap

92

PART II THE AESTHETIC

97

Introduction

99

to the Aesthetic

6. The Transcendental Aesthetic

103

1. Introduction: Metaphysical and Transcendental Expositions

105

2. Conclusions from the Expositions: General Observations

109

7. Space, Time, and Perception

117

1. The Perceptual Vocabulary

117

2. The "Blindness" Problem

126

3. The Nature of Kant's Project: Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Psychology

130

8. Space and Time in Experience and in Mathematics: The Metaphysical and Transcendental Expositions

137

1. The Metaphysical Expositions

137

2. The Transcendental Expositions: Space, Time, and Mathematics

150

3. What Do the Arguments in the Metaphysical and Transcendental Expositions Achieve?

156

Contents 9. Kant's Theory o f the Sensory Contribution to Experience

vii

165

1. Kant's Immediate Conclusions

165

2. Kant's Initial Comments and Provisos in the General Observations

178

3. Concluding Summary

185

1 0 . Two Residual Issues from the Aesthetic: Sellars's and McDowell's "Myth o f the Given"; Prolegomena § 1 3

193

1. Myths of the Given

193

2. Prolegomena §13

207

PART III T H E ANALYTIC OF CONCEPTS

221

Introduction

223

to the Analytic of Concepts

1 1 . Kant and Skepticism 1. Skepticism and Skeptical Method

229 230

2. Kant's View of Skepticism and Common Sense

234

3. Transcendental Arguments and Skepticism

239

4. Kant's Positive Response to Skepticism

248

1 2 . The Transcendental Analytic and Metaphysical Deduction

255

1. Two Preliminary Comments

255

2. The Metaphysical Deduction

263

3. Some Criticisms and a Concluding Summary

270

1 3 . The Transcendental Deduction ( 1 ) 1. Two Preliminary Sections: §13 and §14

277 278

2. The First Edition Transcendental Deduction

282

3. The B Transcendental Deduction

295

Contents

viii

1 4 . The Transcendental Deduction ( 2 ) : Three Procedural Issues

307

1. The Two Steps of the B Deduction

307

2. The Distinction between a "Subjective" and "Objective" Deduction, and the Appeal to Psychology

313

3. Modest and Ambitious Accounts of the Transcendental Deduction: A Preliminary Survey

320

1 5 . The Transcendental Deduction ( 3 ) : Conceptual Unity

331

1. The Textual Case in the Deduction

331

2. Reality and Objectivity in the Transcendental Deduction

348

1 6 . The Transcendental Deduction ( 4 ) : Personal Unity

365

1. Comparison with the Cartesian Cogito

366

2. Consciousness, Self-consciousness, Unity, Identity

369

3. The Epistemology and Metaphysics of the Self

378

PART IV T H E ANALYTIC OF PRINCIPLES

387

Introduction

389

to the Analytic of Principles

1 7 . The Analytic o f Principles 1. Preliminaries

393 395

2. The Principles and their Proofs

402

3. Implications

409

4. Parities and Disparities between Inner and Outer Sense and Their Objects

413

1 8 . The Mathematical Principles

417

1. Axioms of Intuition

418

2. Anticipations of Perception

429

3. The Mathematical Principles and Mathematics

436

Contents

19. The Three Analogies of Experience

ix

445

1. The First Analogy

445

2. The Second Analogy

455

3. The Third Analogy

472

20. What Do the Analogies Achieve?

479

1. Ambiguities in Kant's Conclusions and Arguments

481

2. The Positive Argument

490

21. The Postulates and Refutation of Idealism

501

1. The Postulates of Empirical Thought

502

2. The Refutation of Idealism

505

22. Concluding Sections of the Analytic of Principles

523

1. On the Distinction between Phenomena and Noumena

525

2. The Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection

539

23. The Wider Theoretical Context of Kant's Appeal to Things in Themselves

553

1. Adickes's General Position

555

2. Approaching the Textual Evidence

556

3. Concluding Summary

576

4. A Note on Karl Ameriks

580

PART V

T H E TRANSCENDENTAL D I A L E C T I C AND T H E D O C T R I N E O F M E T H O D

587

Introduction to the Transcendental Dialectic and the Doctrine of Method

589

24. The Apparatus and Philosophical Therapy of the Dialectic

593

1. The Vocabulary and Structure of the Dialectic

594

2. Wittgenstein's and Kant's Philosophical Therapies

609

3. Therapeutic Anti-Platonism and Quietism

618

Contents

X

2 5 . The Paralogisms 1. The Arguments in the Paralogisms A and B 2. Questions and Criticisms 3. Immunity to Error through Misidentification 2 6 . The Mathematical Antinomies 1. 2. 3. 4.

The Architectonic Structure The Formal Proofs The Cosmological Issues Implications for Transcendental Idealism

625 627 644 654 661 662 664 670 680

2 7 . The Third Antinomy: Freedom o f the Will

689

1. The Conflict in the Third Antinomy between Freedom and Cause 2. Kant's Resolution of the Antinomy 3. Persons, Morality, and Transcendental Idealism

690 698 712

2 8 . The Fourth Antinomy, Ideal, and Appendix t o the Dialectic

719

1. Arguments about the Supreme Being 2. Summary of the Dialectical Therapy: The Appendix and the Constitutive/Regulative Distinction

721

2 9 . The Doctrine o f Method 1. The Concluding Account of Philosophy 2. The Ideas of System, Holism, and Nonanalytic Conceptual Dependence 3. The Idea of a Metaphysical Grund for Experience 3 0 . A Concluding Summary o f Transcendental Idealism 1. What is Transcendental Idealism? 2. What are Kant's Real Merits?

727 739 741 744 752 757 758 767

Notes

773

Bibliography

857

Index

869

Preface

I n 1962 when I published Kant's Theory of Knowledge the standard works in English on the Critique of Pure Reason were the commentaries of Kemp Smith and Paton. Even more recent work, such as T. D. Weldon's Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, adopted the commentary style but in a more concise way. Since that time renewed interest in Kant as a live philosophical influence has produced a large number of monographs on Kant with a quite different style. They tend to focus on a particular aspect of Kant's work and to emphasize its philosophical rather than historical significance. Even where such books deal with a single Kantian work such as the Critique of Pure Reason they may focus on only a limited range of its texts in order to underline a philosophical issue. Even where they provide a comprehensive outline of such a Kantian text they rarely comment on it in the detail of those earlier commentaries. That new philosophical interest in Kant is a welcome development but it has brought some disadvantages. It would not be surprising if some standard accounts of Kant, widely used in teaching, had become so influential that they were treated as a substitute for Kant and generated discussions which had little relevance to his views. My belief is that discussions of the first Critique have, for these reasons, become increasingly detached from the text and from Kant's own thought. It has consequently seemed natural to me, and not objectionably regressive, to return to the earlier commentary style and to pay a more detailed and comprehensive attention to the text. This is not the first, and will certainly not be the last, call to get "back to Kant's text," but it is not intended to focus on the text and its historical background to the exclusion of current philosophical interest. The aim remains the same as in Kant's Theory of Knowledge, but I seek also to ensure that that philosophical interest matches Kant's own discussion. Almost all the material now included was available to me in the late 1950s and in these areas I simply report and update that earlier work. xi

xii

Preface

On the philosophical side my view of Kant's Critique has not substantially changed, although some work since the 1950s seems to me to throw valuable new light on Kant's position. I do not believe that a sharp distinction between epistemology and metaphysics can be carried directly over to Kant's work, but Kripke's related classification of the "necessary/contingent," "a posteriori/a priori," and "analytic/synthetic" contrasts helps to understand Kant's central account of synthetic a priori judgments. Michael Friedman's account of Kant's philosophy of science and mathematics in Kant and the Exact Sciences has thrown a new light on those aspects of Kant's work. Martin Schonfeld's The Philosophy of the Young Kant has similarly clarified Kant's pre-Critical thought and the change to Critical philosophy in the period after the 1770 Dissertation. Henry Allison's extensive survey of the whole Critical corpus is a remarkable and valuable revolutionary account to which I am greatly indebted. These, and many other, recent works have helped to extend my understanding of the Critique of Pure Reason. The central theme in the commentary is to highlight a conflict between what I call "traditionalist" and "revolutionary" accounts of the Critique. The former ascribe to Kant an exhaustive idealist dualism of mental states, "ideas," and transcendent things in themselves and then note the inevitable tensions and contradictions which arise from Kant's apparent attempts to escape from that tradition. The latter regards Kant as explicitly denying that exhaustive division in his complex contrast between empirical and transcendental forms of both idealism and realism. Such an account relies on a grasp of Kant's central "transcendental/empirical" distinction which is generally dismissed by traditionalists as inscrutable. The revolutionary approach avoids many of the traditional conflicts in Kant because it ascribes almost nothing of the traditional idealist framework to Kant. The traditional inconsistencies which appear when he is represented as both endorsing and rejecting traditional idealism are liable to disappear in the revolutionary account, but the latter is recommended not because it relieves these apparent inconsistencies but because it reflects more accurately what Kant's text says. It has seemed clear to me since the 1950s that there is only one acceptable way of resolving that conflict, namely the rejection of the traditionalist position, reflected in the title The Revolutionary Kant. I have been encouraged in that conviction by the acknowledgement of my earlier view in Henry Allison's and Gerold Prauss's books, but also by the responses of traditionalists. To dismiss revolutionary accounts as merely "anodyne," or as "heroic but misplaced," has seemed to me to reflect little more than a prejudice that Kant, as a traditional philosopher in the eighteenth century, must have accepted the framework he inherited despite his own vehement complaints against it. It testifies to the dead weight of the tra-

Preface

xiii

dition Kant tried to supersede but does nothing to support the traditionalist view. Traditionalists typically claim that Kant's text commits him to a belief in the reality of things in themselves, or noumena, even though this leads to transparent contradictions. That verdict was supported most comprehensively from the text in Erich Adickes's Kant und das Ding an Sich, but even in the 1950s I thought his position mistaken. I did not at that time document my objections in Kant's Theory of Knowledge, but since the issue is fundamental to the distinction between traditionalist and revolutionary accounts I devote some space to Adickes's evidence. It is not my primary intention to appeal extensively to other accounts of Kant but I have noted cases which demonstrate a marked convergence on, or divergence from, my views. The critical comments are mainly directed at undoubted examples of a traditionalist position and at apparent inadequacies in supporting it. The general aim is to show that there can be no justified assumption of Kant's traditionalism, while a detailed survey of the text offers a clear expression of a quite different, revolutionary, position. The commentary style has the advantage of making explicit the detailed textual evidence for its claims, but it has other benefits and other disadvantages. One potential benefit is that in surveying the text in the order of Kant's exposition it provides a step-by-step introduction to his argument. It may consequently be useful in providing students at all levels with such a guide to a notoriously complex and difficult work. It enables students to focus on specific sections without feeling that they have immediately to read all the others, or immediately to pursue in detail the related philosophical issues. The preliminary expositions and summaries of each section offer initial guidance supplemented by separate philosophical discussion. For the reasons given I would like students to be encouraged by the survey to examine Kant's text for themselves and to reach their own view about his final position, rather than to accept the authority of existing interpretations. I would like them, of course, to abandon the temptation to understand Kant in a traditionalist way but I recognize that traditions are inherently hard to dislodge. In this case the embedded tradition consists not only of an orthodox account of Kant as a confused enlightenment idealist but also of a Cartesianism which still haunts contemporary philosophy. Corresponding disadvantages are that the commentary style makes for some repetition and allows less room for further philosophical development. I have tried to minimize repetition but do not expect to have succeeded, and I recognize that there are inevitable restrictions on the further pursuit of the philosophical issues. Kant's views point to many issues which I would like to have pursued but cannot do so within the given constraints. On the other hand, in the context of an account of Kant's philosophy it

XIV

Preface

would be wrong to pursue current developments in philosophy which have no real connection with his views. I gratefully acknowledge discussion, support, and valuable comments from many members of the North American and United Kingdom Kant Societies, but especially from Henry Allison, Sally Sedgwick, Michael Friedman, Gordon Brittan, Howard Williams, and Richard Aquila. I would like to thank the Leverhulme Trust for help with secretarial work, and Cindy Pineo for her patience and guidance in copy-editing.

[1] Introduction

y attempt to understand historical philosophers is a two-way enterprise. It must be anchored in the philosophers' own texts but it may trade on later, and current, philosophical discussion. Fruitful interaction between these will throw light both on the historical figure and on current philosophy but only within certain limits. Too slavish an attention to the text may inhibit philosophical interest; too enthusiastic a link with current work may be anachronistic. These lessons hold for any attempt to understand Kant's Critical philosophy. It is necessary to draw firm, even if not quite precise, boundaries between what Kant actually says, what his words may evidently mean, what we might develop out of his insights, and what goes beyond his own understanding. In particular it is necessary to avoid any sheer prejudice against evidence which puts an historical figure like Kant at odds with his contemporaries. Just as overenthusiasm for current issues may generate anachronism, so commitment to a supposed historical tradition may distort by concealing novelty and originality.1 That is particularly true of historical figures who explicitly represent themselves as revolutionaries breaking away from the very tradition they inherit, and Kant is preeminently such a revolutionary philosopher. Everyone recognizes the revolutionary aspirations of Kant's Copernican experiment, called a "revolution in our way of thinking," (Bxxii) and the new direction implicit in the title Prolegomena to any future Metaphysics conceived as a Science? The question is not whether Kant is a revolutionary but only of the nature and extent of his revolution. In this section I sketch an opposition between two general ways of attempting to understand Kant: the traditionalist which locates him in the previous tradition, and the revolutionary which places greater weight on his evident wish to break with that tradition. Kant's revolutionary aims offer to resolve the central and familiar conflicts in the modern tradition, associated above all with Descartes, between the subjective origins of our experience and its supposed objectivity. That 1

2

1: Introduction 2

has been widely accepted, but it has also been generally thought that his attempt failed. That supposed failure is marked in a spectacular conflict between what Kant calls "appearances" (Erscheinungen) and "things in themselves" (Dinjje an sich). Kant restricts our knowledge and experience to appearances and denies that we can ever attain knowledge or experience of things as they really are in themselves. It would be natural to conclude that such a doctrine pessimistically denies us any knowledge of reality, of things as they really are, and confines our experience to the way those things merely appear to us. It may seem to legitimize only a subjective experience and to reject the very objectivity which Kant claimed to establish. Kant himself was adamant that no such conclusions could be drawn from his account. For him appearances themselves provide the required objectivity, while the claim to know things as they are in themselves is no more than an illusion. Commentators have recognized that Kant deploys a complex apparatus to explain this position, but there is still no agreement about that apparatus or about the consequent understanding of his view. An illustration of such conflicts in understanding Kant is provided by one of his earliest published critics, namely, Christian Garve, and by Kant's response. The two reviews of Kant's work by Garve, supplemented by Feder in 1782-83 (Gottingischer Anzeige von gelehrten Sachen),3 and Kant's response in a letter of 1783 and in the appendix to the Prolegomena are well known, but it is worth emphasizing their central points. In the reviews Kant's transcendental idealism is characterized in the following way: (1) The world and ourselves are transformed into ideas, and all objects originate thereby out of appearances. . . . All knowledge originates from certain modifications of ourselves which we call 'sensations'. . . . If there is a real thing in which ideas inhere—if there are real things independent of us—we know nothing of the least properties of either. Nevertheless we assume, or postulate, objects. (Landau 1991, 10)

Kant's position is said to be: (2) just like Berkeley's in building on sensations as mere modifications of oneself . . . out of which the understanding makes objects. It makes them and creates nature. . . . Just as understanding makes a series of objects out of our sensations . . . so reason aims to extend the series to its initial and ultimate members. But all principles of reason lead to illusion or contradictions if they are extended to establish real things and their properties. . . . (Landau 1991, 10-14) [Our sensations tell us nothing of the real qualities of things; they are only changes in us brought about through certain qualities in the objects which are themselves unknown to us. These modifications appear to us as objects. So a contradiction emerges between sense and reason: The former says: 'There are objects', but the latter says: 'We

1: Introduction

3

know nothing of their properties'; so the existence of things remains doubtful. It is a matter of indifference whether we reduce things to ideas, or transform the ideas into things . . . though the latter conforms better to our ordinary language.] (Landau 1991, 54-55)

Given this background view of Kant it is not surprising that the reviewer reaches the conclusion: (3) (For Kant) it is a fallacy to infer absolute properties of oneself from inner sensations, just as it is to infer bodies from outer sensations. In this way common, or 'empirical', idealism is disarmed; not by proving the existence of bodies but by the disappearance of the benefits associated with a conviction of our existence over that of bodies. (Landau 1991, 15)

Garve's framework is that of a traditional normative epistemology within which Kant is said throughout to adopt a "higher idealism." The discussion makes clear that the central issues concern the justification of our beliefs about outer objects, but there is some unclarity about whether those outer, or independent, objects are regarded by Kant as illusions generated by reason, or constructs generated by the understanding out of our subjective sense experiences. The following claims stand out: Kant's idealism accepts the initial reality of ideas, as sensations or private mental states, and gives the understanding the task of "making" or "creating" objects and nature from this base. But it seems that that creative task cannot be completed by understanding or reason, so that its outcome in genuine knowledge of real independent objects remains doubtfid. If the aim was to establish that antiskeptical conclusion, then it fails, or as the review more discreetly puts it: "[This contrast between appearances (phenomena) and unknowable things in themselves (noumena), leads to unavoidable and unanswerable questions]" (Landau 1991,41, 51). It fails not merely by leaving the existence of such real independent objects dubious, but also by abandoning the traditional idealist security of genuine knowledge of ourselves. Garve's claims stand as an example of traditionalism in virtue of their inherent and exhaustive dualism of "subjective" sensations and real independent things (in themselves) which must be "created" or "postulated" but remain problematic. In what must be one of the first occasions of its use, Garve's phrase "the mind making nature" is intended to capture that traditional dualism as Kant's basic position. But the specific idealist problem occurs within the more general scope of a normative epistemology which responds to skepticism about an adequate foundation for our knowledge. Garve can find only two possible responses to this issue in Kant. Either he appeals to common sense, which is notoriously insufficient, or he returns to a traditional foundationalist idealism. In Garve's eyes such

4

1: Introduction 4

a return is particularly unhelpful in this case since Kant has abandoned the standard idealist certainty of self-knowledge. This is the fundamental idealism which Garve accepts from the tradition and which he ascribes to Kant. It leads, in Garve's mind, to the noted confusions between outer, independent objects constructed by the understanding from sense experiences and illusory objects of reason. The connecting link between these two conceptions arises from the assumption that a construction of the outer world from private sensations will fail and consequently make reference to the objects of that outer world transcendent, that is, objects of reason. The idealist problematic itself puts outer objects, at least initially, beyond the "veil of perception," but if the proposed construction fails then those objects must remain inaccessible, as Kant himself insists. Garve evidently believes that Kant never succeeds in resolving these ambiguities. It was that background idealist epistemology to which Kemp Smith appeals in his claim that Kant was in the end the victim of conflicting tendencies.4 On one side is a Berkeleian idealist tendency to attach a fundamental priority to our subjective sensations as the sole material content of experience in order to generate a justified belief in independent objects. On the other side is a realist tendency to accept the existence and properties of independent objects beyond any experience verifiable in the medium of ideas. Kant is represented as an idealist in the existing tradition seeking to resolve those problems about the existence of independent objects, but falling into confusions about their status either as subjective ideas or as unattainable objects of reason. That assumed normative, idealist dualism of subjective "ideas" and independent, transcendent objects is the core of what I will call "traditionalist" accounts of Kant. After the first review, Kant had an apologetic letter from Garve (July 13, 1783) to which Kant gave a friendly reply (August 7, 1783) with relatively little philosophical substance (Vorlander 1964, 180-99; Landau 1991, 10-17, 34-55). Kant explains that he had objected not to the disagreements but to a persistent tone of disparagement and arrogance which he found in the original review. Beyond that he stresses the twofold significance of representing objects as "appearances" or as "things in themselves," and also the extent of the revolution he envisaged for metaphysics: "If you look again at the whole account you will notice that I am not just reworking metaphysics in the Critique, but developing instead a quite new and so far untried science, namely the critique of a reason which claims to judge a priori." Even in this brief, initial comment Kant expresses his revolutionary intention to break away from Garve's tradition, but in the appendix to the Prolegomena (Ak. 4.372-82) Kant gave a more detailed and more aggressive response with the same general message. I list summarily the central points in that response.

1: Introduction

5

Kant begins by distinguishing two ways of judging such a book as his. In one the current assumptions of metaphysics are endorsed and the new work is judged against that background. In the other it is recognized that the work conflicts with those assumptions on a reasoned basis, and the focus of attention is on the argument against them rather than on the novel conclusions. Kant leaves no doubt that Garve chose the former, inappropriate method rather than the latter. Since Garve's central claims ascribe a traditional, Berkeleian idealism to Kant, in (1) and (2), it is natural to see Garve's ascription of idealism, with the resulting insoluble problems, as Kant's primary target. The reviewer is said not to have grasped Kant's project, for example, in confusing the transcendent with the transcendental. Kant offers as explanations for these failures either Garve's impatience, or his disinclination to reform metaphysics, or his inability to question the assumptions of an unthinking "school metaphysics." This point is repeated several times. The claim that Kant's position depends on the two appeals to common sense and to idealism is said to show Garve's complete lack of understanding in "fighting with shadows." Kant may well have had in mind the passages in (2) above which refer to reason's inability to establish truths about objects. Garve plainly confuses the illusions of a transcendent reason with the constitutive principles of an immanent understandings partly through failing to grasp the contrast between the transcendent and the transcendental (Ak. 4.373n). Since those terms apply both to inner and outer objects, both to "mind" and "world," to treat the transcendental as transcendent is bound to leave Kant, as Garve thinks, without an adequate foundation in either. Garve's complaint of a lack of proof of bodies' existence may have encouraged Kant to provide his new formal proof in the second-edition preface (Bxl) and Refutation of Idealism (B274-79). Kant also complains that the review wrongly objects to his new technical vocabulary, and says that this would be like objecting to Euclid that he provides a needless language to make incomprehensible claims which would be better expressed without it. The comparison with Euclid is an important underlying thought in the Critique. Although Kant distinguishes sharply between mathematics and metaphysics (B740-66), he nevertheless sees significant parallels between them. In a similar way he consciously models his own Copernican revolution on his understanding of methods in natural science (preface, Bxviiin). I suggest later that formal mathematics, and especially Euclidean geometry, provided a model for his own primary project of drawing an abstract map of the fundamental concepts (Grundbegriffe, Elementarbegriffe) in our experience. Kant returns to the issue of idealism in an important passage (Ak. 4.374-76) by sharply contrasting his own doctrine with that of Eleatic idealists up to and including Berkeley. The latter hold that "all knowledge

6

1: Introduction

through the senses and experience is illusion, and truth lies only in the 'Ideas' [Ideen] of pure understanding and reason."5 Kant by contrast holds that "all knowledge of things from pure understanding or pure reason is illusion, and truth lies only in experience." Kant repeats this often misunderstood and sometimes disbelieved claim in Prolegomena §13, that his view is precisely the opposite of traditional idealism, and elaborates this with reference to the treatment of geometry. According to Kant, idealists such as Berkeley treat space as an "empirical idea" known only through experience, while he treats geometry, rightly, as an a priori discipline. This is an important point because it raises the questions How does Kant understand empirical idealism? and What is meant here by the expression "empirical idea"? One answer is that the relevant empirical idealism treats space as an a posteriori idea and so treats formal a priori geometry, wrongly, as an a posteriori natural science. That answer, however, implies that Kant's objection is directed against empiricism rather than idealism, even though the latter is the target on this occasion. Another answer is that the empirical idealist treats space as an "idea" in an empirical sense, that is, as an occurrent mental state from which it would be impossible to obtain an a priori formal geometry. That latter answer is supported by Kant's repudiation of the idealism ascribed to him by Garve with its exhaustive dual contrast between mental sense experiences and transcendent ideas of pure reason, and by paragraph 3 of A24. Kant's considered view of geometry, as of experience generally, is that its objects are neither mere sense experiences nor transcendent. That is how Kant summarizes the contrast between his view and that of the idealists at the start of the passage, and how he presents it subsequently in a footnote (Ak. 4.375). There he associates idealism with Platonism and its Schwarmerei in regarding pure reason as providing genuine knowledge of reality and sense experience as illusion. Kant reverses that verdict in treating the claims of pure reason as illusory and those of the senses as providing truth. For Kant the existence and character of outer, physical objects has to do with the senses and not with a realm of objects of pure reason beyond the veil of sense experience. Objects of pure reason are for Kant transcendent, and beyond our knowledge, but are not to be identified with outer spatial objects in our experience. Kant's powerful hostility to Garve's account yields some conclusions and raises some questions. Garve has failed to understand the extent to which the Critique rejects current metaphysics, and has reached his unfavorable verdict by measuring its claims within and against a framework of traditional philosophy, a "school metaphysics," which Kant rejects. Kant evidently believes that a reviewer should have noticed the intention to reject that framework, and then evaluated the book by considering the grounds for that rejection without assuming previous metaphysics. Such an

1: Introduction

7

attitude expresses the strength of Kant's hostility to the tradition but raises the question how far Kant wished to go in rejecting it. Garve's criticisms are made within the framework of both a normative and an idealist epistemology, and Kant might have rejected either or both of these aspects of the tradition. On one side he certainly rejects a traditional idealism in which knowledge can be only either of the senses and illusory, or of pure reason and transcendent. On the other he rejects Garve's belief that his answer to skepticism appeals either to transcendent objects of reason or to common sense. Garve thought both responses inadequate and Kant evidently agreed. He bypasses idealism in the Refutation of Idealism, which proves the existence of outer empirical objects, not transcendent things in themselves, and he rejects an appeal to common sense against skepticism in the Prolegomena preface. "[Hume's critics] found a more congenial resource, dispensing with any insight, namely the appeal to common human understanding. . . . Properly viewed it is no more than an appeal to the judgement of the masses: a chattering at which philosophers may blush, but where popular wits can criticise and triumph." (Ak. 4.259) Garve's interpretation locates Kant's work in the existing frameworks of a normative epistemology and a standard idealist dualism. It addresses the central skeptical problem of our knowledge of an independent reality but offers a confused and highly dubious resolution of it. It throws up immediately many of the ambiguities and contradictions for which Kant's theory has been traditionally criticized. Kant is supposed to assume a traditional idealism but to offer a theory which rejects it. He assumes that our knowledge can be only of subjective sensory states or objects of pure reason, and yet denies that either can justify knowledge of an independent reality. Kant denies that our knowledge is purely subjective, and yet accepts our ideas or sensations as the only material basis for that knowledge. He rejects any appeal to common sense in answering Hume's skepticism, and yet insists that a commonsense empirical realism is correct. Kant's own response to these apparent inconsistencies is to imply that they arise only because Garve cannot escape from a routine school metaphysics which the Critique questions. In rejecting all previous metaphysics Kant denies that he is working within that assumed traditional framework so that Garve has simply failed to appreciate the extent to which Kant's metaphysics of experience is revolutionary. That metaphysics of experience is well-characterized in the footnotes (Ak. 4.373 and 375) where Kant speaks of his primary interest as "the fruitful bathos of experience" and rejects the schwdrmerische, transcendent tendencies of "proper idealism" and its "windy metaphysics."6 The fruitful bathos of experience which interests Kant evidently contains more than the idealist restriction to subjective sense experiences and transcendent objects.

8

1: Introduction

1. Contemporary Commentators It may be thought that Garve's account of Kant is widely recognized as naive, and that no commentator now ascribes these positions to Kant. Probably few commentators hold exactly the same views as Garve, but many meet the basic requirements for what I have called "traditionalism." These are the underlying framework of a normative, antiskeptical, foundationalist epistemology, and an idealist insistence on the dualism of subjective ideas and transcendent objects in justifying or constructing our knowledge of an independent reality. Some commentators who regard Kant as a classical phenomenalist put more weight on the construction of an independent world out of subjective sense experiences and insist on a similarity between Kant and Berkeley. Others put more weight on Kant's epistemological commitment to the reality of transcendent objects or "things in themselves." But any commentators who emphasize these points within the traditional framework qualify as "traditionalist" as I shall use the term. By the same token, those who deny that underlying framework of antiskeptical normative epistemology with its associated idealist dualism, and who take seriously Kant's aims of rejecting that tradition in order to provide a revolutionary reform of philosophy (Ak. 4.258) I shall call "revolutionaries." That these disagreements still continue among commentators can be seen in the recent publication of James Van Cleve's Problems from Kant (1999) which is determinedly traditionalist, and Arthur Collins's Possible Experience (1999) which is avowedly revolutionary. Van Cleve's traditionalism classifies Kant as an "honest-to-goodness idealist," while Collins, as a revolutionary, denies that Kant is either an idealist or a foundationalist. In later discussions I shall claim that influential commentators such as Guyer and Strawson7 also ascribe to Kant that underlying dualism of subjective ideas and transcendent objects and qualify as traditionalists. They echo Kemp Smith's claim that Kant was the victim of those conflicting tendencies. Strawson does not endorse the view that Kant's position is the same as Berkeley's, but he says on several occasions that "Kant is closer to Berkeley than he (Kant) acknowledges" (1966a, 22, 35). Like Garve, Strawson ascribes to Kant a "phenomenalistic idealism," in which outer objects are "reducible" to representations, and describes it as an "extreme subjectivist" position (1966a, 173). There are, no doubt, more sophisticated versions of idealism and phenomenalism, but this language undoubtedly pushes Kant towards the most basic view of Berkeley's philosophy.8 On the other side of that assumed dualism, commentators such as Garve or Jacobi have represented Kant as committed to the existence of the items contrasted with sense experiences, that is, transcendent objects, "things in themselves," or "noumena." 9 Things in themselves may be

1: Introduction

9

identified, as in Garve's review, with independent physical objects, or may be regarded as an underlying causal factor in our "creation" of such an independent world. Adickes's doctrine of the "double affection" outlines a traditionalist commitment to an unknowable reality of things in themselves as an essential part of Kant's theory.10 The doctrine represents Kant as committed to parallel causal interactions between transcendent things in themselves and minds on one side, and between objects of experience and empirical minds on the other. Kant is represented as endorsing both kinds of causal relation even while admitting that only the latter is knowable. Strawson (1966, 235-38) echoes Adickes's view in noting Kant's causal language both for phenomena and for noumena, but in any case commits Kant to the reality of supersensible things in themselves.11 He says, "The doctrine is not merely that we can have no knowledge of a supersensible reality. The doctrine is that reality is supersensible and we can have no knowledge of it" (1966, 38). Strawson represents Kant's view in Garve's way as "the mind making nature" (1966, 22), in which the mind which makes nature is not the ordinary empirical mind but its supposed transcendent counterpart, the mind in itself. Kant's firm denial of such a view of reality at B195, B270, and B517, 1 2 coupled with his vehement rejection of Garve's similar view, demonstrates the need for some resolution of this evident conflict of interpretation: "The possibility of experience is, then, what gives objective reality to all our a priori modes of knowledge" (B195). Rae Langton, in Kantian Humility, accepts that Kant is committed to things in themselves as transcendent causes of our receptive senses and is consequently led to identify external spatial causes of that experience as such transcendent objects. In her discussion of the relation between appearances, or phenomena, and things in themselves she represents Kant's terms "appearance," or "phenomenon," and "thing in itself' as extensionally equivalent or even identical (1998, 158, 159). In order to avoid, or mitigate, a resulting skepticism about our knowledge of external reality she regards "phenomena" as knowable properties belonging to unknowable things in themselves. This is to assimilate Kant's position less to Berkeley than to Leibniz, for whom underlying monads are the hidden essences, revealed to reason, of the same objects we perceive through the senses in only a confused fashion. It echoes Garve's belief that for Kant to argue for the reality of independent objects would be to justify reason's claims about things in themselves. Kant's persistent denial of such an aim and his devastating criticisms of Leibniz13 yield another apparent conflict calling for an interpretative resolution. Throughout the examination of Kant's text I shall argue for a revolutionary, and against a traditionalist, account of Kant. The claim will be that Kant wished not only to reject traditional philosophy and reform it, but

10

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also to reverse its approach and direction. As a consequence Kant cannot be properly represented as accepting either the framework of a normative, foundationalist epistemology, or Garve's "idealist problematic" within that framework. He does not canvass an exhaustive dualism of inner mental states, "ideas," and independent things in themselves, and does not take reality to be composed of unknowable things in themselves. In line with the passages at B195, B270, and B517, Kant accepts the reality of phenomena, the objects of possible experience, and does not regard them as mere properties of unknowable things in themselves. He does not envisage either a phenomenalist construction of the outer, physical world, or Garve's doctrine of the "mind making nature" in which an unknowable mind in itself outside nature literally creates or constructs nature itself. Kant is concerned, as he says, with the "fruitful bathos of experience" rather than "windy metaphysics," but he does not appeal to common sense against traditional skepticism. He does address some skeptical issues which need to be identified and distinguished, but these are more specific than the blanket skepticism of a normative epistemology, and his method of dealing with them depends upon the reformed framework of his own philosophy I shall argue that that reformed framework is what Paton called a "metaphysics of experience," that is, a descriptive survey and classification of the central, fundamental elements constituting our experience. It provides a metaphysical classification of those elements and relates them in what Kant calls "the web of human knowledge" (B117). It echoes both Kant's conception of a "transcendental topic" (B324), in which those elements are mapped in their rightful locations, and his central task in the Critique of providing an "inventory of all our possessions through pure reason, systematically arranged" (Axx). A metaphysics of experience cannot be wholly divorced from issues in epistemology or psychology, but the claim is that Kant's interest in epistemology is not of that traditional normative foundationalist kind. Nor, as I shall suggest, is Kant a straightforward "honest-to-goodness" idealist.

2. A Cartesian Idealist Framework I earlier identified the tradition which Kant rejected in terms of his distinction between appearances and things in themselves, and a Cartesian distinction between subjective mind and objective world. I have suggested that the familiar conflicts in Kant's position arise primarily from certain assumed ways of assimilating the two distinctions.14 If appearances are located within the Cartesian mind and things in themselves are positioned in the Cartesian world, then Kant's internal problems take a large step towards the intractable inconsistencies noted above. What I have called tra-

1: Introduction

11

ditionalist views may emphasize different Kantian commitments within that framework, but all of them revolve around that dualism of subjective ideas in the mind and transcendent objects independent of it. Idealism, as I indicate later, is an unclear and complex doctrine, but that dualism can be expressed in a generic Cartesian idealism with the following three aspects. (1) A commitment to the priority of our subjective experiences in justifying an objective experience based on them. (2) The identification of a privileged subjective experience which provides a foundational content for knowledge and a distinctive method of psychological enquiry. (3) A consequent debate about the antiskeptical success, or the skeptical failure, of the theories produced in response to (1) and (2). Traditionalist commentators typically hold that Kant is committed to all three features. His acceptance of the terminology of "ideas" (1Torstellung) is taken to support (1) and is linked with the belief, noted above, that outer objects are "reducible" to ideas. His appeal to the transcendental unity of apperception expressed in terms of the Cartesian cogito is held to provide the requisite foundation for knowledge in (2). His transcendental arguments are thought to provide a new, but dubiously successful, method of answering the consequent skepticism in (3). 15 Such a position, as I have indicated, tends also to imply a commitment to an independent reality which goes beyond any possible experience, that is, commitment to the existence and reality of transcendent things in themselves. Such a traditionalism often includes other important claims which I have not so far stressed. Kant's arguments may be thought objectionable in confusing appeals to psychology, logic, semantics, and epistemology, and his classifications, say between sense and understanding or duty and inclination, may be criticized for being too rigid and inflexible.16 His distinctive conception of philosophy as "transcendental" is sometimes thought too obscure to be of help in understanding his claims or arguments.17 Revolutionary opposition to any account which locates Kant in that Cartesian tradition may, however, appeal to other aspects of the Critical position. The Refutation of Idealism canvasses a priority of outer experience over inner in evident and conscious opposition to (1). The differences between Kant and Descartes in their appeals to the cogito converge on the Paralogisms section which severely criticizes (2). Kant's generally dismissive attitude towards philosophical skepticism casts doubt on the role of transcendental arguments outlined in (3), and his persistent, robust denial of transcendent knowledge importantly qualifies any commitment he may

12

1: Introduction

have to things in themselves. The collateral claims may be rejected by regarding Kant's distinctions as not rigid or inflexible, or by insisting, as Kant patently does at B80-81, on the higher-order, transcendental nature of philosophy. What is distinctive, and new, in Kant's transcendental project may be understood without confusing psychology, epistemology, logic, and semantics, and without commitment to traditional idealism. If we think of ( l ) - ( 3 ) as a traditional package, then there is clear evidence that Kant did not wish to take it for granted, and did not intend his own work to be an unqualified contribution to it. There is indeed clear evidence in his repeated claim to provide a revolutionary new direction for philosophy, in its detailed specification of the Copernican experiment at Bxvi, and in his vehement response to Garve that Kant quite consciously wished not merely to change previous philosophy but to reverse it, to turn it completely round. The Copernican revolution is a radical revision of earlier philosophy and a reversal of its previous direction; it rejects the assumption that "all our knowledge must conform to objects" in order to test the supposition that "objects must conform to our knowledge." Earlier I suggested that the question was not whether Kant advocated a revolution in philosophy but how radical his revolution was. These points indicate that we cannot exclude the possibility that the revolution aimed to reject the traditional package ( l ) - ( 3 ) , to reform philosophy and lead it into more fruitful forms of enquiry. An acceptance of these qualifications to the traditional package defines a revolutionary approach to Kant's philosophy. In recent times revolutionary interpretations of Kant have had greater prominence and articulation. Works by Allison, Prauss, Paton, Weldon, Walsh, Pippin, Gordon Nagel, Collins, and Abela, as well as my own Kant's Theory of Knowledge, have contributed to the development of such an alternative account.18 These representatives, like the opposed traditionalist commentators, do not agree about every aspect of Kant, but they share a firm recognition of the transparent absurdities of the traditionalist position and an unwillingness to ascribe it to Kant. They have generally recognized the provisos with which Kant distances his own view from the tradition. Among these are the formal account of the contrast between appearances and things in themselves, the special character o f transcendental enquiry, and the attack on, and reversal of, the tradition noted above in the Copernican experiment, the Refutation of Idealism, and the Paralogisms. But the disagreements between traditionalist and revolutionary commentators remain unresolved. The former will say of the latter that they provide only "anodyne,"19 or overcharitable, accounts of Kant, "deviant interpretations" which may seem "momentarily attractive . . . but cannot for long be held to represent Kant's views" (Strawson 1966, 235-36). Kant insists that appearances are "mere ideas," that we "impose"

1: Introduction

13

laws on nature, and that the a priori principles which govern experience are "in the mind," or "in us." All these expressions are to traditionalists so clear a commitment to noted aspects of Garve's account that it would be merely perverse to deny it. Revolutionaries on the other side may point to the provisos Kant makes about each of these expressions. Outer appearances, items in space, are plainly not mere ideas and not merely "in us" in any ordinary sense. Kant evidently believes that such characterizations are compatible with an empirical realism which endorses legitimate knowledge of outer, spatial objects. To note these points is to recognize the need to ask in what sense Kant insists that all appearances are "mere ideas" and not "things in themselves," and how exactly such a claim is compatible with empirical realism. Even traditionalist philosophers have sometimes recognized that Kant uses "idea" (Vorstellung) in different ways, but they have not usually identified the differences correctly.20 Similarly, it is also necessary to ask what is meant by saying that we "impose" laws on nature, or that our a priori knowledge is in some way "mind-dependent." If the traditionalist regards revolutionary accounts as perversely anodyne, the revolutionary can complain that the former has not bothered to ask, or seriously to answer, those further questions. What to revolutionaries is a potential conflict in Kant's text which calls for such interpretative enquiry is to a traditionalist no more than a terminal incoherence.

3. Aims and Methods The aim here is twofold; first to survey the whole text of the Critique, and second to show how such an interpretative enquiry supports a revolutionary rather than traditionalist account. The first aim is designed to guide students in their reading of Kant, and also to be explicit in showing what is taken as significant in Kant's text and what is left out. It will make clear to critics whether important items have been overlooked or disregarded. The second aim recommends an interpretative style which takes seriously the attempt to explain the familiar apparent conflicts in Kant's text. Unlike the method of "fighting Kant tooth and nail," this interpretative style is intended to learn something from the apparent tensions in Kant's text rather than simply to add them to the list of Kant's inconsistencies (Bennett 1966, viii). There are occasions when an apparent conflict is so striking that we should be forced to think seriously about its significance, and this is often the case with Kant. Such apparent conflicts may usefully be regarded not as decisive objections but as indications of the need for further consideration of the issue; not as a terminus to enquiry but as its starting point.

14

1: Introduction

An interpretative effort of this kind seems especially appropriate for historical philosophers, and yet in Kant's case it has often taken second place to the identification of his supposed mistakes. This may be because analytic philosophers have been typically more interested in evaluating the logic of an argument for some view than in establishing exactly what that view is. Here, by contrast, the primary interpretative effort is directed towards establishing what Kant's position ^rather than either criticizing or defending him. It seems evident that one cannot criticize, defend, or evaluate some view until it is clear what that view is, and traditionalist and revolutionary accounts of Kant are disagreements about precisely that. The primary goal here is to identify and understand Kant's position, and only then to offer an evaluation of it. I have suggested that Kant's revolution in philosophy must be radical if we take his own goal seriously. He says at the start of the Prolegomena (Ak. 4.255): "My aim is to convince all who concern themselves with metaphysics that it is indispensably necessary to set aside your previous work, and to disregard everything that has happened before in order to face the preliminary question: Is metaphysics possible at all?" Kant demonstrates in this way a powerful opposition to the tradition he inherited, and throws some light on one of his contentious claims. In the first-edition preface Kant notoriously made the following optimistic assertion: "there is not a single metaphysical problem which has not been solved, or for the solution of which the key at least has not been supplied" (Axiii). That comment has generally been taken to represent little more than arrogance on Kant's part, and on the traditionalist account that conclusion is inevitable. But I shall suggest that if we insert the term "traditional" between the words "single" and "metaphysical" the claim expresses fairly, and more modestly, Kant's intended break with the past. That, after all, is how philosophy appeared to Kant in the 1770s during the period after the Dissertation when he began to recognize the need for his revolution in and reform of the subject. To accept the truth behind that optimistic claim is not to accept everything Kant says or to free him completely from his historical position. It is only to begin to recognize adequately the extent of the revolutionary new direction which he advocated for the reform and future progress of philosophy. To recognize Kant's intended radical break with his past is an antidote to the historical interest which locates him in that past and fails to recognize the novelty of his approach. There are dangers in treating Kant as if he were merely a product of his historical background, but there are also dangers of reading into his work contemporary ideas which are anachronistic. To recognize Kant's innovations is not to license a general ascription to him of current doctrines. There are places where Kant genuinely anticipated recent views, such as his claim in the Metaphysical

1: Introduction

15

Deduction that judgments have a priority over their constituent concepts. His firmly anthropocentric attitude throughout the Critique indicates some form of what we recognize as relativism. I shall argue that Kant's metaphysics of experience and transcendental topic have close affinities with what has been called a "descriptive" rather than "normative" metaphysics, and that his distinction between the empirical and the transcendental has some connections with Carnap's later views. I will claim that Kant's synthetic a priori classification of judgments, often thought indefensible, can draw some support from Kripke's complex classifications. And I will argue that Kant's major critical attempt to diagnose and correct errors in the philosophical tradition shares that therapeutic aim with Wittgenstein. There are other places where such anticipation may seem plausible but cannot be sustained. Kant deploys the Fregean terminology of Sinn and Bedeutung in talking generally of meaning, and yet his terminology has none of the articulation or depth of Frege's. The same point can be made more generally for recent attempts to fit Kant into contemporary views of meaning. In the 1960s commentators ascribed both semantic verificationism and an associated phenomenalism to Kant, but these attributions are now widely understood to be misconceived.21 More recendy, semantic debates about "externalism" or between truth-conditional and assertionconditional accounts of meaning have been associated with Kant. The latter issues may seem particularly close to Kant if they are linked respectively to "realist" or "antirealist" accounts of meaning and truth. If "antirealism" is characterized as a form of idealism, the connection with Kant may seem inevitable and illuminating. But just as Kant's terms Sinn and Bedeutunpf have nothing of Frege's background articulation, so his form of idealism has none of the articulation of contemporary antirealist doctrine.22 Kant has no formal conception of effective decidability, or of nonclassical logics with distinctive attitudes to bivalence and the law of excluded middle. At best these semantic doctrines are developments of Kantian hints, and at worst they are ascribed to him only anachronistically. Since this is a commentary, it follows the course of Kant's own text rather than that of its central themes. The hope is that the summary exegesis of each section will support, and encourage readers to pursue, the more philosophical development of a revolutionary interpretation, and I now summarize some of the distinctive aspects and locations of that interpretation. (1) I represent Kant's revolution as a rejection of a normative, justificatory epistemology in favor of a descriptive metaphysics of experience. The aim is to map in their rightful places and relations the Grundbegriffe, including a priori intuitions, of our experience. The

16

1: Introduction aim follows Kant's own accounts of the "inventory" in the preface (chapter 2) and of the "transcendental topic" in the Amphiboly (chapter 22). That initial account of the preface can be usefully read in conjunction with the concluding account of the Doctrine of Method in chapter 29. Kant's project, understood in this way, has implications for both empiricism and skepticism. (2) Kant regards dogmatic rationalism as the childhood of a metaphysics which matures under empiricist scrutiny into the Critical philosophy (B789). He regards empiricism as an unstable intermediate phase which cannot answer skepticism because it fails to recognize the existence of a priori elements in experience and their synthetic a priori judgments. Kant's analytic apparatus in the introduction (chapters 3, 4) is designed to prepare for that correction to empiricism, and for the later arguments on the a priori status of the fundamental intuitions, concepts, and principles governing our experience. (3) Kant's inventorial, descriptive project also has implications for skepticism. Its descriptive stance neither endorses nor refutes skepticism but the resulting map of experience provides grounds for correcting those skeptical assumptions, in idealism and empiricism, which Kant specifically targets. Since he evidently thinks that skepticism derives from empiricist assumptions, the correction of empiricist assumptions in (2) is bound to question at least that form of skepticism. In chapter 11,1 consider Kant's approaches to different forms of skepticism and note his unargued dismissal of a general, idle skepticism and his approval of what he calls "skeptical method." One of his characteristic reversals of the tradition is an acceptance of scientific knowledge coupled with a skeptical doubt about philosophy's authority to question science. (4) Among Kant's central, but inadequately understood, distinctions is that between the "empirical" and the "transcendental." To describe his philosophy as "transcendental," and to note the persistent references to "transcendental" as opposed to "empirical" accounts of some element in experience, is not meaningless or vacuous. In chapter 5,1 outline Kant's threefold contrast between the empirical, the transcendental, and the transcendent, as an antidote to commentators who regard the terminology as hopelessly obscure and unhelpful. I argue that a failure to appreciate this distinction, along with the failure to recognize the nature of Kant's project under (1) and his correction of idealism in (5), are among the chief reasons for ascribing traditionalist views to him.

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17

(5) At the heart of Kant's enquiry are refutations of traditional, empirical idealism and its replacement with his own transcendental, formal idealism. Just as Kant seeks to identify what is right and what is misguided in empiricism, so he attempts to locate what is right and what is wrong in idealism. The discussion addresses the consequent treatment of the doctrine in the Aesthetic (chapter 8, 9), Analytic (chapter 13, 15, 16) and Dialectic (chapter 26, 27). It is generally understood that Kant's own corrected idealism regards experience as "mind-dependent," but it is rarely explained what "mind-dependence" means. In those chapters I clarify Kant's conception of mind-dependence, and note its different aspects in the Aesthetic, Analytic, and Dialectic. I reject the naive account of "the mind making nature." (6) Traditionalist accounts of Kant claim that he is essentially committed, as an integral part of his metaphysics, to the existence of transcendent objects, things in themselves or noumena. In chapters 10 and 23,1 argue, against that view in general and Adickes's detailed support for it, that Kant is not committed to the existence of things in themselves but only to their conceivability. The transcendental contrast between "appearances" and "things in themselves" is widely discussed in terms of so-called two aspects and two worlds accounts. I argue that these labels are misleading and should be dropped. Kant's discussion of transcendental Ideas (Ideen) in the Dialectic makes that conclusion clear and points in the Third Antinomy (chapter 27) to the importance of the practical, moral dimension in experience. To reject Kant's commitments to traditional empirical idealism and to the actual existence of things in themselves is the basis for a revolutionary and more accurate picture of what is distinctive in transcendental idealism. (7) The claims in (l)-(6) correctly represent Kant's primary interest in the "fruitful bathos of experience," rather than in the tradition's "windy metaphysics," and the Dialectic continues and reinforces that interest. It is difficult to understand how commentators can ascribe to Kant traditionalist commitments to the existence of things in themselves in the face of his uncompromising criticism of those pretensions of pure reason in the Dialectic. In Garve's case the attribution rested on clear misunderstandings of Kant's project and apparatus in (4), but there is less excuse for contemporary commentators who have shared in the twentieth-century criticisms of metaphysics associated with Russell, Moore, the logical positivists, Wittgenstein, and Austin. Like Wittgenstein Kant provides a

1: Introduction diagnosis and therapeutic treatment for philosophical, dialectical illusions. He also provides, more clearly than Wittgenstein, a more positive account of the role of transcendent, especially practical, Ideas as part of his inventory (chapters 25, 27, 28).

P A R T

I

The Preliminary Apparatus: Prefaces and Introduction

Introduction to the Preliminary Apparatus: Prefaces and Introduction

two prefaces and the introduction oudine Kant's primary aims and construct an analytic apparatus to clarify them. Both aims and apparatus have been extensively debated and criticized, and I give here a summary indication of the way they can be explained. The prefaces can usefully be read in conjunction with the concluding part of the Critique, the Doctrine of Method (B735-884), and I note some points where that reference is helpful. In chapter 2, I outline and comment on the two prefaces, and in chapter 3,1 summarize the principal claims in the Introduction. Chapter 4 offers an account of Kant's hybrid synthetic a priori classification, and in chapter 5, I consider the less obvious, but equally important, distinction between the "empirical" and the "transcendental."

1. The Prefaces Kant's aims are often seen as a contribution to a traditional normative epistemology in which certain foundations are claimed to provide a justification for our conventional knowledge. His belief that we have a priori knowledge may be seen as a way of identifying those foundations, and his transcendental idealism may be seen as a way of locating those foundations within the mind. Traditionally Kant's position has been described as that of the "mind making nature," where the assumption is that we can be certain of nature's characteristics simply because we construct them. In more or less sophisticated ways that background has been represented as Kant's answer to a traditional skepticism about knowledge. That picture, however, is at odds with Kant's background view of skepticism and with the prefaces. Kant makes plain that he embarks on his project not in order to justify knowledge in the sciences but in order to rehabilitate philosophy itself by modeling it on science. The suggestion is that skepticism is properly directed not by philosophy against 21

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Apparatus

other disciplines but against philosophy and its supposed authority. A central part of Kant's project is the Copernican experiment in which we are to consider the implications of supposing that we contribute to knowledge of objects rather than that objects impose their features on us. That experiment is plainly designed to support and elucidate Kant's belief that we have a priori knowledge, but the success of the experiment, as Kant outlines it (Bxix), is not the restitution of ordinary or scientific knowledge, but the resolution of contradictions in traditional philosophy. The experiment succeeds, according to Kant, not by justifying our conventional knowledge against a skeptical challenge but by rehabilitating philosophy and directing it onto a new, reformed path. These indicators cast doubt on the claims that Kant accepts the framework of normative epistemology and is a straightforward contributor to it. Those claims may even conceal Kant's stated revolutionary goal, which is to establish through an inventory the a priori structure of our experience. In place of normative justification and the search for indubitable foundations Kant offers a descriptive survey of the fundamental elements in our experience. Kant rejects virtually all traditional theories in normative epistemology such as dogmatism and skepticism, empiricism, rationalism, and idealism, which suggests that the rejection depends on their assuming that ambitious normative framework. The aim of Kant's metaphysics of experience is first to identify the a priori elements—the intuitions, concepts, and principles—which form the structure of our experience, and then to use the results to evaluate those traditional doctrines. The outcome may in the end support a dogmatic rationalism or a skeptical empiricism, or it may show that both are mistaken and should be replaced. Understood in these terms, Kant's Critical alternative to those theories is not another rival version of that traditional epistemology but a rejection of its general framework coupled with a new direction for philosophy

2. The Analytic Apparatus in the Introduction Kant's analytic apparatus for identifying a priori elements in experience has two initial resources. First, the appeal to an "abstraction" or "isolation" procedure, and, second, the construction of a new judgment classification, the synthetic a priori. In the former Kant proposes to take our unreflective experience and to isolate and distinguish the diverse elements it contains. That attempt distinguishes particularly those elements which belong to sensibility or to understanding, those that are a posteriori or a priori, and those that are analytic or synthetic. These divisions are not comparable in every respect. The analytic/synthetic distinction applies only to judgments, but the a

Introduction to Part I

23

posteriori/a priori distinction is applied to judgments, to concepts, and to intuitions. The division between sensibility and understanding is applied to particular ideas or concepts rather than to judgments, but in the Dialectic Kant also distinguishes principles belonging variously to understanding and to reason. To support the new judgment classification Kant offers separate criteria for the analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions from which the hybrid "synthetic a priori" is constructed. The underlying motive is to make room for a classification which marks Kant's opposition to previous philosophers, especially empiricists, who allow only one classification and conflate the a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic distinctions. In admitting synthetic a priori judgments Kant gives a sense to "a priori" which empiricists characteristically reject. Although the apparatus has this underlying philosophical motive it is, and should be, introduced in a formal and neutral way. That formal introduction has been heavily criticized. The criteria offered to distinguish the complex subsidiary classifications are extensive and conflicting, but it is important to focus on the primary criteria rather than merely to criticize the peripheral and informal accounts. The claim is that the a posteriori/a priori contrast depends on the different types of warrant used to ground those judgments, and that the analytic/synthetic contrast turns on two related criteria to do with meaning and contradiction. These criteria have also been criticized from two opposite directions. One group accepts the empiricist claim that there is only one classification, generally the analytic/synthetic, and regards Kant's synthetic a priori novelty as inconsistent. Another rejects both subsidiary distinctions and consequently also dismisses Kant's hybrid. A third group, including Kripke, allows room for classifications which go beyond the one-dimensional contrast between analytic and synthetic. Kripke's classifications provide hybrid forms similar to Kant's synthetic a priori judgments, and are compared with Kant's position to see how far they validate it. The claim is that synthetic a priori judgments do not hold in all possible worlds but that their truth can be determined a priori, that is, without empirical evidence.

3. The Empirical/Immanent/Transcendent/ Transcendental Distinctions Kant has another important distinction which runs through his discussion in the Critique and is mentioned but not extensively clarified in the introduction. At B25 he introduces a distinction between the empirical and the transcendental which is explained again briefly at B80-81 and used throughout the Aesthetic and Analytic. Despite the fact that Kant regards

24

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his own revolutionary philosophy as distinctively "transcendental," he provides a careful account of the distinction only much later in the Dialectic (B352-53). Partly because the apparatus is poorly exposed it has often been regarded as mysterious and unfathomable, but it is just as central to Kant's reformed philosophy as the analytic/synthetic and a posteriori/a priori distinctions. I have consequently provided in chapter 5 an explanation of this additional apparatus even though it involves reference to later passages in the Critique. The term "transcendental" has a history in the development of philosophy before the Critique, and it is useful to begin to see how that historical use changes in Kant's hands. For Kant there is a crucial distinction to draw between "transcendental" and "transcendent" even though it has been misunderstood by Garve and by others afterwards. The background helps to explain why Garve failed to acknowledge the contrast, and why Kant was so exasperated at that failure. Kant importantly has a threefold distinction between the empirical or immanent, the transcendental, and the transcendent, and not simply a dual contrast between the empirical and the transcendent. It is also sometimes assumed that when the term "empirical" is used in opposition to "transcendental" it means "a posteriori," and that Kant's use of the terms "transcendental" and "transcendent" is inconsistent. I argue that these claims should be corrected, and that an adequate understanding of the distinction is essential for Kant's project. Later particular instances are given of the misunderstandings that can arise from these failures to grasp Kant's threefold contrast.

[2] The Two Prefaces

T h e two prefaces deserve to be considered separately, for there are some clear differences between them, but Kant makes it plain that the new edition does not mark any change of substance. He says that the B text is a "more intelligible exposition" which, however, alters "absolutely nothing in the fundamentals of the propositions put forward, or their proofs" (Bxlii). He speaks instead of correcting "misunderstanding in regard to the Aesthetic, obscurity in the Transcendental Deduction," a "false interpretation" placed on the Paralogisms, and of adding further support in the proofs of the Principles (Bxxxviii; see [4] below). It is in this rather peripheral context1 (Bxxxix) that Kant adds in a footnote the famous reference to the scandal to philosophy that the existence of outer objects has not yet been proved, and to his proof in the new Refutation of Idealism (B274-79). The B preface is longer and wider in scope than the first. Even if it marks no substantial change in Kant's views, it deploys new ways of expressing them. It contains a new review of disciplines which have achieved what Kant now calls "the sure path of a science," and it introduces the famous idea of a "Copernican experiment." Although these images are not present in the A preface, the ideas they represent are. The former expresses Kant's aim to effect a revolution in philosophy which will properly establish its methods and its limits, and this is already contained in A. The latter is used to express the central theme of A, namely an enquiry into the possibility and range of a priori knowledge. In B, Kant elaborates the technical contrast between "appearances" (Erscheinunjjen) and "things in themselves" (Dinge [or Sachen] an sich), and extends his discussion of that distinction beyond the theoretical realm to that of the practical or moral. He is led to make the famous claim that he has to "deny knowledge in order to make room for faith," and points in this way to the Third Antinomy about freedom (B566-86), which makes the transition from the epistemology in the first Critique to the moral philosophy in the 25

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second. And in B, but not in A, he has that much-quoted reference to the philosophical scandal of so far failing to prove the existence of outer objects. Kant's own assessment of these changes, that they do not alter the substance of Kant's position, seems to be correct.2 Beyond these differences of expression, however, there is a clear difference of attitude. The A version is more optimistic and terser, and reflects a belief in the accessibility of Kant's ideas. By contrast B is less optimistic and more defensive. It shows less confidence in the accessibility of those ideas, no doubt as a result of the critical reception of the first edition.3 By 1787 Kant could have been in no doubt that his ideas were more revolutionary than accessible, and the comments of reviewers such as Garve undoubtedly contributed to this conclusion. Kant explains that in the new edition he sought to remedy the many misunderstandings into which even acute thinkers have fallen in passing judgment on the book (Bxxxvii). He must have reflected, somewhat ruefully, on the even wider range of misunderstandings which will have afflicted the less acute readers.

1. The A Preface: Three Interrelated Themes 1.1. The Character of Philosophy Kant's central aim throughout the Critique is to investigate the possibility, scope, and limits of philosophy or metaphysics. In A the motives for such an enquiry are located first in the peculiar, nonempirical character of its questions, and second, in the deplorable current state of the discipline. The former is initially explained in terms of certain abstract questions which arise out of science but are not answerable by any empirical scientific enquiry. Later examples of such questions are the issues in the Dialectic about the "simple nature of the soul," and the "necessity for a beginning of the world" (Axiv). The former is one of the problems in the Paralogisms (A341^05), which arises out of psychology, and the latter, one of the Antinomies (A405-567), which arises out of cosmology. These problems are represented as subject to no empirical test and so encourage us to resolve them by accepting principles which transcend the limits of experience. The higher-order question that then arises is: When are we entitled to canvass and accept such transcending principles? This question is formally put and answered finally in the Dialectic at B362 and B69 3-94. Since philosophy claims to provide answers by appealing to such principles, the question can be put by asking: How is metaphysics possible, and what are its scope and limits? The second motive is a consequence of the first. It might be expected that if there is no clear way of separating experience-transcending princi-

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pies which are legitimate from those which are illegitimate, there will be endless disputes and confusion about the underlying issues. Kant claims that this is indeed so and uses the contrast between dogmatist and skeptic to demonstrate the resulting confusion. Dogmatists are those who claim to resolve the experience-transcending problems by appealing to general principles without satisfactorily explaining their justification (Bxxx). Skeptics are those who think those claimed resolutions are inadequate and so cast doubt on our ability to achieve any such knowledge. Since Kant believes that a shoulder-shrugging indifference is not a serious option, this oscillation in philosophy between dogmatic overoptimism and a consequent skeptical pessimism needs to be stopped in some reasoned way.4 We need to find out what, if anything, we can know independently of experience, that is, what we can know a priori. Since philosophy itself claims to be an a priori, rather than empirical, discipline such an enquiry can guide us towards an understanding of its scope and limits.

1.2. Two Faces of Reason The projected enquiry concerns the scope of reason, which evidently has both legitimate and illegitimate roles, both uses and abuses. Kant associates reason with logic in what may be regarded as a legitimate use and speaks also of the "misunderstandings," such as those in the Antinomies, where "reason comes into conflict with itself' (Axiv). Kant says of these misunderstandings that it is "the duty of philosophy to counteract their deceptive influence," and adds that it is entirely beyond his power to "extend human knowledge beyond all limits of possible experience" (Axiii-xiv). Reason, like logic, has a transparency which allows us to investigate its role directly and with completeness, and it can require both certainty and clarity in its claims if they are to be accepted as a priori. It is in the context of completeness that Kant makes his claim for the Critique: "I venture to assert that there is not a single metaphysical problem which has not been solved, or for the solution of which the key at least has not been supplied" (Axiii). This is an ambitious expression of the revolutionary intention to scrutinize and reform previous metaphysics, but it is, as he suggests, more modest than those dogmatic philosophers who pretend to establish truths beyond all possible experience. The appeal to philosophy as an a priori discipline leads Kant to an important proviso, namely that although psychology cannot be eliminated from his enquiry into reason, nevertheless its role has to be qualified in two ways. The first indicates that a psychological investigation such as Locke's in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding is not what is required (Aix). The second is that in a central part of the text, the Deduction of the

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Pure Concepts of the Understanding, the subjective, psychological aspect of the argument is not strictly essential to it (Axvi-xvii). Both provisos importantly distance Kant's enquiry from empirical psychology. There is a general problem, considered later, about the role of psychology in Kant's transcendental project, but these provisos firmly distinguish the two disciplines.5

1.3. An Inventory of Pure Reason So far Kant's account of his project is indeterminate and negative. It is to investigate reason and metaphysics in order to assess their limits; it is a higher-order enquiry into the possibility of a priori knowledge in metaphysics which distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate uses of reason; and it is quite different from such a psychological enquiry as Locke's and from that of the previous philosophical tradition. In the final pages of the A preface Kant offers a brief but more positive account of the project. After repeating that metaphysics alone of the sciences has the opportunity to complete its task, he describes it thus: For it is nothing but the inventory of all our possessions through pure reason, systematically arranged. . . . What reason produces entirely out of itself cannot be concealed, but is brought to light by reason itself. . . .The complete unity of this kind of knowledge and the fact that it is derived solely from pure concepts . . . make this completeness not only practicable but also necessary. (Axx)

The metaphor points towards a project in which the a priori elements in our experience are properly identified and described. It answers a complaint in Leibniz's "Of Universal Synthesis and Analysis" where he says: "But as things are man's knowledge of nature seems to me like a shop, well stocked with goods of all kinds, but lacking any order or inventory."6 Later in B Kant explicitly endorses just such an account of his project (B5-6), but in the opening pages of A he does not elaborate it any further. It is, however, worth making two initial points about it. The first is that Kant evidently does not think of his inventory merely as a list. The idea is also to describe the relations between these a priori elements, to locate and classify them properly in their relations with each other, and to show how such a network governs our developed human experience. Kant is more explicit about these relationships in B: pure reason, so far as the principles of its knowledge are concerned, is a quite separate, self subsistent unity, in which, as in an organised body, every member exists for every other, and all for the sake of each, so that no principle can safely be taken in any one relation, unless it has been investigated in the entirety of its relations to the whole employment of pure reason. (Bxxiii-xxiv)

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The passage underlines what is evident independently, that Kant's account of experience is holistic, and not atomist. The second is that he typically uses other metaphors which may seem to point in a different direction. In the preface (Axii) he introduces the pervasive legal imagery in which reason is brought before a tribunal of enquiry (cf. B731-32). Elsewhere throughout the Critique he also deploys a range of geographical, cartographic, and navigational metaphors (e.g. B294-96) which fit better the image of an inventory than that of the legal process. The descriptive metaphors indicate Kant's view in the Prolegomena preface (Ak. 4.262) that we need a map to find our way around experience, not as a practical exercise but as a philosophical guide towards the role and location of our central concepts and the relations between them.7

2. The B Preface 2.1. The Sure Path of a Science As in the A preface, Kant represents his central aim as that of establishing metaphysics on a proper, "scientific," basis. In B, however, he uses a claimed analogy with the "intellectual revolutions" which have put the established disciplines of formal logic, mathematics, and natural science on a "sure path" (Bxii). Such a revolution, marking progress from a "mere random groping" to an established method, is needed for metaphysics itself and can be modeled on the success of those sciences. Kant uses again the A image of contemporary metaphysics as a futile battleground of "mock combats" in which no progress is ever made to support the need for a revolution (Bxv). Though the sciences provide a model for philosophy, Kant is clear that metaphysics cannot be a science of just the same type as either mathematics or natural science. Metaphysics, for example, "rests on concepts alone," unlike mathematics, which rests also on intuitions (Bxiv; see also Axx quoted above). The intellectual revolutions in established sciences such as Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics provide a qualified model of what is needed in metaphysics (Bxviiin). Later I will indicate how Kant appeals to more specific aspects of that model in his own metaphysical project. It is worth adding a note to Kant's claim at Bxiv that metaphysics rests on concepts alone. It has been claimed that this is not to be taken at face value as an account of Kant's own conception of metaphysics and that Kant means here only that dogmatic rationalist philosophy rests on concepts, and that this is a fundamental error. It is true that Kant rejects inferences from truths about concepts to claims about supersensible objects, and

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regards this as a basic philosophical fallacy of dogmatic rationalism. It is also true, however, that Kant thinks of his own philosophy as dealing in concepts, as he repeatedly emphasizes in this passage, throughout the Doctrine of Method, and elsewhere (B740-766, and Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Ak. 4.469). 8 Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts. (B741) There is a transcendental synthesis from concepts alone . . . with which the philosopher is alone competent to deal; but it relates only to a thing in general, as defining the conditions under which the perception of it can belong to a possible experience. (B747)

Kant's complaint about dogmatic philosophers is not that they deal in concepts, which is unavoidable, but that their dealings misuse concepts by inferring fallaciously to corresponding objects. The central difference between mathematics and philosophy is that the former may draw conclusions about its objects of intuition, while the latter cannot draw such conclusions about objects of experience. Part of the misunderstanding arises from the parochial assumption that "truths about concepts," or "conceptual" truth, can mean only "analytic" truth. Kant plainly holds not that philosophy consists of analytic truths but that it necessarily deals with concepts in mapping their relations to each other. Some expressions of those relations qualify as synthetic a priori rather than as analytic truths. Even when the issues concern space and time as intuitions in the Aesthetic, it is their concepts which philosophers have to elucidate, as Kant points out.9 For Kant philosophy is not analytic but it is conceptual and does rest on concepts alone. The error of dogmatic rationalism is not to deal in concepts but to misuse them.

2.2. The Copernican Experiment In elaborating how that scientific model of intellectual revolution can be applied to metaphysics, Kant appeals again to the A idea of determining what can be known a priori, but now he uses the Copernican analogy to express the point more forcibly Copernicus's "first thought" or "experiment" (Bxvi-xvii) is represented as explaining the observed movement of "heavenly bodies" by appealing to the motion of the observer. In a similar way, the suggestion is, we might experiment with the supposition that a priori knowledge is due to features of the knower. The scientific and the philosophical cases share a reference to two different standpoints (Bxviiin, von zwei verschiedenen Seiten betrachtet) and a change from one point of view to another (Bxxiin, eine Umtinderung der Denkart, "a revision or

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reversal in our way of thinking"). Kant expresses this dependence on the knower in different ways: Hitherto it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects. . . . We must therefore make trial if we have more success . . . if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. (Bxvi) understanding has rules which I must presuppose as being in me prior to objects being given to me, and therefore as being given a priori. . . . we can know a priori of things only what we ourselves put into them. (Bxvii-xviii) nothing in a priori knowledge can be ascribed to objects save what the thinking subject derives from itself (Bxxiii)

These claims advance Kant's view but also raise questions. What is a priori has some "subjective" reference, but what is it to be "subjective" in this way? The "subjective/objective" contrast, one of the most opaque in philosophy, may seem to echo a traditional idealism, and yet when Bxvii-xviii speaks of "rules of understanding in me," does this mean anything more than that such rules have to be grasped by subjects? An idealistic background may make it seem appropriate to ask, if Kant restricts himself to individuals' subjective experiences, with what right can he also speak collectively of what "we" suppose, or of what "we" can know? Similarly to speak of rules "in me" may seem to equate "a priori" with "innate," and yet we know independently that Kant denies that equivalence and rejects innate knowledge (B168; Ak. 8.202; Ak. 10.123-30). Kant associates reason and the a priori with a certain transparency, but a priori disciplines such as logic or mathematics may be said to be transparent or self-evident without supposing that this reflects a Cartesian access to the mind. The Copernican example, after all, does not reduce planetary motion to the observer's consciousness in an idealist way. It is rather that the physical motion of the observer is an essential part of the explanation of his conscious perception and of the real world of the solar system. The parallel would be not that Kant proposes to reduce objects, or the rules they obey, to a subject's consciousness, but that he treats the latter as a vital part of the explanation of the former. Again, in the light of Kant's examples of scientific revolutions it may seem as though he is offering a thesis on scientific method, and there is no doubt that he rejects an empiricist, overly passive, and observational account of scientific theorizing.10 But it is also clear that Kant is offering a much wider claim about the role of a priori principles throughout the whole of experience whether scientific or not. The envisaged "revolution" is a change in our conception of philosophy as well as in that of science; it is a radical change in our way of thinking which offers to reverse traditional philosophy.

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2.3. Limits to Possible Experience11 The new Copernican metaphor begins to elaborate Kant's conception of the a priori and raises important issues, but on one central negative point it reinforces the A account. Kant claims that his experiment succeeds and yields the "startling" conclusion that "we can never transcend the limits of possible experience" (Bxix). In A, Kant had resorted to the irony of disclaiming any competence on his part to transcend possible experience, but now the limits fall out as a consequence of the experiment. The experiment refers again to the Dialectic and the Antinomies, the "conflicts o f reason with itself," but Kant now expresses it in terms of the distinction between conceiving objects ^appearances and ^things in themselves. T h e experiment will depend on which of these interpretations yields, and which resolves, these conflicts, but Kant's answer is not in doubt. He believes that contradictions arise if we interpret objects as things in themselves, and vanish only if we interpret empirical objects as appearances. If on the supposition that our empirical knowledge conforms to objects as things in themselves we find that the unconditioned cannot be thought without contradiction, and that when . . . we suppose that our representation of things, as they are given to us, does not conform to these things as they are in themselves, but that these objects, as appearances, conform to our mode of representation, the contradiction vanishes. . . . what we assumed for the purposes of the experiment is . . . definitely confirmed. (Bxx-xxi)

Kant later spells out such an experiment in the context of the Third Antinomy between causal mechanism and free will (Bxxvii-xxviii). The conflict arises, he claims, only because "I have taken the soul in both propositions in one and the same sense, namely as a thing in general, that is, as a thing in itself." If, however, we follow the Critique in taking "the object in a twofold sense, namely as appearance and as thing in itself," then there is no contradiction. In this way Kant connects his experiment both with the earlier claims about a priori knowledge and with the later discussion of the contrast between "appearances" and "things in themselves." The restriction to appearances confines our knowledge, even a priori knowledge, to possible experience, and enables us to resolve the contradictions in the Antinomies. Another new factor is added in B. Although any such reference beyond possible experience cannot constitute knowledge, nevertheless we may pass beyond those limits "from a practical (moral) point of view" (Bxxi). In this context it is "necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith" (Bxxx). Even if we cannot know free will as a thing in itself, the twofold conception of "object" enables us to reconcile causal mechanism and free will. Kant sums this position up at Bxxix:

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The doctrine of morality and the doctrine of nature may each, therefore, make good its position. This, however, is only possible in so far as criticism has previously established our unavoidable ignorance of things in themselves, and has limited all that we can theoretically know to mere appearances. . . . Morality does not indeed require that freedom should be understood, but only that it should not contradict itself.

The restriction of knowledge to appearances is intended to safeguard freedom and morality from the objections of causal determinism, but at this stage it is not clear how this is to be achieved in the resolution of the Third Antinomy, discussed in chapter 27.

2.4. Appearances and Things in Themselves In the A preface the distinction between appearances and things in themselves had scarcely emerged. There Kant firmly insisted on a restriction of even a priori knowledge to possible experience, but it is only in the B preface that that restriction is associated with the contrast between appearances and things in themselves. The term "appearance" marks the distinctive contribution which the senses make to experience in providing objects of intuition (Bxxv-xxvi), and reflects Kant's fundamental contrast between sensibility and understanding formally introduced only later at B29. If this change in B reflects Kant's assessment of the distinction's importance then it is certainly apt. The contrast between appearances and things in themselves is one of the most important in the Critique, and its diverse interpretations lead directly to two opposed accounts of Kant's position, the traditionalist and the revolutionary. In the B preface Kant introduces the device but cannot resolve its ambiguities. Two points can be noted. First, "appearance" and "thing in itself' are in some way correlative terms. Kant argues that we cannot intelligibly have the former without some reference to the latter: But our further contention must be duly borne in mind, namely, that although we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in a position to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears. (Bxxvi-xxvii)

The "objects" which we may think of as things in themselves and know as appearances are what Kant calls "objects of experience." To know such objects only as appearances is to restrict knowledge to possible experience, but Kant evidently wishes to introduce the distinction so that we cannot think of or know objects as appearances without also being able to think

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of them as things in themselves. It is not required, indeed it is impossible, for us to know objects as things in themselves, but without the possibility of thinking of them as things in themselves the notion of an appearance would be absurd; it would be the notion of an appearance which is not an appearance "of" anything. Kant provides in this way two initial motives for the introduction of his term "appearance." Syntactically it already makes a reference to something which appearances are "of," and philosophically the necessary conceivability, but unknowability, of things in themselves as correlates of appearance is required to resolve the Antinomies. Later it becomes clear that Kant envisages a complex fourfold distinction between empirical appearances and their objects, and between transcendental appearances and their correlates. Second is the significant qualification which Kant immediately adds to that claim, namely, that the contrast does not for us identify two different kinds of object, but only two different ways of conceiving or considering objects, either as appearances or as things in themselves. Kant reinforces that proviso by insisting that it is the same objects of experience which are so differently conceived (Bxxvii): "Now let us suppose that the distinction, which our Critique has shown to be necessary, between things as objects of experience and those same things as things in themselves, had not been made." Throughout this passage Kant repeatedly speaks of "taking the object in a twofold sense [Bedeutunjj]" that is, as appearance or as thing in itself, and so indicates that the terms function as higher order, philosophical characterizations of those objects of experience or knowledge (Bxxvi-xxix). It is natural to insist that the descriptions are intensional, not extensional, references to those objects, in which the former are governed by different philosophical views about their status. That is a reasonable first approximation to what Kant has in mind, but it becomes clear that such a view is not entirely correct. The idiom undoubtedly reinforces the idea that we cannot use the descriptions to identify different objects but only two different ways in which philosophers have characterized the general status of objects of experience. Commentators have consequently distinguished a "two worlds" or a "two aspects" account of the terminology.12 The former treats appearances and things in themselves as belonging to two distinct worlds; the latter treats them only as two ways of conceiving one world. The issue is contentious and needs to be examined in the light of many later passages, but in the summary I offer an initial resolution of that disagreement.

3. Comments on the Two Prefaces Kant's prefaces are only preliminary accounts of his position which point in certain important directions but do not yet fully explain his view. I dis-

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cuss the central themes under two headings, 3.1 Philosophy and Science, 3.2 The Positive Project, and, in 3.3, I offer a summary of the issues. Under 3.1 Kant attempts to identify the distinctive features of philosophy and to explain why a positive project is needed. Under 3.2 he begins to outline some of the central, and controversial, aspects of that project. I make some use of later passages to clarify points made in the prefaces.

3.1. Philosophy and Science Kant emphasizes that distinctively philosophical issues may arise out of empirical sciences but not be resolved by them. He associates scientific issues with empirical enquiry and with established methods, and contrasts these with the nonempirical character of philosophy and its current lack of established methods. The contrast both explains the confusion and disrepute into which philosophy has fallen and underlines the need to investigate philosophy and to put it on the "sure path of a science" by modeling it, with provisos, on already established disciplines. Kant illustrates the state of philosophical confusion in several ways; by noting the perennial oscillation between skepticism and dogmatism in the tradition, and by citing the Antinomies. The former testifies again to Kant's revolutionary aims in rejecting the previous tradition, and the latter conflicts offer a clear picture of Kant's central idea. If, for example, we move from a survey of particular spatial regions within the physical universe to ask whether the universe itself is spatially bounded, then we immediately change the character of the enquiry. It is not just that the latter seems difficult, wide ranging, and ambitious, but rather that it seems incoherent. If the physical universe is spatially bounded, then other spatial regions define those bounds and these seem to be both included in, and excluded from, the physical universe itself. If it is not spatially bounded, then it is unclear how we could establish or even understand such a claim. We may be tempted to think that the issue, although arising out of physical cosmology, can be settled by philosophical a priori reasoning, but Kant's belief is that this can be shown to be an illusion in the Antinomies. Other such conflicts have a similar character but may have even more complex implications. Temporal, or causal, origins for the physical universe bring not only similar puzzles about the coherence of such bounds, but also nonscientific, theological questions about a creator for the universe. Such a creator must, it seems, both be independent of the universe and yet have causal and temporal relations to it. The issue of understanding how a causal sequence could be initiated without any prior influences raises also the more mundane question, identified as crucial in B, whether in exercising a free choice a human agent is acting spontaneously outside a causal

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network, or is simply a further part of that network. In this way, questions about causal origins involve issues not only about science but also about morality and religion. The structure of these problems, and their migration beyond the bounds of empirical science, show at least that they are not straightforwardly empirical or scientific. They raise issues even about our understanding of the problems and the concepts in them, and about the appropriate methods to use in dealing with them. Kant's intention in citing such cases at this stage is not to resolve the issues, but rather to demonstrate initially that there are prior problems about understanding them and the methods appropriate to them. Since he takes the issues to be typically philosophical rather than straightforwardly scientific, they provide an indication of the distinctive character of philosophy itself. Philosophical issues are typically neither empirical nor scientific. They raise higher order questions which may arise out of sciences but are not simply scientific. Clearly defined methods for resolving those issues are not available in science, and indeed in some cases the issues may really be unresolvable (Avii). At B507n and B508 Kant recognizes that although in these questions of reason we must find answers and cannot plead ignorance, nevertheless one answer may be to show that there is no answer. The model is Lambert's proof that the ratio of diameter to circumference of a circle is incommensurable. Kant's conclusion is that before embarking on such issues, as dogmatists have done, there must be an examination of the peculiar nature of such distinctive problems, of the methods for resolving them, and the limits to their possible resolution. This is what the critique of pure reason promises. It is a higher order enquiry in the more extended sense that it raises not only philosophical questions about science but also about the nature of philosophy itself. Where traditional philosophy assumed its methods and authority in raising skeptical questions about experience and science, Kant's primary intention is to be skeptical about those philosophical methods and authority. This is one striking way in which his revolutionary aims reverse the order of previous philosophical thinking. An enquiry into the nature and limits of philosophy itself is not at all unfamiliar to twentieth-century Western philosophers, and was involved in the transition from late-nineteenth-century philosophy to the analytic philosophy of the twentieth century. Russell's development and the emergence of Logical Positivism provide clear examples of the outcome of that debate, but the same issues have persisted throughout the twentieth century.13 "Ordinary language" philosophy provided one later outcome, and a Quinean naturalism another.14 Disagreement and hostility at the end of the twentieth century between analytic and "postmodern" philosophers provide yet another illustration which echoes Kant's pessimism about the

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state of philosophy. Disputes between analytic and postmodern philosophy similarly seem to share no common understanding of philosophical methods or of philosophy itself.15 The battleground of metaphysics which Kant surveyed with dismay at the end of the eighteenth century still existed at the end of the twentieth. A similar chaotic swing from dogmatism to skepticism and back again is just as evident. Even if the outcome of Kant's higher order enquiry into the nature and methods of philosophy were unacceptable to us, we should have some sympathy with the enquiry itself. Kant occupies a similar position to late-twentieth-century philosophers but notices, and explicitly rejects, some of their preferred attitudes. Although he says that the unresolvable issues in metaphysics lack "sense and reference" (Sinn und Bedeutung), it is clear that he did not understand these terms in Frege's way16 or accept the verificationist semantics of the Logical Positivists. Although he broadly accepts the range of common sense and scientific experience, he explicitly rejects any "appeal to common sense" in rejecting Humean skepticism (Prolegomena, preface, Ak. 4.259). Although he is often portrayed as a strong antinaturalist, he rejects an authoritative voice for a dogmatic "first philosophy" just as a naturalist would. He would not have sympathized with the irrationalist tendencies of some postmodern philosophy, but he would have wished to go further than some analytic philosophers in rejecting the philosophical tradition which he, and they, inherited. Russell, for example, advocated a radical break from nineteenth-century idealism and endorsed new and powerful philosophical methods from formal logic. But the philosophical topics which he recognized often belonged to the earlier epistemological tradition.17 The same is true, with some provisos, of the Logical Positivists, though not of more radical philosophers such as Austin or the later Wittgenstein.18 If Kant's views about philosophy echo those of recent thinkers, it has often been thought that his project faces an insuperable difficulty. The objection goes back at least to Hegel and trades on an apparent circularity. One way of putting it would be to say that it is not feasible to bring reason before a tribunal of enquiry presided over by reason itself. Another would be to say, "if the very possibility of metaphysics is to be examined, the investigation cannot itself be metaphysical: It cannot itself adopt or follow the metaphysical method." 19 Hegel himself puts the point by ridiculing the idea of establishing knowledge without presupposing some knowledge. These objections, although popular, are all quite fallacious. There may be some legal or moral objection to an institution's monitoring its own performance and being effectively both judge and defendant, but there is no logical or real impossibility in such a procedure. If we set out to examine the possibility of some discipline, it does not follow that the enquiry cannot be categorized as belonging to that very discipline.

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There is no compelling reason why an enquiry into philosophy or metaphysics should not itself be characterized as philosophical. There is equally no compelling reason why an individual or discipline may not be able to monitor its own performance, as Kant recommends for philosophy at B823 (cf. also B697): "on the other hand reason is reassured and gains self-confidence, on finding that it itself can and must apply this discipline, and that it is not called upon to submit to any outside censorship."20 Hegel's point depends upon the assumption that Kant attempts to justify knowledge on the basis of philosophical knowledge but Kant's intention, as we have seen, is to question philosophical but not scientific knowledge. What these objections show is not that there is some decisive flaw in Kant's project, but only that it does not fit the conventional procedures in metaphysics. But that was already evident in his own revolutionary account of the enquiry.

3.2. The Positive Project The issues considered under 3.1 demonstrate Kant's revolutionary posture. He is against skepticism, dogmatism, and idealism (Bxxxiv) and, we might add, empiricism and rationalism. He is, in short, against the previous tradition which has led to the deplorable state of philosophy. But although I have outlined in the introduction something of the philosophical content of that previous tradition, we need to consider Kant's own account of that content in his positive project. The prefaces still only gesture towards the project, and deploy metaphorical ways of expressing it, but they show something distinctive in Kant's approach. I want to indicate how his account in the prefaces leads directly to two radically different interpretations. In one, the traditionalist, Kant accepts the fundamental tenets of traditional idealism but claims to find new ways of resolving its problems. In the other, the revolutionary, Kant rejects those fundamental tenets and seeks novelty not in the solutions to old problems but in the problems themselves. For traditionalists Kant is, like Russell, exploring new methods of resolving old, traditional problems; for revolutionaries Kant is, like Wittgenstein or Austin, rejecting the traditional problems and seeking a new direction for philosophy. Kant outlines his project in three related ways: by characterizing the a priori in the Copernican experiment; by distinguishing between appearances and things in themselves; and by canvassing an inventory of experience. 3.2.1.

THE

A PRIORI

AND THE COPERNICAN EXPERIMENT

Even in A Kant recognized that the character of a priori knowledge was at the centre of his enquiry; but only in B does he offer the distinctive image

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of the Copernican experiment. The experiment is to reverse the previous philosophical assumption that all knowledge must conform to objects, and to suppose instead that objects must conform to our knowledge. The supposition does not mean either that we can literally create objects of experience or that every aspect of objects must conform to our knowledge. For Kant it is the a priori elements in objects of experience which conform to our knowledge. "We can know a priori of things only what we ourselves put into them" (Bxviii). These necessary provisos, however, do not resolve all the uncertainties in Kant's claim. Kant expresses it at one point by saying: "nothing in a priori knowledge can be ascribed to objects save what the thinking subject derives from itself" (Bxxiii). Such claims have formed the basis for the attribution to Kant of what Strawson calls an "extreme subjectivism" (1966a, 173) which goes back at least to Garve, Fichte, and Hegel. At the limit such a view claims that the whole of experience is a construct from each individual subject and can reach no further than that subject's consciousness. Such a position reflects a Cartesian dualism which not only raises the traditional skeptical issues but also makes them virtually unanswerable. It raises the question noted earlier: If experience can be understood only within such an individual consciousness, how can we account for the belief in a nonconscious, physical world? Even if we could answer that question, we need still to ask how any individual consciousness manages to conform to that of other such individuals. With that background it is natural to ask how Kant can refer so often to "our" experience or the knowledge "we" have. One answer is that he is simply confused; another is that he does not accept that background. Philosophers in the tradition have offered more or less plausible answers to these questions, but none could be said to have succeeded. Classical phenomenalism claims to explain how beliefs about physical objects depend solely on the sense-datum fragments of individual consciousness. Leibniz's doctrine of a preestablished harmony might be invoked to explain the requisite match between my constructed experience and that of others. These attempts have demonstrably failed, but in any case Kant rejected them. He is quite explicit in rejecting Leibniz's doctrine (B167-68; A272-86; A389-91), and certainly rejected classical phenomenalism in its standard empiricist form.21 Two other considerations suggest that Kant did not understand "subjective" in these ways. Even when he speaks of our being "the source of laws of nature" (A127, A114, A125, and A126) he notes its apparent literal absurdity, and qualifies it by reference to a purely "formal" contribution. Earlier in the same passage he says: "Thus the understanding is something more than a power of formulating rules through comparison of appearances; it is itself the lawgiver of nature" (A126). This is minimally to

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reject a purely empiricist account of laws of nature. Such an account can be rejected, and a formal appeal to an a priori contribution to knowledge canvassed, without any commitment to "extreme subjectivism." What traditionalists may stress is that Kant is committed to a psychological account of that a priori contribution. If that contribution is literally something which occurs within the confines of an individual consciousness, then the subjective view seems unavoidable. One way of pursuing this would be to say that these prior psychological operations are supposed to be innate, but Kant makes it plain even in these prefaces that he is not engaged in any such empirical developmental psychology, and elsewhere that he did not equate "a priori" with "innate." These provisos again indicate the need to explore alternative ways of grasping what Kant means by "a priori" and the associated metaphors of "imposing laws on nature." It is naive to accept the associated view that the transparency of reason must be understood in terms of a Cartesian mind rather than the self-evidence of logic. These considerations do not show that the tradition is simply wrong. What they show is that Kant himself gestures towards alternative accounts, and that it would be wrong to dismiss or ignore them by assuming a traditionalist view. They should at least inhibit us from ascribing the crude traditionalist doctrine of "the mind making nature" to Kant. 3 . 2 . 2 . APPEARANCES AND THINGS IN THEMSELVES

If the Copernican account of the a priori points in two radically different directions, traditionalist and revolutionary, the same is true of the related distinction between appearances and things in themselves. If that latter distinction is understood within the framework of traditional dualism, then it leads to both subjectivism and internal incoherence. The former arises directly from the identification of appearances as subjective sensory states, and things in themselves as real-world objects represented in such sensory states. The incoherence arises from Kant's claims to know realworld objects coupled with his rejection of any knowledge of things in themselves. These objections are not particularly subtle or difficult to grasp once the underlying assumptions are made clear. Once those assumptions are made clear, then we have the options of either convicting Kant of gross confusion, as the tradition has sometimes supposed, or else representing him as rejecting the assumptions, as a revolutionary account would. But although those options are clear enough, the revolutionary account itself remains in need of explanation. For the revolutionary the question is: How can we explain and understand the "subjective" aspect of the Copernican revolution, that is, the idea that objects might conform to our knowledge? For the traditionalist there is no such interpretative

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problem. If Kant is regarded as an "honest-to-goodness idealist," then Kant's restriction of knowledge to appearances is a restriction to knowledge of our own subjective, mental, sensory states, and his central problem is a standard idealist skepticism about knowledge of an external world. With those assumptions, if there is to be any justified knowledge of real-world objects beyond our mental states it will arise from one of the traditional antiskeptical devices, an empiricist phenomenalism, a preestablished harmony, or a causal inference. Kant's apparent rejection of each of these devices leaves, once again, the familiar options. Either he is blankly inconsistent or else he does not accept those idealist assumptions about "subjectivity." Any account needs to accommodate Kant's own claims about appearances and things in themselves, and the two noted ways of characterizing that distinction in terms of a difference between two worlds or between two aspects. Kant himself sometimes speaks in the former terms of two worlds (A249), but more often he speaks of a difference in "points of view" in which we conceive or consider objects either as appearances or as things in themselves. The issue cannot be resolved at this early stage, but something can be done initially to relieve the tension by first noticing the obvious objections to both accounts, and then recognizing that Kant can perfectly well hold both of them with suitable modifications. If we take the label "two aspects" seriously then it will be necessary to ask what these two aspects are aspects of. It seems that they can't be aspects either of appearances or of things in themselves, since those are the aspects. We may consequently be led into the position of wondering what mysterious third thing, itself neither an appearance nor a thing in itself, these might be aspects or features of. Such unwelcome, and needless, questions are induced by the label rather than by Kant's own account, which in any case suggests rather that things in themselves and appearances are properly thought of as "objects" rather than "aspects" or "properties."22 Kant's account of two "points of view" does not talk of "aspects" or "features" and does not draw a distinction between things and properties. A "point of view" is a point from which objects, in this case objects of experience, can be considered from one side or the other; it is not a feature of objects but a relation between viewer and object. It was suggested earlier that the "points of view" in this case are the different philosophical standpoints which offer an account of those objects. These evident difficulties with the "two aspects" account may seem to strengthen the alternative "two worlds" view, but this has its own problems. For it would be natural to construe such a "two worlds" view as a commitment to the existence and knowledge of those worlds, but Kant firmly and repeatedly denies any such commitments to things in themselves. In the light of those denials there must be a question about the

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legitimacy of even making a reference to such things, and this has been a steady complaint against this version of Kant's position. Even if we accept Kant's disclaimer about our ignorance of things in themselves we need to know why it is necessary to invoke references to possible worlds of which we can in principle have no knowledge. Neither the "two aspects" nor the "two worlds" labels seem to be acceptable. These immediate difficulties can be simply resolved. Kant undoubtedly thinks of the basic distinction as one between two points of view, that is, between conceiving or considering objects of experience as appearances or as things in themselves, but the two conceptions may be conceptions of two different worlds. Kant's own position is that objects of experience are the only things we can properly identify and know, but that these may in different philosophical positions be construed, or misconstrued, in different ways. In one way, which Kant accepts, they can be regarded as "appearances" necessarily attached to our sense experience; in another, which Kant rejects, they may be regarded as "things in themselves" necessarily detached from that sense experience. There is no serious question about any third object of which these might be aspects or properties, and there is no question for Kant of our having any knowledge of things in themselves, or of making a commitment to their existence in those terms. The conventional "two worlds" and "two aspects" labels are thoroughly misleading and should be given up. This means that there are inevitable limitations in talking about things in themselves, and it is left to Kant to show that there is a real point in such a vocabulary. We cannot straightforwardly ask, What exactly are things in themselves? not because it is meaningless, but because we have no means of answering it. The only genuine knowledge we can have is of objects of experience, and their world is not the world of things in themselves but the world of appearances. We can ask only, How, or why, do we come to think of a world of things in themselves? One answer to that question might provide the motivation for other philosophers' claims that we can know things as they are in themselves, and Kant recognizes such motivations in a Lockean representative realism and a Leibnizian monadology (B327-28). But Kant provides his own motivation at Bxxvi-xxvii, namely, that his concept of "appearance" requires things in themselves to be conceivable, and that this enables him to resolve the conflicts in the Antinomies. I add one further preliminary point to be considered in more detail later. Commentators disagree about the commitment Kant makes to things in themselves in this preface passage. On the face of it Kant insists only on the necessity of being able to think objects as things in themselves, but some have argued, with Adickes, that it commits Kant to the actual existence o f such things. The motive for such a view is that the argument relies

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on the absurdity or impossibility of there being "appearances without anything that appears." That point undoubtedly requires the actual existence of objects that appear, but it is not obvious that those objects are things in themselves rather than objects of experience. Kant is committed to the belief that appearances are "of objects," but he is also clear that those objects, known through appearances, are not things in themselves. The issue turns on the form of the argument from that accepted impossibility to the contested existence of things in themselves. In fact there is a simple formal argument, outlined later in chapter 23, to the conclusion that things in themselves must be "thinkable" which depends on the premise that if things in themselves were inconceivable then our empirical concept of "things that appear" would be impossible. There is ample evidence to show that Kant accepts that premise, and takes the concept of an "empirical object that appears" to depend on the conceivability or thinkability of things in themselves. I add two brief quotations to illustrate the general point, which is part of Kant's diagnosis of Dialectical illusion and explained only in that later section. At B186-87 he outiines the general route, which leads to the error of supposing that we can infer from our concepts to "things in general" and then to "things in themselves." Arguing from this assumed fact we conclude that the categories in their pure significance, apart from all conditions of sensibility, ought to apply to things in general, as they are, and not . . . represent them only as they appear. [But] the pure concepts can find no object and so can acquire no meaning which might yield a concept of some object. . . . The categories therefore . . . represent no object.

In the Dialectic this is the error of hypostatizing Ideas (Idee, not Vorstellung) of reason so that we think, mistakenly, that they designate objects: owing to a natural illusion we regard this principle, which applies only to things given to the senses as being a principle . . . valid of things in general . . . and then . . . substituting for it the concept of a thing. (B610)

That diagnosis of error concerns our concept of a "supreme being" but the same principle applies to any misuse of the concept of a "thing in general" in inferring to the notion of a thing in itself. The same point was made earlier about the rational dogmatist misuse of its dealings with concepts. "For I have taken the soul in both propositions in one and the same sense [Bedeutung], namely as a thing in general, that is, as a thing in itself' (Bxxvii). In the light of this general diagnosis it is scarcely possible that Kant could have made that mistake himself in arguing from the required

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concept of a thing in itself to its actual existence. The argument in the Preface licenses the thinkability of the concept but not the belief that for us it designates an actual object. Although the contrast between appearances and things in themselves is introduced here only in a general way, one of its essential features should be underlined. The contrast provides two different points of view which depend upon philosophical considerations. The two points of view outline different metaphysical accounts of our knowledge and its reality which ordinary experience does not notice. It is only philosophers who accept, or deny, a metaphysical reality different from and underlying the "passing show" of ordinary experience. The contrast is, in this way, technical and philosophical. In particular, as Kant insists in the Aesthetic, it does not reflect merely our colloquial distinction between the appearance of objects, the "way things appear," and the things themselves.23 Kant's technical term "appearance" cannot be identified with the ordinary use of "appearance," and the term "thing in itself' similarly cannot be identified with any ordinary use of "object" or "thing." 3 . 2 . 3 . INVENTORIES AND DESCRIPTIVE METAPHYSICS

The two central features of Kant's project, the Copernican account of the a priori and the distinction between appearances and things in themselves, provide only an outline of Kant's aim. The procedure for identifying those a priori elements, an "isolation" or "abstraction" process, is elaborated immediately after the prefaces at B5-6, and the distinction between appearances and things in themselves points in two directions for further enquiry. It indicates first a need to explain the philosophical error of supposing that we have knowledge of things in themselves, and second an exploration of our legitimate knowledge in which its a priori ingredients are related to appearances, that is, to what can be presented to the senses. Kant carries out those explorations respectively in the Dialectic and in the Aesthetic and Analytic. The goal of constructing an inventory of a priori elements in experience, and the extended cartographic and navigational imagery,24 point additionally to a descriptive metaphysics of experience, in which a priori elements are identified and related to each other in a holistic framework (Bxxiii-xxiv). That inventorial project raises two questions which disclose systematic ambiguities. If we ask what kind of map is envisaged we might answer that it will be a map of our psychological faculties which shows how they serve to construct our developed, adult, human experience. But this is rejected by Kant when he distances his project from a Lockean empirical psychology in the prefaces and dismisses a Cartesian rational psychology later in the Paralogisms. If we take those rejections seriously then the project will

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not be straightforwardly psychological, but the original question remains unanswered. If, further, we ask what philosophical role the map is to fulfill then another ambiguity appears. We might say that its role is to answer a traditional skepticism and so attempt to justify our experience rather than merely to record it. But this answer has given rise to a standard criticism of Kant, namely, that his attempts to justify our experience do no more than take it for granted. Since the traditional skeptic raises a query about our justification for such an assumption, Kant's procedure will seem to beg the question. We, therefore, need to ask whether Kant's map is purely descriptive and not targeted directly at the traditional skeptic, or justificatory and normative and begs the skeptic's question. The latter position is associated with the traditionalist view and the former with its revolutionary alternative. Kant does not offer answers to these questions in the prefaces. All that can be done here is to consider alternative options which at least have the merit of liberating our minds from the standard traditionalist view. First, there is no great difficulty in envisaging a description of experience which is not overtly psychological, and many recent analytic philosophers have canvassed such a project. Carnap's frameworks, Wittgenstein's language games, Ryle's category disciplines, Quine's web of belief, Strawson's descriptive metaphysics, and many recent exercises in formal metaphysics provide examples of such projects.25 Kant's project has similarities to, and differences from, these more recent conceptions. Kant is concerned to map related features of our experience, but his concern is with experience as a whole rather than with specific sectors within it. Wittgenstein's language games, Carnap's frameworks, and Ryle's category disciplines, concern mainly specific parts of experience. Kant has also a conception of the a priori, and an associated classification of judgments as synthetic a priori, which most of those philosophers, influenced by an underlying empiricism, would not be prepared to accept. There is no great difficulty in seeing Kant's primary task as that of mapping the dependences and priorities among the network of a priori elements in our experience, but we still need to know how that descriptive task relates to traditional skepticism. That, too, is not answered in the prefaces, but later in chapter 11 it will be shown how Kant's project responds to a range of skeptical issues. That task is just what the inventory and map metaphors indicate, but Kant also gives a more explicit account of it in the later Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection (B316-49). There Kant outlines the task of "transcendental reflection," of exploring what he calls in evident recognition of the spatial imagery a "transcendental topic" Of this he says: Let me call the place which we assign to a concept, either in sensibility, or in pure understanding, its transcendental location. Thus the decision as to the

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place which belongs to every concept according to difference in the use to which it is put, and the directions for determining this place for all concepts according to rules, is a transcendental topic. This doctrine, in distinguishing the cognitive faculty to which in each case the concepts properly belong, will provide a sure safeguard against the surreptitious employment of pure understanding and the delusions which arise therefrom. (B324)

It may be said that in locating each concept in some particular psychological faculty Kant is reverting again to an objectionable psychological idiom, but Kant's aim is evidently to provide a classification or map of concepts and their relations which echoes the imagery of the inventory. The classification allocates concepts to sense or to understanding, but it is not obvious that this is objectionable psychology rather than a metaphysics of experience. Beyond that, and at this stage, it should be said that no epistemology can afford to be totally divorced from psychological considerations. It is not their mere presence in epistemology which is objectionable, but their conflict, or confusion, with some prior philosophical project. In any case a more austere metaphysical map of the dependences and priorities among our concepts will be bound to have a correlative account of the way in which such a system of experience arises and develops psychologically. We can expect that the metaphysical project will be closely related to, even though essentially different from, a psychological enquiry, and this is the point Kant makes himself at Axvi-xvii. The suggestion is that Kant's inventorial project is of that more austere metaphysical kind.

4. Explicit Changes in the Two Editions I briefly outline the four changes to the A text which Kant specifically notes in the B preface. These are changes to remedy (1) misunderstanding in the Aesthetic, especially with regard to time; (2) obscurity in the Transcendental Deduction; (3) insufficient evidence in the proofs of the Principles; (4) a false interpretation placed on the Paralogisms. Two of these changes, (2) and (4), involve substantial rewriting and need further consideration. (1) Kant makes some small changes in the Aesthetic, in the renumbering of the sections, in some limited arguments in the Metaphysical Exposition of space and time, and in deleting a paragraph at A28 whose claims are importantly modified at B69-70n. Properties like color and taste are denied application to "objects" in the deleted paragraph, but allowed to be properties of empirical objects of the senses in the later passage. The more extensive changes are those

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in the newly entitled "Transcendental Exposition" of time, and the three additional sections, II, III, and IV, in the "General Observation." The former concerns the relation of time to an a priori science and identifies that science as the "general doctrine of motion." In other passages, and popularly, Kant is supposed to relate time to arithmetic, and this section may be added to identify the relevant science. The change in the "General Observation" is not particularly related to time and considers three central issues: first, a Leibnizean account of our knowledge of objects as thoroughly relational; second, a Berkeleian view that to call the objects of the senses "appearances" is to regard them as "illusory"; and third, an "illustration" of a nonstandard cognitive power such as God's in which there is no contrast between sense and understanding. All three are important in distancing Kant's position from those of Leibniz and Berkeley and in marking the emphasis on human cognitive powers and limitations which persists throughout the Critique. These changes add something to A but do not alter the substance of Kant's view. (2) The Transcendental Deduction is completely rewritten in B, so that the comparisons between the two versions provide any number of differences. But the change which has often appeared most significant is the downgrading of the A reference to the psychology of the threefold synthesis which does not reappear either in that form or at that location in the B argument. Despite the provisos in the prefaces about Kant's lack of interest in psychology, the threefold synthesis in A may have given the false impression that the Deduction was essentially psychological and the change in B may be intended to correct that impression. The change heralds a shift from a psychological to a linguistic interest underlined also in the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences (Ak. 4.475). 2 6 (3) The changes in the proofs of the principles appear minor. Kant makes changes in most of the formulations of the principles, and adds some paragraphs which help to clarify the formal structure of the proofs. In the Third Analogy the principle in B but not in A specifies spatial substance, and I discuss this change later (chapters 20, 21).There are two larger changes which do not directly concern the proofs of the principles, namely the inclusion of the B Refutation of Idealism (B 274-79) and the "General Note on the System of Principles" (B 288-94). The former is a significant addition to A and replaces the Fourth Paralogism A. It is a natural conjecture that the B version is at least a clearer, more forceful, and perhaps more persuasive rejection of traditional idealism than the

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A Fourth Paralogism which has even been read as an endorsement of traditional idealism. The "General Observation" usefully underlines Kant's central position in B, but does not offer views that cannot be found elsewhere. In the section on "Phenomena and Noumena" Kant cuts out of B several paragraphs from A which are oddly expressed. (4) The Paralogisms, like the Transcendental Deduction, were completely rewritten in B and similarly provide innumerable differences of exposition. One major change is that noted in (3), namely the provision in the B Principles of an anti-idealist proof in place of previous rejections of traditional idealism in the Aesthetic and Fourth Paralogism A. In the light of the inclusion of the Refutation of Idealism in B it is reasonable to think that the "false interpretation" of the Fourth Paralogism A is the traditional idealist reading noted in (3). The B version of the Paralogisms is briefer, but contains many of the same ideas and conclusions of A.

[3] The Introduction

1. The Central Claims The introduction repeats many of the claims from the prefaces. Kant emphasizes again the enquiry into the scope and limits of reason, its transparency and completeness (B26-27), its conflicts in the Antinomies, and its legitimate and illusory faces. We should not assume that the claimed transparency is that of an idealist direct access to the mind. Reason, logic, mathematics, and other a priori disciplines are transparent in other ways which contrast their character with that of a posteriori sense experience. Kant underlines the distinction between a posteriori and a priori knowledge by identifying two "basic fallacies," an empiricist and a rationalist, indicated through the whole Critique. One fallacy is that of inferring from the fact that all knowledge begins with a posteriori experience that it all arises from that experience (Bl). The other fallacy is that of inferring from a priori knowledge that it must designate special, nonempirical, nonsensory objects. The former fallacy is evidently directed at empiricists, and the latter at rationalists such as Plato and their dogmatic misuse of concepts. Mathematics gives us a shining example of how far, independentiy of experience, we can progress in a priori knowledge. . . . Misled by such a proof of the power of reason, the demand for the extension of knowledge recognises no limits. The light dove cleaving the air in her free flight and feeling its resistance might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of the ideas in the empty space of pure understanding. He did not observe that with all the efforts he made no advance—meeting no resistance that might, as it were, serve as a support upon which he could take a stand. . . . ] (B 8-9)

The passage underlines two central themes from the prefaces, namely, the exploration of a priori knowledge and the recognition of the illusions 49

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that may arise from it. The first reinforces Kant's view of mathematics as an established a priori discipline; the second identifies the basic rationalist fallacy. This fallacy identifies an inference attributed to Plato from the occurrence of a priori knowledge to the existence of objects of pure understanding, conceived as existing beyond the world of sense. These supposed objects accessed by pure understanding or reason are what Kant calls "things in themselves" or "noumena." It is evidently a central therapy in his treatment of philosophical pathology, elaborated in the Dialectic, to reject that inference from nonempirical, a priori knowledge to nonempirical, supersensible objects. Although the point does not establish the falsity of the conclusion in either the empiricist or the rationalist fallacy, Kant is clearly right to say that both inferences are fallacious. What is new in the introduction is Kant's conception of the a priori, which points both to the central questions of his enquiry and to his novel analytic apparatus. His central questions ask how mathematics, pure natural science, and metaphysics are possible. Since, for Kant, the first two patently contain a priori knowledge, the hope is that their structure can throw light on the claim that metaphysics also legitimately contains such a priori knowledge, and so resolve the endless oscillation between dogmatism and skepticism in metaphysics. Kant's examination of mathematics and natural science is not undertaken in order to justify their status, which Kant evidently takes for granted, but in order to justify a similar status for metaphysics. The point is forcibly made at B119-20 (and in the Prolegomena § 40, Ak. 4.327): "Pure mathematics and natural science have no need of a deduction to underpin their certainty. . . . Both sciences have undergone the [earlier] investigation not because they need it, but for the sake of another discipline, namely metaphysics." The strategy demonstrates one of the noted reversals of traditional philosophy in the Copernican experiment. In the tradition, philosophical skepticism is directed at ordinary and scientific knowledge on the assumption that philosophy has the authority to question it, but Kant's skepticism is directed at philosophy rather than scientific enquiry. It questions philosophical knowledge but takes science for granted. The issue for philosophy is its claim to a priori status, and this makes necessary Kant's exploration of the two separate classifications "a priori/a posteriori" and "analytic/synthetic." That exploration is part epistemological, part formal, and part methodological. The epistemological part concerns primarily the a priori/a posteriori distinction. Kant offers two criteria for judgments which are a priori, namely, necessity and strict universality. The contrast is between a mathematical claim such as "All prime numbers larger than 2 are odd" and an empirical claim such as "All Presidents of the U.S.A. are male." Kant holds, like almost all philosophers, that the former claim has a necessity

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and strict universality which the latter lacks. Indeed almost all philosophers, including traditional empiricists, would accept the use of "a priori" to capture the special status of the former. It is not the mere recognition of such a priori judgments that discriminates Kant from these empiricists, but the underlying explanation of that character. For the empiricists such a priori judgments depend upon analytic relations between concepts which have themselves been derived from a basic sense experience. Procedures of abstraction from that basic sense experience, which enable us to construct and learn concepts, will also generate analytic relations of identity, inclusion, or exclusion between those concepts. The empiricists suggest that a priori truths, such as those in mathematics, record those analytic relations. Kant undermines such an account by pointing to the empiricist basic fallacy. Even though all knowledge begins with such basic sense experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of that sense experience. Kant here clearly expresses his own intention to examine not the simple empirical origins of our experience but the character of its content. At B61-62 and elsewhere Kant describes his enquiry as one into the "origins and content" of our knowledge and shows an awareness of this distinction.2 The reference to "origins" has suggested to some commentators that despite his disclaimers in the preface Kant is engaged on a psychological enquiry, or else is confused about his aims. Later I comment on the significance of that distinction, but in the present context nobody seriously doubts the empirical origins of experience, but there is doubt about the a priori status of certain of its contents. Kant's central interest is to claim that some of these contents are themselves a priori and not derived from experience. The formal part of Kant's analytic apparatus helps further to specify the disagreement between himself and earlier philosophers, who had constructed a variety of terms to classify the character of our judgments. Contrasted pairs such as "necessary/contingent," "matters of fact/relations of ideas," "analytic/synthetic," "logically true/empirically true," as well as "a priori/a posteriori" have been used for this purpose. Before Kant, this analytic apparatus had become, in the hands of Leibniz and Hume, more extensive and better defined, and Kant attempts to refine it further. His principal innovation is to separate the two pairs "a priori/a posteriori" and "analytic/synthetic" and so to make possible various hybrid forms of classification, such as "analytic/synthetic a posteriori" and "analytic/synthetic a priori." For Kant, synthetic a posteriori judgments are the basic empirical judgments of our sense experience, and all analytic judgments are regarded as a priori. But he also held that some a priori judgments are synthetic and so parts company with empiricists and rationalists. Characteristically, earlier—and later—philosophers have regarded

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"a priori" as equivalent to "analytic" and "a posteriori" as equivalent to "synthetic."3 For them there is no room for a judgment which might be both a priori and synthetic; all a priori judgments arise from analytic relations between concepts. Kant offers many ways of differentiating between analytic and synthetic judgments, and this variety has created difficulties for him. Two major criteria are principally used for this purpose; one which depends upon the meaning content of judgments, and one which depends upon a contradiction test. In the former Kant initially talks of a "covert containment" relation in analytic judgments between subject and predicate; in the latter he associates the denial of analytic truths with contradiction. In the comments later I consider some of the controversy which these criteria have generated. For the present I note only that Kant's important hybrid, the synthetic a priori, now points to judgments which are necessarily or universally true, but whose truth either does not depend only on the meaning of their constituents or does not pass the contradiction test. Some critics accept the basic classifications but reject the hybrid form, and others reject the basic classifications themselves, but whether Kant's classification is acceptable or not, this is a major disagreement with traditional empiricists. Rejection of the "synthetic a priori" classification has led some commentators to represent Kant's theses as if they were independent of these classifications and of the resulting hybrid, but this is to misrepresent him.4 To identify synthetic a priori judgments as "unobviously analytic" is to make him closer to empiricism than he wished to be. The analytic apparatus brings two methodological developments; a guide to the identification of a priori elements in our experience (B5-6) and a program of enquiry comparing the established a priori sciences with a putative a priori metaphysics (B19-24). In the former, Kant envisages a process of abstraction, or isolation, from a developed adult human experience in which demonstrably a posteriori elements are progressively set aside. What is left, abstracted, will be at least a candidate for a priori status which may be established in subsequent arguments. Kant's process of abstraction is plainly and importantiy different from Locke's. Locke appealed to such a process as a part of psychological development in which we come to construct or learn general concepts from sense experience.5 It is, for Locke, a required process of normal human development without which we cannot acquire language. Kant's process is not a standard part of normal human development but a philosophical method of isolating a priori items in our experience from their a posteriori accompaniments. If we never engage in Kant's process that may inhibit our development as philosophers, but it need not prevent our normal development as language - speakers.

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The point is reinforced in Kant's initial attempt to explain what is distinctive in his transcendental enquiry. He says: "I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as this mode of knowledge is to be possible a priori" (B25). What is transcendental, what belongs to transcendental philosophy, is not the first-order knowledge of objects we acquire in ordinary or scientific contexts, but a higher-order enquiry into the a priori status of elements in our experience.6 Kant's abstraction method and his transcendental reflection in the Amphiboly, unlike Locke's abstraction process, are part of that higher-order, transcendental philosophy The tradition has sometimes taken this to be a psychological enquiry, but even in the prefaces Kant denies this to make room for his own more austere, nonpsychological enquiry into the metaphysics of experience. In chapter 5, I offer a more extensive account of this less-evident part of Kant's analytic apparatus, namely, his distinction between the empirical and the transcendental. Even at this early stage Kant makes it plain that his program accepts the established sciences and their a priori contribution for the sake of examining the claimed a priori contribution of metaphysics itself. Later Kant reinforces this position in the claim that a science like geometry needs no "birth certificate" (Beglaubigungsschein) from philosophy (B119-20). It was noted earlier that Kant reverses a traditional view and accepts science for the sake of questioning philosophy. If rejecting the authority of such a traditional first philosophy is a mark of naturalism, then this is part of a strong naturalist tendency in Kant's own position.7 The point has important implications for Kant's attitude to skepticism and to a normative epistemology. If Kant is questioning philosophy's authority to raise skeptical issues in a normative epistemology then he cannot be straightforwardly engaged in that normative project.

2. Comments on Kant's Analytic Apparatus Many of the numerous criticisms of Kant's apparatus are superficial or even erroneous and I consider briefly and summarily only a selection of them. Others, such as Bennett's, or Quine's influential rejection of the "analytic/synthetic" distinction, deserve more careful discussion, but will also be set aside. In these initial comments on the analytic apparatus my aim is to show that the standard objections are not decisive enough to warrant rejection of Kant's position. In the following chapter I consider more positively how Kant's distinctions should be understood and how far they, and the resulting classification of synthetic a priori judgments, can be accepted.

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2.1. Some Summary Points (1) It is worth noting an awkwardness that arises from the range of items to which the terms "a priori/ a posteriori" apply. Kant speaks not only of judgments and principles but also of concepts and intuitions as a priori or a posteriori.8 Although it has become common to define the a priori in terms of knowledge or truth, such definitions cannot be applied directly to subpropositional items such as concepts and intuitions. For neither concepts nor intuitions by themselves could be said to be necessarily true or false, or known to be so. Kant faces this difficulty because although he defines "a priori/a posteriori" for judgments he wishes also to characterize those subjudgmental items as a priori or a posteriori. For the present I note only that some derivative account of a priority for subjudgmental forms is required. (2) It has been objected to Kant's criteria for a priority, namely, necessity and strict universality, that he understands these within an objectionable "introspective semantics" (Bennett 1966, 7 - 8 ) . The ground for this is only that the criteria are said to concern what "is thought in a judgment" (B3-4). Plainly, if Kant meant by this that to determine whether a judgment is a priori or not we have only to consider introspectively whether we think it necessary or universal, then he is wrong. For it may be that while we think the judgment necessary, we are mistaken. If Kant is only insisting that the required necessity and universality have to be an integral feature of the judgment, so that any thinking of it involves those features, then he is not open to such an objection. Since he goes on to consider ways in which such features can be, more or less easily, shown to belong to a judgment he evidently did not think any introspective method adequate by itself. Attribution of an "introspective semantics" on this basis is unwarranted. (3) Kant offers various accounts of the "analytic/synthetic" distinction, and some of these are plainly inadequate as strict criteria. Even the two principal criteria, "covert containment" and "contradiction," may not be equivalent and are separately open to criticism. Covert containment, for example, is metaphorical and explicitly restricted to subject-predicate judgments, but these drawbacks are easy to remedy. Instead of saying that a subject term "contains" a predicate we can say that the latter is part of the definition or meaning of the former. Instead of restricting attention to subject-predicate judgments we can speak of determining the judgment's truth, or falsity, solely in terms of the meanings of its con-

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stituents. Any reference to definitions, or to meanings of terms, may be thought objectionable in the light of Quine's arguments against the distinction, but these belong to the less superficial criticisms considered later. (4) The contradiction criterion throws up other remediable problems. Kant says that "it would be absurd to found an analytic judgment on experience" (B 11), but this apparently overlooks the possibility of our coming to believe an analytic truth on an empirical basis. Distrusting the formality of Euclidean proofs, I may come to think that the interior angles of Euclidean triangles add up to 180 degrees by measuring them and finding that this holds within expected limits. I may come to believe a mathematical theorem on someone's legitimate authority, or by consulting a computer proof. It is not worth discussing such issues. What is true, and what Kant may have wished to say, is only that such experiences are not sufficient to show that a judgment is analytically true. (5) Commentators have sometimes been less than totally clear about the contradiction criterion's application to "judgments" or to "truths." If we define a judgment as analytic iff its denial yields a contradiction, then this has the unwelcome consequence that contradictions themselves become synthetic judgments. For the denial of a contradiction does not yield a contradiction but an analytic truth. Kant does not commit this error, but he is not quite explicit about the distinction between judgment and truth. This difficulty is also easy to remedy. The distinction may be defined in terms of either "judgment" or "truth." If we use the former then we simply need to recognize that analytic judgments include both analytic truths and analytic falsities. (6) It is commonly, and rightly, said that Kant's famous argument to show that "7 + 5 = 12" is synthetic is fallacious. Kant's argument is that "7 + 5 = 12" cannot be an analytic truth, since it is possible to understand the expression "7 + 5," or the task "Add 7 to 5," without knowing that the sum is 12. Intuitively this may show that the expression "7 + 5" does not include " 1 2 " in its meaning, so that "7 + 5 = 12" satisfies the "meaning" test for being synthetic. But even if that is so, it does not show that the judgment also fails the contradiction test. We may prove that 7 + 5 = 12 from certain a priori or analytic axioms9 and so demonstrate that its denial is contradictory. The "meaning" criterion may suggest that the formula is synthetic, while the contradiction criterion suggests that it is analytic. That we can prove such formulae within arithmetic is

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not itself enough to show that "7 + 5 = 12" is analytic, for that would depend on the analytic or a priori status of the axioms on which the proof depends. But these weaknesses show that the "meaning" and "contradiction" criteria are complex, separately questionable, and do not necessarily fit together. Other distinctive features of analytic judgments as "explicative" and of synthetic as "ampliative" are evidently inadequate as strict criteria even though they may have some heuristic value.10

2.2. Bennetts Criticisms of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction In chapter 3 of Kant's Analytic, Bennett offers an extensive discussion of Kant's analytic/synthetic distinction. This discussion trades on a Quinean suspicion of that distinction and on Strawson's descriptive metaphysics in Individuals.; it also offers an explanation of an alleged mistake that had led Kant to canvass the hybrid synthetic a priori classification. Bennett outlines his central claim: The most interesting truths that Kant calls synthetic a priori have something like the status I have claimed for Strawson's theory. They are unobvious analytic truths about the conditions under which certain concepts can have a significant use, affirmative or negative. (42)

Strawson's arguments in Individuals (chapter 2) examine a purely "auditory" world in order to see whether any spatial, or spatial-like, features could be included in it. According to Bennett these arguments consist in "certain ways of assembling facts about meanings," and he illustrates this by reference to two propositions: (a) Anything square is rectangular. (b) Anything square belongs to a world in which objective angular measurements can be made. (1966, 42)

Of these (b) is claimed to be the better model with which to understand the synthetic a priori classification. (a) says what a thing must be like to count as a square; (b) seems to do this too, but the condition which it lays down is also a condition of anything's being in a plain sense not-square. While (a) concerns the applicability of 'square', (b) concerns the utility of the 'square/not-square' distinction. (1966, 42)

Bennett recommends that we call (a)-type propositions "analytic" and (b)-type "conceptual but not analytic" (1966, 42). He claims that Kant's

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synthetic a priori classification results from an "introspective semantics" which mistakenly supposes that all analytic truths must be transparently obvious. The diagnosis is ingenious, since it is easy to understand how someone who required analyticity to be so transparent might wrongly classify unobvious analytic truths as synthetic and also think of them as a priori. Bennett assumes what has been earlier questioned, that "transparency" can be only the Cartesian transparency of access to one's mind, and an earlier reference to Kant's alleged introspective semantics was shown to be unwarranted. The question arises whether this further account is any better. I shall argue that Bennett's case is too confused to be acceptable. (1) Bennett in fact offers two incompatible ways of characterizing Kant's synthetic a priori truths. Sometimes they are called "unobvious analytic truths" and sometimes "conceptual but not analytic." The illustrative example, moreover, makes these accounts less rather than more clear. One distinction between (a) and (b) is said to be that the latter, but not the former, expresses a condition of anything's being not-square. Yet (a) seems to express a condition, nonrectangularity, of anything's being not-square via contraposition; and it is at least arguable that (b) does not express a condition for anything's being square. It may be said that (b) expresses a condition for the (objective) detectability of squareness, and added that lack of detectability does not entail nonexistence. Even if we were incapable of measuring angles objectively it does not follow that squares would simply not exist. (2) The remaining difference between (a) and (b) turns on the distinction between "applicability" and "utility," but this is neither independently clear nor easy to fit into Quine's position. It is difficult to see why (b) does not concern the applicability of "square." Both the utility and the applicability of the term seem compromised by an inability to make angular measurements. The central notion of concept utility is unclear since that may have nothing to do with the concept's meaning. If the concept of "matrimonial offence" has, or lacks, utility in divorce law, then this seems to concern social circumstances which already presuppose the meaning of the expression. It was perhaps for this reason that Bennett speaks of "facts about meanings," but in this case there are relevant facts but no necessary connection with meanings at all. The characterization of "facts about meanings" does not sit well with a Quinean position which officially rejects a dichotomy between "fact" and "meaning."

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(3) Bennett ties the ability to make objective angular measurements to the "conceptual" status of (b) because he accepts, and ascribes to Kant (1966, 24), a verificationist account of meaning. The earlier objection that squares might still exist even if we were not able to measure their angles offered an intuitive obstacle to such an account. That general issue may still be philosophically controversial, but the ascription of semantic verificationism to Kant is unwarranted. Bennett supports that ascription by referring to a passage at B507n, in which Kant says: "A question as to the constitution of that something which cannot be thought through any determinate predicate—inasmuch as it is completely outside the sphere of those objects which can be given to us—is entirely null and void." Kant is talking of "things in themselves" for which no determinate description can be established. If the expression "null and void" (;nichtig und leer) were taken to be equivalent to "meaningless," then the passage might be construed as a verificationist commitment. But although elsewhere Kant describes such cases as lacking sense and reference (Sinn und Bedeutung) the terms nichtig and leer make no such clear commitment. They are better, and neutrally, understood as "futile and empty" to reflect our inability to establish determinate properties of things in themselves. In any case Kant's official view about references to things in themselves is that they do not totally lack meaning, and are not inconsistent. Even the prefaces make clear that it is a requirement for Kant's resolution of the Antinomies that such references are consistent and have some meaning. It is still necessary to ask how Kant understands the residual meaning which attaches to such empty references, but that question cannot be peremptorily answered simply by invoking semantic verificationism. If Bennett were right in claiming that the synthetic a priori classification rested on nothing more than the errors of "introspective semantics," then this would prevent any further exploration of Kant's apparatus. But the substantial difficulties in Bennett's account of Kant's supposed errors make it impossible to accept his diagnosis, however ingenious it seems. To set aside that diagnosis of error does not establish that Kant's classification is acceptable, but it does allow us to explore it further.

2.3. Quine's Rejection of the Analytic/Synthetic Distinction Quine, in extended arguments from "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (in From a Logical Point of View) and Word and Object, has influenced many

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contemporary philosophers in rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction. In the former, Quine accepts a distinction between logical and nonlogical truth, and in the latter he is prepared to admit a primitive classification of judgments as "stimulus-analytic," but he insists that these concessions fall far short of accepting the conventional contrast between analytic and synthetic truth. The central difficulty in extending logical truth to the wider class of analytic truths arises because the latter depend upon notions such as "synonymy" or "meaning" which Quine finds questionable. Analytic truths, such as "All bachelors are unmarried," can be derived from acceptable logical truths together with such claims as that "'Bachelor' means 'unmarried man,'" but Quine is not prepared to accept those latter claims about synonymy. Subsequent extensive discussion has influenced a widespread rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction, but it has also revealed some ambiguity in the supporting arguments. I shall outline what seem to be the central arguments for his position and claim that they do not compel us to reject the distinction. (1) In the "Two Dogmas" paper Quine suggests the weak argument that the distinction should be rejected because we cannot always, or easily, tell whether a judgment is definitely analytic or definitely synthetic. This is weak because the existence of such a grey area does not prevent us from classifying some judgments in these ways, and because it questions the exhaustiveness of the distinction rather than its criterion. The argument has force against anyone who requires the distinction to be exhaustive, but the distinction can be drawn without that requirement. We can say that some judgments are definitely analytic, some definitely synthetic, and some neither definitely one or the other. (2) Sometimes Quine is taken only to endorse a Wittgensteinean claim that meanings are not "objects" or should not be construed exclusively in terms of names and bearers, or that meaning is a complex and still little understood phenomenon.11 But these claims are not wholly clear and do not by themselves compel the rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction. Even if analytic truths are understood as those dependent upon the meanings of their constituents, this places no obvious restrictions on how we might come to understand the notion of "meaning" itself. So long as refinements in a linguistic theory allow us to identify the meanings of constituents in a judgment they will allow us to distinguish analytic from synthetic judgments. We may agree that the meanings identified are not "objects" in some sense, or do not function on the model of name and bearer, without preventing us from speaking of

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such meanings. Similarly, disquiet about our theoretical grasp of meaning does not prevent our drawing such a distinction with current semantic resources. In any case we might avoid these issues altogether by appealing to the contradiction criterion. (3) Quine has better ways of supporting the theoretical inadequacy of appeals to meaning. His central arguments rest on claimed circularities in the appeals to synonymy, or to semantic rules, which underpin the identification of analytic truth. One such argument distinguishes extensional from intensional aspects of language, and then marks the circularity of basing intensional analyticity on other intensional characters such as synonymy, or necessity, or semantic rules. Quine's underlying assumption here is that intensional properties can be adequately supported only by appeal to extensional aspects.12 If that requirement cannot be met, then, the suggestion is, analyticity with its related family of intensional terms is unjustified or unacceptable. We should distinguish the bare charge of circularity from the underlying assumption. Even though there is some circularity in explaining one of a family of related terms by reference to other members of the same family, such circularity may be neither objectionable nor avoidable. To mark that circularity is not, therefore, enough to warrant rejection of analyticity. What is additionally needed is acceptance of the underlying assumption, and it is not obvious that we should accept it. To reject Quine's conclusion here it is not necessary to reject that assumption; even if we are agnostic about it his argument fails. (4) In Word and Object the circularity argument is supplemented by an appeal to the "radical indeterminacy" of translation and meaning. Radical indeterminacy is related to, but goes beyond, what is called "the under-determination of theory by evidence."13 That latter doctrine claims that different, incompatible theories may be consonant with all possible empirical evidence. The former trades on the range of diverse categories which may be used in a field linguist's effort to interpret some other language. The linguist will inevitably deploy his own familiar categories, preferring "rabbit" to "undetached rabbit part," but, the suggestion is, other linguists may have different home categories and may be equally capable of understanding the native language in the light of all possible evidence. The natives' own home categories may then seem to be inscrutable. Two points deserve to be noted in this argument. One is that Quine has a restrictive view of the available behavioral evidence, just as he has a restrictive view of the priority attached to extensional aspects in the determination of intensional properties.

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The other is that he is quite willing to allow that a linguist may practically achieve his goal of providing an adequate, intelligible translation of the native speakers. Nor does he shrink from such consequences of that practical achievement as that the successful theory provides, within its limits, truths about the native language.14 It is just that those limits allow the possibility of equal practical success for quite different translations. Quine consequently denies that "there is any truth of the matter" about the meaning of the native utterances, and asserts the radical indeterminacy of translation. The earlier doubts about objective meaning or about meaning as an "object" in (2) may be understood in this way Kant can defend his distinction between analytic and synthetic truth against these points in two ways. One is to note that, as in earlier cases, the argument rests on certain assumptions of a restrictive sort. If we are dubious about the restriction to certain types of behavioral evidence, as we might also be about the priority attached to extensional properties, then the conclusions will not go through. The second is to note that Quine allows the practical success of the field linguist, and regards it as inevitable that he should deploy his home categories in that achievement. It is quite possible then to distinguish the philosophical argument which prohibits determinacy of translation from the practice which allows it. That is not to concede that the philosophical argument is at all satisfactory; it may belong to that assumption of philosophy's authority to question scientific beliefs which Kant himself calls into question. It may be that it belongs to the realms of intellectual pathology and can be set aside for that reason, but for present purposes it is not necessary to consider that. We can simply allow the analytic/synthetic distinction to be used in practice independently of the philosophical argument, just as we may still use the resources of a current, perhaps inadequate, semantic theory to separate analytic from synthetic judgments or truths. (5) It is also finally worth noting that Quine sometimes runs together different considerations from semantics and epistemology.15 Some of his reasons for rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction have to do not with semantic theory and its shortcomings, but with standard empiricist reductionism and a claimed vulnerability to "recalcitrant experiences" of all judgments. For Quine even logical truths, and those elsewhere classified as analytic, are vulnerable to, and can be replaced in the light of, such recalcitrant experience. Even if this is true, however, what it shows is that both analytic and

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synthetic truths have one such feature, epistemic vulnerability, in common. But even if they cannot be discriminated on that epistemic basis, it does not follow that there is no other way of distinguishing them. In a similar way to reject reductionism is not necessarily to reject the analytic/synthetic distinction. It is true that standard empiricists also endorse certain forms of analytic reduction, but to accept the analytic/synthetic distinction is not necessarily to endorse any reductionist thesis, and Kant himself is certainly not a reductionist in the empiricist manner. Acceptance of some analytic truths is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition of any analytic reductionist thesis. These epistemological points have more to do with the other a priori/a posteriori distinction and are made in this context primarily because Quine, like the Logical Positivists, assimilates the two contrasts between analytic/synthetic and a posteriori/a priori.16 But the difference between semantic and epistemological grounds suggests that we should not arbitrarily assimilate these, and Kant's separation of the two distinctions insists on that requirement. The discussion of Quine's thesis is not intended to show that it is wholly untenable but that the argument is ambiguous and parts of it are invalid. The formal point, that his argument rests on certain assumptions about which we may be agnostic, allows that if those assumptions were established then his conclusion might be unavoidable, but until they are established we cannot be compelled to accept Quine's conclusion. The intention here is only to claim that the analytic/synthetic distinction does not have to be rejected in the light o f Bennett's and Quine's arguments.

[4] Synthetic A Priori Judgments

I n the previous chapter even the most serious objections to Kant's analytic apparatus were shown to be indecisive, but that does not yet establish the formal adequacy of the apparatus or of its most important outcome, the hybrid synthetic a priori classification. I want now to provide a more constructive account of the apparatus and that outcome by considering two questions: 1. How can the two distinctions, "a posteriori/a priori" and "synthetic/analytic," be separately understood? 2. Does the formal apparatus make room for the hybrid "synthetic a priori" classification? There is a third question to which only a partial answer can be given at this stage: 3. Can any adequate examples of synthetic a priori judgment be given? It was already conceded that one of Kant's examples of a synthetic a priori judgment from mathematics, namely, "7 + 5 = 12," was based on a fallacious argument. That Kant's argument was fallacious still allows that such a judgment may be synthetic a priori, but the most important examples of such judgments come not from the sciences but from Kantian metaphysics and his transcendental philosophy.1 Part of what is distinctive about that philosophy is its identification and proof of particular synthetic a priori principles which ground the sciences and our common experience. Since that identification and those proofs of the principles are the topic of the later Analytic those examples must be considered in that context. The primary task here is to explore the formal apparatus and to see if it leaves room for the hybrid classification, that is, to answer 1 and 2. 63

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1. A Posteriori/A Priori Kant's introduction of this distinction relies on the criteria of "necessity" and "strict (or unrestricted) universality." Kant notes that the term "a priori" is sometimes used in a loose and relative sense where a judgment is strictly neither necessary nor independent of experience, but is based on immediate and unassailable evidence which needs no further empirical enquiry (B3-4). Kant makes it clear that the proper use of the term marks what is strictly independent of empirical experience. All three notions, necessity, strict universality, and independence from experience, evidently play an essential part in the a posteriori/a priori distinction. It was claimed earlier that there is no good reason to ascribe to Kant an objectionable "introspective semantics" in his account of the distinction, but other, more germane, issues arise. There is, for example, a problem about Kant's ascription of the terms both to judgments and to subjudgmental constituents such as concepts and intuitions. While the former can be understood directly in terms of a priori knowledge or truth, the latter cannot. More centrally there is unclarity about the relations between the three principal notions, necessity, strict universality, and independence from experience. Necessity and universality may be conceived directly as forms of judgment, or indirectly as properties of judgment. Any judgment of the form "All X s are T " is unrestrictedly general in form but evidently no judgment could be regarded as a priori simply in virtue of that form. Some such judgments may be directly based on observed regularities in experience and so be a posteriori by any standard, and some judgments which do not have this form, such as "Wombats are marsupials," may nevertheless be always, universally true. Similarly no judgment of the forms " X is necessarily T " or " X must be y could be regarded as a priori simply in virtue of those verbal forms, and other judgments of the form "Xis T " may nevertheless be necessarily true. Kant effectively makes these points himself in his account of the loose, relative sense for "a priori" which he rejects. For those judgments are naturally expressed by using such terms as "necessarily" or "must," and yet would not be a priori true in the strict sense that Kant requires. If the verbal form of some judgment is neither necessary nor sufficient for its being a priori or a posteriori, then the criteria may concern rather the different types of warrant for judgments of those kinds. Rejection of the verbal form as a criterion turned partly on cases where the judgment was evidently dependent on experience for its warrant, and this indicates a more fundamental role for dependence on, or independence of, experience in the distinction. Kant's view is that empirical experience, what I shall call "presented experience," is an adequate basis for a posteriori judgment but not for a priori judgment, and that a priori judgments are properly war-

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ranted in other ways. If we accept that "7 + 5 = 12" is at least a priori true, then that is because it expresses a strictly universal and necessary truth which is not warranted merely by presented experience. Such a truth can be exemplified or realized in experience when we count 7 items, add them to 5 others, and arrive at the sum 12, but the suggestion is that the arithmetical claim itself, as a priori, rests on a warrant of a different nonexperiential type. In the mathematical case such a warrant may be supplied by a procedure, such as a formal proof, which depends on logic or reason rather than on any presented experience. In other cases, such as those which license analytic truths, the nonexperiential warrant may be the relations between the meanings of the constituents in a judgment. Such nonexperiential warrants are contrasted with cases where we make a claim about some particular matter of fact currently presented to our experience, or make a claim with wider scope based on some presented regularity in experience. In these latter cases, and in the absence of any other warrant, cautious forms of expression, such as " X seems to be T " or "So far all X's have been T," may be strictiy more appropriate than the less cautious " X is T " or "All X's are T." There is no prohibition against the assertion of the less cautious forms as hypotheses, but the mere presentation of such experiences strictly licenses only the assertion of the more cautious claims. Assertions made on this purely experiential basis could not be regarded as licensing necessary or universal truths. Such an account gives the notions of dependence on—and independence of—presented experience a primacy in the a posteriori/a priori distinction, and then claims that the necessity and strict universality of judgments derive from that primary sense. A posteriori judgments, whose warrant depends only upon presented experience, can never adequately support such necessity or universality; a priori judgments which have those features depend upon other nonexperiential types of warrant. It may be thought that the difference in the warrants makes the attribution of a priori truth indefeasible, but this is not so.2 Just as an experiential warrant for an a posteriori judgment may be overturned by subsequent experience, so a purported proof of some a priori mathematical theorem may be subsequently overturned by more careful scrutiny of its steps. Nor would it be plausible to argue in the latter case that such scrutiny involves only an appeal to presented experience, for what is at issue is the rational status of the proof and not the veridical or predictive quality of our experience of it. Kant does not explicitly make these provisos, and his account may therefore seem committed to the belief that thinking some judgment to be necessarily or universally true provides an indefeasible guarantee of truth. The account of "introspective semantics" reads Kant in that way, but that was earlier shown to be neither obligatory nor plausible. We may read him as

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saying that necessity and strict universality belong to a priori truths, and also allow that our beliefs about the ascription of these properties to judgments are defeasible. The problem of applying "a priori" both to judgments and subjudgmental constituents can be pardy resolved by accepting that the notions of dependence on, and independence from, experience are prior to the propositional criteria. Intuitions and concepts may be a priori, that is, independent of experience, even though the propositional criteria of necessity and strict universality do not apply directly to them. It would not do to link the two sets of notions by claiming that a concept is a priori just so long as necessary or universal truths can be constructed from it. For any analytic truth is a priori, for Kant, and these may contain nothing but a posteriori concepts. Nor can it be claimed that for Kant a priori concepts or intuitions cannot be exemplified in experience for this would encourage the basic rationalist fallacy. Since pure a priori concepts without any sensory content cannot be direcdy exemplified in sensory experience the temptation is to suppose that they designate supersensible objects. For Kant a priori judgments and concepts must be connected to a sensory content and exemplifiable in experience if they are to have a genuine use.3 What makes them a priori is not that they refer to items beyond experience, but that exemplification in experience by itself does not warrant their unqualified assertion or their a priority. A priori concepts and intuitions can be similarly used in experience though not derived from it. But Kant needs some argument linking the a priori character of judgments to the a priori character of their constituents, and seems to provide it in his account of an "abstraction" procedure at B5—6. There Kant notes the gap between ascribing a priority to judgments and to subjudgmental concepts, and outlines a process of removing what is demonstrably a posteriori to reveal what is at least prima facie a priori. The procedure could be elaborated in the following way: if we have a judgment with an apparent necessity, we first check whether it is analytically true, and, if not, remove any concepts which are demonstrably a posteriori, so that what are left will be candidates for being a priori. The procedure makes a natural transition from the criteria for a priori judgment or truth to the identification of a priori concepts. It does not prove the a priori status of such concepts but merely offers its candidates for later proofs like those for the fundamental intuitions and concepts in the Aesthetic and Analytic. For the present I note only that the point has a wider importance because it indicates ambiguities in the traditional notion of "the given." Sometimes the given is used as a contrast to what is inferred on occasion, or more generally as a contrast to what can be derived from experience. What is "given" in experience may cover either what can be presented in

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experience or can be derived from what is so presented, but traditionally its essential character is to be a posteriori. But the notion of what is, or might be, presented in experience is itself indeterminate. It might be understood to cover anything which we ordinarily recognize as perceptible, and then it offers an unphilosophical record of our possible perceptions. More commonly in the philosophical tradition the given has been understood to cover some limited set of privileged items, such as elementary sensory properties, or their subjective sensory counterparts, or items which are indubitably certain. In the tradition of normative epistemology these items are supposed to be the foundational elements from which the rest of experience can be derived and validated. Sellars's "myth of the given," discussed in chapter 10, describes them as "self-authenticating inner experiences." Kant rejects those traditional conceptions of the given, so that for him what is presented in experience and what is a posteriori are not the same. For Kant what is presented in experience may be, or include, a priori elements, which are not derivable from experience and need to be isolated in that experience through the process of abstraction. He frequently uses the expression "given a priori" to mark his own untraditional use of that traditional expression (B8, B38, B46). 4 The suggestion is that Kant uses the expression to indicate that both a priori and a posteriori items are presented to our senses or to our perception. Kant would not deny that spatial features, for example, are presented to our senses, or that we really perceive spatial relations and magnitudes, but he would deny that our concept, or intuition, of space is a posteriori, or that it could be derived from a posteriori experience. His position matches the project, noted earlier, of a metaphysical inventory in which our developed human experience is taken as a datum from which its a posteriori and a priori elements are to be disentangled and abstracted. To avoid the ambiguities of "the given," and any overt commitment to Sellars's "myth of the given," I identify Kant's in terms of what is "presented" in experience. What is so presented does not signify only what is a posteriori and is not restricted to a privileged class of sensory and subjective properties. What is so presented describes neutrally the character of our experience. Provisos need to be made about further specification of the a priori/a posteriori distinction. The account so far provides no answers to traditional philosophical questions about either the ultimate nature of presented experience or the standard required to know something. Nor does it explain in any detail how specific judgments are warranted experientially or in other ways. Traditionally, presented experience has been understood in the subjective and psychological terms of "sense-data" or "sense experiences," but no such commitment is made in Kant's account. Similarly skeptical issues are traditionally raised about the appropriate standard for knowledge of a

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priori and a posteriori judgment and these have also been set aside. One reason for this is that Kant's analytic apparatus should be introduced and understood in a formal way independently of these traditional questions, and Kant's own introduction of the apparatus adopts that strategy. There is no good reason to commit Kant at this stage to a traditional normative epistemology which assumes that presented experience is subjective and psychological, and his untraditional use of "given" counts against it. Equally there is good reason to avoid the traditional skeptical debates about the standard of knowledge in this formal context. We could do this either by treating "knowledge" in a neutral way, or by defining the a priori/a posteriori distinction in terms of "belief" or of "warranted assertibility." There is merit in the conventional view that "a priori" is an "epistemic" property and not "semantic" or "logical," as "analytic" is, and this provides an initial framework separating the two contrasts as Kant wishes. But that epistemic character can still be marked even if, like Kripke, we choose to speak of a priori belief rather than knowledge. It might be best therefore, instead of using the phrase "a priori truth" . . . to stick to the question whether a particular person or knower knows something a priori or believes it true on the basis of a priori evidence. (Kripke 1972,

260)

These considerations allow the following range of definitions: (1) A judgment is a posteriori a. iff determination of its truth (falsity) requires presented experience. b. iff its warranted assertion (or denial) requires presented experience. c. iff warranted belief (or disbelief) in it requires presented experience. (2) A judgment is a priori a. iff determination of its truth (falsity) does not require presented experience. b. iff its warranted assertion (or denial) does not require presented experience. c. iff warranted belief (or disbelief) in it does not require presented experience. These definitions avoid explicit reference to knowing a priori for the reasons given, but could be rewritten in those terms so long as the conception of knowledge is treated as neutral with respect to traditional

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skepticism. Similarly, what is a priori or a posteriori could be taken to be not judgments but true judgments and the definitions could then be written in those terms.

2. The Analytic/Synthetic Distinction Kant himself generally talks of analytic or synthetic judgments, but there is a confusion, noted earlier in chapter 3.2.1, (5), between criteria for (analytic/synthetic) judgments and for (analytic/synthetic) truths or falsities. I shall talk of analytic or synthetic truths where this means only analytic or synthetic true judgments. In the earlier discussion two principal ways of characterizing analytic or synthetic truths were identified from Kant's own descriptions. (3) An analytic truth is one whose denial yields a contradiction. (4) An analytic truth is one whose truth can be determined solely from the meaning of its constituents. As they stand these are plainly not equivalent and it is therefore necessary to choose between them. (4) is more restricted than (3), and also makes reference to "meaning" which may be better avoided. Quine's arguments against appeals to meaning were indecisive but it remains true that we have as yet no wholly adequate semantic theory. It may consequently be better to avoid such references in the definition of analytic truth and so to prefer (3) to (4). Apart from that (4) arguably defines a more limited class of truths than (3). Any formal proof of a proposition or theorem will yield an analytically true conditional with the premises as antecedent and conclusion as consequent. If the premises are themselves analytic truths then the conclusion can be discharged as an analytic truth in its own right. But in such cases it is not obvious that the discharged conclusion depends for its truth solely on the meanings of its constituent terms, or even solely on the meanings of all the constituent terms in the premises and rules of inference used in the proof. Despite uncertainty about this semantic issue we may nevertheless be entirely satisfied that to deny the conclusion is inconsistent. There are consequently good reasons independently of Kant to prefer (3) to (4), but it does not mean that (4) should be simply dispensed with. (4) might be regarded as defining special cases of (3) where the contradiction arises uncontroversially from the meanings of some judgment's constituent terms. That reflects the claims that whatever satisfies (4) will satisfy (3), and that it is doubtful whether what satisfies (3) will always satisfy (4).

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Criterion (3) does not specify any particular method of determining whether the denial of some truth is a contradiction. Like the criteria for a priority, which are not committed to any traditionally restricted view o f presented experience in terms of sense-data, (3) allows any number o f appropriate methods for determining inconsistency. Among these methods will be formal decision procedures in the simplest systems of logic, but proof procedures and considerations of meaning may also be included. Just as in the earlier case of a priority we can include immediate presentations and regularities in experience to determine what is a posteriori, so in this case we can specify such different methods of establishing what are analytic truths on the basis of inconsistency. In this way Kant, unlike Quine, is prepared to license as analytic truths those where the demonstration of inconsistency turns on considerations of the meaning of their constituents. The distinction points to ways of establishing truth (analytic truth) which depend on appeals to logic, reason, and meaning, just as there are ways of establishing truth (a posteriori truth) which depend on presented experience or on regularities in presented experience. There is an evident temptation to conflate the analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions in these terms, so it is necessary to remember that for Kant they are intended to be different. In particular we have to be careful to notice that the criterion for analyticity depends on the satisfaction of the contradiction test, and not on any contingent features of our administration of it. A posteriori truth and its associated procedures are formally opposed by Kant to a priori truth, not to analytic truth; analytic truth and its associated methods are formally opposed by him to synthetic truth, not to a posteriori truth. If we do not mark these differences we may fall into the empiricist assumption that the two distinctions are equivalent or can be assimilated. It may be that they will turn out to be equivalent, or assimilable, but at this stage that should remain an open question. Criterion (3) offers an account of analytic truth, but Kant generally speaks of analytic or synthetic judgment. It was noted earlier that the strict contradiction test could not license false judgments as analytic, but there is no difficulty in amending the criterion to apply to judgment generally and so to include analytic falsities. In the case of analytic truths the test will be whether their denial yields a contradiction; in the case o f analytic falsities the test will be whether they yield a contradiction. If we wanted to provide a formal criterion for analytic judgment, then we could write: (3')

A judgment is analytic iff either its denial is inconsistent or it is itself inconsistent.

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The corresponding formulations for synthetic truth and synthetic judgment would be: (5) A judgment is a synthetic truth iff its denial is not inconsistent, (5') A judgment is synthetic iff neither it nor its denial are inconsistent.

3. Synthetic A Priori Truth The separate discussions of the two contrasts, a posteriori/a priori and analytic/synthetic, provide a range of basic definitions for the terms. I formulate a preferred version of these definitions in order to raise the question whether they allow the possibility of synthetic a priori truth. (6) A judgment is a posteriori (true) iff determination of its truth requires presented experience. (7) A judgment is a priori (true) iff determination of its truth does not require presented experience. (8) A judgment is analytically true iff its denial yields a contradiction. (9) A judgment is synthetically true iff its denial does not yield a contradiction. Kant has two central requirements for his framework. The first is that all analytic truths must be a priori, and the second is that not all a priori truths are analytic. The former marks a connection between the two sets of criteria, and the latter marks their separation in the synthetic/a priori classification. The two requirements can be captured by formulating two entailments, the first of which is accepted in Kant's scheme and the second of which is rejected. The first entailment is: (10) A judgment's a posteriori truth entails its synthetic truth, or (10') Necessarily, if determination of the truth of a judgment requires presented experience, then the judgment is synthetically true. By contraposition these yield the required claims: (11) A judgment's analytic truth entails its a priori truth,

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and (11') Necessarily, if a judgment is analytically true, then determination of its truth does not require presented experience. The second entailment which Kant must reject is: (12) A judgment's synthetic truth entails its a posteriori truth, or (12') Necessarily, if a judgment fails the contradiction test then determination of its truth requires presented experience. The two entailments can be expressed by the following biconditionals, typically assumed by empiricists: (13) A judgment is a posteriori true iff it is a synthetic truth, and (14) A judgment requires presented experience to determine its truth iff it fails the contradiction test. In each case, (13) and (14), Kant is committed to accepting one limb of the biconditional, namely (10) and (10'), but rejecting the other, namely (12) and (12'), and so rejecting the biconditionals themselves. The question is whether those commitments are acceptable. The first requirement is widely accepted and not difficult to support. The issue is whether passing the contradiction test means that that truth does not require presented experience. So long as that relation holds, then any analytic truth will be a priori. But it has been accepted from the start that determining truth by means of some rational procedure, whether through a proof or consideration of meaning, is different from, and opposed to, a determination through presented experience. That does not exclude the possibility that we might come to hold some analytic truth on the basis of an experiential warrant, but it does mean that no such experiential warrant is required. Nor is it necessary to deny that we access such rational procedures in our experience. We read, and recognize, the steps of a proof through sight or touch or hearing. But the rational procedures themselves, the contents of judgments which are related logically in a proof, are determined nonexperientially. The issue concerns the passing or failing of the contradiction test, and not the circumstances of the test's administration.5 The second issue is more complicated and controversial. Here what is required is the denial of an entailment, namely that being a priori entails

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being analytic, or that not requiring presented experience entails passing the contradiction test. In this case the belief that the entailment fails is not widely held; on the contrary what I call a "standard" empiricism accepts the entailment and so accepts both (13) and (14). Standard empiricism assimilates the two distinctions and consequently rejects the hybrid synthetic a priori as inconsistent. Quine's nonstandard empiricism rejects (13) and (14), but in a non-Kantian way, because he rejects the analytic/synthetic classification and holds that even logical truths are vulnerable to experience and revisable. In the accounts so far given, and apart from standard empiricist assumptions, there is no reason yet to think that the hybrid form is inconsistent. The criteria given for the two distinctions do not immediately exclude the synthetic a priori classification, and that provides a minimal license for the hybrid form. Some commentators accept that minimal commitment but regard the class of such hybrid judgments as empty6; for them the classification is consistent but applies to no identifiable judgment. In order to examine the issue further I consider first the empiricist assumption that the biconditionals (13) and (14) hold, so that the hybrid synthetic a priori is inconsistent. I then examine Kripke's nonempiricist account of the basic classifications to compare it with that of Kant. The empiricist position has been formulated in the following way: Twentieth century empiricists such as Ayer have maintained that a proposition can only be known a priori if it is analytic, i.e. true in virtue of the meanings of the words in it, rather than in virtue of the way the world is. On this account all a priori knowledge is of analytic truths; synthetic truths can only be known empirically. (Dancy 1989, 213-14)

That report of the empiricist position endorses the limb of the biconditional (12) which Kant rejects. It contains no argument for assimilating the two distinctions, but only an assumption that they should be assimilated. Closer scrutiny of the report shows also where that assumption might be questioned. It is not at all clear why we should accept an exhaustive and exclusive division between "truth in virtue of the meanings of words" and "truth in virtue of the way the world is." Quine rejected the claim that we can separate the semantic and the factual aspects of judgment in that way, but his nonstandard empiricism is of no help to Kant. More pertinently it might be asked why we should assume that "the way the world is" can be identified with a posteriori judgment. Why should there not be ways in which the world is which are not simply given a posteriori in experience? The assumptions that any way the world is must be given and so a posteriori, and that those a posteriori resources can be contrasted only with analytic truth, express a standard empiricism which begs the question in this

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context. They confuse the earlier distinction between what is "given" and what is "presented" in experience, and provide further examples of what Quine called "unempirical dogmas of empiricism."7 Kant rejects both of them. Kant's position is that "the way the world is" cannot be separated from the way we view it, from the rules through which we make it intelligible. If it is objected that this is not an adequate conception of the way the world is independendy of us, Kant's reply would be that such a conception of "independence" is either unclear or mistaken. His point is that we cannot properly conceive of the world without taking into account our cognitive powers. This is to claim that the world is in some way dependent on certain a priori aspects of those cognitive powers, and not merely that those powers are necessary for us to respond a posteriori to what is already there. To object that this denies the world's independence begs the question against Kant. It raises the question how we should understand the notions of "dependence" and "independence," considered later in a discussion of an "absolute conception of reality" (chapter 15.2.1). Familiar models have been deployed to add flesh to that alternative nonempiricist position. Suppose, for example, that some ways in which the world is are fixed not simply by the presentation of particular experiences but instead by its underlying structure or rules. If it makes sense at all to speak of an underlying structure, then it may indicate how the world is precisely by indicating how it has to be. Such an account would give a sense to Kant's Copernican hypothesis, in which objects sometimes conform to our knowledge rather than our knowledge always conforming to objects (Bxvii-xviii). The claim would be not that specific objects, say physical objects, are magically brought into existence by an act of conceptual will, "the mind making nature," but that certain underlying structures or rules are necessary for, and make possible, the general character of our experience. That is how Kant himself generally expresses the point about an underlying structure. The very idea of an "underlying structure" and its mode of operation remains problematic, but Kant's conception of a condition of possible experience and his detailed explorations of such conditions in the Analytic of Principles indicate a long-term resolution to the problem. More immediately they suggest a familiar but partial model. It has been suggested that in a game such as chess the basic formal rules function as conditions of the possibility of the game. The model provides a sense for the Copernican experiment, since it might be said that the "objects" of chess, that is, the practice and theory of the game, including the identification of a piece as a bishop or of a position as advantageous to Black, conform to the rules rather than the other way round. The rules cannot be explained, it might be said, only in terms of what is presented in

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experience of the game, for that experience itself depends upon those rules. The rules have priority over that experience and have characteristics, such as universality, necessity, and normativity, which do not belong to barely presented experiences. The point can be familiarly illustrated in the differences between what uninstructed and instructed observers of a game "see." What, it might be said, is given in such experience is no more than the changing spatial relations of certain pieces on a squared board, but the instructed observer construes these changes in line with a grasp of the underlying rules of the game. Those underlying rules do not bring the board or the pieces into existence but serve to define the role of those items in the practice of chess playing and determine the instructed observer's appreciation of the scene. What is important in such a model is not merely that experience of the game requires reference to the concepts we use to describe its features, but that certain of those concepts and their associated rules are prior to that empirical experience and constitutive of it. The metaphor is useful but limited and potentially misleading in its application to Kant. It is partial because game playing itself is only a fragment of adult human experience and trades on that wider background. The model can only indicate, and not establish, an antiempiricist thesis such as Kant's, which requires that the whole of experience presupposes certain concepts and their associated rules. It is obvious that the game-playing model cannot be extended in that way without some amendment. Again one reason for attaching priority to the rules of chess over the experience and activity of chess playing lies in the stipulative and normative character of the rules, but Kant's account of the a priori appeals rather to universality and necessity. It is true that chess rules are universal and necessary within their own context, but that serves only to reinforce the limited similarity to Kant's position, which requires that his rules govern the whole of experience and not merely some restricted part of it. The model indicates what has been called only a "relative" or "structural" a priority8 in relation to some partial system rather than a global a priority in relation to experience as a whole. Kant's global rules governing experience are "relative" in one way, for they concern our human, adult, experience, but they are not relative in governing only a partial fragment of that human experience. Despite its limitations, the model offers some useful guidance in understanding the relation between a prior structure and the practice which it makes possible. That relation does not have to be construed as causal or psychological as it is in the crude doctrine of the "mind making nature." The relative a priorities in the model are determined from within the game and not, except metaphorically, imposed from outside it as that crude doctrine claims, and the rules have, as Kant claims for his a priori principles of the understanding, an immanent role in experience rather than a transcen-

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dent role beyond it. They function only in relation to the practice and have no constitutive or designative role beyond that. Again, if we think of the rules as making the game possible we are not thinking simply of particular occurrences in which a player, who has memorized the rules, appeals to his memory in order causally to determine what his next move might be; nor are we thinking of some original historical invention of the game. Such "interiorization" and its causal consequences undoubtedly occur, but the relation between the rules themselves and the game which they make possible is plainly not of that order. Two features of the model match Kant's position. His account of the a priori principles which govern experience as a whole is neither psychological nor causal; it is neither a hypothesis in empirical psychology nor a transcendent claim about things in themselves beyond experience. In a similar way it has been suggested that Kant's project is not primarily directed at traditional skepticism, and that holds also for the model. Chess playing is a public phenomenon and its rules are publicly accessible. The distinction between rules and the practice they make possible occurs within an unquestioned distinction between what is subjective, namely, a particular player's thought processes, and what is objective, namely, the position on the board and any demonstrable features, advantages, and disadvantages which belong to it. There is no serious question in the chess context of a philosophical skepticism about that experience or its subjective origins. If, as I have suggested, Kant's account is neither causal, psychological, nor idealist, the model, though limited, helps to remind us of these Kantian requirements. The game-playing model offers a partial and informal way of understanding Kant's claims, but it needs to be connected to Kant's formal requirements for synthetic a priori judgment. One way of doing so would be to note the possibility of classifying relative a priori principles, like the rules of a game, as synthetic a priori. In some cases, such as Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, or correspondence and over-the-board chess, there are variations in the rules which indicate that some do not hold unconditionally. If it is possible for some rules to be altered without essentially changing the game, then those rules might be said to be synthetic a priori. They are relative a priori in governing this version of the game, but are not analytic since they do not hold for all such variations. They define what is called a "dedicated" formulation of the system, such as a chessplaying computer program. It would be natural to describe that latter feature by saying that such rules do not hold in all possible worlds, and philosophers such as Gordon Brittan and Kripke have used the terminology of possible worlds to provide schemes of classification which can be compared with Kant's.9 They do not like Quine reject the basic classifications or like standard empiricists

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reject all classifications except the analytic/synthetic distinction. They revert to the Leibnizian idea that while some truths hold only in some possible worlds others may hold in all possible worlds.10 The question is whether these accounts throw light on Kant's classification, and I consider that by comparing Kant and Kripke.

4. Kant and Kripke Kripke provides a more complex taxonomy than either the empiricists or Kant. Kripke distinguishes not only analytic and synthetic truths and a priori or a posteriori modes of knowing but also necessary and contingent truth. Kant uses that latter distinction in his account of the a priori but not in the same way as Kripke. There are consequently some differences between Kant and Kripke, but both distinguish the a priori/a posteriori and analytic/synthetic distinctions, and both offer a liberation from the standard, and the Quinean, empiricist restrictions. Where Kant identifies just one important hybrid form, the synthetic a priori, Kripke identifies two hybrid forms, the contingent a priori and the necessary a posteriori. Kripke appeals also to notions such as rigid designation and the contrast between reference-fixing and meaning-giving, which play no part in Kant. In order to compare the two schemes I outline some of the central aspects of Kripke's account. (1) For Kripke the a priori/a posteriori distinction is epistemic and not either logical, semantic, or metaphysical. It classifies judgments in terms of the ways in which subjects can have knowledge of them. It does not concern the logical relations between constituents in a judgment, or the question of the judgment's truth in all or only some possible worlds. Kripke, however, makes some provisos about these claims. First, he recognizes that to treat the classification as "epistemic" is not to raise at once the traditional issues about standards of knowledge (1972, 260). For the distinction can be drawn just as well in terms of subjects' beliefs, and the warrants on which such beliefs rest. Kripke thus accepts the proposal, made earlier on Kant's behalf, that the formal classification is separated from those traditional epistemological issues. Second, although Kripke, like Kant, introduces the a priori as what can be known independently of experience he prefers, as he says, to "stick to the question whether a particular person . . . knows something a priori" (1972, 260). Typically, too, Kripke considers cases in which something is, or is not, known rather than those in which something is at least knowable (1972, 319). This proviso fits his insistence that even a priori judgments may come to be believed on an a posteriori basis, and so reinforces the earlier point that the distinction concerns the type of warrant used, or available, for particular judgments. Third, Kripke also raises

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the Kantian question about the range of subjects, knowers, to whom the classification applies: "That means that in some sense it's possible . . . to know [something] independently of experience. And possible for whom? For God? For the Martians? Or just for people with minds like ours?" (1972, 260). Kripke gestures in this way towards the anthropocentric relativity already noted in Kant, but Kripke, unlike Kant, does not explicidy answer his question. For Kant, as I have suggested, what is in the first instance knowable a priori is so for people with minds like ours, with our cognitive capacities. In the context of the a priori/a posteriori distinction Kripke and Kant are evidently very close. Both treat it as an epistemic distinction, and both sidestep the traditional issues about standards of knowledge. Both regard "independence of experience" as the central notion, and both admit the distinction's relativization to some reference class of knowers. Kripke, unlike Kant, does not explicitly identify that reference class as subjects with our cognitive powers; Kant, unlike Kripke, does not relativize his distinction to particular subjects on particular occasions. (2) Kripke contrasts the epistemic a priori/a posteriori distinction with a metaphysical distinction between the necessary and the contingent. The former records different ways in which judgments are known or believed, while the latter separates respectively judgments which hold in all, or only in some, possible worlds without reference to ways in which we might know this. The metaphysical distinction is linked to Kripke's contrasts between rigid and nonrigid designators, and between fixing a reference and giving the meaning. The former contrast separates those expressions which designate the same item in all possible worlds from those which do not. The latter distinguishes between features which belong to referential aspects of judgment and those which attach to the meaning of expressions. Both rigid designation and the meanings of expressions will generate necessary truths which hold in all possible worlds but they do so in importantly different ways. Typically analytic truths will be determined by the meanings of their constituent expressions and hold in all possible worlds, but rigid designators will also determine truths holding in all possible worlds by virtue of their reference-fixing rather than their meaning-giving powers. That opens the way for the possibility of truths which hold in all possible worlds and are therefore necessary but whose necessity does not depend on meaning as, for Kripke, analytic truths do. The primary differences between Kant and Kripke concern the necessary/contingent and the analytic/synthetic distinctions. For both Kant and Kripke the a priori/a posteriori distinction is between respectively what can, and cannot, be known independently of presented experience, but Kant associates necessity with the a priori and does not reserve a distinctive role for the necessary/contingent relation. For Kripke the neces-

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sary/contingent distinction is defined respectively in terms of truth holding in all, or only some, possible worlds, while for Kant the analytic/synthetic distinction is more naturally understood in those terms. If that latter Kantian distinction is defined, as I have suggested, in terms of what passes the contradiction test (analytic truth) and what does not (synthetic truth), then the former truth will hold in all possible worlds and the latter will not. Kripke does not distinguish the "contradiction" test for analytic truth from the "meaning" criterion, and defines analytic truth in the latter semantic terms, but he also accepts, as Kant does, that analytic truths are both a priori and necessary. Kant does not in the introduction emphasize the necessary/ contingent distinction, but in associating necessity with the a priori he makes it, contrary to Kripke's intention, an epistemic rather than metaphysical classification. For these reasons the central comparison between the two schemes involves on Kripke's side the necessary/contingent and a priori/a posteriori distinctions, and on Kant's side the analytic/synthetic and a priori/a posteriori distinctions. If Kant's analytic/synthetic distinction is understood, as I have suggested, in terms of the contradiction test and that is associated with truths holding in all, or only some, possible worlds, then it is nonepistemic, like Kripke's necessary/contingent distinction. We can, for present purposes, set aside Kant's epistemic connection between necessity and the a priori, and Kripke's use of the "meaning" criterion for analytic truth. With that background the important similarities concern the hybrid forms which each scheme allows, namely, Kant's synthetic a priori and Kripke's necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori judgments. But of those latter two only the second is a serious candidate for comparison with Kant. The first, necessary a posteriori judgment, can be set aside in terms of Kant's understanding, since although the two conceptions of the a priori/a posteriori distinction are the same Kant could not accept any association of necessity with a posteriori judgment. Kant's account of necessity as a criterion for the a priori would conflict with the a posteriori character of the judgment. If, instead, we consider Kripke's conception of necessity as truth in all possible worlds, then Kant would have to license a warrant from presented experience to truth in all possible worlds, that is, for him, analytic truth, which he could not accept.11 Kripke's other hybrid, the contingent a priori, is closer in conception to Kant's synthetic a priori, even though Kripke's examples are different from any that Kant offers. The conception is similar since Kripke's contingent a priori truths are, translated into Kant's language, truths which do not hold in all possible worlds, are therefore synthetic and not analytic, but can be known a priori, that is, independently of presented experience. Both Kant and Kripke are prepared to license such a category, and accept a similar argument for it. Kripke's argument considers why we should assume

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that anything knowable a priori must also be necessary, and hold in all possible worlds, and then claims that the assumption is ungrounded. The central point is expressed in the following way: "This [belief/assumption] depends on the thesis that there can't be a way of knowing about the actual world without looking, which wouldn't be a way of knowing the same thing about every possible world" (1972, 263). This line of argument is familiar. It is essentially the point made earlier on Kant's behalf against Ayer's assumption that there is no way the world actually is which does not depend (a posteriori) on presented experience. We can bring them into line in the following comparison of views which both Kant and Kripke reject. (15) Kripke denies: There is no way of knowing about the actual world without looking (i.e., no a priori way), which doesn't yield a truth about all possible worlds (i.e., is a necessary truth). (15') Kant denies: There is no way the world actually is (i.e., reported in a synthetic truth) which does not depend upon presented experience (i.e., is a posteriori). By contrast, the possibilities which they want to keep open are respectively: (16) Kripke asserts: There are ways of knowing about the actual world without looking (i.e., a priori ways), which yield truths holding in some but not all possible worlds (i.e., are contingent). These are contingent a priori truths. (16') Kant asserts: There are ways in which the world actually is (i.e., reported in synthetic truth) which do not depend on presented experience (i.e., are a priori). These are synthetic a priori truths. Although there are differences in terminology and background apparatus the two positions evidently have much in common. Both license a hybrid category of judgment against standard empiricism and do so on substantially the same basis, even though the similarity may be concealed by their divergent uses of "necessity" and by their dissimilar examples. Kripke's central example, the promulgation of the standard meter, is: (17) Stick S at t is one meter long. One of Kant's examples, the Second Analogy from his principles, is: (18) Whatever happens presupposes something on which it follows according to a rule (A189).

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Apart from evident differences in form, Kripke's example differs from Kant's in two salient ways.12 Kripke's (17) relies on an appeal to the apparatus of rigid designation. It is because the reference to the stick S designates nonrigidly, for Kripke, that (17) is contingent, that is, not true in all possible worlds. Kant has no such appeal to rigid, or nonrigid, designation and could not, therefore, have classified the judgment in these terms. There is a second divergence over the a priori character of the judgment. Kripke supports that character by appealing partly to the stipulative aspect of the judgment, and partly to the claim that we could know it to be true "automatically without further enquiry." The first of these points reflects the stipulative, or normative, character of rules in the earlier game-playing model, which is at least not explicit in Kant, and the second point conflicts with Kant's conception of the a priori. The appeal to what we might know without further enquiry reflects only that loose, relative sense for a priori which Kant sets aside at B2. Even if Kant were impressed by the appeal to stipulation in the example, he might point out that it does not exclude the requirement of a presented experience. Such a feature is built in to the example and it is difficult to see how it could be avoided. Kant could not have accepted Kripke's example of a synthetic a priori truth, but the more important issue is whether Kant's later discussion establishes the metaphysical truths he identifies as synthetic a priori. If this account is correct Kant's analytic apparatus resists the earlier objections and has a positive rationale. It remains to be seen whether later arguments establish any Kantian principles as synthetic a priori, but the classification cannot be dismissed as incoherent.13 The common objections are seen to rest on a question-begging empiricism when Kant's position is a conscious attempt to reject empiricism. It claims that certain judgments fail the contradiction test, are therefore not true in all possible worlds, but can be known independently of a posteriori experience. They are grounded neither in the analytic proof or decision procedures of formal logic, nor merely in the meaning of their constituent concepts, nor through an a posteriori survey of what occurs in experience. But they are related to experience in something like the way in which the prior rules of a game determine its nature and its practice. The account excludes those formal and empirical ways of grounding synthetic a priori principles but does not yet offer any more specific form of grounding. Kant later offers a nominal answer by saying that they are based on transcendental, not formal, logic, and he indicates that they require a special form of transcendental argument or proof. This requires the use of reason, in his metaphysics of experience, to abstract or isolate from experience and prove the rules which immanently govern it. Although the a priori elements are not derivable from empirical experience there is for Kant no question of any transcendent role in which they des-

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ignate real objects beyond that experience. The notion of "independence from experience" covers those two cases ambiguously, but if a Leibnizian dogmatic rationalism infers the existence of transcendent objects from those elements then it commits what Kant identifies as the basic rationalist fallacy. Kant's classification offers an argument to demonstrate that fallacy, since it provides an explanation for the special status of the relevant judgments without making that ontological claim. That outcome underlines the important point that Kant's enterprise in his metaphysics of experience, his transcendental topic, is neither empirical nor transcendent, but properly transcendental. Although that additional, less-exposed part of his analytic apparatus has not yet been explored, its primary role is made clear at B25. Transcendental enquiries are those which explain the possibility of a priori concepts and intuitions, and support the attribution of synthetic a priori status to the associated principles. The notion of a transcendental enquiry is not primarily directed at arguments against the skeptic but at the identification of a priori elements against empiricism. How that strategy relates to skepticism remains to be seen, but it reinforces the discussion of the synthetic a priori classification as "skepticism neutral." The formal classification offers no immediate answer to traditional skepticism about knowledge, and the transcendental enquiry it heralds is aimed primarily at empiricism rather than skepticism. It is consequendy important to consider, in the next chapter, Kant's distinctions between the empirical, a posteriori, immanent, transcendent, and transcendental.

[5] The Transcendental/Empirical Distinction

I n the preliminary sections of the Critique Kant begins to introduce his analytic apparatus, but later sections establish its role. The philosophical distinction between "appearance" and "thing in itself' is introduced in the B preface but later passages in the Aesthetic, Analytic, and Dialectic are needed to explain it fully.1 The synthetic a priori classification is formally introduced in the introduction, but Kant's claims for the synthetic a priori principles await their proofs in the Analytic of Principles. Similarly Kant's related use of "transcendental" and its contrast with "empirical" are aired at B25, in a passage cited above, but do not receive the clarification they deserve until later (B80-81, B350ff.). Put in the most general terms "transcendental" is Kant's favored description of his distinctive philosophy. That is true even though Kant regards "transcendental philosophy" as too ambitious a project for his book, and contents himself with what he calls only a "propaedeutic" (Bxliii) and the present "transcendental critique" (B25-26). Transcendental philosophy develops the revolutionary new direction for metaphysics for which the Critique is primarily a preparation. Throughout the Critique Kant distinguishes specifically "transcendental," as opposed to "empirical," accounts of virtually all his key terms. Kant's idealism is qualified as "transcendental" in opposition to a traditional "empirical" idealism, and central concepts such as "thing in itself," "outer object," "self," "synthesis," "psychology" and many others have both an empirical and a transcendental use. The distinction between "appearance" and "thing in itself," required for that part of the Copernican revolution which resolves the apparent contradictions of reason, evidentiy can be understood either empirically or in its philosophical significance transcendentally. One of Kant's principal complaints against Garve was that he failed to understand this distinction, confused "transcendental" with "transcendent," and so failed to observe a distinction between objects of experience and objects of reason. It must have been an added irritation to Kant that 83

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Garve did not even use Kant's term, but used transcendentell rather than transscendental. Contemporary commentators sometimes sympathize more with Garve than with Kant in regarding Kant's terminology as obscure or mysterious. Garve's position may be excused by claiming that Kant often uses "transcendental" when he should use "transcendent," is generally careless, even inconsistent, in using the two expressions, and never explains them adequately. Commentators, such as Cassam, sometimes explicitly avoid discussion of the terminology on the ground that it is too obscure to be disentangled,2 despite the fact that it is evidently central to Kant's understanding of his project, and to his fundamental distinction between those uses of his key concepts. Even at this early stage it is consequently useful to offer some clarification for Kant's distinction between the "transcendental" and the "empirical," even though it appeals to later passages. The distinction belongs to Kant's analytic apparatus, outlined in the introduction, even though it is a reticent part of it. In Kant's Theory of Knowledge (chapt. 3) I had already given some account of Kant's distinction and cited relevant passages in the Critique as B25, B40, B56, B62-63, B66, B80-81, B117-18, B296-98, B344-51, and B535. The passages at B25 and B80-81 particularly represent transcendental enquiries as self-consciously higher-order enquiries into the character of our knowledge and experience, both in ordinary life and in science. Not every kind of a priori knowledge should be called transcendental, but only that by which we know that—and how—certain representations (intuitions and concepts) can be employed or are possible purely a priori. The term 'transcendental' . . . signifies such knowledge as concerns the a priori possibility of knowledge or its a priori employment. . . .The distinction between the transcendental and the empirical belongs therefore only to the critique of knowledge; it does not concern the relation of that knowledge to its objects.

(B80-81)

Kant's distinction has at its center the idea of that self-monitoring scrutiny of one's own intellectual activities which Hegel and others have, pessimistically, supposed impossible (B823). For this reason, as I noted, Kant's project might be said to have an even higher order. It concerns the character of (and so has a higher order than) ordinary or scientific knowledge, but is also concerned to monitor philosophy itself, that is, to question its character and authority. Indications of Kant's attention to those higher-order issues about philosophy occur throughout the Critique, but I cite a revealing example from MetaphysicsLx (Ak. 28.1.223): It is good to determine the boundaries between sciences and to depict them in a system; otherwise we are always apprentices and know nothing; for example,

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how psychology and metaphysics are related, and whether they do not involve several different disciplines. . . . The reason why metaphysics was confused with empirical psychology was that we didn't know exacdy what metaphysics was, and hadn't outiined its boundaries. So much was included under the heading: First Principles of Human Knowledge.3

The passage expresses not only Kant's self-conscious monitoring of his own and other disciplines, but more particularly his awareness of potential confusions between psychology and metaphysics which he is often thought to overlook. I had noted that in contrasting a transcendental and an empirical enquiry Kant used those technical terms adverbially rather than adjectivally. Typically Kant's transcendental accounts refer not to special transcendental objects beyond those presented in experience, but deal transcendentally, rather than empirically, with those objects of experience and our conceptions of them. A transcendental account of such terms as "object," "self," or "synthesis" is not, consequendy, a material reference to objects, selves, or syntheses distinct from those items in our experience, but a formal, philosophical account of our conception of those items in our experience. The adverbs indicate different ways of dealing, empirically or philosophically, with the same things, and Kant makes extensive use of the "formal/material" distinction in this way in the Dialectic.4 Metaphysics and empirical psychology may both be concerned with belief, memory, imagination, and attention, but they deal with them in, respectively, philosophical or empirical ways. That divergence does not mean that the two modes of enquiry are distinct; it is natural to think that they overlap and complement each other. It would be natural to complain that this still does not explain the contrast unless we already understand what is distinctive in philosophy, or in Kant's new philosophy. The complaint might be answered by claiming that philosophy deals with concepts, and is distinctively "conceptual," and it was noted that in the prefaces, and elsewhere, Kant does claim that philosophy is conceptual. His project of "transcendental reflection" has to do with the correct allocation of our concepts to their cognitive sources, and more generally he discloses dependence relations among our concepts. But Kant plainly does not think that philosophy is "conceptual" in generating only analytic truth, and his use of "conceptual" consequently differs from that of recent analytic philosophers. Part of his point is to contrast philosophers, who are concerned with concepts, with formal and natural scientists, who deal with the ground floor objects those concepts designate. The point is elaborated in the Discipline of Pure Reason where Kant draws that distinction between philosophy and mathematics (B752-55).

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[Mathematicians] think it unnecessary to investigate the origins of pure concepts of the understanding . . . and to determine the extent of their validity; they care only to make use of them. In all this they are entirely in the right, provided they do not overstep the proper limits . . . [and] . . . unconsciously . . . pass from the field of sensibility to the precarious ground of pure and even transcendental concepts. . . . In mathematics, on the other hand, their passage gives rise to a broad highway which the latest posterity may tread with confidence. (B753-54)

B25 makes the point clearly and explicitly in saying that transcendental knowledge is concerned "not so much with objects as with our mode of knowledge of objects. . . . " In many of the cited passages Kant offers a further specification of distinctively transcendental interests. Ordinary people and scientists dealing with ground-floor objects in experience are interested primarily in differentiating them, and even their general theories concern restricted classes of such objects. Philosophers, by contrast, are typically concerned with more general issues about experience as a whole, and this is certainly true of Kant's project of outlining the a priori structure of experience. Although the conceptual and empirical interests of metaphysics and psychology, or philosophy and science, may overlap, nevertheless philosophers' interest in the general structure of experience, or in classifying the status of items in it, is typically on a different level from that of scientists. Scientists are not generally interested in drawing a map of the fundamental concepts in our experience as a whole, or in classifying the objects of knowledge as "appearances" rather than "things in themselves." Kant's interest in both of those issues is distinctively transcendental rather than empirical. In the German philosophical tradition before Kant's Critical philosophy the terms "transcendental" and "transcendent" were widely used to mark that interest in general issues. Recent work by Alison Laywine (2001) considers some of that earlier usage in connection with correspondence between Kant and Lambert around the time of the Dissertation, over the contrast between a "general" and a "special" metaphysics. "Transcendental" and "transcendent" were used to signify what was distinctive of a "general metaphysics," dealing with knowledge as a whole, as opposed to a "special metaphysics" which dealt only with some subset of items, such as Wolff's special metaphysics of immaterial substances. The tradition referred further back to the philosophical interest in so-called transcendental concepts such as "one, true, good" to which Kant refers at B113-16. In that passage Kant refers to the "transcendental philosophy of the ancients" and to the "transcendental predicates" of the proposition from "school metaphysics," "quodlibet ens est unum, verum, bonum." Such a proposition qualifies as "transcendental" in virtue of its generality, but

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Kant is less interested in pursuing the topics of school metaphysics than in correcting the mistakes he believes the tradition made in so classifying them. His view is that what were taken to be "transcendental predicates of thing?* were in fact nothing more than "logical requirements and criteria of all knowledge of things in general." This repeats the contrast between scientific and higher-order philosophical enquiry. He goes on to argue that the omission of these transcendental predicates from his table of categories is consequendy deliberate and not itself an error, but the more important point is his prior insistence on that traditional mistake. His point is that transcendental enquiries, unlike those of science, deal with our concepts and the way we know of things rather than with the things themselves. In this emphasis on the higher-order character of transcendental, as opposed to empirical or scientific, enquiries Kant both reinforces his earlier distinction and indicates a break with that earlier tradition. One strong indicator of that break is Kant's distinction between what is "transcendental" and what is "transcendent." In the discussion between Kant and Lambert it seems as though no firm distinction was drawn between the terms, but it is a central aspect of the Critique, and a major complaint against Garve, that they should be sharply distinguished. Even if the terms were used indifferentiy before 1781 they are importandy separated in the Critical philosophy. That formal separation is made explicit only late in the Critique at B352-53 after extensive use has been made of the terminology, and long after Kant had initially explained the distinction at B25 and B80-81. At B350-53 he rejects the idea that "appearance" means "illusion," claims that the senses cannot err because they cannot judge, and separates empirical (e.g., optical) from transcendental illusions. He goes on: We shall entitle principles whose application is confined entirely within the limits of possible experience immanent, and those which . . . profess to pass beyond those limits transcendent. In the case of the latter . . . I mean actual principles which incite us to tear down all those boundary fences, and to seize possession of an entirely new domain which recognises no limits of demarcation. Thus 'transcendental' and 'transcendent' are not interchangeable terms. The principles of pure understanding . . . allow only of empirical and not transcendental employment, that is, employment extending beyond the limits of experience. A principle, on the other hand, which takes away those limits, or even commands us to transgress them, is called transcendent. If our criticism can succeed in disclosing the illusion in those alleged principles, then those which are of merely empirical employment may be called . . . immanent principles of pure understanding.

Kant draws a rough distinction between transcendental metaphysics, which is broadly good, and transcendent metaphysics, which is illusory, but the

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detail in the account and some of the new terminology remain unclear. Kant adds the contrast between "transcendent" and "immanent" to the distinction between "transcendental" and "empirical," and is vulnerable in the fourth sentence to the common charge that his use of the terms is inconsistent. In that sentence we might expect Kant to write, "only empirical and not transcendent employment." The occurrence of such an apparent fault in the very passage which defines the terms looks at best careless and at worst confused. It may easily be regarded as a typical Kantian incoherence, but I argue that Kant's expression is neither inconsistent nor confused. I then consider other aspects of the terminology, and indicate some errors made in trying to understand it.

1. Transcendent and Transcendental Kant's account invites the two questions: How can he consistently describe "transcendental" principles as also "transcendent"? and: How can principles, so described, belong both to an approved Kantian metaphysics, and also to a bad, illusory metaphysics? That there is no satisfactory answer to these questions is entailed by the following taxonomy. A

Metaphysics

Transcendental

Transcendent

(good, Kantian philosophy withinthe bounds of possible experience)

(bad, illusory, non-Kantian philosophy beyond any possible experience)

If we accept A, then Kant's use of "transcendental" for "transcendent" is objectionable. What is "transcendental" is then coordinate with what is "transcendent," so that they are then opposed as exclusive branches of metaphysics, one approved one disapproved. This scheme, which may be simply taken for granted, rightly marks Kant's wish in the quoted passage to treat the two terms as "not interchangeable," as not synonyms, but it does so in a way which yields inconsistency. A, however, is not the only possible scheme, and might be replaced by an alternative, prompted by the reflection that while Kant denies that the terms are interchangeable, he does not say that they are mutually exclusive. They could fail to be interchangeable while there is a one-way entailment or implication between them, and that condition is satisfied by the following scheme.

5: The Transcendental/Empirical B

Distinction

Transcendental Philosophy (General Metaphysics)

Immanent Principles

Transcendent principles

(Use limited to possible experience)

(Use beyond possible experience)

Legitimate

Illegitimate

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Science

A priori

A posteriori

(mathematics) (Natural Science)

B shows "transcendental" and "transcendent" not to be interchangeable, but does not make them exclusive. They no longer appear as coordinate and opposed sub-branches of a general metaphysics. Transcendent principles, and a metaphysics which endorses them, are a sub-branch of transcendental philosophy, but a sub-branch which for Kant is illusory. It might still have been better if Kant had written "transcendent" for "transcendental" in the fourth sentence of the B352 passage, but there is no longer any inconsistency, or even conflict, since even transcendent principles count as transcendental. I shall take it that B, rather than A, is Kant's intended scheme.

2. Empirical and A Posteriori I had also earlier noted,5 as a consequence of this account, that Kant committed himself to an ambiguous use of the term "empirical" which conceals the force of his distinction and is liable to mislead. In the passage at B80-81 Kant importantly distinguishes transcendental and a priori enquiries. Although transcendental enquiries, and philosophy or metaphysics in general, are themselves a priori in character, not all a priori enquiries count as properly transcendental or philosophical. Kant gives the example of mathematics, which is an a priori enquiry with an outcome in a priori propositions and truths, but which is not philosophy and is not transcendental. Mathematics does not have the higher-order character of philosophy and in particular provides no explanation of the possibility of a priori truths. Mathematics deals in a priori truths but offers no account of how such truths are possible, how they arise, or how, having arisen, they can be applied in a posteriori experience.6 Those further accounts belong instead to the higher-order enquiries of philosophy in which the a priori is

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defined, its scope and character are oudined, and its provenance and application are explained (B75 3-54). I shall use the term "provenance" to translate Kant's Ursprung as an indication of his intention to classify concepts according to their cognitive sources in the project of transcendental reflection. Kant's account of such "origins" in that project is not, as he explains, a part of empirical psychology, but belongs instead to metaphysics. The separation of his project from empirical psychology is made clear even in the prefaces, and underlined in later passages such as B118-20. What exactly Kant understands by classifying ideas as belonging to sensibility, to understanding, or to reason will be considered later in connection with his outline of transcendental reflection in the Amphiboly and in the Dialectic.7 The term "provenance" is useful since it indicates not merely the empirical origins of some item but something of its status as saleable or collectable. It provides salient information about, and a relevant classification of, items in a catalogue, just as Kant's metaphysical classification does in his inventory of items in experience. It follows from this account that Kant has two related distinctions in which the term "empirical" ambiguously figures. On one side "empirical" means "a posteriori" and is contrasted with what is a priori; on the other it is contrasted with what is transcendental and in that case cannot be equated with "a posteriori." For a discipline like mathematics contains a priori truths which are not transcendental, and so in some sense "empirical," but are a priori and not a posteriori. In one sense some "nontranscendental," that is, "empirical," truths may be a priori, while in the other sense what is "empirical," that is, "a posteriori," cannot also be a priori. We could note the difference by writing "empirical^' (nontranscendental) for one opposition to "transcendental," and "empirical2" (a posteriori) for the other opposition to "a priori." The term "empirical" might then have been used as a proper contrast to "transcendental" without understanding it as "a posteriori."8 Although it is a fault in Kant that these distinctions are not made fully explicit, his own account of the situation shows how to remedy it. The difficulty is not substantial enough to justify the response of commentators who represent Kant's term "transcendental" as utterly mysterious. To stop at that point is one kind of interpretative failure; it does not simply misinterpret Kant's text but it fail even to attempt to resolve an evidently resolvable problem in the text. One important corollary of such an account is evident if we further ask how the term "empirical^' should be understood in its contrast with the transcendental. If it does not mean "a posteriori" what does it mean? The direct answer is that since transcendental enquiries are higher-order enquiries into the character, provenance, or possibility of a priori truths or disciplines, the contrasted "empirical" enquiries are not higher order and

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do not offer any account of those aspects. They, like the conventional operations of mathematicians or natural scientists within their disciplines, pursue and develop work inside some established framework rather than raise and answer questions about such frameworks from the outside. The internal operations of mathematicians in proving theorems within some framework are, though not a posteriori, just as much "empirical^" that is, "nontranscendental," as are the operations of a carpenter or an engineer in building, or theorizing about, furniture or suspension bridges. Kant's distinction between the empirical and the transcendental echoes in that way a general distinction between what holds true as a part of, and within, experience and what is true beyond those claims. The former will be the particular truths of some nonphilosophical discipline, or of everyday life, and the latter will be more general philosophical or metaphysical truths. What is transcendental belongs to a general metaphysics which claims to establish a priori truths going beyond the particular, and partial, truths of other disciplines. But that latter philosophical division can be understood, as Kant makes clear, in two significantly different ways, reflected in the ambiguity noted in chapter 4 of the phrase "independent of experience." Just as "independent of experience" may mean either "underivable from experience and a priori" or "going beyond any possible experience and transcendent," so a general metaphysics may be thought to canvass claims which go beyond particular scientific aspects of experience or to be transcendent and beyond any possible experience. We can distinguish an illegitimate, transcendent, aspiration to establish general truths wholly beyond our experience, and a legitimate claim to establish truths about the whole of our experience. Both sets of claims go beyond the particular truths of any nonphilosophical discipline, but the former generate illegitimate and transcendent, and the latter legitimate and immanent, metaphysics. Kant's position can be properly captured in the following threefold distinction: (1) Empirical (nontranscendental) propositions which hold within our experience. (2) Legitimate, immanent, transcendental claims about the whole of experience. (3) Illegitimate, transcendent claims which claim to hold beyond our experience. In Kant's scheme the empirical1 claims in (1) are not necessarily a posteriori; those in (2) are transcendental, but immanent and legitimate; and those in (3) are transcendental, transcendent, and illegitimate. If such a

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threefold distinction is represented, as it was by Garve, as a dual contrast between the empirical, or even the a posteriori, and the transcendent, it is unsurprising that Kant's position should seem incoherent. Failure to recognize that threefold distinction yields many serious consequential misunderstandings of Kant's position throughout the Critique, but in this early context I mention just one. If Kant is restricted to the dual distinction between the empirical and the transcendent, then his interest in psychological aspects of our experience is bound to seem incoherent. That interest might still be criticized if it is part of empirical psychology, but it would be as intelligible as Locke's or Hume's psychological claims. The difficulty here is that Kant himself constantly denies that his claims belong to empirical psychology, and distances his own project from that of Locke's in just that way (B118-19). If that option is rejected and the alternative is a transcendent psychology, then Kant's position becomes dubiously intelligible. It is open to the objections that transcendent psychology is a spurious, occult discipline, and that Kant officially recognizes this in denying any knowledge of transcendent things in themselves, and in rejecting transcendent psychology in the Paralogisms. Either route leads to the conclusion that Kant's transcendental psychology is an "imaginary discipline."9 Commentators may notice Kant's intention to distinguish the transcendent from the transcendental, but still hold that the confused term "transcendental" led him into the resulting verbal and philosophical muddles.

3. Kant and Carnap Kant's account of the "transcendental/empirical" distinction has in this way effectively the same structure as Carnap's famous distinctions between "internal" and "external" questions, in his "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology." 1 0 Carnap's central point is to distinguish four questions about existence and to argue that traditional ontological issues cannot be meaningfully identified with any of them. Carnap separates particular and general internal questions, and shows that neither is properly at issue in the tradition. In terms of his illustrated number and thing languages "Is there an even prime number?" would be particular and internal, while "Do physical objects exist?" would be internal and general. Internal questions in those formal and empirical languages are trivially answerable given the criteria in the language for the queried items. The tradition evidently knew those trivial answers and took its questions about existence to be not internal but external. Carnap distinguishes theoretical and practical external existence questions, and regards the tradition as concerned with the former theoretical

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issues. Practical issues arise in asking whether we can usefully adopt some theoretical framework, but the answers plainly fall short of a demonstration that the relevant items exist. The remaining theoretical external questions can typically be formulated in contrast to their trivial internal counterparts as: "Plainly numbers exist in arithmetic, but do they 'really' exist?" or "Evidently physical objects once existed in Lichfield market place, but do they 'really' exist?" According to Carnap the tradition was concerned with those external theoretical questions and yet they have never been given a satisfactory sense. In order to meet that requirement the questions need a new background framework in which the criteria for "real existence," and for the questioned entities, are made sufficiently explicit to enable us to give an answer. Without that background the traditional questions cannot be answered because they lack that required sense. Carnap's position has been criticized by philosophers such as Quine and Stroud, but others have argued that, understood in these terms, it is not vulnerable to their objections. Although there are differences between Kant and Carnap, it is not surprising that commentators have sometimes appealed to Carnap's views to throw light on Kant's project. What Kant calls "empirical^' is what Carnap would call "internal" operations within some nonphilosophical discipline, whether that discipline and its outcome are themselves a priori as in the number language, or a posteriori as in the thing language. What is for Carnap "external" raises a higher-order question about such disciplines, and this is what Kant calls "transcendental." For both philosophers external or transcendental questions are typically the stuff of philosophy and are contrasted with nonphilosophical, internal/empiricall, questions. Despite the more elaborate, non-Kantian detail which Carnap then attaches to his basic "internal/external" distinction and one substantial divergence of view, both Carnap and Kant use that generic distinction to underline something of the special, and higher-order, character of philosophical enquiry itself. Carnap, it is true, then goes on to regard all external theoretical questions as unanswerable or even meaningless11 while Kant does not. Kant agrees that some transcendental issues, specifically the transcendent, are empty and futile, but he does not regard even them as meaningless. Kant would doubtless be content to accept Carnap's view that theoretical external questions have no answer unless a framework for their formulation with the appropriate criteria is available, and he would probably have accepted Carnap's complaint that traditional philosophers had typically failed to provide that necessary framework. On the other hand Kant plainly did not accept any strictly formal requirements which Carnap might have imposed on frameworks, such as their ideal expression in some canonical form of modern logic.

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The prefaces' revolutionary hostility to the previous tradition expresses a similar attitude to Carnap's belief that previous metaphysics had at least failed to make its questions clear. Kant did not accept a verificationist criterion for meaning, but, contrary to Stroud's claim, even Carnap in his paper on semantics and ontology did not appeal to that criterion.12 Both Carnap and Kant accept a general requirement for a reputable question that accessible criteria for its answer should be available in a possible experience, but neither appeal in this context just to a verificationist semantics. Neither Carnap nor Kant wished to reject philosophy altogether; both intended that the old, and flawed, philosophy in the tradition should be reformed and replaced with a more "scientific" method. They differed over their preferred methods for a more constructive future philosophy, even though both would support appeal to the "fruitful bathos of experience" against "windy metaphysics." Carnap's preferred goal was formulation in some formal logic, while Kant's marked a wider interest in our fundamental cognitive powers. Both regarded it as a requirement for future metaphysical issues that they should be at least in principle resolvable, and both encouraged a clarity of formulation with that aim in mind. Kant's project in the Critique is to provide correct answers to his legitimate, revolutionary, transcendental questions. I have indicated that a failure to appreciate the scope and significance of Kant's "empirical/transcendental" distinction leads to substantial misunderstandings of his position which will be considered later. For now I offer comments on two accounts of Kant's understanding of "transcendental" to indicate how extraordinarily divergent, and as I claim erroneous, some of these accounts are. The two accounts suggest that some of the obscurity that has been ascribed to Kant's terminology may derive more from commentators' imaginations than from Kant's text. In the Routiedge Encyclopedia entry for Kant's transcendental idealism it is claimed baldly that "transcendental" means "having to do with our cognitive powers" (4.665). No reference is made to the higher-order character of Kant's transcendental enquiry in the passages from B25 and B80-81, or to any resolvable ambiguity in the contrast between "transcendental" and "empirical," or to the contrast with "transcendent" issues. The basic claim is a consequence of assuming a view of transcendental idealism in which, as the entry says, our cognitive powers "create their objects by unconscious operations on unconscious stimuli" (4.665). Once that traditionalist account of "the mind making nature" has been recognized, it is not difficult to see how the definition of "transcendental" has come to be made, but it is patently mistaken. A claim such as "Vitamin C helps to improve memory in people over the age of eighty" has to do with our cognitive powers and would have consequently to be classed as "transcendental" under this rubric. Similarly what is explicitly transcendental for

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Kant, namely an explanation for our a priori knowledge, would not be classed as transcendental if it made no reference to our cognitive powers but expressed a conceptual dependence like that between "event" and "cause" in the Second Analogy. The same holds of other transcendental principles, and even of an empiricist explanation of a priori knowledge which equates the a priori and the analytic. Another recent commentator offers a completely different account in claiming that the "transcendental/empirical" distinction separates issues of meaning from questions of fact. In Bennett's Kant's Analytic, what is transcendental is said to "have to do with meaning" (23), but it is now surely clear how this subverts Kant's intentions. Kant's use of the term "empirical^' as a contrast to "transcendental" does not mean "factual" or "a posteriori," and Kant does not believe that his transcendental questions are just about meaning. Kant accepts that philosophical questions are "conceptual," in the sense that they deal with concepts in the task of transcendental reflection, but he denies that they are concerned only with the "analysis" of concepts or their meanings and yield only analytic truths. Transcendental questions are designed to elicit answers about the character, possibility, and use of a priori concepts and principles and deal with our experience as a whole. They issue in dependence relations between concepts which Kant takes to be synthetic.13 Kant's conception of metaphysics in the Critique is quite different from that of such predecessors as Wolff or Baumgarten, or even his own pre-Critical rationalism,14 but he still thinks of transcendental issues in a reformed general metaphysics as dealing with claims about experience as a whole. There is no good reason to think that such questions are solely about semantics, and every reason to deny that Kant thought they were. The belief that philosophical questions necessarily concern meaning, or yield "conceptual" and analytic truths, is a twentieth-century conviction which Kant, rightiy, did not share.15 The account given here in general terms is confirmed in other relevant parts of Kant's work, and has important implications. The distinction between the transcendental and the transcendent heralds the general diagnosis, and detailed therapeutic treatment, of philosophical illusions in the Dialectic. There is an extended discussion of transcendent and transcendental immanent claims throughout the passage at B355-90, from which the earlier quotation was taken, and at B370-71 with particular reference to Plato: For Plato Ideas are archetypes of the things themselves, and not, in the manner of categories, merely keys to possible experiences. Plato . . . recognised a higher need than merely to spell out appearances . . . in order to be able to read them as experience. He knew that reason leaps [sich aufschwingen] into modes of knowledge which so far transcend the bounds of experience that no given

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empirical object can ever coincide with them, but must be recognised as having their own reality, and are by no means mere fictions of the brain. Plato found the chief instances of his Ideas in the field of the practical (morality, politics, religion) . . . (footnote: He also extended his concept to cover speculative knowledge. . . . He even extended it to [cover] mathematics although the object of that science is to be found only in possible experience. In this I cannot follow him, any more than in his mystical deduction of these Ideas, or in the extravagances whereby he, so to speak, hypostatised them.)

In such passages Kant reinforces his account of the distinctions between immanent, transcendent, and transcendental claims, and distinguishes a strong, speculative Platonism about mathematics, which he vehemently rejects, from a "milder" version applying to the practical fields of morals, political legislation, and theology, which he accepts. Kant replaces appeals to a speculative realm of transcendent objects with claims about the conditions which enable us to read appearances as experience, that is, to treat categories immanently as "mere keys to possible experience."16 Kant's transcendental metaphysics of experience as a whole still refers to the immanent "fruitful bathos of experience" rather than to the supposed transcendent objects of a "windy metaphysics." It encourages him to replace a tradition of "proud ontology" with a more modest "analytic of concepts" (B303). In the practical, but not the speculative, context Kant makes clear that Plato has a better case, and that his Ideas are not "mere fictions of the brain." The issues considered here are primarily speculative rather than practical, but later discussions of practical issues in the Dialectic and second Critique explain what is correct in a Platonic account of those practical Ideas.

P A R T

I I

The Aesthetic

Introduction to the Aesthetic

I n the Aesthetic Kant begins the task, outlined in the introduction, of isolating, or abstracting, a priori elements in experience. The task is directed towards those elements belonging to sensibility (B36), and later in the Analytic Kant outlines the parallel task for the understanding (B87). Kant identifies space and time as intuitive a priori elements in our experience, and classifies them as forms, modes, or conditions of intuition belonging to sensibility. Kant is not primarily concerned with a priori intuitions as psychological events but as items to be given a correct metaphysical classification in his transcendental topic. First he provides proofs that space and time are a priori ways in which objects, appearances, are presented to our senses, and then he outlines his own theory of perception and experience as a consequence of that conclusion. The central aspect of that theory is the claim that space, time, and appearances are "transcendentally ideal" and "empirically real." Both the proofs and the general theory have proved controversial. The former proofs and the theory of transcendental ideality and empirical reality have been understood and assessed differently by different commentators. Kant has been sometimes represented in this context as a "good old-fashioned idealist" and sometimes as simply appealing to a common sense view of what we perceive and experience. Questions consequently arise about the extent to which Kant's "transcendental" idealism shares the framework of traditional idealism, and about the role of an appeal to common sense experience as an antidote to skepticism. I offer an answer to both questions, and draw attention to the point that Kant's theory relies on some understanding of his distinction between the transcendental and the empirical outlined in chapter 5. The upshot is that Kant in the Aesthetic is neither canvassing a traditional idealism nor directly answering an idealist skepticism about the external world. Kant's discussion is more complex than that bare account of its central features indicates. Kant also introduces a more complex perceptual 99

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vocabulary than that of his predecessors. The earlier vocabularies of "ideas," or "impressions" and "ideas," are supplemented with such terms as "intuition," "sensation," and "appearance." He offers a preliminary account of mathematics to be completed later in the Transcendental Deduction (B147-48), the Analytic of Principles (B202-18), and the Doctrine of Method (B740-66). He considers the disagreements that had arisen between Leibnizian and Newtonian doctrines over the character of space and time in physics. In his new vocabulary and in his conclusions he underlines his insistence, against Garve, that he is attempting something entirely original, which leads to a reform of, and new direction for, philosophy. With that background Kant distances his position from those of Leibniz, of the empiricists, of Berkeley, and his own earlier theory in the 1770 Dissertation. The aim above all is to distance his own view from traditional idealism, and to show what residual truth lies in that doctrine. He attempts to explain why his own theory of transcendental ideality is not a traditional "empirical" idealism, and canvasses in opposition to it a parity between inner and outer sense. Kant takes it that traditional idealism attached an epistemic priority to inner experience over outer, and now claims in contrast that there is no such priority. Inner and outer sense have a parity both in their immediate relation to their objects and in the lack of any epistemic privilege or priority attached to inner sense and its objects. Kant further claims that his theory allows the unquestioned empirical reality of space, time, and appearances. In chapter 6, I summarize Kant's discussion in the Aesthetic. In chapter 7, I consider some preliminary questions about Kant's vocabulary, about his view of sensibility as causally receptive, and about a problem, the so-called blindness problem, which has been thought to damage his approach. That problem arises because Kant later (B75-76) requires both sensibility (intuitions) and understanding (concepts) for genuine experience, and says that intuitions without concepts are "blind." The difficulty is then that the Aesthetic is supposed to outline the character of sensibility and its intuitions independently of our concepts, even though such intuitions without concepts are blind and inaccessible. I argue that the problem can be resolved so that Kant endorses a currendy controversial acceptance of "nonconceptual content." The receptivity of the senses has also produced a major disagreement about the character of the causes of our sensory responses. Traditionalist commentators insist on Kant's commitment to a causal relation between things in themselves and our senses which conflicts with his denial that we have any knowledge of such things in themselves. The issue has ramifications going beyond the Aesthetic but I argue that it is an error to ascribe such a commitment to Kant on the basis of his claims in that section at B 32-3 3.

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In chapter 8, I examine the arguments for the a priori and intuitive character of space and time as forms or modes or conditions of intuition and experience, and make an initial comment on Kant's account of mathematics. That account can be completed only in relation to later passages in the Analytic of Principles and the Doctrine of Method, but I offer an interim resolution of an important disagreement between commentators about the synthetic a priori character of mathematics. In chapter 9 , 1 offer a final account of Kant's theory of the sensory contribution to experience as a metaphysical classification of space and time. I argue that Kant is right to represent his version of "transcendental idealism" as different from and opposed to traditional idealism. The chief difficulty in such a claim arises from Kant's insistence that the a priori and intuitive character of space and time entail their "mind-dependence" for this may be regarded as the hallmark of traditional idealism. At its simplest the claim is that space and time, as a priori and intuitive, are "ideas," "in the mind" and "subjective," but a central question arises about the meaning of such claims. Most commentators recognize that Kant qualifies these claims in a significant way by insisting that to be transcendentally "ideal" or "in the mind," unlike being empirically "in the mind," is compatible with the empirical reality of outer, spatial, objects. It is only misleading to express Kant's claims without qualification as representing space, time, and appearances as "in the mind" and that provides a motive for using instead the phrase "mind-dependent." In offering to explain Kant's transcendental use of that claim, I argue that the two grounds for Kant's conclusion that space and time are "mind-dependent," namely, their character as a priori and as modes of intuition, do not endorse but reject traditional idealism. In a final chapter I discuss a doctrine due initially to Sellars about traditional errors of a "myth of the given," and a particular passage in the Prolegomena §13, which has sometimes been thought to commit Kant to the real existence of things in themselves. The former issue raises the questions whether Kant commits the error of a "myth of the given," and whether he is right in a resolution of the "blindness" problem to allow nonconceptual content. I argue that Sellars's notion of a "myth of the given" is ambiguous, that his arguments against it are sometimes inconclusive, and that Kant does not endorse any "myth of the given" which Sellars shows to be untenable. The latter examines the Prolegomena passage and indicates some misunderstandings of it in two commentators, Ralph Walker and Rae Langton. I argue that Kant's description of his view in the passage, and elsewhere in the Prolegomena, as the "opposite" of idealism does not commit him to the real existence of things in themselves. The discussion throws further light on Kant's distinction between conceiving objects as appearances or as things in themselves.

[6] The Transcendental Aesthetic

Aesthetic is the first of Kant's "elementary" accounts of our experience. It deals with the basic resources in experience attributable to sensibility. Kant had earlier (B29) explicitly identified sensibility and understanding as "two stems of human knowledge," and had throughout the introduction implicitly distinguished between the contributions of the senses and understanding. The B preface traded on the same distinction in its introduction of the formal contrast between "appearances," attributed to the senses, and "things in themselves," attributed to understanding or reason. In the Aesthetic Kant embarks on the inventory of a priori knowledge he had projected in the preface A by focusing on that sensory contribution; the Analytic deals with the parallel contribution of the understanding (B87). The procedure to be followed is that noted in the Introduction (B5-6) in which a priori elements are abstracted from experience; in the Aesthetic, as Kant explains (B35-36, B42, B51), it involves isolating sensibility by removing what belongs to understanding, and abstracting from sensibility whatever is a posteriori. Two general features of Kant's discussion cause difficulties in understanding his account. The first is that the passage is extraordinarily short, given the importance that the senses can be expected to have in our experience. That is particularly true of one who, like Kant, accepts an "empiricist principle" which requires a reference to sensibility in any possible experience. "According to the principle of empiricism the understanding is always on its own proper ground, namely the field of genuinely possible experiences . . . [where] every object . . . can and ought to be represented in intuition" (B496). This brevity is particularly disadvantageous since Kant offers an account which differs radically from both the empiricists and the rationalists, and from his own earlier 1770 Inaugural Dissertation} In the Critique Kant's emphasis on the importance of the senses puts him closer to the empiricists than the rationalists, but his belief that the senses contain a priori elements distances him significantly from both. The 103

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Dissertation had canvassed the idea that the senses and the understanding respectively provide information about two discriminable items, things as they appear and things as they are. The Critique and Prolegomena restrict knowledge from either source to appearances, and treat the temptation to suppose that understanding divorced from the senses can yield knowledge of things in themselves as illusory. This change is important and will contribute later to discussion of Kant's Critical distinction between "things as they appear" and "things as they are in themselves." Although the Critique differs significantly from the Dissertation, the similar terminology and the passage's brevity encourage readers to assimilate them. That first difficulty is compounded by Kant's intention to deal in this section with a variety of related topics. Kant offers an account of space and time, an account of mathematics and science in relation to space and time, and an evaluation of the space/time theories of Newton and Leibniz. He outlines an extensive philosophical vocabulary for perception along with his own theory of perception, distinguishes his position from those of Berkeley (B70-71) and Leibniz (B61-62), and provides an introduction to his central doctrines of empirical realism and transcendental idealism (B43-46, B51-53). Kant regards each topic as an integral part of an overall theory, but the Aesthetic is not simply a philosophical theory of sense perception. Such a theory is hard to identify in the discussion partly because it is embedded in Kant's treatment of the other related interests. It is unfortunate that Kant's official philosophy, his transcendental idealism, is so lightly sketched in the main sections of the Aesthetic, for that too has encouraged extensive misunderstanding of his views. Kant notices, and attempts to forestall, a number of ambiguities and misunderstandings in these doctrines, but it is left to the General Observation and later sections in the Critique to complete the account. I make some references to later sections even at this early stage in order to clarify his position. For these reasons the discussion of the passage has to include Kant's metaphysical account of space and time in our experience, his transcendental expositions of the role of space and time in mathematics and natural science (chapter 8), and his theory of perception, with its outcome in the theories of empirical realism and transcendental idealism (chapter 9). In this initial summary I outline Kant's account under two headings and indicate some of its problems: 1 deals with the introduction to the Aesthetic, and the Metaphysical and Transcendental Expositions; 2 deals with the conclusions from those arguments and the subsequent provisos made in the concluding General Observations.

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1. Introduction: Metaphysical (B33-41; B46-48) and Transcendental Expositions (B40-42; B40-49) In his introductory remarks (B36) Kant prepares the way for his principal conclusion that "space and time are a priori forms of intuition." That conclusion fits direcdy into his avowed aim of notionally stripping away from experience those elements which belong either to understanding or to the a posteriori matter of sensation. Kant introduces a new technical vocabulary for perception which includes "intuition" (Anschauung), "sensation" (.Empfindung), "appearance" (Erscheinung), and "object" (Object, Gegenstand) as well as "form" and "matter." These terms, and the more extensive catalogue at B 376-77, deserve attention, not least because they constitute Kant's attempt to improve on the traditional vocabularies of "clear and distinct ideas" (Descartes), "idea" (Locke), and "impression and idea" (Hume). Just as Kant sought to enlarge and improve the analytic apparatus of Leibniz and Hume, so he seeks also to enlarge and improve earlier vocabularies of perception.2 Even at this stage a difficulty emerges. Kant's aim of isolating what belongs purely to the senses and not to the understanding suggests that we must identify sense-contents without the benefit of any descriptive resources. His definition of "appearance" as "the indeterminate [unbestimmt] object of an empirical intuition" (B34) reinforces the point, for the terms bestimmt and Bestimmung are typically used for the descriptive properties we ascribe to experienced items. Taken in one way Kant's requirement is patendy absurd. If no such descriptive resources are allowed then it seems impossible to know what is being sensed or identified; sense-contents would become inarticulate and unidentifiable even as "sense-contents." Commentators notice that such a divorce between sense and understanding is additionally in apparent conflict with Kant's later requirement at B75-76: "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind. . . .The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise." It would be easy, but premature, to draw the conclusion that Kant contradicts himself or is confused. Later in that same passage he himself draws a different conclusion: "But that is no reason for confounding the contribution of either (sense or understanding) with that of the other; rather is it a strong reason for carefully separating and distinguishing the one from the other." Kant's problem here is not unique to him. Any account which identifies, as most philosophers and psychologists do, a distinctive contribution from the senses in our experience faces the issue of identifying that contribution. What separates Kant from other traditional philosophers is rather

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that he seems more aware of the problem, which his own "abstraction" method of separating the senses and the understanding is designed to resolve. It suggests that we may notionally separate for theoretical purposes what is not literally separable in experience but we need to be satisfied, in opposition to recent claims by McDowell (1994), that such a device is coherent. The issue has been called by Falkenstein (1995), following the quotation from B75, the "blindness" problem. How can we identify a distinctive sensory contribution to experience if the senses without understanding are "blind"?

1.1. The Metaphysical Expositions In the first metaphysical exposition Kant provides an immediate statement of his position: Space is a form of outer sense and time a form of inner sense (B37). The metaphysical expositions are so called because they are designed to represent "clearly, though not necessarily exhaustively," what a concept such as space or time contains "as given a priori" (B38). Kant's references to "concepts" of space and time and to what is "given a priori" underline important points. Although Kant aims to classify space and time as "intuitive" or as "intuitions" it is the "concepts" of space and time which are so classified. For Kant philosophy is "conceptual," though not in the analytic way contemporary philosophers accept. Philosophers cannot literally trade in bare intuitions, but can through concepts identify and discuss what belongs metaphysically to the senses and intuition. The phrase "given a priori" makes the antiempiricist point noted earlier that for Kant what is given, or presented, is not restricted to a posteriori material but may include an a priori form. The strategy of his project, implicit in such a phrase, is to take our experience as it is normally presented and to filter out, through the method of abstraction or isolation, those elements in it which belong to the understanding and are a posteriori. The outcome of the strategy, that space and time are a priori forms of sense, is represented by saying that space and time are both a priori intuitions. The strategy exemplifies both the abstraction procedure and the map-making, inventorial aim of the "transcendental topic" (B324-25). That task, a metaphysics of experience, is properly to locate concepts in the inventory of our experience, so that we assign them correctly to their original sources. An enquiry into the "origins" of different elements in experience might be understood to be an empirical developmental psychology, but Kant's rejection of such a Lockean project in the prefaces and elsewhere counts against that interpretation. For that reason I chose to speak of Kant's enquiry into the "provenance" of our ideas in chapter 5.

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Kant gestures towards the conflicts, which had exercised him in the precritical period, between a Newtonian and a Leibnizian account of space and time. Although neither Newton nor Leibniz is explicitly mentioned, the options he outlines seem to refer to their accounts: What then are space and time? Are they real existences? Are they only determinations or relations of things, yet such as would belong to things even if they were not intuited? Or are space and time such that they belong only to the form of intuition, and therefore to the subjective constitution of our mind, apart from which they could not be ascribed to anything whatsoever? (B37-38)

It is natural, though misleading, to associate Newton with the "real existence" option, Leibniz with the "relations of things" option, and the third "forms of intuition" option with Kant.3 In both subsequent metaphysical expositions Kant provides numbered arguments for his conclusion that space and time should be classed as a priori and intuitive. There are five arguments for space in A, reduced to four in B; and five for time in both A and B. I summarize them briefly, since they will be considered in more detail in the later comments. (1) Space and time are already presupposed in empirical representations of their relations. (2) The absence of space and time cannot be represented, but we can represent them as empty of objects (appearances). (3) Apodeictically certain principles (axioms) of time would be impossible unless time had an a priori necessity. (The parallel argument for space appeared in A but was deleted in B.) (4) Neither space nor time is discursive or general; they signify only one space or one time and so are intuitive. Apodeictically certain principles of space and time cannot be derived solely from concepts, and require a priori intuitions. (5) Space and time are represented as infinite or unlimited. Their parts are determined only through limitation and this distinguishes them from general concepts. (The argument from limitation for space appears in B4). At two points, (3) and (4), Kant appeals to his account as preserving the "apodeictic certainty" of space-time principles such as those in geometry. Commentators may see this as a reference to a Kantian argument against a skepticism which denies us any genuine knowledge or certainty in our experience, but this is premature. His account is intended to elucidate the

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special character of mathematics against such empiricist views as those of Berkeley or Mill, but he insists in the Critique (B118-119) and in the Prolegomena (§40) that his project is not an antiskeptical defense of those disciplines. His view is that they need no defense from philosophy, and that it is philosophy which needs both defense and reform. Kant relates his intended conclusions, that space and time are intuitive and a priori, to specific points in the arguments, and this has encouraged commentators to assume that the numbered passages uniquely target just one or other of those conclusions. It may be objected that the arguments in the numbered paragraphs overlap, as evidently do some arguments in the Metaphysical and Transcendental expositions. But since Kant does not commit himself to the idea that each argument has relevance to just one numbered passage, or to just one exposition, and recognizes that there is some such overlap (B48), I shall not make that assumption or those objections.

1.2. The Transcendental Expositions The transcendental expositions aim to provide an explanation of the possibility of accepted synthetic a priori knowledge. The arguments claim that only space's a priori intuitive character could make intelligible the possibility of geometry as a body of synthetic a priori knowledge; and that only time's similar character could make possible synthetic a priori knowledge of motion. The arguments in both cases rest on the claims that the propositions in those sciences (a) have an apodeictic necessity explicable only through the a priori character of their fundamental concepts and (b) are synthetic, not analytic, truths. While (a) rests on Kant's belief that representations of space and time are fundamental to those scientific systems, (b) rests on his conviction that geometry, and mathematics generally, require a reference to the construction of concepts in intuition ( B 7 4 0 ^ 6 ; B271): "mathematical knowledge is . . . gained by reason from the construction of concepts. To construct a concept means to exhibit a priori the intuition which corresponds to the concept" (B741) Two immediate difficulties arise from these sections. First, the argument assumes that mathematics contains synthetic a priori judgments, and that assumption may be questioned. It will be questioned typically by empiricists who explain the apodeictic certainty of mathematics by appealing to the analytic truth of their judgments. Since the Aesthetic is generally designed to reject an empiricist account of space and time, that antiempiricist assumption is bound to weaken the force of the general conclusion. Second, there is some unclarity about the kind of explanation which the argument offers for the synthetic a priori character of mathe-

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matical judgments. It is not only that such an explanation might appeal to psychology, or even to physiology, but also that it might offer either a necessary or a sufficient condition for that synthetic a priori character. A sufficient condition would claim: (1) If space and time are a priori intuitions, then mathematics contains synthetic a priori judgments. A necessary condition would claim: (2) If mathematics contains synthetic a priori judgments, then space and time are a priori intuitions. The issues about the psychological or metaphysical nature of Kant's project, and the difference between such sufficient or necessary conditions, are discussed later in more general accounts of Kant's theory of mathematics.

2. Conclusions from the Expositions: General Observations Kant draws a number of immediate conclusions from his preceding arguments for space and for time, but adds in the General Observations an extended further discussion of the significance of those conclusions. In that latter passage he recognizes that his conclusions may be misunderstood (B59), and attempts to forestall objections arising from such misunderstanding. The immediate conclusions can be summarily listed as follows: (1) Neither space nor time can be properties of things in themselves, for no such properties could be intuited a priori, that is, prior to those things themselves. (2) Space is nothing but the form of outer sense, and time nothing but the form of inner sense. These are the subjective conditions of sensibility which exist a priori in the mind. This explains how they can contain, prior to experience, principles which determine a spatiotemporal structure for objects which affect our senses. (3) Time is the formal a priori condition of all appearances; space is the formal a priori condition of all outer appearances. (4) We can speak of space and time only from the human standpoint; if we abstract from the subjective conditions of our intuition,

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In his general comments on the immediate conclusions about space and time (B43^i6; B51-53) Kant outlines briefly his central theory and anticipates some of the provisos in the General Observations. He distinguishes empirical and transcendental ideality on one side, and empirical and transcendental reality on the other. His own account of space and time represents them as empirically real but transcendentally ideal, and opposes their representation as transcendentally real or empirically ideal. These positions are repeated in the later Fourth Paralogism A (A368-73) and appealed to in the transcendental idealist resolution of the Antinomies (B518ff.). Elucidation of the differences between these two opposed positions is central to Kant's epistemology, and commentators differ in their accounts of them. The Aesthetic begins that task of elucidation, and does not complete it, but it is worthwhile to quote two key passages in this early section which immediately precede the statement of (6) above: Our exposition therefore teaches [lehrt.; Kemp Smith, "establishes"] the reality, that is, the objective validity, of space in respect of whatever can be presented to us outwardly as object, but also at the same time the ideality of space in respect of things when they are considered in themselves through reason, that is, without regard to the constitution of our sensibility. We assert, then, the empirical reality of space, as regards all possible outer experience; and yet at the

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same time we assert its transcendental ideality—in other words, that it is nothing at all, immediately we withdraw the above condition, namely its limitation to possible experience, and so look upon it as something that underlies things in themselves. (B44) What we are maintaining is [ unsere Behauptungen lehren], therefore, the empirical reality of time, that is, its objective validity in respect of all objects which allow of ever being given to our senses. And since our intuition is always sensible, no object can ever be given to us in experience which does not conform to the condition of time. On the other hand we deny to time all claim to absolute reality; that is to say, we deny that it belongs to things absolutely, as their condition or property, independentiy of any reference to the form of our sensible intuition; properties that belong to things in themselves can never be given to us through the senses.4 This, then, is what constitutes the transcendental ideality of time. (B52)

I draw attention to two related items in these passages: (1) Kemp Smith's two mistranslations give the impression that Kant is proving the empirical reality of space and time rather than merely claiming its compatibility with their transcendental ideality. In the Antinomies Kant talks of a proof (Beweis) in the Aesthetic of transcendental ideality in which everything in space and time has "no independent existence outside our thoughts" (B518-19), but it is not claimed that the empirical reality of space and time is also proved.5 (2) The central difference between appearances and things in themselves is that the former are associated with whatever is presented to the senses, and the latter are objects considered through reason independently of the senses. Transcendental ideality entails a limitation to possible experience which excludes only that realm of supposed nonsensory things in themselves accessible through reason. The related denial is not of the reality but of the absolute reality of space and time, where absolute reality is, again, characterized as a reality independent of our senses. The central concepts in these claims are susceptible of interpretations which define very different accounts of Kant's position. We need to ask: What is it to conceive of objects through reason and independently of the senses? How should we understand, and draw the line between, the contrasted notions of "possible experience" and "absolute reality"? Both questions raise issues about "mind-(independence," and about the range of "possible experience." If appearances are "mind-dependent" in virtue of

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their status as subjective mental states, such as sensations, then it would be natural to identify things in themselves as external physical objects. This would be to locate Kant within the framework of a traditional idealism, but two of Kant's provisos conflict immediately with the hypothesis. First, the a priori intuitions of space and time are not to be understood on the model of a posteriori sensations (6). Second, in the Prolegomena appendix Kant rejects an Eleatic idealism which claims that the senses are illusory and only reason provides truth (chapter 1). Kant reverses those claims and holds that reason is illusory and only the senses provide truth. That reversal is consistent with the claims that appearances range over both outer and inner objects, 6 and that possible experience is not restricted to subjective mental states. Kant's denial of any "absolute reality" to space and time then reflects a rejection of philosophical misconceptions of a reality beyond any possible experience rather than a commitment to that form of idealism. The intention here is only to draw attention to these ambiguities and not yet to resolve them. Kant evidently recognized that his conclusions were potentially ambiguous since he prefaces the next section, General Observations, with the comment: "To avoid all misapprehension, it is necessary to explain, as clearly as possible, what our view is regarding the fundamental constitution of sensible knowledge in general." The explanations that follow insist that things in themselves are quite unknown to us (B45), that "appearance" should not be misconstrued as implying any "illusion," and should not encourage any assimilation to Berkeley's theory (B69). Nor should it be understood in a Leibnizian way as a confused perception of things in themselves (B61-62). These explanations reinforce the earlier claim that the distinction between appearances and things in themselves does not separate two types of discriminable object for us, but only two ways of viewing such objects (B56). Kant insists that the transcendental concept of "appearance" is not to be confused with our ordinary empirical notion (B45), and that the transcendental concept of a "thing in itself' is similarly not to be confused with our ordinary empirical conception of things in themselves such as raindrops (B62-63). The transcendental term "appearance" does not presuppose, as the ordinary notion does, that its correlate, the thing in itself, is a possible subject for investigation (B45). The empirical notion of a thing in itself which applies properly to raindrops and roses, as opposed to rainbows and scents, is exemplifiable and investigated in our experience, but the transcendental notion is not. The technical significance of Kant's transcendental uses of "appearance" and "thing," and his general contrast between viewing items empirically or transcendentally, already evident in the prefaces, are here reinforced. These provisos are captured in such a passage as:

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In such examples as these that which is itself originally only appearance, for instance, a rose, is being treated by the empirical understanding as a thing in itself, which nevertheless in respect of its color can appear differently to every observer. The transcendental concept of appearances in space, on the other hand, is a critical reminder that nothing intuited in space is a thing in itself, that space is not a form inhering in things in themselves, as their intrinsic property, that objects in themselves are quite unknown to us. . . . (B45)

The same point is made, however, in many other places, for example, A29, B53, B62-64, B69-70 and footnote.7 Throughout the section Kant repeats the restriction of his claims to the human standpoint (in [4] above), and expresses a modesty in our judgments concerning the intuitive capacities of other thinking beings: we can indeed say that space comprehends all things that appear to us as external, but not all things in themselves, by whatever subject they are intuited. . . . For we cannot judge in regard to the intuitions of other thinking beings, whether they are bound by the same conditions as those which limit our intuition and which for us are universally valid. (B43)

Kant adds a further clarification, directed specifically to time, at B53-59. He deals initially with an objection "unanimously" raised to his account of the transcendental ideality of time, namely that our awareness of successive experiences proves the reality of time, so that even if there were no outer objects at least time would be real. Kant's response is that this rests on a misunderstanding of his "unfamiliar" doctrine, which does not deny the reality of time, but only its "absolute reality." Time is real with respect to (transcendental) appearances but not things in themselves. Kant explains the misunderstanding as the result of an assumed idealism "which teaches that the reality of outer objects cannot be proved . . . while that of the object of inner sense (myself and my states) is immediately evident" (B55). This was an assumption made by Garve in his review of the Critique, and formed one of the targets in Kant's reply. In the Aesthetic Kant rejects the assumption again by insisting on a parity between inner and outer sense: What they fail to recognise is that both are in the same position; in neither case can their reality as representations be questioned, and in both cases they belong only to appearance, which always has two sides, the one by which the object is viewed in and by itself (without regard to the mode of intuiting it—its nature therefore always remaining problematic), the other by which the form of intuition is taken into account. (B55; my emphasis)

The passage importantly rejects an epistemic priority of inner over outer sense and replaces it with a parity between those senses and their objects

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which runs through the Critique (B55, B67-69, B156). Traditional idealism ascribes a privileged certainty and immediacy only to inner sense and its objects which Kant's form of idealism evidendy rejects. Kant reinforces the point, and underlines his lack of interest in traditional idealist skepticism, in adding (B56): "This ideality of space and time leaves . . . the certainty of empirical knowledge unaffected, for we are equally sure of it whether these forms inhere in things in themselves or only in our intuition of them." 8 Throughout the Aesthetic, but especially in the provisos of the General Observations, Kant's discussion raises the central issues of the conflict between what I called in chapter 1 traditionalist and revolutionary accounts of his philosophy. One way of putting those issues is to ask how close Kant is to Berkeley or Leibniz. Traditionalists commonly liken Kant's position to a Berkeleian idealism or to a Leibnizian rationalism despite his vehement protestations against such assimilations. The underlying philosophical issues can be put by asking what Kant might mean by characterizing the whole of our experience transcendentally as "mind-dependent." Berkeley's and Leibniz's views, and idealism generally, might be expressed in the same terms, and then the question is whether Kant's conception of "mind-dependence" is the same as that of his predecessors. The Kantian vocabulary of mind-dependence involves such undoubted claims as that space and time as a priori intuitions are "mere representations," "ideas," which are "in us," as "modifications or determinations of our minds," and as "subjective conditions of our sensibility." These encourage traditionalist commentators to take Kant to locate space, time, and their inhabitants within the framework of a Cartesian consciousness. Once that step is taken it is equally natural to regard Kant's theory as a form of phenomenalism or idealism in which the outer world is to be constructed out of, or somehow related to, subjects' inner mental states.9 That may lead to an assimilation of Kant to Berkeley, but the outcome is problematic in two ways. Both the independent success of those theories and their attribution to Kant are at best highly dubious. Any retreat to a Leibnizian real world, accessible to reason and invulnerable to the illusions of sensibility, is open to the same problems. Leibniz's "pre-established harmony" is independentiy unplausible and Kant explicitly rejects that doctrine and its monadic framework of things in themselves (B60-61). When Kant says that "in experience no question is ever asked of things in themselves" (B45), and that only reference to appearances can preserve the universality and necessity of mathematics, he indicates a superiority of status attached to appearances, not things in themselves. The same point is made about the character of immanent reality in the noted passages at B195, B270, and B517. Kant's refusal to attach a superior status to a reality of things in themselves distances his position

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just as much from a Leibnizian belief in a real world of monads accessible through reason. One possible outcome is that Kant is confused about these rival positions and his own response to them, and consequently produces the traditional inconsistencies and absurdities noted in chapter 1. Another is to recognize Kant's explicit awareness of the problems and to find it incomprehensible that he offered no ways of evading them, whether in the end they prove adequate or not. His explicit and powerful repudiations of Berkeleian idealism and Leibnizian monadology, his often misunderstood distinction between the "empirical" and "transcendental" uses of his vocabulary and its application to the contrast between "appearance" and "thing in itself," his proviso that although space is in some way "minddependent" it cannot be intuited as "something in us" (B37), the claim that "appearance" in his theory stands for objects of empirical intuition, and the parity he attaches to inner and outer sense all mark substantial qualifications of his view and distance it from those earlier traditional idealisms. These provisos do not guarantee that Kant's resolution of the problems is successful, but they show that he recognizes them, has some apparatus to deal with them, and that no account of Kant can be accepted which disregards them. There is an interpretative obligation to resolve the disagreements between traditionalist and revolutionary views and the Aesthetic provides their first major test.

[ 71 Space, Time, and Perception

I n this chapter I prepare the way for Kant's central arguments about space and time in the Metaphysical and Transcendental Expositions. Because those issues are complex and have aroused controversy it is necessary first to consider some background problems. The background problems concern (1) Kant's vocabulary, (2) the "blindness" issue, and (3) the nature of Kant's project. (1) arises primarily from the fact that Kant attempts to construct a new vocabulary for perception and knowledge; (2) concerns the suspicion that Kant's references to sensory content without concepts are incoherent, the so-called blindness problem; (3) considers how we might distinguish Kant's metaphysical interest in space, time, and perception from epistemology and psychology.

1. The Perceptual Vocabulary Kant oudines a novel perceptual vocabulary at B33-36. Its central terms are: "sensation," "intuition," "appearance," "matter," "form," and "object," but behind these lies the central distinction between sensibility and understanding. In the Aesthetic, Kant aims to identify the a priori elements of sensibility and so to abstract from any contribution of the understanding. The basic ingredients of his picture are: objects (Gegenstcinde) causally affect our receptive senses to produce sensations, but it is intuition which "immediately" presents objects to us. Such empirically presented objects are appearances, which are indeterminate (unbestimmt) in the absence of conceptual resources. The senses present us with particular items, while the understanding provides general concepts. Sensations are the a posteriori "matter" of appearances while their a priori "form" orders that material in certain relations. It may be thought that such an account violates Kant's own distinction between his transcendental project and that of empirical psychology, but this is so far just a confusion. Any epistemol117

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ogy deals in psychological terms, such as "belief," "memory," or "representation." What distinguishes philosophy from psychology is not a disjoint vocabulary, but the distinctive way in which each discipline examines a shared topic. To think otherwise is to confuse "being distinctive" with "being distinct." Philosophy's examination of a perceptual vocabulary is distinctive but the basic vocabulary is shared with psychology. Although Kant's vocabulary is different from, and more discriminating than, earlier appeals to "ideas" and "impressions," it is also open to queries. On the face of it Kant offers an unexceptionable picture of a causal interaction between objects and senses (B32-33), and classifies those presented objects as empirical appearances accessed through material sensations and formal intuitions. The distinction between a posteriori matter in sensation and a priori form in intuition may seem premature, but it can be taken as a hypothetical claim to be established only with the later classification of space and time as a priori intuitions. Otherwise the picture of the senses as causally receptive seems to reflect a commonsense view coupled with a definitional link between intuitions and those objects. The suggestion is that sensations do not by themselves present or represent objects as empirical intuitions do. Yet despite the apparent simplicity of this picture commentators have raised a number of difficulties about it. It has been supposed that the objects which causally affect our senses cannot, on Kant's account, be appearances and must be things in themselves; it has been doubted whether his attempt to "abstract" sensibility from understanding is coherent; it has been asked how exactly we should understand the term "intuition," and more generally how we characterize each of the items in his vocabulary as "subjective" or "objective" aspects of experience. Are sensations, intuitions, and appearances psychological, physiological, or physical items in experience? Such questions are not obviously any more pressing than those which arise from the vocabularies of earlier philosophers but they need to be answered. At this stage I offer summary answers to be checked against Kant's later arguments. If sensations and intuitions are thought of as distinct mental states, then Kant's position would be open to objection. We would have to make sense of the claim that one mental state provides the material content of our experience, while another provides us with a formal content. Perhaps some such hypothesis might be canvassed in psychology or neurophysiology together with a proposed mechanism to fuse these discrete factors into an ordinary unified experience such as that of an object's color, but Kant does not offer any such hypothesis.1 He takes it that our ordinary experience is of such items as colored physical objects with various spatial features, and then claims that within such an experience we should distinguish the status, as a priori or a posteriori, of those references to color, space, and phys-

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ical objects. Color will be part of the a posteriori material to be ascribed to sensation; certain aspects of space will be part of the a priori form ascribed to intuition, and ordinary perception of physical objects will involve both a posteriori sensation and a priori intuition. Kant's earlier appeal to an inventory, and to his "abstraction" method of compiling it, represent the enquiry as disentangling the status of such items in our experience, but neither representing them as literally distinct, nor offering empirical hypotheses about the psychological or physiological mechanisms which may underlie and unify them. We have sensations just insofar as the content of our sense experience is empirical or a posteriori; we have intuitions just insofar as the content is a priori or refers to objects. Typically our ordinary sense experience contains both such elements. The point is confirmed in a rather unlikely place at B457n: "Empirical intuition is not, therefore, a composite of appearances and space (of perception and empty intuition). The one is not the correlate of the other in a synthesis; they are connected in one and the same empirical intuition as matter and form of the intuition." Kant characterizes intuitions in sensibility, as opposed to concepts in understanding, in three ways, as "immediate," "particular," and "passive" or "receptive." I consider issues about receptivity separately, but Kant speaks of intuitions as in immediate relation to objects, and treats them as concerned with particulars in virtue of their contrast with the discursive, generalizing contribution of concepts. These features, immediacy and particularity, appear to be different, but there is no good reason to suppose that we have to choose between them. It has been suggested that immediacy entails particularity, or that they are different intensionally but extensionally equivalent, and these claims demonstrate at least a close link between them. The former, immediacy, suggests a phenomenological feature of ordinary sense experience, in which we perceive some presented object without the need for any enquiry, inference, or determinate identification. This is not a "refutation" of idealism, but a descriptive survey of the character of our perception.2 The latter categorizes such presented objects as particulars without the general character which the understanding provides through its concepts. It should be reemphasized that Kant does not need to think of these abstracted aspects of experience as literally distinct, or as produced by separate mechanisms. Immediacy and passivity are familiar aspects of sense perception, as is the functional difference between presentation of a particular and its classification as an item of a general type. A question may be raised about the intelligibility of a reference to particulars independently of their characterization as particulars of some type, but this "blindness" problem is resolved later in section 2 below.

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Although these difficulties can be met, they raise another issue about what may, misleadingly, be called the "subjectivity" or "objectivity" of impressions, sensations, intuitions, and appearances. The opposition between subjectivity and objectivity is radically ambiguous throughout philosophy, but I shall take it that the question here is whether we should take any, or all, of these terms to designate purely mental states.3 There is no serious doubt that for Kant both sensations and intuitions, taken as occurrent items in experience, should be classed as mental states. The point might be put by saying that sensing and intuiting are undoubtedly mental states, while the differences between them are that the former's content is confined to a posteriori "matter," and the latter's includes the a priori "forms" of experience. I have suggested that the "matter/form" and associated "a posteriori/a priori" distinctions attached respectively to sensations and intuitions, are at this stage only hypothetical. They await strict confirmation from the succeeding arguments to identify what Kant regards as a priori forms of intuition, namely space and time. Kant also suggests that intuitions relate directiy to "objects" while sensations do not. This distinction might be construed as a conventional, but not wholly clear, contrast drawn between "representative" and "nonrepresentative" mental states. There are mental states, such as aches or itches, which may not represent anything although they are caused by some stimulus, and sensations will typically include these. Intuitions by contrast are essentially representative in their reference to objects, but, as I suggest later, the term "object" here does not mean "outer object." Both inner and outer sense have their "objects." Despite these differences and uncertainties in the contents and representative capacity of sensing and intuiting, both acts can be construed as occurrent mental states or events. That construction should be distinguished from the metaphysical classification of items in Kant's "transcendental topic" as "belonging to sensibility (intuition)" or "belonging to understanding (concept)." That sensing and intuiting can be construed as occurrent mental events has no parallel for appearances, which are the objects of empirical intuition (B34). The point is reinforced grammatically since there is no personal or subjective form for "appearance" corresponding to the verb forms "sensing" or "intuiting" for "sensation" and "intuition." I sense and intuit things but it is objects which appear. Appearances are what empirical intuitions represent and Kant typically regards all objects of experience as appearances. Commentators have sometimes taken these claims in two opposed ways, both of which are prima facie inadequate. On one side, some have been encouraged to treat appearances as mental states, like sensations or intuitions, because Kant frequently characterizes them as "ideas." For the present I note only that when he does so it is in the special context of what he calls " transcendental ideality," and that this raises

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questions about transcendental idealism which have to be deferred. If that doctrine is to be consistent then to call appearances transcendentally "ideas" must be compatible with their also being classified by Kant as objects of intuition and identified sometimes as empirically outer physical objects. Transcendental ideality for Kant has to be compatible with, and linked to, what he calls the "empirical reality" of such objects. Kant's text also indicates clearly enough that, whatever they may turn out to be, appearances are plainly not mental states just like sensations or intuitions. They are essentially contrasted with, and plainly not, things in themselves, but it does not follow that they are purely mental states. Other commentators are more impressed by the claim that appearances are the objects of intuition, and consequentiy take them to be external, physical objects.4 But that claim is evidentiy mistaken since Kant refers frequendy to both inner and outer appearances throughout the Critique, just as he also frequendy talks of inner and outer experience and perception. For him, uncontroversially, inner mental states such as a pain or a thought are inner appearances presented to inner sense, while outer objects such as shadows or tables are outer appearances presented to outer senses. Commentators sometimes fail to recognize the parity in Kant's account between inner and outer sense in which the objects or contents of such senses are both characterized as appearances with similar features, but it is essential for his perceptual vocabulary in distancing his position from traditional idealism.5 Appearances must at least include empirically outer, physical objects as well as inner mental states, but cannot be simply or exclusively identified with either of those categories. They are empirical objects, inner and outer, of representative mental states such as intuitions. Finally it is sometimes claimed that appearances are "intentional" objects,6 and this may ultimately throw some light on their problematic status. The distinction between sensations and intuitions, and the account of the latter as representative, have already indicated the importance of the "contents" of such mental states. I noted earlier Kant's reference to his enquiry into the "provenance" and the "content" of knowledge (B62). Sensations and intuitions are not to be understood simply as bare mental occurrences, but as having contents typically identified, and distinguished, in linguistic terms. Such contents may be regarded as "intentional objects" and may introduce a more subde characterization of appearances as the contents of such sensory states. The point is important in relation to the "blindness" issue raised in section 2 of this chapter and later to Kant's contrast between "modes" and "contents." If appearances are treated as "intentional contents," then those contents seem to be identifiable only through concepts and language, and yet strictly appearances are "blind" and abstract from the understanding and its concepts. More generally we need to ask how intentional objects are to be characterized in terms of the

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cruder "subjective/objective" and "mental/nonmental" distinctions in idealism. One recent commentator, Lome Falkenstein in Kant's Intuitionism (1995), has claimed that Kant's "subjective" vocabulary for perception, which includes his terms Eindruck (impression), Empfindung (sensation), and Anschauunpf (intuition) is essentially physiological rather than psychological (123). His conclusions are that "sensations [Empfindunjjen] . . . are, one and all, physical states of the nervous system in the sensing subject" (123), and that Kant's distinction between the intuitive and the intellectual is "properly to be seen as a distinction between the physiological and the psychic, or more exactly . . . between the physical and the cognitive" (123). Falkenstein concedes that the evidence is equivocal and does not account for every use of Empfindung. The case might be made more strongly for Eindruck (impression), whose literal etymology indicates a physical and causal effect on the sense organs. But even Kant uses the term Eindruck just as we now use the term "impression," to indicate more widely and figuratively how things strike one. If even that term is not restricted to its bare physiological use, then it is hard to accept that Kant's other terms, "sensation" and "intuition," are essentially physiological. Inevitably all the terms have associations with physiological events, and Falkenstein's account valuably notes that recognition even in the eighteenth century,7 but almost all the textual evidence is compatible with that weaker claim. Kant was well aware of the links between the mental and the physiological, but the evidence in favor of their general identification in these cases is not strong enough to exclude a psychological understanding of such a term as "sensation."

1.1. The Receptivity of the Senses It was noted above that for Kant the senses are essentially "receptive" and distinguished from the "discursive" and active, sometimes "spontaneous," character of the understanding. Part of what this entails is that the senses, both inner and outer, are causally affected by their objects. This causal relation has raised a persistent question about the status of the items which have this effect on the senses, that is, whether they should be regarded as appearances, as things in themselves, or as both. It is often assumed that Kant's reference to "objects" causally affecting our senses is a reference to things in themselves, but the text at B33 certainly does not say so, and does not refer to "things in themselves." Moreover, since the objects are referred to as Gegenstande, and appearances are said to be the objects (Gegenstande) of intuitions, there is a strong presumption that they are appearances and not things in themselves.

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Insofar as the text offers immediate guidance it points to that conclusion, which in any case conforms to Kant's principled restriction of knowledge to appearances. Kant uncontroversially holds that the only causal relations we can properly know are those between appearances, and that we can never have knowledge of causal relations involving things in themselves just as, more generally, we have knowledge only of appearances but not of things in themselves. Kant insists in the Analytic on that specific restriction in the case of a category such as cause, whose only genuine theoretical use is restricted to immanent appearances. It would, therefore, be entirely natural to suppose that this first step in outlining his account of experience should express something that is knowable, that is, a causal relation between appearances, rather than something which is acknowledged as unknowable and problematic, namely a causal relation involving things in themselves. These considerations are enough to show that simply to assume that at B32-3 3 the objects affecting our senses are things in themselves, or that Kant here asserts an admittedly unknowable relation between things in themselves and the senses, is unwarranted. The most that could be said for the assumption is that the categorization of such "objects," as appearances or as things in themselves, is left open at this stage, but in fact there is good reason, quite apart from the textual points already made, to reject the classification of such objects as things in themselves. Kant's method in compiling his inventory is to identify ordinary experience in order to disentangle, to abstract, its a posteriori and a priori elements, and this procedure runs through the whole Critical philosophy. It is therefore natural to take the B33 references to causal relations between objects and senses as a part of that ordinary experience and then the "objects," as items of experience, must be appearances and not things in themselves. It may be objected that Kant's procedure so understood is empirically based, even based on common sense, and that this runs counter to his claim to conduct an a priori enquiry in which appeals to common sense are insufficient (Prolegomena preface, Ak. 4.258-60). But that objection fails in two important ways to grasp the extent of Kant's revolutionary aims. It fails to distinguish the a posteriori experience, which is a fundamental datum for the enquiry, from the investigation of its structure, when both structure and investigation are a priori. And it fails to recognize that Kant's objection to common sense in the Prolegomena is as an antidote to a Humean skepticism. Kant is not rejecting every appeal to common human experience, but denies only, and correctly, that merely to cite that experience is sufficient to refute Hume. Even if the assumption is rejected it has also been argued that the objects in question must be things in themselves. Probably the most extensive textual arguments for such a conclusion are those given in Adickes's

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Kant und das Ding an Sich. These deserve an equally extensive examination later (see chapter 23), but they can be set aside for the present, because Adickes does not deny that those objects must also be taken as appearances. His position depends upon acceptance of his own "double affection" theory, which allows objects as appearances to affect our senses causally but also claims that Kant is committed to an unknowable causal relation between things in themselves and our senses. Since Adickes does not dispute the causal relation among appearances at B33, and since his further claim about things in themselves ranges widely over other passages in Kant's Critical writings, I shall not address his view here. Instead it is more germane to consider arguments which claim, against Adickes, that the relevant causal relation cannot be between appearances, but must involve only things in themselves. One such argument is explicitly given in Sebastian Gardner's Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. He says: "This is indeed suggested by the statement in the first paragraph of the Aesthetic that in sensibility 'we are affected by objects' (A19/B33), which—since here 'objects' cannot intelligibly refer to empirical objects, the elementary presuppositions of which are at this point being analysed—demands to be read as referring to things in themselves" (1999, 287). Gardner is right to indicate that Kant is investigating the presuppositions, the conditions, of an experience which includes the perception of empirical objects, but the argument from this premise to his conclusion is fallacious.8 Kant's way of identifying those presuppositions is to start with our experience and to disentangle the different elements, sense or understanding, a priori or a posteriori, which constitute it. Our experience is a datum for the subsequent metaphysical investigation which catalogues the a posteriori or a priori elements in that experience. It is not necessary even to insist on the ascription of such a procedure to Kant in order to demonstrate the fallacy in Gardner's argument. Even though that procedure is used abundantly throughout the Critiques, all that is necessary is to show that the argument overlooks that possibility. Once that inventorial procedure is accepted the argument actually shows that the objects in question cannot be things in themselves, for whether things in themselves exist or not they certainly form no part of that given experience for Kant. Examination of the argument and the earlier textual considerations point towards the same conclusion. Although the argument is fallacious, it is worth considering how it might be thought decisive. The argument is brief and may seem obviously valid for two related reasons. One arises from the assumption that Kant is not merely describing the character of our experience and disentangling its a posteriori and a priori elements, but seeking to justify a belief in empirical, and outer, objects against a traditional skeptic. For if that were Kant's aim, then merely to cite the causal influence of such objects on our senses,

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and so to presuppose their existence, would blatantiy beg the skeptic's question. It may seem implausible to ascribe that strategy to Kant both because of its evident failure and because it appeals to common sense against skepticism in the very way which Kant rejects in the Prolegomena. It may consequentiy seem preferable to appeal instead to unknowable transcendent objects as causes of our sense experience, but that appeal can certainly be no more successful. If it is implausible to appeal to common sense against skepticism it is even more implausible to appeal to what is unknowable in order to justify knowledge. Both lines of argument point to the denial that Kant seeks to justify a belief in empirical objects against skepticism at this stage, and instead to Kant's assumption of experience as a datum for his a priori enquiry. That line of argument is associated with two dubious background beliefs. First it echoes a familiar traditional belief that Kant needs to appeal to transcendent things in themselves as the initiating causes of our experience. Even if there is no satisfactory argument to support such a claim at B32-33 it may result from an independent belief that Kant commits himself to such transcendent causes as the "grounds" (Griinde) of our experience in the Dialectic. It is true that Kant considers such appeals to ultimate grounds of our experience in the Dialectic and in the polemic against Eberhard, but I argue later that even in that context he never retracts the claim that we can know nothing of things in themselves (chapter 23 and part 5). The concept of an intelligible thing in itself plays a central role in the Dialectic, but its legitimate, regulative role is licensed only within the general proviso that it provides no knowledge of such things. There is a fundamental difference for Kant between the "constitutive ideas" (Vorstellungen) in the Aesthetic and the "regulative ideas" (Ideen) of the Dialectic. The same line of argument is also apt to mislead about the primary task of the Aesthetic since its conception of the objects which affect our senses is ambiguous. On one side it is natural to see the issue as the standard idealist anxiety about justifying belief in an outer world, and yet the issue might also be seen as an attempt to justify knowledge of any object, inner or outer. The distinction might be expressed by saying that the former issue is explicitiy about outer, spatial, physical things while the latter is more generally about a claimed "objectivity" in our knowledge or beliefs which concerns truth, whether about inner or outer objects. The tacit assumption may be that when Kant talks at B 3 2 - 3 3 of objects (Gegenstdnde) causally affecting our senses he restricts himself to outer, physical objects. The consequence is that the Aesthetic is taken to be primarily an idealist exercise in justifying our beliefs about those external, physical objects. I have argued that Kant's primary goal is not a justification of our beliefs against skepticism but an attempt to disentangle the diverse elements

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involved in our sense perception. The primary target is consequently not that idealist anxiety but an identification and exploration of those, particularly a priori, elements in sensibility, whether they involve outer or inner sense. To restrict Kant's attention to outer sense and outer objects in that normative idealist project is to miss the central point for those two reasons. The project is not a normative antiskepticism and it is not confined to outer sense. Kant's conclusions identifying the a priori forms of sense are concerned just as much with time and inner sense as with space and outer sense. More controversially perhaps, Kant also accepts empirical causal relations between inner objects in inner sense just as he accepts such relations between outer objects and outer sense (B67-69, B156n, A385-86). In contemporary philosophy "perception" may be unthinkingly restricted to what Kant called "outer sense," and "object of perception" may mean what Kant calls "outer object," 9 but that is no reason to overlook Kant's different terminology which, rightly or wrongly, does not make that restriction. The noted parity between inner and outer sense allows parallel relations, including causal relations, between both inner and outer perception and their inner and outer objects, namely, appearances. Kant's distinction between inner and outer sense undoubtedly faces problems, considered in chapter 8, but they should not conceal the fact that he endorses these parities between inner and outer sense. His account records our ordinary distinction between the mental and physical in what he calls an "empirical dualism" (A379), and leaves it open how it can be elucidated philosophically.10 There is no good reason to deny that Kant's basic picture at B32-33 is the unexceptionable commonsense view outlined above, and that the objects which causally affect our inner and outer senses are familiar empirical objects such as chairs and thoughts.11

2. The "Blindness" Problem The division between the Aesthetic, which deals with the a priori contribution of the senses in intuitions, and the Analytic, which deals with the a priori contribution of the understanding in concepts, creates a further problem. Kant envisages a procedure in which those distinctive contributions to experience are abstracted, or separated, from experience, but this has been criticized in two ways. One objection arises internally from Kant's own requirement that sense and understanding yield knowledge only in conjunction, or that sense without understanding is "blind": "Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind" (B75). A second arises independently of Kant from the belief that it is impossible to identify a pure sense experience with-

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out any reference to the understanding or to concepts. The two problems may be connected by supposing, as McDowell does,12 that the quoted claims express that independent belief, so that to speak of sense without understanding as "blind" is already to deny the possibility of such a separate, distinctive contribution from the senses. McDowell's claim is that sensibility cannot be "even notionally separated" from understanding (1994, 51) but, right or wrong, Kant believes that they are not literally but are notionally separable through his "abstraction" procedure. These preliminaries make it clear why the difficulties have come to be called the "blindness" problem. Some initial points can be made to clarify Kant's position. First McDowell's assimilation of Kant's position to that of contemporary philosophers who deny the possibility of a separate sensory contribution to experience is evidently a misunderstanding. If Kant held such a view, then it is hard to see why he distinguishes the Aesthetic from the Analytic, and emphasizes the abstraction procedure in which sense is notionally separated from understanding, and a priori elements in the senses are notionally separated from a posteriori elements (cf. B457n). But Kant in any case makes the same rejoinder in what is said immediately after the "blindness" claim at B75-76. There Kant continues to insist on a necessary link between sense and understanding, but treats that as a reason not for denying their distinctive contributions but for carefully separating them. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge arise. But that is no reason for confounding the contribution of either with that of the other; rather is it a strong reason for carefully separating and distinguishing them. We therefore distinguish the science of the rules of sensibility in general, the aesthetic, from the science of the rules of the understanding in general, that is, logic.

The passage implicitly concedes that the separation of sense from understanding is artificial, something that can be achieved only by the theoretical "abstraction" or "isolation" procedure outlined earlier at B5-6. It cannot be said, therefore, that Kant falls into these difficulties inadvertently; he recognizes a problem but insists on his theoretical means of overcoming it. That recognition does not establish that he successfully resolves the problem. It leaves the questions whether the abstraction procedure can satisfactorily reconcile both the union and the separation of the two faculties, and whether it is possible to identify sense contents without appeal to the understanding and its concepts. More is said on this issue in chapter 10 on Sellars, McDowell, and "myths of the given." One way to begin answering these questions is to note that the B75-76 connection between concepts and intuitions does not require that every

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experience, or every instance of knowledge, should refer to a current intuition coupled with a conceptual classification. It requires only that appeal to both faculties should be really possible. Kant allows cases where knowledge or experience is based one-sidedly on either sense experience or concepts. The former is exemplified in the Prolegomena distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience and in the Critique's reference to what I have called a "deviant experience" at B123. In another passage13 (Logik Politz, Ak. 24.2.510) reference is allowed to a sense experience which the subject either cannot or does not characterize: In every cognition we must distinguish the matter, that is, the object, from the form, that is, the way in which we recognize the object. For example a savage who sees a house in the distance but does not understand its function represents exacdy the same object as another but in a different form. With the former it is only intuition, but with the latter it is intuition and concepts representing that this is a human dwelling.

Similar cases arise in mathematics where a conceptual operation either has, or could have, no intuitable object (B146-47); or in science where theory points to the existence of some item even though we do not, or cannot, perceive it through our senses (B273-74). Kant recognizes that these particular cases may be one-sidedly either intuitive or conceptual, but licenses them as genuine knowledge so long as they can be connected to the other intuitive or conceptual side. There is a more general lesson to be drawn from these cases. They commit Kant to the noted weaker link between sense and understanding, and also to the consequence that any failure in that link may inhibit the ascription of knowledge in different ways. They allow the possibility that deviations from the strict union of sense and understanding may occur with different degrees of intelligibility. Kant does not hold that all deviant, one-sided cases are strictly unintelligible, but only that as they deviate further from the standard case they come closer to unintelligibility.14 Kant's position is not a traditional, rigid, and strict demarcation between what is known and what is not, or between what is intelligible and what is not. It allows some flexibility in characterizing deviations from the standard, core cases. Even if the weaker version of the "blindness" claim can reconcile Kant's two central claims that does not yet establish independendy that it is intelligible to identify a pure sensory content without reference to concepts. In particular it does not explain how this might be possible. First, however, it is necessary to resolve an ambiguity in the opposing claims. To say that it is not possible to identify a sensory content without concepts might be construed in either of the two following ways where the modality has different scope:

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(1) It is impossible to identify a (sense content without concepts). (2) Without (using) concepts it is impossible to identify a sense content. To show that (2) was false we would have to identify some sense content without the benefit of, that is, without deploying, any concepts. To show that (1) was false would be to identify some sense content by deploying concepts which were not, however, attached to that content by the subject. (2) is a stronger claim than (1), and correspondingly more difficult to falsify. For it is impossible to identify a sense content, even as a "sense content," without deploying concepts at all; some concepts are needed in order to make the sense content determinate. If, however, we are allowed to use concepts but to detach them from the relevant sense content, then we can falsify (1). For we might identify a sense content, belonging to some subject, as an object's color or taste on the assumption that the subject cannot, or does not, itself identify it in that way. This feature is responsible for our ability to say truly of some percipient that he saw the President of the USA or tasted truffles even though the percipient had no such conception of what he saw or tasted. The same feature allows us to identify a sense content across different percipients in saying that they perceive exactly the same things even though only one recognizes that content in some particular conceptual way. It allows us to think of a sense content, abstracted from the descriptions with which specific subjects having that sense content may, or may not, be able to identify it. These features allow us to identify sense contents without concepts vicariously, in a way which falsifies (1) even though it does not falsify (2). The resulting abstract conception of a "pure" sense experience is artificial and theoretical, but it is no more problematic than other theoretical distinctions such as that between the syntax and semantics of sentences of a natural language. Uttered sentences are not presented with separate syntactic and semantic components; we distinguish their syntactic and semantic features in a similar abstract way from a uniform presentation. A difficulty might be thought to remain, namely, that although it is possible so to identify a sense content we could never have grounds to locate any such cases. Such a response concedes the central claim, that (1) is false, but retreats to the different objection that such falsification could never be justified, but such a retreat achieves nothing. There is no general, or adequate, ground to deny that we can falsify (1) in certain cases such as those noted above. Where a subject has a similar physiological sense apparatus to ours, and responds behaviorally in ways which we recognize as appropriate to that content, then there may be no serious doubt about the

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sense content even when the subject cannot identify it in our terms.15 It might be objected that under these conditions we should also attribute the relevant concept to the subject, and then the examples would not falsify (1), but there is no compulsion to take such a view. Nor is the claim committed to saying that a nonconceptual percipient is capable of recognizing, or differentially responding to, every discrimination that we might make. We should allow that different creatures, at different stages of development, have diverse and variously limited repertoires of response. Nor could it be coherentiy argued that such cases succumb to a philosophical skepticism in which it is always possible that the nonconceptual percipients perceive the same scenes differendy from us. Standard skeptical appeals to "inverted spectra" in perception might be deployed in this way, but they prove too much since even ordinary cases of perceptual comparison between language-speakers will succumb to that. There is no more of a problem from philosophical skepticism for "blind" creatures than there is in ordinary circumstances for the "sighted." There is, therefore, no good reason to reject the falsification of (1), and so no good reason to reject the viability of notionally identifying sense contents without concepts, or nonconceptual content. We can achieve a theoretical, abstract conception of a subject's sense content without the subject's ability to identify it conceptually, and that makes coherent Kant's intention both to separate the theoretical contributions of sense and understanding and also to insist on their union in the paradigm cases of knowledge and experience.

3. The Nature of Kant's Project: Metaphysics, Epistemology, and Psychology It has been argued that Kant's inventorial project is primarily a metaphysical survey of our experience to be distinguished from an empirical psychology. It has also been suggested that a metaphysics of experience cannot be wholly divorced either from epistemology or from psychology. Kant's metaphysics is a metaphysics of our experience, that is, of our cognitive economy and our cognitive powers. It is essentially anthropocentric. The project, therefore, is bound to have links with both epistemology and psychology, but the links need to be carefully mapped. On one side the connection with epistemology would be open to a standard objection if the latter is conceived as the traditional project of justifying our cognitive claims against skepticism. Skeptics typically deny not that our experience has the contested features but that they can be adequately justified, so that a mere description of experience inevitably begs the skeptic's question. On the other side the connection with psychology would be vulnerable if Kant's psychological claims are conceived as a part either of an empirical,

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or of a nonempirical transcendent, discipline. Kant denies that he is engaged in empirical psychology, and denies that we have transcendent knowledge in psychology. Questions remain, therefore, about these connections between Kant's project and traditional epistemology and psychology and in this concluding section I offer some preliminary clarification. There is no doubt that Kant has some forms of skepticism as targets. The question is not whether Kant addresses skeptical issues, but which ones he addresses, and how his metaphysics of experience deals with them. One radical solution to this problem would be to recall Kant's rejection of all previous philosophy and to insist that traditional skepticism is a part of what is to be rejected. It was noted earlier that Kant reverses the priority in a tradition which treated philosophy as having the authority to cast doubt on other forms of knowledge. Kant's own skepticism about that supposed authority to cast doubt on other scientific disciplines is one of the central motives for his reform of the discipline. There is a case, considered in chapter 11, for saying that Kant does not so much argue against that general skepticism as simply dismiss it out of hand as "idle." Yet there are other specific types of skeptical argument which Kant takes more seriously. One of Kant's primary targets throughout the Critique is indisputably a Humean empiricism and its associated skepticism. This is evident in the Copernican revolution which seeks to support a belief in a priori concepts and principles which go beyond any empiricist conception of the a priori. It is evident in Kant's project of a descriptive inventory which aims to identify, and map relations between, the a priori concepts which provide the fundamental structure of our experience, and whose role he thought Hume had overlooked. And it is evident in Kant's general attitude to empiricism and specific comments on Hume (B792-93; second Critique Ak. 5.5 Of). In all these contexts the central issue is that of identifying such an a priori structure and explaining its role, but it remains unclear how this relates to skepticism. One temptation would be to see Kant's conception of the a priori as providing a guarantee of empirical knowledge against the skeptic by establishing truths which hold in all possible worlds, but there are two problems with this. One difficulty is that for Kant such a guarantee would provide only analytic truth, and it is not clear how appeals to analytic truth would adequately answer skepticism. But in any case Kant's response depends essentially on his appeal to synthetic a priori truths which do not hold in all possible worlds. In the earlier reference to apodeictic certainty in mathematics Kant rejects an empiricist account of mathematical truth as a posteriori, but this offers a realistic classification of mathematics rather than an antiskeptical guarantee of truth. Kant's response to skepticism in this context may amount to no more than the belief that in rejecting empiricism he rejects also its skeptical consequences, and I argue for that view in chapter 11.

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A second point can be made about the relation between Kant's metaphysics of experience and an idealist skepticism. If Kant's project, his "transcendental topic," is designed to map the structure of our experience, this can be pursued equally well in relation either to our representations or to the items in experience which those representations designate. It is a matter of indifference whether we map the relations of dependence and priority among our concepts or among the items which they represent. If we wish to identify a priori elements in our experience it is inevitable that we examine our concepts rather than their objects. That seems clear independently of Kant, but his own insistence that philosophy deals with concepts underlines the point. Kant's interest is in the fruitful bathos of our experience, and our experience is captured in our ideas, our representations, our concepts, of reality. For Kant's project, construed in this way, there is no need to mark the traditional divorce between representation and reality, for the structure of reality as we experience it is the structure of our representations. To investigate that structure is to map relations between its concepts. In a similar way a traditional skepticism based on representational failure, on perceptual illusions, is dubiously relevant to the project as Kant himself makes clear (B278-79). The empirical circumstances of perceptual illusion, and any skeptical generalization from their occurrence, are not at issue in mapping the structure of experience within which those illusions occur. The structure makes possible the empirical circumstances of both veridical and illusory perception. The priority inevitably accorded to an examination of our concepts in Kant's project is related to another feature of Kant's discussion in the Aesthetic which sometimes causes difficulties. Although Kant's central theses in the Aesthetic are that space and time are intuitions, the discussion is carried on by reference to features of the concepts of space and time. Readers sometimes suppose that Kant is merely slipshod in using "concept" where he should have said "intuition" but this is not so. For Kant any metaphysics deals with concepts, and we have concepts of space and time just as we have concepts of colors or sets. It is inevitable, and acknowledged to be inevitable, that the discussion is carried on in terms of the concepts of space and time, but this is entirely compatible with their metaphysical classification in Kant's "transcendental topic" as intuitions or as intuitive, that is, as belonging to the senses. This is not to make a point in empirical psychology about our occurrent intuitions but to provide a classification of these distinctive items and their role in experience. It is, as I indicated in chapter 5, to talk not of their developmental "origins" but of their metaphysical "provenance." Another major issue arises in connection with psychology. Just as Kant's interest in epistemology can be divorced from the skeptical framework of both empiricism and idealism, so his interest in psychology within

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his metaphysics can be divorced from both empirical and transcendent psychology. Empirical psychologists investigate the occurrent workings of our psychological faculties and the laws, if any,16 which govern them, but they do not generally attempt to relate those faculties in a more general map of experience. Kant's interest in cognition attempts to locate it in such an overall map of experience, and does not concern its empirical, causal operations. Just as Kant is concerned with the relations of priority and dependence in experience generally, so he is also concerned with the relations of priority and dependence among our cognitive powers. Kant insists (Axvi-xvii) that a "subjective," psychological and causal, account of our experience is not his principal target, but our cognitive psychology is a part of that experience and deserves to find a place in the overall map. The role of cognitive psychology in that overall experience is bound to relate to empirical enquiries and to demonstrate some overlap with philosophy, as Kant shows in the preface (Axvi-xvii) and later in the Analytic (B150-60), but his central concern is to map the structure of our experience and of our psychology within it. The traditionalist picture of "the mind making nature" adds to that account an explanation from transcendent psychology in which the mind stands outside nature and literally creates it. The account given above of psychological factors finding a place in a map of our experience will be said to overlook Kant's claim that somehow the mind has responsibility for the a priori structure of experience. Common assumptions about transcendental idealism represent it as offering an "explanation," in terms of our minds, for the structural features of our experience, and one crude version represents those minds as transcendent, that is, not merely as a part of our experience but distinct from it and able to construct it. Even if that literal traditionalist picture is set aside some account still has to be given of that psychological responsibility and its problematic character. Kant clearly denies us transcendent knowledge in psychology and elsewhere, but critics may conclude that his commitment to it marks another of his inconsistencies. The issue is central to Kant's philosophy and a decisive answer can be given only after considering the Aesthetic and Analytic, but it is worth noticing defects in one such criticism. Strawson's traditionalist account accepted that Kant's project is not an empirical psychology, but notoriously drew the conclusion that it is an "imaginary" transcendent discipline (1966a, 32). He echoed in this way Kant's own criticisms of a transcendent rational psychology described as "an imaginary science" (A395). Strawson describes his objection as "ad hominem" but he nevertheless draws the critical conclusion: The theory of synthesis, like any essay in transcendental psychology, is exposed to the ad hominem objection that we can claim no empirical knowledge of its

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truth; for this would be to claim empirical knowledge of the occurrence of that which is held to be the antecedent condition of empirical knowledge. (1966a, 32)

Although many commentators have subsequentiy rejected Strawson's argument and his conclusion, it is worth pointing summarily to three of its principal faults. These are first that the argument establishes not that Kant's psychology is transcendent but only that it is a priori. It does so by correctly supposing that any condition of empirical knowledge will itself be nonempirical, that is, a priori. But there is no inference from being a priori to being imaginary or transcendent, and that indicates the second error. For not only is there no such valid inference, but one of Kant's most fundamental principles insists on exacdy that basic rationalist fallacy of inferring from what is a priori to what is beyond experience and transcendent. Strawson's argument is not only invalid, but overlooks Kant's recognition of that invalidity. What remains of Strawson's position is only the residual claim that there is no such thing as a priori psychology, but his argument offers no reason to accept that. A third, and the most significant, defect in the argument arises from the earlier account of Kant's complex distinctions between the empirical, the immanent, the transcendental, and the transcendent. Strawson's argument assumes that if Kant's claims do not belong to an immanent, empirical psychology, then they must be transcendent. It accepts the exhaustive alternatives of "either empirical or transcendent" and disregards the third option of being "transcendental," that is, neither empirical nor transcendent. In a later article Strawson noted Kant's rejection of an imaginary rational psychology but was puzzled that Kant did not apply the criticism to his own transcendental psychology: "It is not clear why Kant's own brand of what might be called 'transcendental psychology'—which is clearly distinguished from the empirical—does not fall under the same interdict that he places on 'rational psychology'" (Strawson 1987, 408). But the puzzle arises direcdy from acceptance of the exhaustive dual contrast between the empirical and the transcendent, which effectively identifies the transcendental and the transcendent. Its resolution requires only the replacement of that dual scheme with Kant's threefold contrast between the empirical, the transcendent, and the transcendental. Once transcendental and transcendent psychology are distinguished in that threefold classification, then Kant may consistendy criticize the transcendent discipline of a pseudorational psychology and canvass his own transcendental, but immanent, psychology. That third, transcendental option was earlier characterized in terms of claims in a general metaphysics about experience as a whole including its psychological features. Such claims are not merely about discriminable parts of, and within, experience, but they do not purport to go

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beyond the scope of experience. They are about experience as a whole and transcendental, but immanent and not transcendent. Kant's transcendental psychology is designed to operate in that third transcendental, but not transcendent, sector. How that transcendental option works to "explain" the structural features of our experience will be considered later, but what has already been said is sufficient to reject the traditionalist doctrine of a transcendent "mind making nature." For now it is important only to recognize what was anticipated in chapter 5, that the puzzle and criticism are a consequence of the failure to grasp that part of Kant's analytic apparatus.

[8] Space and Time in Experience and in Mathematics: The Metaphysical and Transcendental Expositions 1. The Metaphysical Expositions At the start of the metaphysical exposition of space Kant associates space with outer sense, representing objects as outside us, and time with inner sense, representing ourselves and our states. He asks, what are space and time? and offers three answers which echo earlier views of Leibniz and Newton. They are either (a) Real existences. (b) Determinations or relations of things which belong to them even if they are not intuited. (c) Forms of intuition belonging to "the subjective constitution of the mind, apart from which they could not be ascribed to anything." These alternatives are liable to confuse quite different issues about space and time. One issue between Newton and Leibniz arose from the "relative" or "absolute" character of space/time in physics1; another arises from the analysis of space/time as either relations between objects or irreducible to such relations2; a third arises from the epistemological question about how we know space/time. The first issue has to do with philosophy of science, the second with a metaphysical, or logical, analysis of space/time as relational or not, and the third concerns the epistemology of space/time as knowable a priori or a posteriori, and as mind-dependent or mind-independent. These issues are different but overlap; (b)'s reference to "relations" might involve a metaphysical issue about relational or intrinsic properties, or an epistemological issue of "mind-dependence" about relations between subjects and what tiiey perceive .^Someone might hold an absolute view of space and time in 137

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physics but still analyze space as a relation between objects. Someone might accept a relational analysis of space/time and be neutral about whether they are epistemically mind-dependent or mind-independent. For these reasons it is misleading to associate either (a) or (b) directiy with Newton or Leibniz; and it is not clear whether any of the three claims entail acceptance or rejection of any others. Even (c), which might seem incompatible with (a), is so only on the assumption that "real existence" excludes any form of "mind-dependence" as references to things in themselves do. Kant's own central interest lies in the question of "mind-dependence" which appears initially in the second clause of (b) and is decisively expressed in Kant's own preference for (c). That latter issue is Kant's primary target, but turns on resolving ambiguities in the notion of "minddependence." Kant expresses his conclusions decisively. He holds that: (1) Space and time belong to intuition, that is, to sensibility rather than to understanding. (2) They are, as intuitive, particulars and not general things. (3) They are known not a posteriori but a priori, as forms of outer and inner sense. These claims also have some complexity. To say that space and time are forms of intuition seems to express a claim about human cognitive psychology, but to say that they are to be classified as belonging to sense rather than understanding is part of a "transcendental topic" (B324), Kant's metaphysical inventory. To say that space and time are, as intuitive, particulars rather than general things is to outline their logic; to say that they are a priori is to reflect their epistemic status. There is no general reason why Kant should not put such a complex package together, but the connections between the items in it are not made clear in Kant's text. The metaphysical claim, that space/time belong to sense rather than understanding, naturally suggests explanatory hypotheses in cognitive psychology; the logic of space/time as particulars might be thought a consequence of the metaphysics; and Kant patently believes that mind-dependence and a priority are strongly connected (Bxviii). I repeat summarily two preliminary points. It is sometimes objected that if space and time are intuitions or intuitive, then Kant should not speak of them, as he persistently does, as concepts. But Kant's philosophical task is conceptual (Bxiv); it is to classify such concepts as belonging to sense rather than to understanding. It is also sometimes asked whether Kant is accounting for space and time, or only for our ideas of space and time, and it may be objected that what holds for our ideas of space and

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time may not hold for space and time themselves. The issue is important because Kant expresses his view that space and time are transcendentally mind-dependent by speaking of them as ideas, and this, like the comparable claim for appearances, expresses what transcendental idealism is. From the perspective of Kant's transcendental topic the issue can be set aside, since the task of mapping our experience can be carried out just as well for the relations holding between the ideas which constitute experience as of those between the items which the ideas represent. To say that space and time are intuitive and a priori is to say something about their location and that of those representations in the map of our experience. Since Kant's arguments are directed at the two characteristics of space/time as intuitive and a priori, I consider them under those two headings for space and time together. This has the advantage of locating the central points wherever they occur in the numbered paragraphs, and of avoiding duplication both within each section and between the two sections. Despite the evident differences between space and time the arguments about their status are formally similar. Kant insists on a general parity between spatial, outer, and temporal inner sense although one noted difference between them, considered later, is that the latter covers all representations while the former covers only a subset of them. The arguments have generated diverse interpretations partly because they are too brief to be quite determinate. My aim is not to consider all the accounts which have been offered, but to outline a central structure for the arguments which fits the text.

1.1. The Structure of the Arguments The two sets of arguments in the metaphysical expositions for space and time are divided into distinct numbered paragraphs, and aim at two conclusions, namely that space and time, or their representations, are "intuitive" and "a priori." I indicated earlier that the arguments for the two conclusions are not restricted uniquely to each numbered paragraph. Those arguments can be divided in the following way into four for the a priori character of space and time, and two for their intuitive character: The A Priori Character of Space and Time (1) Space and time are presupposed in our experience; they cannot be derived from, and are prior to, a posteriori experiences, (paragraph 1) (2) The absence of space and time cannot be represented, but they can be represented as empty of objects, (paragraph 2)

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(3) Apodeictically certain principles of space and time, for example in geometry, support their a priori necessity in experience, (paragraph 3; in B, paragraph 3 for space is deleted) (4) Space and time are infinite given, or unlimited, magnitudes, (paragraph 5 in A; in B paragraphs 3 and 4 for space and 5 for time) The Intuitive Character of Space and Time (5) The distinctive relation of parts to whole in the case of space and time excludes their discursive or conceptual character, (paragraph 4 in A; paragraph 3 for space in B) (6) The notion of "limitation" in space and time is the basis for identifying determinate magnitudes in them, and this supports their nonconceptual, intuitive character, (paragraph 5 for time, 4 and 5 for space in A; paragraph 4 in B for space) I oudine and comment on the arguments in order before considering the transcendental expositions in 2, and summarizing the outcome in 3.

1.2. The Specific Arguments 1 . 2 . 1 . ARGUMENT ( 1 )

Kant's claims in this opening paragraph underline two distinctive aspects of his account, captured in his references to "presupposition" and "sensation." The claim is that space and time are presupposed in our experience and are not derivable from a posteriori sensation. Since "sensation" is defined for Kant as the a posteriori matter of sense experience (B34-35) these two claims point towards a denial of any empiricist derivation of space and time from sensory impressions or ideas. This is evidentiy a central goal of the Aesthetic, but this argument suffers from several related weaknesses. Kant's definitional distinction between a posteriori sensation and a priori intuition cannot establish that there are any a priori intuitions, still less that they can be identified as space and time. Kant might consequently adopt the following strategy: If the empiricists' basic sense impressions are shown not to contain adequate resources to derive our concepts of space or time then they must be presupposed in our experience. If additionally those concepts of space and time are necessary for our experience, then their nonderivability from the empiricists' basic sensory material and their necessity in experience entitle us to classify space and time as a priori. This is an argument strategy rather than a specific argument and requires com-

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pletion for both the nonderivability and necessity conclusions, but both are evidently at issue in the subsequent arguments. Necessity is involved in (2) and (3), and nonderivability in (2) and (4). Such a formal strategy may seem to place all the weight on the subsequent arguments, but this is not quite true. The idea that basic empiricist resources are inadequate for the derivation of some aspect of experience is not unique to Kant and can be found in many other contexts.3 Characteristically empiricism has been represented as deflationary, as failing adequately to account for a full-blown experience, and as potentially leading to skepticism. Empiricist accounts of mathematics or of external objects may leave a residual knowledge which falls short of our standard beliefs and surrenders to a traditional skepticism. The strategy suggests a general argument to the effect that empiricism yields these deficits because it leaves out some required aspect of our experience. There is no doubt that Kant follows such a general strategy throughout the Critique and that he uses his conception of a "transcendental" enquiry to indicate that point. To "go transcendental" is for Kant to invoke some presupposed general feature of experience which cannot be adequately accounted for on empiricist grounds (A97, A106, A113-14). In the Aesthetic, Kant's strategy in "going transcendental" is designed to disclose factors in experience which empiricism overlooks, namely the priority of space and time over their inhabitants and their classification as a priori. Arguments for those conclusions are presented in (2), (3), and (4), but is there any additional argument, to implement the general strategy, in (1)? Commentators have denied that there is on two related grounds: That the presupposition relation is trivial and at best establishes priority but not a priority. Both points can be shown in the presupposition relation which holds between any determinate concept and its determinable genus. We might argue that the concept "red" presupposes the determinable "color," but neither we nor Kant would infer that "color" is an a priori concept. If (1) argues from a determinate spatial distance from me, or a spatial relation between objects, that the determinable "space" is presupposed, then it fails to reach the required conclusion that the determinable is a priori. It has been suggested that the determinate reference to something "outside me" is not to a spatial relation but to something "distinct from" or "other than" me.4 Then the argument identifies a presupposition of that relation as the representation of space. One difficulty here is that the suggestion does not exactly match Kant's text, which talks of something outside me as "something in another region of space from that in which I find myself." The textual contrast is between my location in space and other things in space rather than that between a nonspatial me and the space around me. The former reference includes a person (me) in space, but it

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does not exclude space itself, and that brings one potential advantage. For the danger of such a reference to a nonspatial person is that it is then committed to a pure nonspatial Cartesian consciousness. Quite apart from the objections to conceiving persons in that Cartesian way it is also in danger of incoherentiy relating a nonspatial item spatially to other things. It makes no sense to talk of spatial relations between trumps in a game of cards unless they can be associated with particular spatial players or playing cards. Some light is thrown on the issue by considering two passages from the 1770 Dissertation and the lectures on metaphysics where Kant addresses it. For I cannot conceive anything as located outside me unless I represent it as in a space different from the space in which I myself am; nor can I conceive things as outside one another unless I place them in different parts of space. (.Dissertation §15) I as intelligence have no place [location in space] but my place [location] in the world is determined by that . . . of my body. (Metaphysik L} [Ak. 28.1.225])

In that latter passage Kant goes on to say that the brain is only an analogue of the location of intelligence or of mind, but not strictiy its place. Kant evidently has in mind the contrast between the space I occupy and that of other items outside that space which parallels the spatial relation between any object and another outside it. The suggestion is that the contrast will be misconstrued as one between what strictiy belongs to consciousness (mind) and what is in space (world).5 In these passages and in paragraph 1 Kant's contrast is between the space in which I exist, that is, my bodily location, and other regions of space beyond that. It is not a contrast between a Cartesian nonspatial consciousness and a space around it. An understandable compromise would be to conceive of persons as dimensionless Euclidean points with a spatial location and a spatial point of view. Kant accepts the abstract picture of dimensionless points in a spatial array as a characterization of formal geometry, and one of the arguments, (2), relies on that account. But he makes important provisos about that characterization both in the Aesthetic and in the mathematical principles and would not have regarded that account as an adequate description of our a posteriori spatial experience. In a similar way he would not have thought an account of persons as dimensionless points to be an adequate description of that empirical experience. Our point of view on the spatial world may be notionally represented as a Euclidean point, but the quotations make clear that for Kant our actual position is embodied.6 With those qualifications the argument in paragraph 1 remains indecisive. To insist on a nonspatial Cartesian consciousness is independendy open to objection, but it also fails to produce the required conclusion. Such a pure consciousness may not presuppose a wider space for other

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objects, and may enable its subject to conceive of other subjects as similar nonspatial centers of consciousness. The compromise position of the subject as a notional dimensionless point, with location and a spatial point of view, yields to the more realistic conception of an embodied subject, but both include a reference to a spatial subject. Both consequently revert to the central claim that such a subject with a particular spatial position presupposes a wider conception of space for other spatial objects. That claim makes space in general prior to particular spatial locations or relations, but it does not suffice to show that space is a priori. Kant still needs to demonstrate that an empiricist conception of space is untenable and that is attempted in (2) and (3). 1 . 2 . 2 . ARGUMENT ( 2 )

This argument expresses two relations between space/time on one side and experience and objects on the other: "We can never represent to ourselves the absence of space (time), though we can think of them as empty of objects." If these claims were true then Kant would establish that space and time are both necessary in our experience and prior to objects. The priority claim would not by itself establish that space and time are a priori, since one a posteriori concept may be prior to another. Sentient beings may be prior to headaches if it is possible to have the former without the latter but not possible to have the latter without the former, and yet the concept of a sentient being may not be a priori. But if it is impossible to represent the absence of space/time so that experience must include them, then Kant can claim that they are a priori. In this way a claim about representation points to a plausible and respectable conclusion about the character of what is represented. It reinforces the point already made that Kant's classification of elements in experience can be made indifferently either in relation to our ideas or the items they designate. It reinforces also the point that Kant's interests are directed just as much to time and inner sense as to space and outer sense; they are not directed exclusively at the traditional problem of external objects. There are three immediate objections to the argument: If the first claim establishes that space and time are a priori then the second claim is redundant; there is an ambiguity over the unrepresentability of the absence of space and time together or separately; and the alleged priority of space and time over objects may be questioned. The first, redundancy, objection does not impugn the argument's validity, but it can in any case be answered. Kant draws the conclusions not only that space and time are a priori but also that they are "conditions of the possibility of appearances." That priority of space and time over appearances adds an account of the way in which they are necessary in

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experience, and expresses a rejection of the Leibnizian priority of appearances over space and time. Kant claims not only that space and time are necessary, or a priori, in experience but that they function as conditions of the possibility of appearances and objects in that experience. It points to a required asymmetry between space/time on one side and appearances on the other. Even if we could not represent the absence of the former it might be true that we could not represent the absence of the latter either, and then there would be no asymmetry and no priority of the former as conditions of the latter. The second claim is needed for that asymmetry. Kant's formal division between space and time suggests the claim that their absence is separately unrepresentable, even though his case would be stronger if it referred to their joint absence. The former claim is vulnerable in the light of the admitted difference between space and time that all representations are governed by inner sense and its temporal form but only outer representations are governed by outer sense and its spatial form (B38; B46). That difference means that the separate spatial claim might be denied if it were possible to represent a purely inner, temporal but nonspatial, experience. Kant rejects that idealistic possibility formally in the later Refutation of Idealism (B275-79) but the comparable claim in the Aesthetic (B55-56) is different. In the Aesthetic Kant rejects traditional idealism by insisting on the parity between inner and outer sense, but in the Refutation of Idealism he goes further and reverses the idealist priority in arguing that outer experience has priority over inner. Both claims deny an idealist priority for inner over outer sense, but the latter is stronger than the former. Kant is not, in the Aesthetic, merely duplicating the later formal argument provided in the B Refutation. One consequent difficulty is that if Kant's claims deal separately with space and time, they may express only such trivial tautologies as that space is a condition of the possibility of spatial appearances, or that we cannot represent temporal appearances in the absence of time. This is another aspect of the discussion in argument (1) which was resolved by appealing to the notion of a subject not merely as a spatial point of view but as embodied. In those terms the claim would be that it is impossible to represent anything without some reference to space simply because all, even inner, representations make a reference to my spatially located body. The parallel argument for time claims the impossibility of representations which have no reference to temporal sequence or succession. That would not mean that the content of any representation includes both spatial and temporal relations, but that it is an ineliminable feature of our intuitive representing that it occurs in such a spatial and temporal form. Both arguments appeal not to the content of our representations but to the conditions of representing anything at all in the senses, namely a spatial body or

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bodily point of view and a temporal sequence. More will be said to evaluate these claims later, but even at this stage it is clear that they are not merely trivial. The third objection queries the truth of the claim that we can represent space and time as empty of objects. It might even be said that if the earlier argument is accepted, so that there must be a reference in intuiting both to a spatial body and to a temporal succession, then this final claim has already been rejected, since reference to a body entails reference to objects. That objection is defused if we insist, as Rant does, on the distinction between the content of representation and the conditions or modes of representing. Kant describes space and time variously as "conditions" or "forms," and "modes" or ways of intuiting (Anschauungsarten or Arten der Anschauung)\ these may be taken to be the same, but I suggest later that they point in related but different directions. Not only does the argument point in the direction of that distinction between a content of representation and a mode of representing, but Kant's own terminology relies on it. Kant's appeals to a spatial body and to a temporal sequence are appeals to fundamental conditions, forms, or modes or ways, of representing through the senses, and allow the contents of our representations to include spatiotemporal features without direct reference to objects. That defuses one objection but does nothing to support the claim that such contents can intelligibly include spatiotemporal features without reference to empirical objects. That belief can be supported, however, by an appeal to abstract representations in geometry and mechanics which depict a spatiotemporal structure without such objects. Euclidean points and lines, coupled with their translation or movement in kinematics, represent in an abstract form a spatiotemporal structure without empirical objects. They provide a formal template which can be realized by replacing Euclidean points and lines with physical objects to represent our ordinary spatial experience. Such a conception of these branches of formal mathematics supplies the possibility Kant uses in the argument, and there are good independent reasons to understand Kant's conception of mathematics in those terms. This appeal to mathematics might be expected in the transcendental rather than the metaphysical expositions, but I already indicated that these considerations are separated only artificially. Argument (3) in the metaphysical exposition also concerns these mathematical disciplines. 1 . 2 . 3 . ARGUMENT ( 3 )

This argument appeals to the apodeictic certainty of principles of geometry and axioms of time such as that space has three dimensions (A24) and

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time only one (B47). For both space and time the claim is that if they were not a priori and necessary, then these principles and axioms would not be themselves a priori or apodeictically certain. The argument might be taken as additional confirmation of (2)'s conclusion that space and time are a priori, but it is weak as an independent ground for that conclusion, because it does not exclude an empiricist account of a priori truth in mathematics. Empiricists typically recognize a priori truth in mathematics but account for it in terms of the abstraction from experience of spatiotemporal concepts whose analytic relations give rise to analytic truths. What distinguishes Kant from empiricists is that Kant regards mathematical truths not as analytic but as synthetic a priori,7 but nothing in this argument establishes that. What is needed to exclude an empiricist account is the earlier argument in (2) which claims the nonderivability of space and time from a posteriori experience, and their necessary priority over a posteriori appearances. Kant might claim that the earlier conclusion provides a sufficient condition for the apodeictic certainty of the relevant principles, but not yet that it offers a necessary condition. That latter claim is explicidy what the Transcendental Expositions aim to establish. 1 . 2 . 4 . ARGUMENT ( 4 )

This argument identifies certain features of space and time, such as "infinite magnitude" or "limitlessness" which are presented in experience but not derivable from it, and contrasts them with specific sizes and particular limitations. Kant uses a related point, the identification of specific regions of space and time by "limitation" rather than "aggregation" (B39), to support their intuitive character. His belief that space and time are "infinite given magnitudes" may seem incompatible with their a priori character, but this overlooks the earlier explanation of Kant's phrase "given a priori" which showed that Kant does not use "given" in the traditional way to mean "a posteriori." Kant has no doubt that a priori aspects of experience, such as space and time, are presented to us in ordinary adult human experience, just as he has no doubt that the chronological origin of all experience does not entail an a posteriori status for all its ingredients. Those beliefs reflect what Kant regards as the two, rationalist and empiricist, basic fallacies. In the former the existence of nonsensory objects is fallaciously inferred from a priori concepts; in the latter the nonexistence of a priori concepts is fallaciously inferred from the chronological origins of experience. The claim in this argument is that features such as infinitude or limitlessness are presented in our spatiotemporal experience but are not derivable from it. Since it would be implausible to claim that either infinite divisibility or extent are literally perceived in experience Kant's claim must

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be that such features are implicit in our contingent spatiotemporal experience but not derivable from it. The argument is, like (3), evidently directed against empiricist accounts of space and time, but remains inconclusive without reference to the mathematics of space and time considered in (2) and the Transcendental Expositions. Even if it is granted that space and time have infinite aspects, it remains an open question whether empiricists can account for them, or, if they cannot, to argue that an empiricist infinity is all that is legitimate. Normative empiricist accounts, like Berkeley's of infinitesimal magnitudes, or Mill's of arithmetic, may be held to be correct even if they restrict the scope for the relevant concepts in mathematics.8 Kant's position may, in line with what he says at B119-20 and Prolegomena §40, simply disregard such an empiricist skepticism about mathematics, but empiricists will not accept such a radical dismissal. Even if Kant's general position provides a prima facie case for treating infinite aspects of space and time as a priori, neither derivable from experience nor reducible to some empiricist surrogate, it does not compel that conclusion. The same is true of the argument from "limitation." Kant claims that a finite empiricist aggregation procedure is inadequate to provide these infinite aspects, and that therefore the identification of specific regions in space and time requires a procedure of top-down limitation rather than bottom-up construction. A more specific appeal to such a limitation procedure is outlined in (6), but the general form of the argument is that the parts of space and time depend upon the whole of which they are parts, that the whole is in some way prior to its parts, and that the latter therefore cannot be used to build up a conception of the whole. There is no doubt that Kant holds just such a view, expressed in the Principles (B211) and Metaphysik Z^, but it has not yet been shown that an aggregation procedure is inadequate for a representation of such infinite features. He says, for example: Points and instants are only limits, that is, mere positions which limit space and time . . . and out of mere positions, viewed as constituents capable of being given prior to space or time, neither space nor time can be constructed. (B211) Physical points are a contradiction. All points are mathematical. . . they are not parts but determinations. . . . So space does not consist of points, and still less does matter consist of simple parts. (Ak. 28.1.208)

Some grounds for these conclusions are provided in (6), in the Transcendental Expositions and in the Principles. It is worth noting that Kant's position is at odds with any atomist or phenomenalist construction of space from its parts.

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The Intuitive Character of Space and Time 1 . 2 . 5 . ARGUMENT ( 5 )

Just as Kant's principal ground for the a priori character of space and time is given in (2), so his principal ground for their intuitive character is given in argument (5). Kant points to certain evident differences between our understanding of concepts, with general content, and intuitions, with particular content. Space and time are represented as cosmic particulars whose instances, specific spaces and times, are parts of those cosmic wholes. There is no doubt that space and time are so conceived, but Kant's argument requires a proviso not always noted. The contrast between the intuitive and the conceptual cases is not that the former cannot also be represented in the latter conceptual terms, but rather that the former have an additional aspect which the latter lack. It is not that we cannot talk of a conceptual relation between "space" or "time" and their specific instances but rather that standard concepts such as "red" lack the corresponding nonconceptual formulation. A particular space or time instantiates a concept of space or time, just as a red patch instantiates a concept of redness. But whereas a red patch is not part of a cumulative redness, particular spaces and times are part of a cumulative space and time respectively It is simply not clear what nonspatiotemporal sense could be attached in the color case to the notions of "accumulation" or "aggregation." The underlying logic is even more complicated, for we have not only concepts of space and time in general and their instantiations in particular subspaces and sub times, but also spatiotemporal concepts or relations and their instantiations. We have concepts of space and time as wholes, and concepts of spatiotemporal relations such as "being next to," where the former may be instantiated in particular subregions of space and time, and the latter in particular objects next to one another. There are consequentiy ambiguities in speaking barely of instances of concepts of space and time. This might refer to particular parts of a given spatial or temporal whole, or to different wholes of space and time, or to specific cases of spatiotemporal relations. If there were distinct whole spaces and times, then each of them would be an instance of those general concepts but they might not themselves be parts of other wholes of space and time, or of the space-time wholes we experience. These ambiguities affect Kant's conception of the "oneness," "unity," or "uniqueness," of space and time (B39). This can be represented as the interrelatability of all spatiotemporal items in our experience, but it has been argued that since other whole spaces and times than those which we experience are at least conceivable Kant's account is mistaken.9 It is not at all obvious that this is an objection to the present argument. Kant's gen-

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eral position does not deny the possibility of other spaces and times than those to which we have access any more than it denies the possibility of other cognitive resources than ours. Kant's account of "our" experience is determinedly anthropocentric, and that is true of its specific psychological features such as intuition, understanding, and even reason, typically qualified as "human reason" (e.g., B614, B651-52). Kant later admits the possibility of an alternative space in the Third Analogy (B260-61) in his discussion of the notion of an "empty space." In relation to the present Aesthetic argument we should consequently distinguish the following three questions: [1] Is it possible for there to be other whole spaces and times than those which we experience? [2] Is it possible that we might have disjoint spatiotemporal experiences (lives) whose spatiotemporal relation to ours is unknown? [3] Is it possible for any spatiotemporal whole to be related to its regions other than as a cosmic particular to its subparts? Argument (5) is directed towards a negative answer to [3] and has no implications for answers to either [1] or [2]. There is no reason why Kant, in this argument, could not give a clear affirmative answer to [2], and his answer to [ 1 ] in the Third Analogy is that there may be other spaces and times than ours of which we have no knowledge. 1 . 2 . 6 . ARGUMENT ( 6 )

Kant also appeals to the identification of particular spaces and times by "limitation," as in argument (4), to support the intuitive character of space and time. The argument rests on Kant's belief that "no concept can be thought of as containing an infinite number of representations within itself' (B40). Kant seems to argue that although we regard concepts as part of a possibly infinite repertoire of "common characteristics" {gemeinschaftliches Merkmal) some finite subset of which form the criteria for any specific concept, we cannot think of any concept as containing an infinite set of criteria. If Kant claims that concepts cannot be thought of as having infinite instances in the way that sets may have an infinite number of members, then his claim would have to be rejected. But if his claim is that we cannot think of all concepts as having infinite sets of criteria, then that is not open to such an objection and is more plausible. If all concepts had such infinite criteria, then, with some provisos,10 their application would be indeterminate. It would make impossible any determinate application of concepts and any use of language, and would reduce to absurdity the idea of having concepts or

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language at all. That conclusion would hold for any particular concept with such infinite criteria. The contrast with space and time requires that we think of them as having determinate parts which are nevertheless infinitely divisible. The difference is that whereas infinite criteria for the application of concepts would make them indeterminate and impossible, it is possible for space and time to have such a determinate infinity. What Kant seems to have in mind is that we can define particular spaces or times by reference to the terminal limits of their extent even though such an extent contains infinitely many points. The claim returns to the argument about aggregation in (4). The length of a line segment, or the duration of a temporal sequence, can be determined in relation to their starting and end points, that is "by limitation," even though an infinite number of points or time instants is contained within those extents. The theoretically infinite composition of a finite line segment nevertheless does not prevent us from immediately identifying the line and its length through its terminal points. This, therefore, marks a further difference between the conceptual and the nonconceptual cases, which reinforces the conclusion in argument (5). Kant relies in this argument on features of Euclidean geometry which we describe in terms of "denseness" or "continuity,"11 which play an important role in the mathematical principles, and which apply to the same abstract representation of geometry and kinematics referred to in argument (2). Kant uses a similar appeal to conceptions of infinity in mathematics in relation to the claim about the nonderivability of space/time concepts from a posteriori sense experience in (4).

2. The Transcendental Expositions: Space, Time, and Mathematics The difference between the Metaphysical and Transcendental Expositions is not that only the latter appeal to mathematics. Appeals to geometry (B39) and to "axioms of time" (B47) are also made in the former and are involved especially in arguments (2), (4), and (6). What distinguishes the two according to Kant is that only the Transcendental Expositions offer an explanation of the synthetic a priori character of mathematical judgments. Kant makes two claims in such an explanation: First, that the relevant disciplines, geometry (B40) and the general doctrine of motion (B49), derive, respectively, from the concepts of space and time; and, second, that those disciplines, and their synthetic a priori character, are possible only if space and time are both intuitive and a priori. It is natural to think of geometry as concerned essentially with spatial relations, and of a general doctrine of motion as concerned essentially with

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spatiotemporal relations, with the traversing of a spatial distance over time. This provides the abstract picture of Euclid and kinematics deployed in the metaphysical arguments, and since geometry is at the heart of both disciplines it can be taken as a standard for Kant's argument. The first requirement that the concepts of space and time are fundamental for these disciplines seems therefore easy to satisfy, but one proviso has to be added. For we may think of geometry, and of Euclid, as a formal, uninterpreted system which makes no essential reference to physical space, or to any specifically spatial relations, and this raises the question of Kant's understanding of formal mathematics. I make some preliminary comments about that issue in 2.1, but defer final consideration until later accounts of mathematics in the Analytic of Principles and Doctrine of Method have been oudined. The second requirement is less easy to formulate, since it is not clear how Kant understands the need to "explain" the synthetic a priori character of mathematics. Quite apart from possible explanations which might involve human physiological or psychological characteristics, such an account might represent the intuitive a priori character of space and time as either necessary or sufficient for the synthetic a priori character of mathematics. Kant himself represents the features as necessary conditions for the possibility of mathematical synthetic a priori truth, so that the most likely option is: [1] If mathematics contains synthetic a priori truths, then space/time are (must be) intuitive and a priori. Option [ 1 ] assumes against empiricists that mathematics contains synthetic a priori truths, and could not be used as an adequate argument against empiricism. Kant's antiempiricist arguments in the Aesthetic have to be located in the metaphysical expositions, but the Transcendental Expositions add something to them. For empiricists the fundamental concepts and judgments of geometry or kinematics will be either a posteriori and intuitive, or a priori and based on analysis of concepts. The point of the transcendental expositions is that if mathematics contains synthetic a priori judgments then its fundamental concepts must be based on a priori intuitions, that is, neither on a posteriori intuition nor on a priori analysis of concepts. Traditionalists may interpret Kant's explanation in terms of the crude literal account of the "mind making nature," in which geometry rests on purely internal, perhaps innate, mental features necessarily imposed by our psychology on all a posteriori sense perception.12 Other commentators such as Michael Friedman have offered a more subtle and more plausible account, but it brings to light an initial disagreement about Kant's account of mathematics.

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2.1. An Initial Disagreement about Mathematics Kant's antiempiricist stance in the Transcendental Expositions depends on identifying features of mathematics which are synthetic a priori. Some commentators, such as Russell, Beth, and Friedman,13 think Kant regards mathematical inferences as synthetic, while others, such as Brittan and Parsons,14 think Kant rests his case rather on the synthetic character of mathematical judgments or axioms. Both sides have offered textual support for their views; the latter appeal to B14 and the former to B744-45: For as it was found that all mathematical inferences proceed in accordance with the principle of contradiction . . . it was supposed that the fundamental propositions of the science can themselves be known to be true through that principle. This is an erroneous view. For though a synthetic proposition can indeed be discerned in accordance with the principle of contradiction, this can only be if another synthetic proposition is presupposed, and if it can then be apprehended as following from this other proposition; it can never be so discerned in and by itself. (B14)

That passage supports the Brittan/Parsons view in two ways. It asserts that mathematical inferences rest on the principle of contradiction and so are analytic, and it correctly marks as fallacious the inference from "Mathematical inferences are analytic" to "Mathematical judgments (axioms) are analytic." The Russell/Friedman view can be supported by the following passage: Now let the geometer take up the question (of the sum of the interior angles of a triangle). He at once begins by constructing a triangle. Since he knows that the sum of two right angles is equal to the sum of all the adjacent angles which can be constructed from a single point on a straight line, he prolongs one side of his triangle and obtains two adjacent angles, which together are equal to two right angles . . . in this fashion, through a chain of inferences guided throughout by intuition, he arrives at a fully evident and universally valid solution of the problem. (B744-45)

In that passage Kant undoubtedly associates mathematical inferences with intuition and, in line with earlier points, with synthetic judgment. It also associates such inferences with procedures of construction which, for Kant, mark the distinctive feature of mathematics, namely its construction of concepts in intuition. Kant does not explicidy call the relevant inferences "synthetic" in that latter passage, and even the claim that inferences are "guided throughout by intuition" (immer von der Anschauung geleitet) might indicate only that the inferences were based on an initial intuitive construction.

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Michael Friedman has provided an ingenious and plausible account of Kant's thinking to explain that guidance. The two central parts of his explanation are first that Kant, inevitably, had no conception of mathematics as a purely formal, uninterpreted logical system, and second that in relation to geometry Kant appealed to intuition as a substitute for what can now be represented by polyadic quantification. The point can be illustrated from the arguments about "limitation" and "aggregation" in (4) and (6). We can represent the infinite divisibility of a line segment by means of iterated quantifiers of the form "(Vx)(3y) . . . .," but Kant had no such formal apparatus available and, according to Friedman, substituted for it intuitive constructions in which such a segment can be repeatedly and indefinitely bisected. With polyadic quantification Euclidean axioms of continuity and denseness can be formulated in a form which enables inferences from them to be represented in a system of predicate logic as purely formal. Friedman's suggestion is that without that logical apparatus Kant was forced to appeal to a nonlogical, nonanalytic, intuitive procedure in order to represent Euclidean inferences. The general claim is well expressed: Finally we should note that our modern distinction between pure and applied geometry, between an uninterpreted formal system and an interpretation which makes such a system true, cannot be drawn here. . . . The idea of infinite divisibility or denseness is not capturable by a formula or sentence, but only by an intuitive procedure that is itself dense in the appropriate respect. . . . The proposition that space is infinitely divisible is a priori because its truth—the existence of an appropriate 'model'—is a condition for its very possibility. One simply cannot separate the idea or representation of infinite divisibility from what we would now call a model or realization of that idea; and our notion of pure (or formal) geometry would have no meaning whatsoever for Kant.

(1992,66)

I outline an interim strategy to respond to this apparent conflict as far as the Aesthetic goes, namely that there is so far no reason to force a choice between Friedman's or Brittan's accounts. It is possible that Kant held both views, or that he was not as clear as we may be about the difference, or that he thought the difference between a principle of inference and an axiom in some formal system is to some extent arbitrary. Principles of inference may sometimes be replaced by appropriate axioms, and axioms or theorems may be treated as derived rules of inference. In the end it may prove impossible to draw the clear distinction between axioms and principles of inference which the conflict presupposes, but there is another reason at this stage not to settle the issue. It would be natural to draw a distinction between Kant's discussions of mathematics in the Aesthetic and in later passages such as the Analytic of

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Principles and Doctrine of Method. It is a central claim in the Analytic of Principles that even geometry, and mathematics generally, require a contribution from the a priori categories of the understanding. There Kant deals not only with geometry and a general doctrine of motion, but also with arithmetic, algebra, and calculus in order to show how the categories contribute to mathematics. In the Aesthetic Kant is concerned only with the intuitive, fundamental, basis for geometry and kinematics and with what he calls the "manifold" of intuition rather than its "synthesis" in the categories. I suggest that in the Aesthetic, and in the early part of the Critique from which the B14 passage comes, Kant is interested in the requirements which institute mathematics, its axioms and fundamental concepts, rather than in the proof procedures which develop it. 15 The emphasis in the Aesthetic is on fundamental principles or axioms (A24, B47) concerning the respective dimensions of space and time. By contrast the notions of proof and inference belong naturally more to the discussions of understanding or reason in the Analytic and Doctrine of Method than to that of the senses in the Aesthetic. Comparison of the roles of the Aesthetic and those later passages suggests such a division of labor. In the Doctrine of Method Kant outlines a view of mathematical procedure, in terms of the "construction of concepts through intuition" (B741), which distinguishes mathematics from metaphysics and relates directly to Friedman's account of mathematical inferences. The notion of an "ostensive construction" in geometry (B745) covers for Kant both the initial representation of a figure in a proof and any additional extension to the figure which a proof might require. The only reference to "construction" in geometry in the Aesthetic at A24 was * deleted by Kant in B and this suggests that discussion of mathematical proof procedure may not be directly involved in the argument of the Aesthetic. The same point is made, obliquely, in the note to B160: In the Aesthetic I have treated this unity [of formal intuition] as belonging merely to sensibility, simply in order to emphasize that it precedes any concept, although . . . it presupposes a synthesis which does not belong to the senses but through which all concepts of space and time become possible.

The suggestion is that mathematics requires concepts but that in the Aesthetic, which deals strictly with sensibility, a theoretical and artificial abstraction is made in order to isolate the distinctive contribution of the senses. That contribution is the presentation of a "manifold" rather than a conceptual "synthesis." Friedman is surely right to say that Kant has no twentieth-century conception of a formal geometry, or of the related distinction between pure and applied mathematics, but there is in the Critique some distinction

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between pure and applied mathematics. Kant speaks of "pure mathematics" at B15 and contrasts it with an empirical application or realization, as he also distinguishes between a pure and applied logic (B77-78), and recognizes forms of pure mathematics which have no available, or possible, application (B146-48). In that latter passage, for example, Kant makes the following points: if no intuition could be given corresponding to the concept, the concept would still be thought, so far as its form is concerned, but would be without any object, and no knowledge of anything would be possible by means of it. So far as I could know there would be nothing, and could be nothing, to which my thought could be applied. . . . Through the determination of pure intuition we can acquire a priori knowledge of objects, as in mathematics, but only in regard to their form, as appearances; whether there can be things which must be intuited in this form is still left undecided. (B147-48)

These passages repeat the strong anti-Platonist picture of mathematics which Kant expresses at B9 and B371n 1 6 in which the pure discipline is not ideal but potentially defective, since it may have no application or realization and would then not constitute knowledge. Kant rejects the thought that pure mathematics is an ideal paradigm designating a Platonic world of forms (Kant's Ideen) independent of the senses, and instead requires some reference to the senses if it is to avoid that defect and relate properly to an object. This is fundamental in distinguishing Kant's position from that of intellectual idealists like Plato and Leibniz. But it would be wrong to think that for Kant all mathematics is applied, at least in the sense in which we contrast that term with a formal uninterpreted system, since he plainly has a conception of pure mathematics as an a priori formal system which may apply to nothing in experience. The picture, deployed in the earlier arguments (2), (4), and (5), of a pure Euclidean geometry and kinematics devoid of empirical objects is of that kind. It raises the problem of understanding what kind of a priori formality Kant attaches to such a discipline. He thinks of Euclidean geometry, and mathematics generally, neither as a twentieth-century uninterpreted, formal, analytic system, nor as an empiricist a posteriori description of objects in sense experience, nor as designating a supersensible realm of Platonic forms. The question is whether any other way of representing the distinctive features of formal, mathematical, systems is viable, but the Aesthetic offers no answer. One interim answer appeals to Kant's notion of an "abstraction" method of identifying what is a priori in our experience. Kant suggests that a formal a priori Euclidean geometry is an abstraction from our ordinary spatial experience and makes a necessary reference to intuition in that experience, but not necessarily to its empirical objects. The picture allows

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a distinction between pure and applied mathematics, and makes a reference to the formal features of pure mathematics without supposing Platonistically that these designate supersensible objects. Euclidean geometry appears as a formal, abstract, schematic representation of space in our experience and of our spatial experience. His distinction between pure and applied mathematics is not a contemporary contrast between a formal uninterpreted system and an a posteriori realization of it in experience, but between an abstract and a concrete representation of our experience.17 Pure geometry contains claims about the general structure of space, such as its infinite divisibility or three-dimensionality, and refers to Euclidean points, lines, and planes which are too abstract and formal to be direcdy exemplified in experience. The structure of Euclidean space is a formal three-dimensional array of such points whose features are determined by the Euclidean postulates and common notions, and which can be supplemented with a temporal dimension to allow for the translation, or movement, of such points in a formal kinematics. The same account of a formal abstract theory with no reference to empirical objects could equally be given of non-Euclidean geometries except that for Kant their application to objects of experience would be at best problematic and probably rejected. Kant might not have recognized this, but they would come into the deviant class of consistent thoughts without any object or application (B147-48). Euclid's is regarded as a dedicated formal system containing some synthetic a priori axioms which hold necessarily of our world, and of our spatial experience, but not in all possible worlds. Kant carries this picture of a formal geometry as far as such a dedicated, abstract representation of our spatial experience, but not as far as a contemporary logicist would go. For the latter Euclidian has no Kantian privilege over other geometries, and, properly understood, makes no reference to our spatial, physical experience.

3, What Do the Arguments in the Metaphysical and Transcendental Expositions Achieve? Kant draws his own conclusions from the metaphysical and transcendental expositions at B42-46 and B49-53, and comments further on them in the General Observations from B59-73. Those final conclusions with the further comments and provisos express Kant's theory of transcendental idealism and empirical realism discussed in the next chapter. In this section I consider the immediate classification of space and time in the Expositions. The metaphysical and transcendental expositions aim at two conclusions and deploy three principal arguments. The two conclusions are that

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space and time, or their representations, are a priori and intuitive. The former classifies them as underivable from empirical experience, and the latter as particulars whose provenance attaches them to sense and not to understanding. Their classification as "intuitive" belongs to a metaphysical inventory rather than to a psychological description of their occurrence in experience. I assume for the moment that in Kant's inventorial map it is a matter of indifference whether the conclusions are expressed in terms of space and time or of their representations (B42). In the following chapter I reconsider that assumption in the light of Kant's conclusions about traditional and transcendental idealism. The three principal arguments are: (A) An "asymmetry" argument in (2) which points to the priority of space and time over objects rather than the reverse, and their necessity in our representative experience. On this basis space and time are regarded as formal conditions of our sense representation, as our universal modes of intuitively representing anything, and as a priori and not derivable from a posteriori experience. (B) A "sensory" argument, (5), which classifies space and time metaphysically as cosmic, mereological particulars, different in kind from the general discursive character of universals or concepts. Space and time are consequently classified in the inventory as intuitive, belonging to the senses, rather than discursive, belonging to the understanding. (C) Arguments which appeal to the mathematics of space and time in Euclidean geometry and kinematics in support of (A) and (B) in (2), (3), (4), (6), and the transcendental expositions. They provide a picture, outlined above, of those formal disciplines as abstract models of the structure of space and time in our experience. The transcendental expositions offer an explanation, in line with the metaphysical expositions, of the assumed synthetic a priori character of mathematical truths. If (A) were accepted it would establish that space and time are prior to objects, and oppose a Leibnizian analysis of space and time in terms of relations between objects. That "priority" does not entail "a priority," but Kant expresses the asymmetry so that the absence of space and time cannot be represented without impugning the possibility of experience. Space and time (or their representations) are then necessary for our experience. The suggestion is that our ability to represent anything in intuition requires reference to a spatial body, or spatial viewpoint, and to a temporal sequence. These requirements are neutral with respect to what might

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be called a "subjective" or "objective" space and time,18 and attach directly not to the content of our representations, but to our mode of representing such contents. They are not merely contingently present in, or material features of, our experience but its a priori formal conditions. Kant's account of an abstract Euclidean geometry and kinematics in (C) provides an answer to the objection that we cannot represent space and time without reference to objects. For Kant these disciplines directly represent formal spatial and temporal relations in, and movement through, a three-dimensional array o f abstract points without reference to empirical objects. If (B) were accepted it would provide a ground for classifying space and time as particulars and intuitions rather than concepts. Kant notes features of the mathematics of space and time in (C), such as their infinite divisibility and the related distinction between an empiricist bottom-up "aggregation" and a Kantian top-down "limitation," which further distance them from concepts and the understanding. They represent mathematical points, in space or time, as theoretical, abstract, representations of aspects of our spatiotemporal experience. These considerations also support a strategy against empiricism on the ground that they demonstrate the nonderivability of space and time from a posteriori experience. (C) plays a supporting but important role in (A) and (B), and has more importance as part of a general account of mathematics provided in the Analytic and the Doctrine of Method. I have suggested that in the Aesthetic Kant is concerned with the fundamental features of geometry and kinematics which institute those disciplines, with their axioms rather than with the theorem-proving, inferential procedures which develop them. The transcendental expositions claim further that only the intuitive a priori character of space and time can explain the synthetic a priori character of mathematical truths. That claim offers an interesting account of mathematics but it provides only a weak argument against empiricism, because it makes the antiempiricist assumption that mathematical truths are synthetic a priori. An initial evaluation of the central arguments, construed in this way, might allow that they provide some reason to draw Kant's conclusions that space and time are both a priori and intuitive but are not decisive. Such a conclusion is almost inevitable since the arguments are bound to rest on some background and questionable assumptions. The asymmetry canvassed in (A), buttressed by Kant's conception of a pure geometry, points towards a fundamental place in our experience for space and time (or their representations), but to be fundamental is not necessarily to be a priori. Empiricists might concede that space and time are fundamental in our experience but deny that their concepts are a priori. Kant needs to make the stronger claim for a priority because it implies a distinction, implicit in the Copernican revolution, between what merely reflects, or tracks, experience

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and what constitutes it. For Kant a priori representations cannot merely track an a posteriori given experience; if they are not derived from, but apply m-> experience then they must in some way constitute it. 19 Some arguments in (C) which use Kant's conception of mathematics are bound to be indecisive but the crucial arguments for Kant's conclusions in (A) and (B) are primarily in the Metaphysical Expositions and these make a less contentious appeal to mathematics. Geometry and kinematics are relevant to those arguments primarily through the claim that they present a spatiotemporal manifold without reference to empirical objects, and that claim is not vulnerable either to empiricist accounts or to a recognition of non-Euclidean geometries. Even empiricists would be willing to accept such an abstract account of geometry although they would explain its formality differently, and if Kant's account holds for Euclid then it will also hold for non-Euclidean geometries. If that limited claim for mathematics can be accepted then it establishes one limb of the asymmetry argument in (A), and with the other limb makes a prima facie case for the a priori, necessary, spatiotemporal character of experience. In a similar way Kant's conclusion about the intuitive character of space and time is plausible but inevitably indecisive. The distinction between the particular character of (our representations of) space and time and the discursive character of concepts points towards the classification of space and time as intuitive, cosmic, mereological particulars, but is questionable. It raises in particular a question about understanding Kant's classification of space and time (or their representations) as "forms," or "conditions," or "modes," of intuition. Henry Allison rightly stresses Kant's interest in establishing a priori, necessary, "epistemic conditions" of our experience,20 but Kant uses all three descriptions and leaves it to his readers to disentangle them. I suggest initially that to see them as "conditions" of experience is to emphasize their a priori character; to see them as "forms" of experience is to point to their formal, abstract representation in mathematics; and to see them as "modes" of experience is to emphasize their universal syntactic character as modifications of the relation between perceiver and content.21 Since those differences, and especially their classification as "modes," are not much noticed I consider that classification and some related problems in the limited context of the initial arguments for the distinct character of space and time. Kant's final position in the Aesthetic goes beyond those limitations and draws a further conclusion about idealism or "ideality" from the arguments. His view is that we can, and should, infer a "transcendental" but not an "empirical" idealism from these initial conclusions. What is, for him, correct in idealism is captured in its transcendental form, but its traditional empirical form is erroneous and should be rejected. In the following chapter I consider those wider conclusions about idealism.

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3.1. Space and Time as A Priori Modes of Intuiting Kant's position in (1) and (2), summarized in 3.1 (A), was expressed in the conclusion that space and time (or their representations) are universal modes in which we intuitively represent anything. They are, for Kant, necessary universal conditions of such representation which cannot rest merely on a posteriori grounds. In the earlier discussion that conclusion was based on the claim that all sense-representing, or intuiting, is subject to the two requirements of a spatial orientation or point of view and a temporal sequence or succession. This reading of the text may be questioned, but it rested on the explicit distinction Kant draws in arguments (1) and (2) and in the Dissertation and Metaphysik L^ between the space which a subject occupies and other regions of space outside it. The given account treats both space and time as universal modes of intuitively representing anything (Anschauungsarten), and distinguishes modes of representing from contents or objects represented, as Kant does in the Prolegomena §13 (Ak. IV.293): "and of these (space and time). . . . I have shown only that they are not 'things' [Sachen] but mere modes of representing [ Vorstellungsarten]." That was the reason for earlier using the expression "mode of representing" in contrast to "content of representation." Kant's position is that space and time should be classed metaphysically as such "modes" of inner and outer sense rather than as objects or contents. Hume had also offered a similar classification of space and time in the Treatise. The idea of a substance as well as that of a mode, is nothing but a collection of simple ideas, that are united by imagination, and have a particular name assigned to them. . . . The simple ideas of which modes are formed, either represent qualities which are not united by contiguity and causation [such as a dance] . . . or, if united together, the uniting principle is not regarded as the foundation of the complex idea [such as beauty]. (Treatise 1.1, §vi) we may conclude, that time cannot make its appearance to the mind, either alone or attended with a steady unchangeable object, but is always discover'd by some perceivable succession of changeable objects. . . . Five notes played on a flute give an impression or idea of time, tho' time be not a sixth impression which presents itself to the hearing or any other of the senses. But here it takes notice only of the manner in which the different sounds make their appearance. (Treatise 1.2, §iii)

Hume shares with Kant the thoughts that space and time are not directiy given in experience, as objects may be, but are ways or modes in which objects are presented, and that time is tied to change in objects. These

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claims, that time is not directly perceived and requires reference to change in objects, play a substantial part in Kant's Analytic of Principles where categories are to be connected to sensibility. Hume differs from Kant in presenting an unqualified empiricist account of space and time as modes which depend on those a posteriori sensible presentations and are not prior to objects. There is in these passages from Hume no suggestion that such modes are unique in being both universal and a priori. The distinction helps to elucidate Kant's account of inner and outer sense, and to resolve some of the problems it has been thought to raise. One well-known conflict arises from the following Kantian claims: (a) That space and time are universal modes of intuiting. (b) That inner sense and its mode (time) govern everything in experience, while outer sense and its mode (space) govern only outer appearances. (c) That, despite (b), Kant claims an a priori universality even for the outer mode of sense. (d) That despite (b)'s claim for the universality of time, all the material for inner sense comes from outer sense (preface Bxl, n.). If we allow that (c) rests on an ineliminable reference to spatial aspects of a perceiver's body even in inner intuition, the problem is to see how that can be reconciled with the claim in (b) that the form or mode of outer sense governs only outer appearances. These claims are commonly taken to be in conflict, or even inconsistent, but they can be reconciled by insisting on the distinction between modes and contents of intuitions. My perception of a distant sound may be intermittent and faint. If asked how, in what way, I perceive, or hear, it I may say "intermittently," or "faintly." More generally we can also exemplify a distinction between a mode of perception, seeing or hearing, and the content perceived, in which sometimes the same content may be perceived in different modes. These are only empirical analogues, or illustrations22 (B123, B126, B582, B686), of Kant's transcendental account of space and time as a priori modes of intuition (A28-29, B44^£5), but the same structure of mode and content arises in both cases. That structure distinguishes in some experience between an epistemic modifier, reflecting the subject's mode or style of experiencing or representing, and the content so experienced. Types of perception, such as seeing or hearing, function as epistemic operators, like verbs for propositional attitudes, in relation to some content. But there are other expressions, like the adverbial modifiers "intermittently" or "faintly," which also qualify the

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content and the percipient's relation to it. Similar features belong to modification or replacement of . . is . . ." claims with those of the ". . .seems/appears. . ." or the . .is apparendy. . ." form. To identify these structures is not to justify, or attempt to justify, a claim about the reality, or veridicality, of the content experienced against some philosophical doubt. It merely offers an adequate apparatus with which to capture the nature of those experiences in perceiving and thinking, and to distinguish their salient aspects in a Kantian transcendental topic. That is what was meant earlier in referring to modes as having a distinctive syntactic character. With that apparatus the apparently conflicting claims (b)-(d) can be understood in the following way: All representing belongs to an inner sense subject to temporal succession, but not all representation-contents are inner since some refer to outer spatial objects. If I see a large house my mode of representing is visual and outer but still subject to time in inner sense, while the large house itself is the outer content of that perceiving.23 According to Kant's view, in (a), every content in perception is subject to both spatial and temporal modes, since every perception involves a subject's successive-temporal and bodily-spatial intuiting, but not every content is explicitly both spatial and temporal. An explicitly spatial content such as "The house is large" may make no reference to a succession, even though the subject's intuiting of that content is successive. An explicitly temporalsuccessive inner content such as "The pain has been getting steadily worse" may make no explicit reference to spatial extension, even though the subject's experiencing involves spatial aspects of its body. Once the distinction is drawn between modes of intuiting and their contents, and if it is accepted that our a priori, universal modes of intuition are spatial and temporal, both (b) and (c) can be accepted together. There is no good reason to think of such modes and contents as disjoint. In empirical contexts modes of representing may be contents, typically where attention is focused on the way in which some prior content is presented rather than on that prior content itself. I may be more interested in the blurring of my vision than in the blurred scene presented to me, and may include the blurring in my description of what I am perceiving. In a similar way I may be more interested in the spatiotemporal character of what is presented in perception than in the material properties presented within that spatiotemporal frame. In a priori contexts such as pure geometry I may be exclusively focused on spatial contents which involve no presentation of any material properties. Such an account offers a way of understanding Kant's implicit distinction between a form of intuition and a formal intuition. The suggestion is that the former emphasizes the mode of representing and the latter a content associated with that mode. It remains true that all intuitive representing, inner or outer, is subject to the two spatiotemporal modes. Claim (d) reflects two different, but related,

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aspects of Kant's position. On one side, in the Aesthetic, it reflects the insistence on a spatial, bodily reference in all sense experience; on another in the B Refutation of Idealism it reflects a formal ground for giving priority to outer over inner experience. Few will query Kant's belief that our modes of intuition are universally successive, although it might be objected that this is no more than an interesting a posteriori fact about our cognitive powers. More common are parallel doubts about the universality of our modes of spatial intuition. There is the potential conflict just resolved between treating space as a universal mode of intuiting even though it governs only a subclass of our intuitive contents. There is a natural appeal to the fact that in reporting all types of perception it is always appropriate either to ask about, or to include, spatiotemporal modifiers. Whatever form of perception is involved it always makes sense to describe its occurring as "here" and "now," or to ask for more specific relations of spatiotemporal kinds. We can be more specific with modifiers such as "seeing it from a distance" or "hearing it over a period." It may still be objected that even if all the material for inner sense comes from outer sense through a reference to a spatial point of view and bodily receptors that is only an a posteriori aspect of our sensory experience. Kant's project is not supposed to rest merely on a posteriori evidence and if it rested only on that it would not entail the intended conclusion. Two responses can be made to such objections. First it will not do to object to Kant solely on the ground that our a posteriori experience has these spatiotemporal features. Kant allows that our empirical experience contains a priori elements, and expresses this in his reference to what is "given a priori." Kant denies not the occurrence of a priori elements in a posteriori experience but the empiricist fallacy which infers that only a posteriori elements are given in such experience. Although Kant appeals to ordinary experience his project has the higher-order, transcendental aim of disentangling its a posteriori and a priori, sensible and intelligible, aspects. The occurrent experience is a posteriori but the project of abstracting and properly classifying its elements is a priori and transcendental. Second it is important to recall the way Kant qualifies the a priori, necessary character of fundamental elements in experience, and the limitations he imposes on the relevant notion of "necessity." The emphasis on the "human standpoint" at B42 marks his explicit proviso at B43 that the claims may not, and do not have to, hold for all creatures in all possible worlds. Even reason, which is sometimes taken to represent for Kant an unqualified necessity is characteristically modified as "human reason." For Kant these truths are a priori, necessary in, and fundamental for, our human experience, but they do not hold absolutely for all perceivers in other possible worlds. If other perceivers, or cognizers, lack the salient fea-

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tures of our perceptual, cognitive, apparatus, they may not be subject to these conditions. Beyond that it should be remembered that Kant's arguments for a priority in the expositions have been allowed to make a prima facie case. Although the issue of Kant's conclusions about idealism is officially deferred until the next Chapter the present account offers a perspective on those conclusions. There is a clear divergence between such an account of universal modes of intuitive representing with its underlying distinction between modes and contents, and the doctrines of traditional idealism. To speak of modes of intuition in this way is not to identify them as subjective mental states, even though the mind and mental capacities are inevitably involved. It is not obvious that it even makes sense to say that a mode of intuiting, or way of perceiving, is itself a mental state. There is no necessity to ascribe a traditional idealism to Kant on this basis any more than there was to ascribe it to Hume on the basis of his classification of space and time as "modes." Such an ascription to Kant in this context rests on a background and unquestioned assumption, and perhaps the same is true of Hume. To speak of vision or hearing as modes of perception is not to make any commitment to an idealist priority of mental representations over outer objects, despite the fact that to perceive something visually requires a subject with the mental capacity of sight. The same is true of an adverbial modifier like " . . . apparently . . . " and of the spatiotemporal modifiers. To say that something is apparently moving, or that something was seen from here or over a period, is not a restricted reference to idealist inner mental states or experiences, even though it makes an ineliminable reference to mental capacities. Spatiotemporal adverbs function more like modifiers than like the epistemic operators of hearing or sight, or the contrast between ". . . is . . ." and " . . . seems. . ." but they make no more of a commitment to such an idealism. They refer to, and modify, whatever occurs in the content of the expression, and express a relation between percipient and an independent content. They are "relational," as Kant emphasizes at B61-63, in requiring an epistemic relation to a percipient and they function, as he says, as "modifications" or "determinations" of our minds (A28, B50). There is something almost absurd in supposing that space and time may be "modifications or determinations of our minds" just as inner mental states are. However tempting it is for traditionalists to read Kant's phrases idealistically, spatiotemporal adverbs are "modifications" of our minds not as mental events but as ways in which mental capacities are exercised even on nonmental contents. They are "mind-dependent" in that sense but not to be classified without qualification as mental rather than physical.

[9] Kant's Theory of the Sensory Contribution to Experience

I n the previous chapter some formal evaluation was given of Kant's arguments in the metaphysical and transcendental expositions with little reference to the wider conclusions which Kant himself subsequently draws from those discussions. Kant draws his own initial formal conclusions immediately after the transcendental expositions (B42-^3, B49-51), but then adds two sets of explanatory comments. The first set (B42-46, B51-59) offers immediate comments on the formal conclusions, while the second, the General Observations (B59-73), provides more extensive provisos about them. These comments and provisos cannot be disregarded for two reasons: they occupy over twice the space of the expositions themselves, and they underline the distinction between traditionalist and revolutionary interpretations of Kant. In this chapter I try to pull the threads together to provide an overall account of Kant's theory of the sensory contribution to experience by first examining those comments and provisos. In section 1, I consider the immediate conclusions and a disagreement that has arisen between a traditionalist and a revolutionary interpreter; in 2,1 consider the more extensive comments in the General Observations; and in 3, I summarize the outcome in an account of Kant's overall theory in the Aesthetic.

1. Kant's Immediate Conclusions These were summarized earlier, and I now briefly recapitulate their principal claims. (a) Space and time, or "space" and "time," do not represent features of things in themselves which remain if we abstract from all conditions of intuition. No such feature could be intuited a priori. (b) Space is the form, or mode, of all appearances of outer sense; time is the form, or mode, of inner sense. They are subjective conditions 165

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(c) (For time only): Time is the formal a priori condition of all appearances. Since all representations belong to our inner states in time it is an immediate condition of inner, and a mediate condition of outer, appearances. So all objects of the senses necessarily stand in time-relations. I make three summary comments on these claims: (1) The reference in (c) to objects of the senses standing in time relations is plainly ambiguous. It might claim that such objects are related in ordinarily objective time, or only that they are related in the successive sequence of intuitions which represent them. I have taken it that Kant's arguments in the expositions focus primarily on the successive character of our intuitive representing and its a priori status. This does not exclude recognition of what we would ordinarily call "objective" spaces and times, but that issue is addressed in the Analytic. (2) Kant may seem inconsistent in saying in (a) that space is not a property of things in themselves (or of "objects themselves"), and yet later (B45) that it "can be ascribed to things . . . as they appear to us." Any apparent contradiction disappears in the light of the point that for Kant space is a property not of things in themselves but of appearances as the objects of intuition. Appearances, unlike things in themselves, are objects of the senses, but not independent of sensory conditions, and that allows them to have a priori sensory properties. There is no immediate inconsistency but Kant's appeal to the distinction between two ways of viewing objects, as appearances or as things in themselves, invites further questions. We might ask: How should we distinguish appearances and things in themselves?, and: What is it for the former to be dependent on, and the latter independent of, sensory conditions? Such questions require an elucidation of the contrast between "mind-dependence" and "mind-independence" and its implications for Kant's "transcendental" idealism. (3) It may seem objectionable that Kant fails clearly to distinguish claims about space and time from claims about the representations, or concepts, of "space" and "time." At B44 Kant concludes that if we abstract from our senses, then "the representation of space stands for nothing," but at B51 under the same condition it is

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time, not the representation of time, which is said to be "nothing." It has been suggested already that from the perspective of Kant's inventorial map of experience it makes no difference whether what are classified, as intuitive and a priori, are space and time or our representations, concepts or intuitions, of space and time. Their transcendental location in the inventory will be exacdy the same whichever mode of expression is used. But this also raises a question about Kant's classification of space, time, and appearances in transcendental idealism as "mere ideas" and "subjective." The immediate conclusions, and the noted initial objections to them, underline the contrast between two ways of understanding Kant. One, which I have called "traditionalist," exemplified in Garve's review, holds that for all his protestations Kant is ultimately a traditional idealist in which our knowledge of space, time, and appearances is no more than knowledge of a world of inner consciousness. Understood in that way Kant faces the traditional idealist problem of our knowledge of an external world, but the problem then seems not merely difficult but insoluble. It encourages the identification of outer, spatial objects and independent things in themselves, despite Kant's claims that we know the former but not the latter. It suggests an appeal to a preestablished harmony, or an empiricist phenomenalism, or a causal inference, in order to resist skepticism about external objects, but Kant rejects these doctrines. It represents him as canvassing a psychological, causal account of the "mind making nature" despite his denial that this is his goal. The earlier discussion has already offered a different account. If Kant's project is a descriptive metaphysics of experience, then he is not engaged in the traditional skeptical issues of normative justification. It has been already noted that Kant's revolution in philosophy includes a reversal of traditional skepticism in which what is doubted is philosophical rather than ordinary or scientific knowledge. Kant cannot assume the authority of philosophy to express doubts about science and at the same time question whether philosophy has that authority. If the metaphysical classification of items in our experience required for the inventory can be carried out equally well for those items and for our representations of them, then there is no idealist significance in classifying representations rather than things represented. If Kant is not proving his empirical realism in the Aesthetic but showing how a revised idealism is compatible with our ordinary belief in inner and outer objects, then he deviates further from the traditional idealist skeptical issues. Since Kant distinguishes the notions of a "thing in itself" and an empirical "object of experience" or an "empirical" thing in itself their identification must be an interpretative error. These points conflict with the traditionalist account and indicate an alternative

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revolutionary project and outcome. To clarify and sharpen that contrast I consider in 1.1 Paul Guyer's treatment of Kant's initial conclusions, and in 1.2 a related issue among the neo-Kantians.

1.1. Paul Guyer's Account of Kant's Initial Conclusions In Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (1987, 354-59), Paul Guyer seeks to establish that in the Aesthetic's formal conclusions (B42; B49-51) Kant argues from the premise that space and time are not properties of things in themselves to the conclusion that space and time are subjective. His claim opposes Henry Allison's view (1983, 356) that the inference goes the other way from the premise that space and time are subjective to the conclusion that they are not properties of things in themselves. This apparent disagreement and Guyer's preferred resolution of it underline the contrast between traditionalist and revolutionary accounts. What is undoubtedly true is that the two claims, that space and time are subjective and that they are not properties of things in themselves, form distinctive parts of Kant's formal conclusions in (a) and (b). They are presumably both consequences of the arguments in the preceding metaphysical and transcendental expositions, but it is hard to see why either should be a conclusion from the other. Kant's text at B42 (a) argues that if space is a priori it cannot belong to things in themselves, and it is assumed that the expositions, especially the metaphysical, establish that antecedent. The following paragraph, (b), then argues that if space is a "subjective condition or mode of sense" and intuitive, it is understandable how it can "exist a priori in the mind." These conclusions both depend upon the arguments of the metaphysical expositions rather than depending on each other. Guyer recognizes that even in (a) Kant refers to the consequence of abstracting from a condition of sensibility, but does not state that space is such a subjective condition. His immediate reason for connecting the claims in his preferred order is that what he conceives as the premise is expressed first, in (a), and what he takes to be the conclusion is expressed second, in (b). Such a ground is plainly inadequate; the page order does not necessarily reflect an inferential order, especially when both conclusions, (a) and (b), derive independently from the earlier exposition claims that space is a priori and intuitive. This weakness in Guyer's account turns out to be irrelevant to the subsequent discussion. For he, rightly, accepts the point made above that Kant's position rests on a quite general claim that any a priori feature of experience must be subjective in some way. The point was made at the start of the Critique in the preface (Bxviii) in Kant's claim that "we can know a priori of things only what we ourselves put into them." The point could be

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put by saying that Kant's term "a priori" already implies a contrast between a mere (a posteriori) "tracking" of a given experience and its (a priori) "constitution," or between what is derivable from a posteriori objects and what requires reference to our cognitive capacities. In the Aesthetic that quite general claim is exemplified both in the metaphysical expositions and in die arguments based on the synthetic a priori character of geometry and the general doctrine of motion as Guyer rightly notes. This argument could represent the Aesthetic's formal conclusions either as (2) or as (2'): (1) There are a priori truths about space and time. So (2) What is known a priori must be, in some way, subjective, and cannot be a property of things independent of us. So (2') What is known a priori cannot be a property of things independent of us, and must be, in some way, subjective. (2) and (2') are different only if they are taken to express non-truth-functional uses of "and" in which it is read as "and therefore." That is how Guyer reads his preferred conclusion (2') although the form of Kant's argument does not justify it. The same point holds just as much for Kant's other claim in the expositions, namely that space and time are intuitive. That argument too does not infer subjectivity from not being a property of things in themselves, or the latter from the former, but infers both subjectivity and not being a property of things in themselves from the classification of space and time as intuitive. Guyer uses his erroneous claim to give a specific content to the doctrine of "transcendental idealism." He objects that Kant's doctrine goes beyond an agnostic claim that we cannot know whether things in themselves are spatiotemporal or not, and asserts the dogmatic claim that things in themselves are known to be nonspatiotemporal. It is that stronger dogmatic commitment ascribed to Kant, from which he thinks, mistakenly, that the conclusion about subjectivity is inferred. The position then ascribed to Kant is represented as inconsistent with his rejection of any knowledge of things in themselves, even though later (B149) Kant addresses and rebuts the objection. There he distinguishes between our ability to say what things in themselves cannot be, and our inability to characterize them more positively in saying what they are like. Guyer's whole argument is evidently intended to support a traditionalist view, and to that end Kant's argument is outiined in the following way: 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 [a priori]

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necessity; therefore it can be only a feature of the constitution of the subject.

(1987,357)

In this argument the a priori nature of truths about space and time excludes their being properties of things in themselves so that the only remaining alternative is that they are features of the constitution of the subject. What is noticeable in the argument ascribed to Kant is its assumption of a traditionalist dualism. The assumption is that there are only two, nonexclusive but exhaustive, possibilities: Either space and time belong to things in themselves or they belong to the constitution of the subject. The alternatives are clearly understood so that the first ascribes space and time to ordinary objects under the description "things in themselves," and the second classifies them as subjective mental states. In this way Guyer claims that for Kant either we make objects spatiotemporal, that is, impose spatiotemporality on objects in consciousness, or else space and time are "reducible" to necessary relations among our representations, our mental states (1987, 366). This is patently to outline a standard traditionalist account of a kind noted in chapter 1 in Garve's review and more recent comments. I have suggested that traditionalist commentators may beg the question of Kant's actual position by simply assuming the dualism on which their account rests, and Guyer's discussion provides a clear example of that procedure. There is so far no hint of the possibility that Kant might have rejected the bare assumption of an exhaustive dualism between things in themselves and mental states.1 But if a traditionalist dualism is assumed in the argument it plainly cannot without question-begging provide any support for the traditionalist account. Even if we disregard the earlier error in reading the text Guyer's account does not support traditionalism but presupposes it. The point can be reinforced by considering evidence Guyer further adduces from the Reflexionen, namely, R6349: 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 contain no necessity, which is characteristic only of a priori cognitions. That they therefore express only the subjective form of our sensibility, which yields the form of intuition before everything empirical, [and are therefore] a priori. . . .

Of this passage Guyer says: 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

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space is merely a form of representation, such a form, of course, being a sufficient condition for explaining a priori knowledge. (1987, 357)

Once again, Guyer assumes the same exhaustive dualism, that is, space is either real or else merely a form of representation, either independent of our senses or else a subjective mental state. In this case, however, the assumption is even less warranted, because R6349 says nothing about the reality of space. Guyer infers Kant's rejection of space's reality from the claim that a priori truths about space are "not possible by means of the perception of objects as things in themselves. . . . " He thus underlines his view that only the perception of, or reference to, things in themselves would allow space to be real, and this not only conflicts with Kant's general intention throughout the Aesthetic, but overlooks Kant's own explicit ascription of empirical reality to space. Since for Kant space and time are empirically real, it is quite wrong to say that he rejects the reality of space and time. What he rejects is a claim to their "absolute" reality in belonging to things in themselves (B52, B54). Neither the cited Reflexion nor the form of the argument in the Aesthetic support Guyer's interpretation, and the traditionalist view is not so much argued for as presupposed. Guyer assumes not only the exhaustive dualism associated with the idealist tradition, but also the belief that for Kant things in themselves are the only genuine reality. It is worth recalling the conflicts noted in chapter 1 between Strawson's similar view (1966a, 38) and Kant's position in B195, B270, and B517. At one point Guyer indicates a more constructive conclusion when he says: "it is difficult to see why anyone should suppose that an argument which does not employ the premise that a priori knowledge of a determination is incompatible with its independent existence could represent Kant's thought" (1987, 362). But the views which Guyer criticizes do not need to deny that premise. All that they need to do is to ask what could be meant in such a premise by the notion of "independence." One standard difference between traditionalist and revolutionary accounts is that the latter, but not the former, raise that question. It is a clear symptom of Guyer's traditionalism that such a notion is taken to be unequivocal and to signify the mind-independent reality of things in themselves. It is then entirely natural to treat such independence as that conventionally attached to outer objects which continue to exist when unperceived, and so to identify things in themselves and outer objects just as Garve did. In the tradition, as in Guyer's discussion, "independence" may be taken to be unequivocal because it marks precisely the exhaustive dualism between dependent mental states and independent external objects, between what is mind-dependent and what is mind-independent, between, as it is now often and niisleadingly said, "mind" and "world." In Guyer's account Kant's real World is that of unknowable things in themselves, but it is quite uncertain

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that Kant endorses that claim and the unequivocal dualism behind it. In the examination, in 2, of the provisos which Kant makes to his formal conclusions I argue against it. Three important conclusions can be drawn from the examination of Guyer's account apart from the confirmation of traditionalist assumptions in his argument. First is an evident explanation for a puzzling feature of Kant's discussion in the Aesthetic, namely, that he sometimes speaks explicitly of "things in themselves" and sometimes only of "things themselves." This variability encourages the idea that in this passage Kant is still reflecting the view of the Dissertation that the senses yield knowledge not of "things" but only of "their appearances." It encourages the identification of ordinary spatial objects and things in themselves. Guyer's own conclusions are of this kind, since his dualist assumption denies the ascription of space and time to real things, that is, things in themselves. It overlooks a distinction between "being derivable from" and "belonging to" objects.2 The discussion indicates a simpler explanation for Kant's apparent carelessness and regression to the Dissertation. For the central argument about the a priori status of space and time will hold whether we speak of Kantian things in themselves or of empirical objects. For Kant, if spatiotemporal concepts are derived from wholly independent things then those concepts will be a posteriori; there is no way in which we can then know a priori, without experience of those things, that they have such features. Kant consequently denies that spatiotemporal concepts can be derived from any wholly independent things, but he rejects the ascription of spatiotemporal properties only to things in themselves and not to empirical objects or objects of experience. Space and time are derivable neither from empirical objects nor from things in themselves, but they belong in our experience only to the former and not to the latter. A second related point is that the notions of "dependence" and "independence," especially of "mind-dependence" and "mind-independence," need to be explained in characterizing Kant's theory. The former point made clear that in Kant's phrase "a priori in the mind" the key notion is "a priori" and its contrast with "a posteriori," just because it is the a priority of space and time which conflicts with their being independent features of objects. But Kant clearly thinks that both the a priority of space and time, and their classification as "forms" or "modes" of intuition, point to their "subjectivity" or "mind-dependence." A question remains, therefore, about what "mind-dependence" or "subjectivity" adds to these characterizations of space and time, and that is precisely why the notion of "mind(in)dependence" needs clarification. Third is the identification of a clear criterion which can be used to assess whether Kant himself makes the same traditional dualist assumptions

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as Guyer. If Kant's provisos acknowledge that exhaustive traditional dualism, then Guyer's position will be vindicated. If they outiine a more complex view than that traditional dualism then the traditionalist account must be rejected.

1.2. The Neglected Alternative: Kuno Fischer and Adolf Trendelenburg The criticisms of Guyer's account may be answered by insisting that it does no more than Kant himself in offering two exhaustive and exclusive options for the status of objects of our experience. In many places, and especially later in the Antinomies, Kant presents his readers with a clear choice between saying of space, time, and appearances that they concern either things in themselves or mere ideas. It will be said that that alternative is Kant's division between what is "mind-independent" and what is not. Since Kant's account appears to be more complex, that response will not be decisive until the conflict has been understood, and further light is thrown on it by the disagreement between two nineteenth-century neo-Kantians, Kuno Fischer and Adolf Trendelenburg. Of the two protagonists, Trendelenburg takes Guyer's traditionalist position and Fischer the alternative revolutionary view. Vaihinger (1892) summarized the debate and, with one proviso,3 voted for Trendelenburg and against Fischer. Kant's inferential oversight was for Vaihinger an "enormous error which threatens Kant's whole system," but I argue that Fischer was correct. The central "gap" in Kant's thinking is expressed in the following ways by Trendelenburg, Vaihinger, and Guyer: Either space is objective as a real thing or as a property of a real thing, or else it attaches only to the subjective character of our mind: The third possibility, that it is both subjective and belongs to things is not considered. (Trendelenburg) What is intuited a prior must belong to the mind; space is an a priori intuition and so must be only a subjective appearance or idea. But why does Kant infer from space's "subjectivity" that it is only "subjective"? (Vaihinger) Space and time, which are known a priori, cannot be genuine properties of objects, and so can be only features of our representations of them. Why does Kant exclude the possibility that space and time are necessary constraints on our perception and genuine features of the objects we perceive? (Guyer)

There are differences in the conclusions each draws. Trendelenburg thinks Kant did not even consider the neglected alternative, while Vaihinger thinks

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that Kant mentions it but never took it seriously, and Guyer holds that Kant deliberately excluded it. Fischer's immediate response is to deny that the allegedly neglected alternative is overlooked. His view is that the intuitive and a priori character ascribed to space and time does not exclude their objective validity, but actually elucidates the only objectivity they can have as their "empirical reality" within the realm of appearances. Kant's denial of objectivity at the transcendental level is compatible with his assertion of objectivity at the empirical level of possible experience. Space andtimeare subjective and ideal compared with things in themselves; as properties of objects of possible experience they are thoroughly objective and real. By the standards of things in themselves our experience is 'subjective', but such a standard is transcendent and out of our reach. By the immanent standards of possible experience our ascription of spatio-temporal properties to appearances is as objective as it can possibly be. (Fischer 1860-67, 3.2.315-16.) Trendelenburg dismissed this response by claiming that empirical reality operates only within the scope of transcendental ideality, so that space and time effectively remain purely subjective features of our minds. Vaihinger responded in a similar way by insisting that for Kant "objective validity" is required in more than the mere empirical sense. For Trendelenburg the issue is not the validity of mere appearances but that of things, and that what we aspire to are truths about things (in) themselves and not truths about us. The central point in all knowledge is to reach the thing as it (really) is: We want the thing, not us; [but according to Kant] we search for things but succeed only in capturing ourselves. This is a modesty which reduces science to beggary. (1865,161) Kant counters the claim that his ideality of space transforms the whole sensible world into illusion, but I'm considering not what Kant intended, but what results even against his wishes. . . . The anxiety remains that appearance [Erscheinung] is illusion [Schein]. [Es verlasst die Furcht nicht dass in der Erscheinung der Schein spiele. ] (1865, 15 8-60) In one clear sense Fischer's response is undoubtedly correct. Kant distinguishes empirical and transcendental realism as he distinguishes empirical objects of experience and transcendent things in themselves. Trendelenburg and Vaihinger cannot deny that Kant considers and takes seriously both of those options, or correspondingly that Kant makes room for the alleged neglected alternative which regards space and time as "objective" and empirically real. Their primary case rests strictly not on

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Kant's failure to notice, and make room for, their "missing" option but on the different claim that it lacks a certain status, so that empirical reality is somehow a second-best and not a "real" reality after all. Their case rests on the traditionalist conviction, noted earlier, that for Kant genuine reality is the transcendental reality of things in themselves, access to which is provided by inner experiences. That claim was denied in chapter 1 by referring to such passages as B195, B207, and B517, and in noting elsewhere that for Kant the world of appearances is not a second-best substitute for "real" knowledge but an expression of the real world of possible experience and science. When Kant rejects the objection that he denies the reality of time and insists that he denies only its "absolute reality" we have to ask what differentiates "reality" and "absolute reality." For Trendelenburg, Vaihinger, and Guyer absolute reality is the genuine article to which we aspire and on which the skeptic casts a substantial doubt. For Fischer the genuine article is empirical reality and in endorsing it Kant is opposing, not surrendering to, skepticism. That view is compatible with the position I have endorsed, that "absolute reality" for Kant is not an expression of our genuine reality in experience but a philosophers' myth about which we should be skeptical. It is the myth canvassed, inadvertendy by Locke and deliberately by Leibniz, in representing objects as beyond the veil of perception and accessible only to reason. A paradigm case for the supposed absolute reality of things in themselves is God rather than outer objects or space and time themselves. Kant wresdes throughout the Dialectic with a proper form of words to express a legitimate belief in God and other Ideas of reason, but the outcome is never an unqualified commitment to the corresponding existents. Fischer consequendy argued correcdy that Kant did not overlook the neglected alternative, and has a strong case against Trendelenburg's response. When Kant replaces the absolute reality of things in themselves with his transcendental ideality of space, time, and appearances, Trendelenburg takes this to be a skeptical denial of our ordinary and scientific knowledge and Fischer disagrees. That disagreement might be regarded as unresolved, but Fischer's position can be further and more pointedly supported by noting three defects in Trendelenburg's position. The first is a misunderstanding about the inference said to be at the heart of Kant's Aesthetic; second is the claim that for Kant space and time are not "genuine" properties of objects; and the third is the failure to distinguish Kant's conception of objects as "appearances" and as "things in themselves." The latter two are connected for part of the reason given for Kant's supposed denial that space and time "belong" to objects is that if the objects are things in themselves then we cannot ascribe space and time to them.

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It might be said that even if Fischer is right to insist on the complexity in Kant's understanding of empirical and transcendental "subjectivity" and "objectivity," this does not affect Kant's underlying fault in inferring fallaciously from "subjectivity" to lack of "objectivity." Trendelenburg's central objection was that Kant held "subjective" and "objective" to be strictly exclusive and so overlooked the possibility that space and time might be both subjective and objective, but Fischer's counterclaim is enough to show that this objection is misplaced. Because the "subjective/objective" distinction is more complex than Trendelenburg admitted there is more than one inference from "subjective" to "not objective." For Kant the inference from "transcendentally subjective (ideal)" to "not transcendentally objective (real)" is accepted, but the inference from "transcendentally subjective (ideal)" to "not empirically objective (real)" is rejected. Once the more complicated scheme is recognized Trendelenburg's belief in an exclusive relation between "subjective" and "objective" breaks down. Kant recognized, did not neglect, the possibility that space and time might be both subjective and objective. He recognized and accepted that they may be both transcendentally subjective and empirically objective; he recognized, but denied, that they are both transcendentally subjective and transcendentally objective. Moreover, in denying their transcendental objectivity as properties of things in themselves he did not take this to cast doubt on our empirical knowledge of objects of possible experience. It might be argued that since Kant classifies space and time not as objects but as "modes" he denies that they are genuine properties, but this is plainly a mistake. Space and time are classified metaphysically as "modes," as Hume suggested, but both Kant and Hume regard this classification as compatible with the ascription of genuine spatiotemporal properties to physical objects. Kant might be thought to hold that spatiotemporal properties do not properly belong to objects for two reasons. The claims would be first that they cannot properly belong to any object if they are known a priori, and second that they cannot properly be ascribed by us to things in themselves. The first reason assumes that the only properties that belong genuinely to objects must be a posteriori, but such a view cannot reasonably be attributed to Kant. His claim, against empiricism, is that there are genuine properties of objects of experience which can be known a priori. To ascribe to Kant the view that only a posteriori properties are genuine is a mistake, and begs the question against Kant's antiempiricism. The second reason reflects the view in all three criticisms that Kant's neglected alternative is precisely his failure to recognize the possibility that things in themselves may have spatiotemporal properties. Guyer's case rests on his conviction that Kant dogmatically denies the spatiotemporality of things in themselves when he should be merely agnostic about them.

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Vaihinger's case is that even though Kant recognized the possibility he never took it seriously, but the underlying assumption, which Fischer rightiy criticized, is that space and time involve genuine properties of objects only if they attach to things in themselves which, on Kant's view, we cannot know. The residual issue is whether Kant's position is open to Guyer's objections, and I argue that it is not. Kant accepts that space and time are genuine properties of objects of intuition and experience, and denies only that they are genuine properties of things in themselves. His reason for the latter denial is the belief that we know nothing of things in themselves accessible only through reason and independently of the senses. That does not positively deny that things in themselves may have spatiotemporal properties of some type, but claims only that, whether they do or not, at least we can never know it. Their characteristics are irrelevant to issues about our genuine knowledge in immanent experience. Kant seems sometimes to go further to claim that we can at least know that things in themselves are not spatiotemporal in our way. In his proviso at B149 we can legitimately deny some features of things in themselves even though we cannot legitimately assert what their "positive" properties may be. That claim is justifiable in the following terms: We are justified in denying ascription of our spatiotemporal characteristics to unknowable objects on the ground that those characteristics are for us tied to our sensory, cognitive apparatus, which is absent in the case of things in themselves. Just as Kant admits that we cannot legislate for creatures with other forms of cognition, so he allows that for all we can know other forms of cognition or sensibility may produce their own versions, or analogues, of our spatiotemporal properties. Such a characterization is necessarily limited since we can have no further conception of those alternative cognitions or their suggested analogues of space and time. This is to answer Guyer's objection and to confirm that Kant's interest is in our world and its fruitful bathos, and not in other possible worlds. One underlying objection should be noted but has already been answered. It may be said that Kant cannot just assume the reality of ordinary spatiotemporal objects since his project is to justify against the skeptic our genuine knowledge of objects with those properties. What has been said already argues that Kant's project is not a normative justification for that claimed knowledge but a descriptive metaphysics of experience.4 Its primary task is not that of justifying our beliefs in empirical objects and their properties, but that of abstracting from those beliefs the a priori concepts and intuitions presented in that experience. Other questions remain: How does Kant make room for the neglected alternative? If Kant is not attempting to justify our belief in empirical reality in the Aesthetic what is the structure of its argument? These questions raise more general issues about Kant's transcendental contrast between appearances and things in

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themselves and his notion of "mind-(in)dependence." The traditionalist objections to Fischer's claims are inadequate, but the discussion leaves those issues to be concluded by examining Kant's comments and provisos after the formal proofs of the a priori and intuitive status of space and time.

2. Kant's Initial Comments (B43-46; B51-59) and Provisos in the General Observations (B59-74) A summary of these comments and provisos was given earlier, where it was noted that they may serve to distinguish traditionalist and revolutionary accounts of the Aesthetic. Traditionalists typically do not see in these passages any modification of the standard idealist dualism ascribed to Kant by Guyer, but the alternative is to regard these passages as an attempt on Kant's part to forestall just such a misunderstanding. The Observations are prefaced by Kant's recognition that his formal conclusions may be misunderstood, and are consciously written in the hope of clarifying his position. Given Kant's expressed anxiety, in the exchange with Garve and at B53-56, that his position may be mistaken for a traditional idealism, it is natural to see the clarification as especially directed towards that issue. To ensure that nothing of significance is omitted I summarize Kant's principal points. [1]. The account of space and time is an account from "the human standpoint" (B43, B51). It cannot be generalized to creatures with other cognitive apparatus, and held to apply to "things in general" and then to "things in themselves" abstracted from any conditions of sense as if they could be accessed through reason alone (B43-44, B 51-52). This explains an error in the Leibniz Wolff doctrine that our senses provide confused representations of real things in themselves (B60-62). The distinction between clarity and confusion is logical not epistemological; to progress from what is confused to what is clear is to remain within the realm of possible experience and not to break out of that realm into a separate world of things in themselves. [2]. Mathematics provides us with an "abstract" account of space and time in its synthetic a priori truths, but it abstracts from a posteriori objects in experience, not from forms or modes of a priori sense, or their relations. To insist on the absolute reality of space and time is to postulate two eternal, infinite, nonentities (B70-71), but to treat them as relations between a posteriori

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objects is to lose the a priori character of mathematics (B64). A priori forms or modes of sense represent a relation between object and subject and not an "intrinsic property" of things in themselves (B64-66; B67-68). This is true of both outer and inner sense under the parity principle. [3]. The conclusions assert (lehren, behaupten [B44, B52]) the empirical reality of space and time with respect to outer and inner objects of experience, and their transcendental ideality with respect to things considered in themselves through reason and independently of our senses (B43-44; B52-53). Transcendental ideality is not the a posteriori subjectivity of sensations, which vary from subject to subject (B45, B58). Nor can the transcendental contrast between appearance and thing in itself be understood in terms of the contrasts we draw within experience between empirical illusion and empirical reality, or empirical things in themselves (roses, raindrops) and empirical appearances (scents, rainbows). In those empirical contrasts we have access to, and discriminate, both items, but the transcendental distinction is a reminder that nothing in experience is a thing in itself. We have no knowledge of such a thing, and in experience ask no questions about it (A29, B45, B53, B56, B62-64, B69-70). Transcendental ideality does not affect the certainty of empirical knowledge; we are sure of it whatever philosophical account is given (B56). [4]. That elucidation distinguishes Kant's doctrine from Berkeley's Eleatic idealism (B53-54, B69-70, Prolegomena, Anhang). To call objects of experience in space and time "appearances" is not to treat them as illusory. Erscheinung (appearance) is a technical, not a colloquial, term in its transcendental contrast with things considered in themselves, and is not the same as Schein (illusion). In a similar way while "intuition" is the "representation of appearance" (B59) appearances themselves are the "indeterminate objects of an empirical intuition" (B34). Appearances are the known objects of possible experience to be contrasted transcendentally with things as they are in themselves of which we have no knowledge (B 59-60). [5], The rejection of Berkeleian idealism at B69-70 is anticipated in the more general rejection of idealism at B54-56. One of the principal differences between Kant's doctrine and traditional idealism lies in the parity Kant ascribes to inner and outer sense (B55, B67-69). Traditional idealism outlines a disparity between these senses in ascribing epistemic priority to inner sense and its objects.

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Apart from the claims (B61) that moral obligation (Recht) belongs to things in themselves and not to appearances, and (B71-73) that human cognitive powers are restricted in comparison to a nonsensory, intellectual intuition which God might have, [ l ] - [ 5 ] capture the central aspects of Kant's comments on the Aesthetic conclusions. There are passages in these comments which may seem to encourage a traditionalist dualism such as Guyer's, and I consider one representative: "This form is not to be looked for in the object in itself, but in the subject to which the object appears; nevertheless it belongs really and necessarily to the appearance of this object" (B55). The passage contrasts objects and subjects in a way which may encourage the same dualism, but it offers no clear explanation of how that distinction is to be understood. It may also seem to imply that appearances, as representations, represent things in themselves to us; but Kant denies at B45 that things in themselves can be known through our sensible representations, at B332 that appearances represent things in themselves, and typically calls appearances objects o f intuitions or representations (B59, B34). The temptation to read it in the traditionalist way arises only on the assumption that the "objects" referred to in the second and subsequent clauses are the "objects in themselves" referred to in the first clause. The passage itself does not warrant that identification because of Kant's two ways of construing objects of experience, either as appearances or ^things in themselves. I argue in chapter 10 that Kant's distinction is not adequately captured by contrasting extensional and intensional references, but it is intensional and reflects different philosophical accounts of such objects.5 It is therefore natural and correct to disentangle the sentence's different intensional references as: This form is not to be looked for in objects of experience construed as things in themselves, but (only) in the subject to which those objects appear (that is, [as appearances]); nevertheless, it belongs really and necessarily to those objects (as appearances).

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If the complexity of those references is disregarded, as it was by Trendelenburg and Vaihinger, then what remains is a simple idealist dualism between things in themselves and subjective ideas. Some commentators will consequendy regard the more complex reading for such sentences as implausible, contrived, and anodyne, but I insist that the references cannot be understood without taking those complexities into account. I recommend the reading not because it removes transparent inconsistencies from Kant's position but because his apparatus requires it. The same syntactic issues run through the Critique and Prolegomena and in chapters 10 and 23 other such examples will be similarly explained. The account underlines the claim, used to criticize Vaihinger and Guyer, that for Kant a priori properties may belong to objects of experience even though they are not a posteriori derivable from them. It shows Kant's move from a simple dualism of transcendent object (thing in itself) and mental state (idea) to the more complex scheme in Fischer's account. The same conclusion arises from the claim that Kant is committed to a traditional idealism because he says that if we eliminate reference to subjects, or to their sense experience, then space and time vanish or are nothing (B43, B52). If it is assumed that for Kant space and time are subjective mental states, then the conclusion holds; if space and time are mental states and we eliminate those states, then we eliminate space and time. The assumption is sufficient to establish the conclusion, but it does not follow that it is also necessary, and yet it is only if the assumption is necessary that Kant is committed to a traditional idealism. If there are other ways of understanding the claim that space and time are subjective or mind-dependent, then Kant's conclusion might still follow without the traditional idealist implications. If, for example, our senses are ineliminably involved in our experience of space and time, even though space and time are not themselves mental states, then to eliminate the senses is also to eliminate space and time as we experience them. Frowns and smiles make an ineliminable reference to minds or intentions, and would be eliminated if minds are, but neither can be classed simply as a mental state.6 The more complex schemes indicated in Fischer's account and in the argument from ineliminability are outiined in the Aesthetic and in the Fourth Paralogism A. Kant evidently envisages four different positions in which there is a choice between empirical and transcendental realism on one side and empirical and transcendental idealism on the other. Commentators differ in their account of these positions, but it is uncontroversial that there are four distinct positions, and that they fall naturally into two opposed combinations: I Empirical idealism with transcendental realism. II Empirical realism with transcendental idealism.

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In the Aesthetic Kant defines these positions in the contrasts between empirical and transcendental things in themselves and appearances in [3], but even before considering those details it is clear that Kant's taxonomy is more complex than the traditional dualism of "representation" and "object," or "mind" and "world." For Kant there is no simple dualism between the real and the ideal, but a complex combination of the four options which involves different, transcendental and empirical, senses for associated terms, such as "object," "idea," "subjective," and "mind-(in)dependence." The earlier criterion identified in the discussion of Guyer shows that Kant's position already differs significandy from the idealist tradition. So long as the detail does not regress to that tradition Kant cannot belong to it. Kant's replacement of the dualist tradition with his fourfold distinction in I and II offers a correction to traditional empirical idealism, and shows how the neglected alternative is covered. The classification includes empirical and transcendental conceptions of "idea" and "idealism" as well as empirical and transcendental conceptions of "object" and "realism." Empirically ideas are those private inner experiences to which traditional idealism attaches an epistemic priority, and objects are individuals we recognize and identify in inner and outer sense. Transcendentally ideas include everything that can be presented in our experience and are contrasted with transcendental objects beyond the range of our possible experience. Empirical idealism draws the significant distinction between what belongs to a privileged consciousness (mind) and what may be, more or less justifiably, inferred from that prior consciousness (world); transcendental idealism draws the significant distinction between the whole of our experience, mental or physical, and what lies beyond possible experience. The "missing" option is covered in Kant's claim that the ascription of spatiotemporal properties to objects of experience is empirically real and makes no reference to a supposed "absolute" reality of transcendental things in themselves. The more formal definitions of II are given at B44, for space, and B52, for time. They differ only in the claim, discussed earlier, that time holds for &//objects of the senses (B52) while space holds only for outer objects. The central definition is given at B44: Our exposition . . . teaches (lehrt) the reality, that is the objective validity of space in respect of whatever can be presented to us outwardly as an object, but also at the same time the ideality of space in respect of things when they are considered in themselves through reason, that is, without regard to the constitution of our sensibility.

The passage seems to allow widely divergent interpretations some of which are evidently quite implausible. The phrase "whatever can be presented to

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us outwardly as an object" may be taken to refer to private mental states or inner experiences, and the contrasted expression "things when they are considered in themselves through reason" may be taken to refer to real external objects. Neither interpretation is at all plausible but the two together would commit Kant to an idealist dualism which accepts the reality of inner experience and raises a doubt about the external world just as Trendelenburg claimed. Such an account depends crucially on the ascription to Kant of that exhaustive traditional dualism of "things in themselves" and "mental states (ideas)" instead of the more complex account in I and II. That more complex account is further elucidated in a series of illustrative explanations given extensively throughout the comments at A28-29, B45, B53, B56, B62-64, and B69-70. 7 They express fundamental aspects of Kant's own position, and the passages at B45, quoted above and at B62-63 can stand as their representative: We commonly distinguish in appearances what is essentially inherent in their intuition and holds for sense in all human beings from what belongs to their intuition accidentally only, and is valid . . . only in relation to a . . . peculiarity of structure in this or that sense. The former . . . is then declared to represent the object in itself, and the latter its appearance only. But this distinction is merely empirical. I f . . . we stop . . . at this point and do not proceed . . . to treat the empirical intuition as mere appearance, with nothing belonging to a thing in itself, our transcendental distinction is l o s t . . . . The rainbow . . . may be called an appearance and the rain the thing in itself. This is correct if the latter concept is taken in a merely physical sense. . . . But if we take this empirical object in its general character and ask . . . whether it represents an object in itself (and by that we cannot mean the drops of rain for these are already as appearances empirical objects) the question as to the relation of representation to the object . . . becomes transcendental. (B62-63)

The passage, like its associates, draws a firm distinction between an "empirical" and a "transcendental" use of the terms "thing in itself' and "appearance." The former is the colloquial use in which we contrast within experience veridical and illusory appearances (B69n), or sensory apparent properties and the things they belong to (A29-30, B62-63), or subjective and objective properties (A29n). The latter is a technical, philosophical response to a general question about the status or classification of objects of experience as variously "appearances" belonging to sensibility or "things in themselves" belonging to reason. It is part of Kant's transcendental enquiry, explained in chapter 5, under the older heading of a general metaphysics, and it claims of the whole of experience that it contains only appearances and not things in themselves. The transcendental term "appearance" does not discriminate items within experience but contrasts

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whatever can be so discriminated by us with what is for us beyond that range. A number of important conclusions follow. Because the terms "thing in itself' and "appearance" may be used ambiguously, either empirically or transcendentally, their use in commentary should always be disambiguated. It is strictly wrong to say that for Kant we have no knowledge of things in themselves, when this holds only for the transcendental use of the term, just as it was wrong of Paul Guyer to hold that Kant denies any form of reality to space and time. Kant accepts our knowledge of empirical things in themselves, inner and outer, but rejects knowledge of transcendental things in themselves; he accepts the empirical reality of space and time but rejects their transcendental, or absolute, reality as properties of transcendental things in themselves. It is sometimes thought that when Kant denies that space and time can be ascribed to "things (in) themselves" he rejects their empirical ascription to objects of experience. That might be thought to follow from his classification of space and time as "modes" rather than "things," but both motives are mistaken. It does not follow from the nonspatiotemporality of transcendental things in themselves, or from the classification of space and time as "modes," that space and time cannot be ascribed to empirical things (in) themselves. They cannot be derived a posteriori from empirical objects, but empirical realism expressly asserts that they belong to them. Those tempting errors rest on wider misunderstandings. The terminology of "appearance" triggers a philosophical contrast between mere appearance and some underlying reality, and reference to "things in themselves" may be understood as a reference to an underlying reality of things "as they really are." These verbal temptations should be resisted for two related reasons: First, because Kant's contrast between appearance and reality is not an unequivocal dual distinction, and, second, because when the ambiguity is resolved, his position differs in each case. Empirically appearances of objects of experience, the ways such things appear, are related to objects of experience sometimes veridically, sometimes delusively; but transcendentally appearances are for us related to things in themselves only delusively. Kant accepts the reality of objects of experience, and of their empirical appearances, but he rejects the supposed underlying reality of things in themselves, the general correlates of transcendental appearances. Kant attempts to forestall the confusion between those empirical and transcendental uses in the General Observations on the Aesthetic in the passages referred to, but commentators have not always recognized their significance and may ask why he used the misleading term "appearance" at all. The term "appearance" was chosen for transcendental duty, despite the potential confusion with its empirical use, to mark the distinctive contri-

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bution of the senses to experience in contrast to an equally distinctive contribution from the understanding through concepts. That notional separation of the senses and understanding has been sometimes rejected because of the "blindness" problem, but the earlier discussion showed how that problem can be resolved.8 Even if the blindness problem cannot be resolved the notional separation of sense and understanding is indisputably a consequence of Kant's "abstraction" or "isolation" method. In its transcendental use "appearance" stands for that notional, indeterminate presentation to sense experience, inner or outer, which abstracts from any determinate description. Its content is the same as the content to which we normally give a determinate sense through such descriptions, but its character as a notionally pure sense presentation is to be understood separately from them. It follows that the usual conception of sense-data, which restricts their character to such things as colored patches or noises, is not the same as Kant's philosophical use of "appearance," which makes no such restriction. Transcendental appearances have the same content that we ordinarily express by "seeing a house," "hearing a bell," or feeling a pain," but they mark the experience notionally distinct from those concepts. Later, in the Analytic, Kant reunites concepts and intuitions by isolating the distinctive contribution made to our knowledge by the understanding, but the Aesthetic deals with a notionally pure sensibility.

3. Concluding Summary In the account given above, the principal aim of the Aesthetic is to represent space and time as a priori and intuitive in a metaphysical inventory of the distinctively sensory part of our experience. That classification rejects the ideas that space and time are derivable a posteriori from objects and that they are concepts belonging to the understanding. It allows them to be ascribed legitimately to objects of experience but excludes their legitimate ascription to transcendental things in themselves beyond experience. The immediate conclusions Kant draws from that classification, and his subsequent comments, are focused primarily on the idealist implications of that classification. Kant identifies aspects of a traditional, empirical idealism which he thinks mistaken and provides his own reformed version of the doctrine which avoids those errors. The central aim is to find a more carefully formulated view which captures what is right in idealism and discards what is dubious or wrong headed. On one side those conclusions reject an empirical idealism with its accompanying transcendental realism, and on the other they endorse an empirical realism coupled with transcendental idealism. In the Prolegomena appendix the former combination is rejected because it asso-

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ciates the senses with illusion, and finds truth only in a reason divorced from sensibility. Kant's view, by contrast, reverses those verdicts in claiming that truth can be found only through the senses, and that a reason divorced from sensibility yields only illusion. Kant's empirical realism, or "empirical dualism" as he sometimes calls it (A379-80), endorses truths about objects of both inner and outer sense, and his transcendental idealism minimally rejects supposed truths about things in themselves from pure reason alone. It will be objected such a minimal account offers no specific arguments with which those conclusions might be supported, and that it leaves out some of the central and philosophically most interesting points. In particular it will be said to leave out the antiskeptical aim of justifying, against traditional idealism, our beliefs about the external world. I have noted generally that Kant reverses traditional philosophy's skepticism by questioning its authority to raise such doubts. My suggestion is that to look at the argument structure o f the Aesthetic without prior prejudices is to emphasize that Kantian attitude. That structure is an attempt to isolate the distinctive contribution of our senses to experience and identify their a priori features in the metaphysical and transcendental expositions. Kant's primary interest is then to use those arguments to correct traditional idealism and replace it with a reformed transcendental idealism which does not raise a question about the existence of an external world. The arguments were examined in chapter 8, and rest essentially on the asymmetry argument for the priority and a priority of space and time in our experience, and on the nonconceptual, intuitive character of our mode of representing spatially and temporally. They were supported by a formal appeal in geometry and kinematics to an empty space-time in which spatial relations and motion can be represented. The transcendental expositions were designed to endorse the metaphysical expositions but were limited by the assumption of the synthetic a priori character of mathematical judgments. Neither the transcendental nor the metaphysical expositions attempt to defend mathematics against philosophical skepticism since Kant evidently did not think mathematics needed any such defense. The crucial step is from the a priori and intuitive character of space and time, proved in the expositions, to Kant's form of transcendental idealism. The central arguments in the passage are those of the expositions and that further step in the immediate conclusions. One way of expressing that further step is to say that Kant infers from the character of space and time that they, and their inhabitants, appearances, are "subjective," "in the mind," "modifications of our senses," and mere "ideas." That is an expression of some form of idealism, but I have insisted that it remains unclear, not least because it has to be differentiated from a traditional empirical idealism. We have to ask what "idea," "subjective," "in the mind," or "mind-depen-

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dent" mean in transcendental idealism, and that question can be answered only by reference to the provisos in the General Observations. There Kant recognizes the need to distinguish his reformed idealism from the traditional variety by insisting on, and attempting to resolve, the ambiguity in those terms. The central ambiguity is that they are all susceptible of an empirical or a transcendental use, and that Kant's version of idealism employs them in their transcendental, not their empirical, sense.9 That distinction between empirical and transcendental idealism can be brought out in three ways, two of which concern inferences from the characteristics of space and time and a third which oudines their significance. The first point derives from the classification of space and time as "modes" of representing. This was understood without the assumption of a background idealism and given a syntactic form, treating space and time as adverbial modifications of our perceptual claims and of perception itself. Just as Hume's account of space and time as "modes" is independent of idealist preconceptions, so Kant's inventorial classification can equally be understood as an elucidation of the role space and time play in our experience. For Kant they are universal and necessary conditions or ways in which we represent in sensibility anything whatever, inner or outer. To provide such an inventorial classification is not to classify them as empirical ideas, that is, as inner experiences within a Cartesian consciousness. To treat vision and hearing as perceptual operators, or to treat " . . . seems . . . " as a modification of ". . . is . . ." similarly makes no commitment to such a traditional idealism. It is perfecdy possible and quite natural to take those classifications in the context of an unquestioned experience in which both inner and outer objects exist. Both classifications nevertheless make a connection, and ineliminable reference, to our minds and our cognitive, sensory powers. They are mind-dependent in a way which is not that of the literal mind-dependence of empirical idealism, or of the doctrine of the transcendent "mind making nature." The second point infers the "mind-dependence" of space and time from their a priori character. Kant typically associates "being a priori" with "being in the mind" or "being subjective," and this was the basis of Trendelenburg's and Vaihinger's account of the neglected alternative. Vaihinger refers at length to the many passages where Kant infers "subjectivity" from "a priority," but his efforts were misdirected since the connection is indisputable and what is at issue is its significance. The crucial question, which Vaihinger scarcely raised and certainly did not answer, is to ask what kind of subjectivity is involved. The same issue arose in the discussion of Paul Guyer's reference to "independence" (in 1.1). It is indisputable that Kant thinks of the a priori as in some way "mind-dependent," but the issue is to clarify that way and, if possible, differentiate it from the conception of "mind-dependence" in a traditional idealism which Kant rejects.

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Those questions can be answered by saying that for Kant a priori features are mind-dependent because they cannot derive from a posteriori experience, but may still characterize and belong to objects of experience. At Kant's transcendental level there is an exclusive choice between what is "subjective," to do with the mind and our cognitive powers, and what is "objective," derivable from objects a posteriori. Kant has no choice but to accept the former at the transcendental level for space and time once they are recognized as a priori. What the advocates of the neglected alternative overlooked, or misrepresented, was that Kant allows an empirical as well as a transcendental level. Space and time are empirically real, not empirical ideas, and that reality is genuine compared with the spurious reality of the supersensible world. If the proofs of a priority are accepted it follows that space and time are not in the world a posteriori, and cannot be derived from its a posteriori presentation. Nor for Kant can they be legitimately ascribed by us to the nonsensory world of things in themselves. They can be characterized only as transcendentally "subjective" in making again an ineliminable reference to the mind and its cognitive powers. The two inferences from "being intuitive" and "being a priori" to transcendental subjectivity already imply an ambiguity for Kant between empirical and transcendental ideas, and correlatively between "being in the mind" empirically and transcendentally. That distinction corresponds to the explicit distinction made between the empirical and transcendental conceptions of "outer object" (A372-74). Empirically outer, that is, spatial, objects are contrasted in experience with empirical ideas, that is, inner experiences. Transcendentally outer objects, things in themselves, are the unknown correlates beyond our experience of transcendental appearances which include everything available to possible experience, inner or outer. To regard space, time, and transcendental appearances as empirical ideas is to treat them as inner mental experiences contrasted with outer physical objects. This cannot be what Kant means since transcendental appearances include empirically outer, spatial objects as well as inner experiences. It subverts his transcendental aim of classifying all objects of experience, inner as well as outer, as appearances and not things in themselves, and moves him towards the empirical idealism he rejects. Commentators have generally noticed this ambiguity in the use of "idea" and "subjective" and in the contrast between "appearance" and "object," but may regard it as a confusion and may misunderstand its significance. Such commentators may accept that such transcendental terms as "idea," or "in the mind," or "subjective" cannot be understood in the empirical way in which we distinguish within experience between inner mental ideas and the outer objects they may represent. In empirical experience we distinguish mental items such as pains or thoughts from nonmental items such as tables and chairs, but the point of Kant's global

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transcendental characterization is that all these items have to be classed as "ideas," as "in us," as "mind-dependent." They all belong to a minddependent experience in contrast to the transcendentally absolute independence of supersensible things in themselves. Strawson, for example, recognized the general point in the following passage: the subjectivity thesis regarding the order of Nature [is] . . . the thesis that we ourselves are the source of order and objectivity in the natural world. . . . We must, of course, recognise that Kant makes two distinct uses of the notion of subjectivity, just as he employs in two distinct senses the contrast between what is 'in us' and what is 'outside us'. The subjectivity thesis . . . is not a retraction of the distinction between the subjective order of self-ascribed or self-ascribable experiences, on one hand, and the objective order of the world . . . on the other. The subjective source of that objective order is not the self as it appears in ordinary empirical self-consciousness, but that mystery, the self as it is in itself. (1966a, 112) The passage correcdy notes distinct, empirical and transcendental, senses in which Kant uses such expressions as "in us," "in the mind," or "ideas" and the correlative expressions "outer," or "independent object." But the only sense attached to Kant's nonempirical, transcendental use of these terms is its transcendent counterpart. For Strawson if the transcendental reference to "mind" or to the "self' is not empirical, then it can be only transcendent and mysterious, referring to things or selves in themselves of which even Kant admits we have no knowledge. Strawson in this way perpetuates the puzzle that Kant denies us knowledge of the very things which constitute his essential explanation for our experience. The self in itself, with its transcendent mind, is then part of the explanation for our whole experience despite the fact that such an explanation is explicidy beyond our cognitive reach. It echoes the traditionalist doctrine of the "mind making nature" in which a mind outside nature literally creates, or imposes a form on, it. There are two ways of describing the mistake in such an assumption. On one side it commits a central mistake which Kant noted in Garve's review (chapter 1), namely that of confusing the "transcendental" and the "transcendent." Kant's apparatus is taken to be a dual, empirical idealist, distinction between the empirical and the transcendent, just as Garve misunderstood it, when it is the threefold distinction between the empirical, the transcendent, and the transcendental outlined in chapter 5. The same point could be made by saying that such a view construes what Kant regards as a "formal" account of "minddependence" as a material and transcendent account. Kant draws that "formal/material" distinction initially at B88-89, and uses it as a diagnosis of the fault which Strawson ascribes to Kant. The problem is the same as that

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outlined in chapter 7 in rejecting the description of Kant's "transcendental psychology" as "transcendent" and "imaginary." Once these points are made to distinguish Kant's reformed idealism from its traditional predecessor the structure of his argument in the Aesthetic is clearer. The primary goal is the argument for, and establishment of, the reformed transcendental idealism just outlined. That version is compatible with an empirical realism and does not cast any genuine doubt on our ordinary recognition of the existence of objects of inner and outer sense. It allows us to accept, or, as he says, "assert" (B44, B52), an empirical dualism in place of the rejected transcendental dualism in the tradition. Three factors underline the claim that, contrary to Trendelenburg's view, the Aesthetic neither provides, nor is intended to provide, a proof of the reality of empirically outer objects. First, such a proof is provided only later in the B Refutation of Idealism; second, that in the Antinomies what Kant says he has proved in the Aesthetic is not empirical realism but only transcendental idealism; and third, the focus in the Aesthetic is not particularly on outer sense and outer objects, but on a priori modes of both inner and outer sense. The Aesthetic is an essay on both inner and outer sensory contributions to experience. Just as transcendental realism goes hand in hand with empirical idealism (A369-70), so transcendental idealism goes naturally with, but does not entail, empirical realism. Transcendental idealism allows the unqualified assertion of an immediate perception of outer objects with the rejection of the traditional priority of inner over outer experience, but it does not prove the existence of outer objects. In particular it does not attempt to prove their existence on the basis of the traditional idealists' prior inner experience. Traditional idealism is corrected by refusing to endorse a Cartesian immediate certainty only for inner experience coupled with a serious doubt about inference to an external world. In Kant's alternative space and time are necessarily connected to our mental powers but neither they nor their inhabitants occur only within the restricted inner world of Cartesian consciousness. The reformed version of idealism does not pose the question of skepticism about the external world but it shows why such a proof is unnecessary if there is no epistemic priority to be attached to inner experience over outer. I summarize Kant's position, as it has been outlined here, in the following four points: 1. Kant's primary project is that "inventorial" task of identifying and mapping the locations of the a priori elements, concepts and intuitions, in experience. That task can be carried out just as well by classifying either those elements or what they designate; by claiming either that our representations of space and time, or space and time

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themselves, are a priori and intuitive. Such a classification may have distant implications for traditional skepticism, for example about external objects, but these are not Kant's primary concern in the Aesthetic. 2. The primary goal is to establish the a priori and intuitive character of space and time, in the expositions, and to infer a reformed idealism which is compatible with, but does not yet prove, empirical realism. The resulting fourfold division of empirical/transcendental idealism/realism develops a transcendental alternative to empirical idealism. The arguments in the expositions are plausible but not totally decisive because they rest on contestable assumptions, for example, about the character of mathematics. The further step to transcendental idealism rests on two claims. First, that what is a priori may belong to objects of experience but cannot be derived from them and must at the transcendental level be conditions of that experience. Second, that if space and time are properly classified as "modes or ways of intuiting" they have an ineliminable reference to our cognitive powers. 3. Kant consequendy recognizes distinct transcendental and empirical uses of his key terms, "object" and "idea" or "representation." The empirical use of "idea" and of "mind-dependence" marks a distinction between what is stricdy mental and what is stricdy physical within our experience. The transcendental use marks a sense in which the whole of our experience is mind-dependent. That transcendental use draws a distinction between an immanent experience subject to our epistemic conditions, and what lies transcendentiy beyond that experience. Kant's transcendental claims have to be distinguished from both their empirical and their transcendent counterparts. 4. The argument discloses ambiguities in the notion of "mind(in)dependence." In traditional accounts of perception, the mindindependence of physical objects is their persistence even when unperceived. This, for Kant, is only an empirical use which defines empirical senses for both "idea/inner experience" and the contrasting "physical object." The empirical sense in traditional idealism raises at once the issue of justifying knowledge of outer objects, but Kant's transcendental idealism does not. Since the classification of space and time covers the whole of our inner and outer experience it does not specifically address an issue about outer experience. It allows Kant's transcendental idealism to assert, as he says, an associated empirical realism.

[10] Two Residual Issues from the Aesthetic: Sellars's and McDowell's "Myth of the Given"; Prolegomena §13 1. Myths of the Given Kant's position in the Aesthetic may be related to recent accounts of a "myth of the given." His rejection of traditional empiricism might be regarded as a repudiation of the myth, but his insistence on a separable contribution to experience from the senses might be regarded as an endorsement of it. I want to resolve those difficulties in measuring Kant's position against the "myth" by considering first Sellars's "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," in his Science, Perception and Reality (1963), and then McDowell's version in his Mind and World (1994). Sellars's original paper is a basic text for identifying the myth and is part of his more general philosophical position.1 In order to compare Kant's position with those accounts of the "myth" I restrict myself to the central aspects of Sellars's text. I first outline the relevant central themes in Sellars's paper, and then consider part of McDowell's account of Kant and his disagreement with Gareth Evans2 over "nonconceptual content."

1.1. Sellars's Account of the Myth of the Given Sellars recognizes that what he calls the "myth of the given" is complex, but at its heart is the central idea of a normative, traditional empiricist, epistemology that appropriate foundations for knowledge can be provided by what is "given" to the senses. In correcting this idea of a "given" Sellars aims also to correct that traditional epistemological foundationalism. Since "the given" may be classified as a private, mental "inner experience," "sensation," or "sense-datum," Sellars's criticisms will also be relevant to idealist foundationalism. In rejecting the myth of the given Sellars rejects a foundational role for what he calls "self-authenticating 193

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inner experiences" and opposes in this way not only a standard empiricist philosophy but also a central strand of Cartesian thinking. Sellars has litde to say explicitly about Kant, except to suggest that Kant-type references to "rationalist principles" and "synthetic necessary connections" provide another nonempiricist version of the myth of the given. Sellars takes Kant to offer what I have claimed he does not provide, namely a traditional antiskeptical foundationalist epistemology. Sellars does not stress, as I have done, Kant's wish to change, even reverse, aspects of traditional philosophy such as its idealist skepticism. There is, consequently, a doubt about Kant's subscribing to the "myth," but since the myth has many diverse forms we may ask more subdy which of them, if any, Kant would accept or defend. Sellars's arguments against the myth turn generally on a contrast between seeing the contentious "given," "self-authenticating," inner experiences either as "paradigm observables" or as "theoretical" items. The tradition preferred the former, but Sellars opts for the latter. He consequently gives some account of theoretical terms in science and adopts a philosophy of science which he calls "naturalistic" and "holistic." I shall consider only the more general priority he attaches to theory, or language, over observation in contrast to a tradition in which theory and language rest on observation. For Sellars our references to inner experiences depend on theory and language and do not constitute a prior paradigm observational base from which they derive. His arguments are all designed to establish the priority o f " . . . is . . ." over " . . . looks . . . " and so to reverse the traditional order in which the latter is the basis of the former, and the former is analyzable into the latter. Sellars rejects the idea that inner experiences have an intentional structure which parallels that of the ascription of properties to physical objects, and diagnoses the error as that of assimilating sensations to thoughts. In a final discussion he outlines what he calls a "myth to kill a myth" which explains how " . . . looks . . . " expressions might arise from ". . . is . . ." expressions without appealing to those traditional assumptions or priorities. It is intended to explain how we may be misled into thinking of inner experiences as if they had the intentional structure of what he calls "the space of reasons." Two central arguments rely first on an ambiguity and contradiction in the traditional notion of "the given," and second on an analysis of the "logic of 'looks'"; that is, the logic or grammar of our ordinary use of such expressions as ". . looks/seems/appears . . ." in contrast to " . . . is . . .". 3 I shall claim that neither argument is decisive in rejecting the myth. The first certainly identifies an ambiguity in the conception of "the given," but it may be resolvable; the second points to various aspects of the logic o f " . . . looks . . . ," but the arguments based on them are flawed.

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1.2. An Ambiguity and Inconsistent Triad Sellars believes that traditional conceptions of a foundational given responded to two competing requirements, namely that the foundation should (1) be an immediate sensory inner experience, and (2) provide an unassailable, "self-authenticating," truth from which inferences may be legitimately drawn. These lead to two different conceptions of the given, natural or normative: (1) (Natural, brute, causal): We sense particulars, not facts; sensing is not knowing; it is noninferential, prior to language and concepts, and an innate ability. (2) (Normative, justification, space of reasons): We sense facts; sensing is a form of knowing; it presupposes language and concepts, contains the possibility of inference, and is an acquired ability. These competing requirements produce an inconsistent triad: (a) 5 senses a red sense-content entails that S noninferentially knows that X (a particular) is red. (b) The ability to sense red sense-contents is innate, unacquired. (c) The ability to know facts of the form "X is red" is acquired, not innate. Two indicators suggest that this argument is not yet decisive. The first makes a reference to Kant, since his evident response is to abandon (a). His view is that sensing or intuiting by itself cannot constitute knowledge, and that knowledge arises only where intuitions and concepts are combined (B75-76). This is the central point, discussed earlier in chapter 7.2, which McDowell approves in Kant and which indicates a conception of the given not vulnerable to Sellars's objections. Sellars himself does not recommend eliminating every concept of the given, but he would insist that we have to choose between (1) and (2), and that if we choose (1) then this given cannot function as a normative foundation. Kant's position indicates that the choice between (1) and (2) may be artificial, and that his appeal to a notional, abstract conception of a sensory given, outlined earlier, may provide an alternative to both (1) and (2). A second doubt about Sellars's argument concerns the conflict between what is innate and what is acquired. In the post-Chomsky era we may be niore reluctant than Sellars to view either sensing or knowing as barely either acquired or innate. The point is reinforced if we talk not of particu-

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lar occasions of sensing or knowing but of the corresponding abilities. Fo r typically our abilities are not straightforwardly either innate or acquired and may have both innate and acquired components. Chomsky's "nativist" position is that our ability to speak English has an acquired component in our habituation to English words and syntax but an unacquired component in our ability to learn language generally. If we replace Sellars's talk of acquired or innate abilities with their acquired or innate components, then (b) and (c) cannot be accepted as they stand, and the inconsistent triad would have to be reconstructed.

1.3. The Grammar ofcc. . . Looks. . Sellars's account of the grammar of . . looks . . . " can be put under the three headings of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, though he does not divide them in that way. I shall not consider all his claims under these headings, but claim that the central syntactic and pragmatic accounts are inadequate, and that the semantic arguments on which the case ultimately rests are inconclusive. In discussing these arguments I shall talk, as Sellars does, o f " . . . looks . . . " although a more general point is made later in comparing ". . . is . . ." with the three modifiers " . . . looks/seems/appears. . . . " Sellars claims that expressions like " X looks red to 5" are not syntactically relational, determinate, or quantifiable, but to establish any o f these claims is to go beyond the mere verbal form of the expression. The expression seems to be relational, and to express a relation between X and S, or even between 5, X, and a look. If this apparent form is misleading, then something needs to be said of the semantic, not merely syntactic, character of the individual expressions and their relations. Typically what is said is that it is wrong to "reify" a "look" or to treat it as a determinate inter mediary between a subject and some state of affairs. Sellars does not deny this, and allows that a relational analysis might be acceptable, but that other, presumably semantic, considerations should turn us away from such an analysis. In a similar way his claim that such expressions are not determinate is indecisive. He contrasts the pair of expressions " C l e o p a t r a ' s Needle is (looks) tall," and says that the "is" form entails, but the "looks" form does not entail, a determinate height. It is not clear that we can draw conclusions from this about the nonrelational, nonquantifiable, or n o n p a r ticulate character o f " . . . looks. . . ." Patches of fog m a y be i n d e t e r m i n a t e in extent or density and yet we would not want to deny that they are particulars, can figure in relations, and may be quantified over. The pragmatic points are also inadequate. Sellars's central claim is that it would be wrong to think of ". . . looks . . . " expressions as r e p o r t i n g "an objective fact" with the same status as ". . . is . . expressions. The

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ground for this is that the difference between (i) "It looks to S as though X i s red" and (ii) "S sees that X is red" concerns only the diverse speech acts performed in these utterances. For Sellars the difference between (i) and (ii) is merely that the latter endorses the fact of X's being red while the former does not. To infer from this that (i) does not report any other fact, viz. that X looks red to 5, would require additional, and implausible, premises such as that to perform one speech act, failing to endorse, excludes xht performance of any other, reporting a fact. Of course (i) does not report the same fact as (ii) with regard to X's being red, but the intention is to deny that " . . . looks . . . " expressions report any fact at all, and that certainly does not follow. Sellars himself tacitly admits a defect in this line, when he talks of inner experiences forming a "common sensational content" in both utterances. But if (i) and (ii) indicate a common sensational content then the divergent speech acts performed in uttering them have no significance for that common content. If (i) reports the occurrence of that sensational content how can it be denied that it expresses a potential fact? We are left with the semantic considerations which involve the assumption that sensory properties, like color, are ascribed with the same sense in both ". . . looks . . ." and " . . . is . . ." expressions. Sellars, like other commentators,4 notes both the difficulties in such an assumption and the complexities it reveals. The suggestion is that the assumption cannot be accepted because inner experiences referred to by "looks" cannot have color properties in the same way as physical objects, for this would be to apply a physical color predicate to the quite different category of mental inner experiences. One problem here is that while some cross-categorial uses are plainly absurd, others are equally plainly not, as when we talk of both sets and their members, or of both individual incomes and national income, as "large." Without some general guidance about when such cross-categorial uses are legitimate or illegitimate particular claims of these kinds will be inconclusive. Sellars rightly notes, and plausibly explains, the difference we feel in talking on one side of "red experiences" and on the other of "experiences of red." The latter "intentional" idiom certainly seems more appropriate, and this is explained with the suggestion that it treats the "experience" as if it were a thought with a characteristic intentional articulation and "epistemic aboutness." Sellars claims that such a view is an error which confuses sensations and thoughts, when it might be said that preference for the intentional idiom is designed to avoid the error of ascribing color properties to mental events. In the end, these and other complexities in Sellars's semantic arguments make it difficult to regard them as decisive. It might have been better, though more boring, to question the underlying idea that there are any inner experiences that have the requisite "self-authenti-

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eating" character.5 This would be to reject the myth of incorrigibility in the given rather than to reject the given itself.

1.4. Sellars's Conclusions Sellars's conclusion, that . . is . . ." expressions are prior to ". . . looks/seems/appears . . . " expressions, could have been reached more simply. If we think of the latter, which are not restricted just to . . looks . . ." as expressions of a relation between a subject and a possible state of affairs, or as a modification of the relation between a subject and a state of affairs, then it is impossible to understand them without also understanding what it is to be a state of affairs. Even if such expressions refer only indeterminately to some item which looked/appeared F it would be impossible to understand its looking or appearing to be F without also understanding what it would be like to be F. In that evident way . . looks/seems/appears . . . " expressions all depend on " . . . is . . ." expressions, but we cannot immediately draw the conclusion that the dependence is only one way. It might be that the latter ". . . is . . ." expressions also depend on the former " . . . looks . . . " expressions so that the dependence between them is mutual.6 Sellars's own "myth to kill a myth" describes a situation in which a community uses ". . . is . . ." expressions without, at least initially, having any vocabulary for "looks," and this might be intended to rule out that second dependence. But such an argument is not conclusive because the issue is not merely whether ". . . is . . ." vocabulary might exist without " . . . looks . . . " vocabulary, but whether the former notion could be understood without an understanding of the latter. A community might use only the former expressions but still have a conception of an individual member's error-inducing relation to the relevant circumstances. Sellars's position remains ambiguous between a one-way or a mutual dependence between these expressions, and this indicates the first of several ambiguities in his conclusions which differentiate between the following conclusions: I Theory (or language, or the space of reasons) is prior to observation, not the other way round. I I Theory (or language, or the space of reasons) and observation are mutually dependent. Conclusions I and I I differ in the strength of their objection to the tradition. The first reverses the traditional dependence of theory on observation,

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but II merely corrects it by adding a dependence in a direction which the tradition had perhaps overlooked. I seems to have greater exposure in the paper and readers may naturally understand Sellars in these terms, but II is also expressed in a casual way (1963, 170). Further ambiguities in Sellars's conclusions are expressed in the following theses: III Understanding the expression " . . . looks/appears . . . " i s dependent on understanding the expression ". . . is . . ." IV Inner experiences (observations) are dependent on concepts (or language, or the space of reasons); the latter is prior to the former. V Inner experience is dependent on outer experience. Sellars's conclusions III and IV are expressed as one-way dependences, and it seems likely that he intended to express those strong forms, but both could be also part of a mutual dependence. Other ambiguities arise from the inclusion of "appears/seems" as well as "looks" in III, from the references to "concepts" and "language" in IV, and from the relationship between III and IV. Sellars's use of ". . . looks . . . " restricts his point to what Kant would call outer sense, but the same relation between what is the case and what appears to a subject to be the case arises for inner sense. It would not be expressed in terms o f " . . . looks . . ." but in terms o f " . . .seems/appears . . . ," but it marks the same relation between what is the case and what appears to a subject to be the case, and it shows a weakness in a tempting inference from III to V. If III is widened beyond the visual " . . . looks . . . " then we cannot infer from it that inner experience depends on outer. The same requirement in III will hold even if it is restricted to inner experience and makes no appeal to outer experience at all. If III holds, then what appears to me to be a migraine requires an understanding of what it is to be a migraine, whether my condition is that of a migraine or only a hangover. Without the restriction to a visual outer sense there is no valid inference from III to V. Even with that restriction V does not establish that the required outer experience is veridical; at most it claims that we cannot grasp that inner, visual experience without a conception of outer. A second ambiguity arises from the different references to "concepts" and "language" in IV. There is intuitively a difference between a subject's understanding some state of affairs and having an appropriate language with which to express it. The two are naturally connected, but having a language seems to be a standard and sufficient, but not a necessary, condition for grasping, having a concept of, some state of affairs. Intelligent responses to some situation on the part of a language-less creature might

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incline us to allow that it had some grasp of the concepts we might use t o describe the situation. The difficulty is to draw a line between that minimal nonlinguistic possession of concepts and other cases where there is a determinate response to some situation but without language or concepts. I suggest that there is no such sharp dividing line to be drawn and that decisions will depend on the kind, and sophistication, of observed behavioral responses. A further ambiguity arises because it remains unclear whether Sellars took I I I and IV to be the same, or whether IV was to be derived from I I I . It seems plain that I I I and IV are not the same if the former expresses a relation between our understanding of two expressions within a language while IV expresses a relation between nonlinguistic experience and language. But we might ask whether IV, in either its "language" or "concept" form, follows from III. It might seem to follow in this way: I I I attaches a priority to outer circumstances, designated by ". . . is . . ." expressions, over the inner experiences designated by ". . . looks . . . " expressions, so that the concepts used to express the former are necessary for the inner experiences designated by the latter. Such an inference will not hold without a restriction to the outer visual case o f " . . . looks . . . " for the reasons given earlier. The contrast between " . . . seems . . . " and ". . . is . . ." for inner cases may not require any concepts for outer experience, but even with that restriction the inference is ambiguous and doubtful. The best chance of validating it would be to consider whether any o f (i)-(iv) follow from a relativized version of III: I I I ' No S could have the concept " . . . looks . . . " without also having the concept ". . . is . . ." (i)

There can't be looks (inner experiences) without concepts or language to express them.

(ii)

There can't be & who have looks (inner experiences) without having concepts or language to express them.

(iii) There can't be 5s who have looks (inner experiences) without having a concept of the distinction between " . . . looks . . . " and " . . . is " (iv) There can't be Ss who have the concept of " . . . looks . . ." without having the concept o f " . . .is. . . ." The inferences which require a language are plainly invalid. There is n o good reason to deny inner experiences to subjects without a language, though the discussion of McDowell in 1.4 raises the issue, (i) does not follow from I I I ' or III, and independent support for it involves the

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a m b i g u i t y noted in chapter 7.2, where it was argued that for S to have inner experiences it is not required that S have a language to express them. The weaker claims in (ii) and (iii) in their "concept" form do not seem to follow from III or III'. They fail in the light of the earlier point that III and III' are about Ss who already have a concept of ". . . looks . . . b u t (ii) and (iii) make no such restriction, (iv) seems to follow from both III and III', but there is no valid step from (iv) to IV. On this evidence the best that can be said for IV is that there is so far no evident route to support it.

1.5. Sellars and Kant There is a major disagreement between Kant and Sellars in these conclusions. Kant's dependences are generally mutual where Sellars is either ambiguous or prefers a stronger one-way dependence. The relations in Kant between concepts and judgments in the metaphysical deduction, and between self and categories in transcendental apperception, are typical examples of mutual dependences, and in the present context the relation between sense and understanding provides another. Understanding depends on sensibility for its presentation of particulars, and sensibility depends on understanding for the determinacy of its concepts. Where Sellars seems to prefer I to II Kant evidently opts for II. It is a consequence of Kant's position that although he does not regard pure sensibility without the understanding as providing genuine knowledge he is prepared to make room for a notional separation of the two faculties. If Sellars's position, like McDowell's, excludes even that notional separation, then Kant subscribes to what both would call a "myth of the given," but the question is whether that Kantian view really is a myth. Beyond that major issue the comparison of Kant and Sellars is more complicated. At one point in the B preface Kant says something close to, but more complex than, III when he requires that the concept of appearance implies that of something that appears. The complexity arises because for Kant that implication can be taken either empirically or transcendentally whereas Sellars understands it only in the empirical sense. Taken empirically Kant's claim is equivalent to III, but taken transcendentally it is not. The former points to a connection in experience between the way things appear and the way they are, and assumes the existence and recognition of empirical objects of experience. Taken transcendentally Kant's claim is also that we cannot grasp transcendental appearances without having a parallel conception of a correlative transcendental object but it does not assume the existence or recognition of such things in themselves beyond any possible experience. Kant's primary

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interest is in the transcendental not the empirical claim, but Sellars's interests in pursuing the grammar of empirical uses o f " . . . looks . . . " and ". . . is . . ." are the opposite. Kant and Sellars may seem to agree on V, but provisos need to be made. Sellars does not make the claim explicitly, since his appeal to ". . . looks . . . " restricts the argument to visual inner experiences with an outer content. He does not express the more general Kantian claim from the Refutation of Idealism that all inner experience depends on outer experience. Kant claims that there is no viable inner experience without some outer experience; Sellars's claim is stricdy only that there can't be inner ". . . looks . . . " experiences without some outer experience. There is in this context too a difference between one-way and mutual dependences. Although Kant clearly accepts and claims to prove V, he also accepts V I Outer experience depends on inner sense, which Sellars is bound to reject in some form once he endorses the strong claim in I. That difference is evidently related to Kant's acceptance of a notionally pure sensibility with its universal reference to inner sense and a temporal form. The serious disagreements between Sellars and Kant arise from those two points: First, that Kant insists on a notional separation of sense and understanding, and second, that outer experience depends on inner sense. Sellars might not reject these claims out of hand, and accepts that outer experience depends on inner experiences so long as it is a brute, natural, causal claim with no relevance to a normative epistemology. In that case the disagreement between Kant and Sellars now moves back to the initial distinction between the natural and the normative, between (1) and (2). Sellars thinks that a philosophical belief in VT rests on the errors of ascribing to inner experiences an "intentionality and epistemic aboutness" which belongs only to thoughts, and of confusing philosophy and psychology. The suggestion is that the natural events under (1) are mechanical, causally determined, with no more cognitive significance than that of a thermometer's responding to temperature changes or a tree bending in the wind. Such events contain no possibility of reasons, argument, or justification, while those in (2) involve language, are intentional, and provide for a space of justifying reasons and inferences. That position implies a final criticism of Kant that even his sensory "given" can be understood only in a brute, natural, causal way which has no role to play in philosophy. Two general objections can be made to those views. First, it is not clear that the sharp contrast between natural, causal accounts in (1) and intentional, justificatory accounts in (2) can be sustained. Second it is not obvi-

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ous that we should accept the requirements of a normative foundationalist epistemology as binding for philosophy in general. Under the first point it is evident that causes and reasons are not exclusive. Creatures like us with a language and intentional references deploy them in a natural, causal framework. The question is whether creatures with perception but no language may be more than mere mechanical devices and have some kind of intentionality, but an answer to that question was already given. The claim in chapter 7.2 was that it is feasible to allow such subjects to have sense experiences with a content which we, but not they, can identify in linguistic terms. If there is room for the ascription to them of intelligent behavior, a derivative, vicarious intentionality can be ascribed to them so long as the circumstances support it. Observed behavior may turn out to be quite unthinking and automatic, even in the human case, but the required support for intelligent responses among language-less creatures is now incontrovertible.7 It enables us to draw a distinction between language-less creatures which allow a vicarious imputation of sensory content, intentionality, and thinking, and others which do not. In ascribing a space of reasons vicariously to such subjects there is no suggestion that they indulge in the philosophical arguments of a normative epistemology, but only that they fall neither into the class of metaphysically minded philosophers nor into that of mechanical devices like thermometers. That proviso still allows that language of some sort, at some stage, is necessary for the identification of sense contents, and for our imputation of such contents to subjects which lack language. Sellars is right to claim, even in that unrecognized deviant case, that sense experiences do not have that imputed structure, as it were, in their own right, or independendy of any appeal to language. Our language enables us to identify others' sense contents and to provide a framework of intentionality within which beliefs and reasons can function. It concedes Sellars's point that intentionality has its primary root in the use of language, but it does not draw his conclusion that to talk intentionally of "an experience of red" is just a mistake. In a similar way this outcome also marks a restriction on those accounts, noted earlier, which regard Kant's "appearances" as "intentional objects." They can be so regarded but, the suggestion is, only in that derivative, vicarious way which depends on our possession and application of concepts and language. Kant's distinction between appearances and concepts recognizes that derivative relation but insists on a notional separation of these cognitive powers. Sellars's second questionable claim is that any natural, causal account of sense experiences in V I is irrelevant to a normative epistemology which trades on the notions of justification and a "space of reasons." Here it niight be asked whether that traditional conception of a normative epistemology exhausts philosophical interests. If it does not then a natural

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account of inner experiences in VI, coupled with the account of vicarious intentionality, might have some relevance to a different philosophical project. What has been said of Kant already shows that some central aspects of that traditional normative project are not obligatory for philosophy. We might reasonably hold the view that there simply are no foundations of the requisite certainty which a skeptic demands, and attempt to understand the character of our experience without searching for such an unattainable certainty. We might, with Kant, question the authority of philosophy to raise skeptical questions about other disciplines, and choose instead to embark on a nonnormative metaphysics. If we ask whether there is room for a nonnormative or descriptive metaphysics of experience then Kant's transcendental topic and his inventorial project provide an affirmative answer Neither of Sellars's concluding criticisms of the Kantian view are decisive.

1.6. McDowell's Myth of the Given Sellars's final criticism of Kant's project is that it fails to distinguish philosophy from empirical psychology, and this is a criticism which McDowell also raises. He elaborates the myth of the given in such a way that no bare theoretical understanding of sense experience without understanding is coherent, and no resolution of the "blindness" problem is possible. For him what we call a sense content can be understood only within the scope of language or concepts which bring with them "the space of reasons," and he rejects an "even notional separation" of sense and understanding (1994, 51). The question is whether McDowell's grounds for his view are compelling, and I argue that they are not. McDowell considers the issue by examining and rejecting three arguments advanced by Gareth Evans (Varieties of Reference) in favor of "non-conceptual content." These are, first, an argument that sensory discrimination has a finer grain than conceptual discrimination; second, a parallel with what Evans calls the "testimony" system; and third, the claim that animals have a sensory experience without conceptual content. Although there are differences between Evans's conception of nonconceptual content and Kant's conception of a notional, purely sensory, contribution to experience, McDowell's position conflicts just as much with Kant. Of the three arguments against Evans, only the third has relevance to Kant. The first two issues concern specific claims in Evans's account which have no parallel in Kant at all, and McDowell's arguments in those cases do enough to question Evans's position, whose appeal to the "testimony" system was admitted to be unsatisfactory from the beginning. Everything turns on the third argument, directly relevant to Kant, which McDowell

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constructs against animals' sensory but nonconceptual experience. That argument is vulnerable to objections at three points. First, it is not obvious that any philosophical argument is needed to underpin a belief in such animal responses. Second, McDowell tacidy modifies his position by rejecting such a belief not because it is false, but because if it is true it is so in some technical psychological context distinct from philosophy (1994, 55). Third, his case ultimately rests on a recommendation that we should say not that we share animals' perception and have an additional capacity which they lack, but that we share only a "perceptual sensitivity" which we have in a "different form" (1994, 64-65). It is important to recognize that philosophical arguments have their limitations. A certain kind of intellectual pathology in philosophy arises from the construction of complex arguments against quite evident matters of fact, even those attested by the best explanations available to current science. Philosophical skepticism typically suffers from this disorder, and the point can be illustrated in relation to Kant's own dismissal of idle skepticism discussed in chapter 11. The current evidence about animal cognition is now so decisive that no philosophical argument, however subtle, can seriously undermine it. This first objection, then, merely insists on such evident facts of the matter and raises the question whether any philosophical argument could properly undermine them. McDowell himself offers such an argument: I am not saying that there is something wrong with just any notion of non-conceptual content. It would be dangerous to deny, from a philosophical armchair, that cognitive psychology is an intellectually respectable discipline, at least so long as it stays within its proper bounds. And it is hard to see how cognitive psychology could get along without attributing content to internal states and occurrences in a way that is not constrained by the conceptual capacities, if any, of the creatures whose lives it seeks to make intelligible. But it is a recipe for trouble if we blur the distinction between the respectable theoretical role that non-conceptual content has in cognitive psychology, . . . and . . . the notion of content that belongs with the capacities exercised in active self-conscious thinking (1994, 55)

What McDowell concedes for cognitive psychology, namely, that it can hardly get along without attributing content to inner states of creatures without conceptual capacities, should naturally be extended to ethology as well, or to any study of animal behavior. It is evident that McDowell's concession expresses just the position which I have attributed to Kant, and if it were not for the fact that McDowell offers the concession only to science but not to philosophy it would be hard to see why he should disagree with Kant at all. The disagreement is reinstated because McDowell insists on differential limits to cognitive psychology and armchair philosophy. It

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would, he thinks, be dangerous for philosophers to take over the apparatus of cognitive scientists, and for armchair philosophers to criticize those scientists. What is missing from the argument is any explanation of the sharp division between philosophy and science which seems to regard them, quite implausibly, as wholly disconnected from each other. How can philosophers simply disregard the results of respectable disciplines and their best explanations of the phenomena? If a respectable scientific discipline is able legitimately to use, or has to use, the relevant apparatus, how can philosophers reject or disregard it? If the notion of nonconceptual content makes sense in psychology, how can it be senseless in philosophy? One possible answer depends on a conception of philosophy as a normative epistemology concerned with the traditional problems of justifying our beliefs, but McDowell's position is not clear. On one side he recommends his own position because it answers a traditional skepticism, but on the other he expresses a wish to rid philosophy of such traditional issues.8 It has been already argued in the context of Sellars's criticisms that Kant's project does not belong in that traditional normative foundationalist category. Kant's different project in a descriptive metaphysics can accept what is coherent in psychology even though his real interest in the notionally separated senses lies in the identification of their a priori contribution and not their empirical operation. This part of the argument against Evans and Kant is inconclusive. The third argument is equally inconclusive, not least because it is structurally faulty. It offers an alternative way of describing animal responses, different from Evans's, which is recommended on the grounds that it avoids the errors of coherentism and the "myth of the given." The structural faults are, first, that merely to recommend an alternative does not establish that Evans's view is mistaken or unacceptable, and, second, that the recommendation now depends upon the earlier arguments about the myth of the given instead of providing independent support for it. McDowell's view is that we do not have to "factorize out," as Kant does in his abstraction or isolation procedure, the conceptual element in our experience in arriving at some understanding of a purely sensory response. He recommends that we think of ourselves not as sharing that sensory experience with animals and having additional conceptual capacities as well, but of sharing with animals a "perceptual sensitivity to the environment" but in a "different form" from them (1994, 64). Such a position would enable McDowell to say that he does not dispute the facts about animal intelligence but only one alternative description of the facts, but the difference between the alternatives remains unclear. In the argument against coherentism and the myth of the given McDowell's recommendation seems in danger of committing a circularity. Initially it

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s e e m e d as though the arguments against nonconceptual content were intended to support the objections to coherentism and myths of the given, but now those latter objections are recruited to support the former. If this is the structure of his argument then it is circular. Even if McDowell's alternative description is feasible it does not by itself offer any reason to accept it or consequently to reject either Evans's or Kant's position.

2- Prolegomena § 1 3 The discussion of the Aesthetic has presented alternative—traditionalist and revolutionary—accounts of the significance of Kant's distinction between appearances and things in themselves, and of his commitment to traditional idealism. These issues reappear throughout the Critique and Prolegomena (§32), but Prolegomena §13 presents the alternative views with a clear test. The issues concern the ascription to Kant of an exhaustive traditional dualism of subjective ideas and real things in themselves noted earlier in chapter 9.1.1. On one side, it may be thought that Kant's appearances, as "ideas," are no more than subjective mental states, inner experiences, and on the other, that real things are what Kant calls "things in themselves." To emphasize the former is to represent Kant as an "honest-to-goodness idealist" with a serious difficulty in justifying our belief in an independent physical world; to stress the latter is to represent him as a realist with an equally serious problem since he strenuously denies us any knowledge of things in themselves or their reality. Both accounts are at least in danger of committing Kant to a profound skepticism about our knowledge of the physical world despite the fact that he disavows such a commitment. Prolegomena §13 is important because in it Kant vehemendy denies that he is an idealist, and asserts, as he also does in the Prolegomena appendix, that his position is the opposite of idealism. Yet the passage is often taken to demonstrate his commitments both to idealism and to things in themselves. Traditionalists may appeal to the text to confirm one or other of these dual views, while revolutionaries may regard Kant's disclaimers as a repudiation of both. I outiine its central issues in 2.1, explain why it is susceptible to these two opposed interpretations, and offer a decision between them.

2.1. Major Issues in Prolegomena §13 The text contains a preliminary section on the status of space and time as a priori forms or modes of intuition, and three notes in which the idealist issue is confronted. Kant's initial point is to say that the difficulties of

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accepting his view are less serious than an alternative in which space and time belong not to the senses but to the understanding, and are consequendy represented as properties of things in themselves. An appeal is made to the argument from "incongruent counterparts," which had a preCritical history in Kant's writings9 but does not surface in the Critique. Note I discusses the Aesthetic issues (B56-58, B64-66) about the status of geometry on the alternative assumptions that space relates to things in themselves or to appearances. Kant's view is that the former casts an absurd doubt on geometry's "objective validity," while the latter preserves that validity against "the chicanery of a diseased metaphysics." The expression of that view already brings to light a typical difficulty which dogs his claims throughout the Critical works. He asserts that mathematics can have objective validity only in application to "objects of the senses," and expresses the general principle: "Our sensible representations never represent things in themselves, but only the manner in which they appear to us" (Ak. 4.287). One way of understanding such a claim, and reducing it to inconsistency, would be: Our sensible representations never represent things in themselves, but do represent things in themselves as they appear to us. So blatant an inconsistency could not seriously be what Kant intended, not least because he provides independent denials at B45 and B62 that things in themselves can be known through our sensible representations. "The true correlate of sensibility, the thing in itself is not, and cannot be, known through these representations . . ." (B45). The preferable and natural alternative is: "Our sensible representations do not represent things—as they are in themselves—, but only the way things (but not as they are in themselves) appear to us." In this reading we have to take references to such terms as "object," or "thing," in Kant's twofold manner, allow that objects are represented to us as appearances, but deny that they are represented to us as "things in themselves." They are what Kant calls "objects of the senses," "objects of experience," "appearances," or "phenomena." 10 Such an account escapes the absurdity of the first reading, and conforms both with Kant's own twofold conception of objects of knowledge or experience as either, correcdy, appearances, or, incorrectly, things in themselves (Bxxii-xxiii), and with the earlier discussion of space and time as relational "modes of intuition" (B65). This may seem a needlessly complex and implausible reading, but it rests on Kant's explicit views, and I claim that the complexity reflects the thought Kant expresses. Kant himself addresses the idealist problem direcdy in Note II. If the senses give us access to things not as they are in themselves but only to "their" appearances, and these are "sense representations," then must not "bodies and space" be no more than "ideas in us," and "exist nowhere than merely in our thoughts"; and "is this not transparent idealism?" Since these expressions, "ideas," and "in us," may be regarded as a decisive com-

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mitment to traditional idealism (in chapter 9), Rant's rhetorical question is effectively a recognition of that traditional objection and of the temptations of the earlier incoherent reading. Kant addresses the issue head-on and does not draw the idealist conclusion but repudiates it in the strongest terms. Kant's position is the "opposite" of an idealism now defined as the doctrine that "nothing exists save thinking beings and their ideas." I admit freely that there are bodies outside us, that is things which, although quite unknown to us as they are in themselves, we know through ideas provided by their influence on our senses, and which we call 'bodies', a word signifying only the appearance of those to us unknown but nonetheless real objects. Can one call this 'idealism'? It is exacdy the opposite. (Prolegomena §13, Note II; Ak. 4.289)

The initial clauses resolve the earlier problem of expression in the way suggested. What Kant unhesitatingly admits is the existence of "bodies outside us," that is, outer appearances, even though we have no knowledge of them as things in themselves. Such outer spatial objects are unknown as regards what they may be in themselves, but as appearances they have normal, empirical, causal relations with our senses. The point was made in relation to Kant's perceptual vocabulary at B32-33 and its causal implications in chapter 7. The concluding clause of the first sentence may seem to commit Kant to calling things in themselves "real" objects, and there are consequently three very different ways in which this repudiation of traditional idealism can be formulated: (1) There are real things in themselves that we call "bodies," and which causally affect our senses but are unknown to us. (2) There are real things that we call "bodies," which causally influence our senses but are only appearances of (other) "real," but to us unknown, things in themselves. (3) There are real things, "bodies," which causally affect our senses; these are known to us as appearances but are unknown to us as they are in themselves. Of these, (1) is implausible as a reading of Kant in its extensional identification of what we call "bodies," that is, appearances or phenomena or objects of experience, and things in themselves. Kant distinguishes between our ordinary knowledge of the causal influence of bodies on our senses and whatever causal properties may belong to unknown things in themselves, but the latter are not what we call "bodies." (2) reinstates that distinction but leaves a question about Kant's acceptance of appearances as

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appearances " o f ' things in themselves, and of the latter as "real" and yet unknown to us. (3) is closest to Kant's considered views, but may be thought to leave out aspects present in (2), such as that bodies, known as appearances, are "appearances of unknown but real things in themselves." One way of accommodating both (2) and (3) is Adickes's "double affection" theory in which parallel causal relations are envisaged between outer appearances and our senses on one side and things in themselves and our senses on the other. In chapter 23,1 examine and reject Adickes's claim that Kant has an unargued, and transcendent, commitment to actual things in themselves as an integral part of his explanation of experience. My claim is that Kant is committed to no more than the conceivability and meaningfulness of references to things in themselves, and that he holds consistently that we can neither strictly affirm nor deny their existence. From our ignorant point of view we may admit that they are real in their own way, "real per se" as he says in the preface (Bxx), but can have no knowledge either of their existence or nonexistence. The role of things in themselves in Kant's speculative philosophy is not to provide a transcendent explanation of the "mind making nature," but to diagnose and treat the inevitable temptation to conjure up such existents in philosophy.11 The central differences between the three claims are that (1), but not (3), makes a commitment to the actual existence of real things in themselves with causal properties despite the fact that we can know nothing of them. (1) repudiates traditional idealism with a commitment to the actual existence of unknowable things in themselves. (2) and (3) repudiate traditional idealism with a commitment to outer spatial objects as appearances which are not purely inner, mental ideas. Both in this section and in the Prolegomena appendix, Kant insists that his view is the opposite of a traditional idealism characterized in two related ways: Either as the claim that the senses are illusory and truth is to be found only in pure understanding and reason or as the doctrine that nothing exists except thinking beings and their ideas. Kant's view evidently reverses those claims by finding truth only in the senses, within the domain of appearances, and allowing in his empirical realism that empirically external objects exist. When he comes formally to refute idealism at B274 it is the existence of outer spatial objects, appearances, which denies idealism, and not the supposed existence of unknowable things in themselves. In the remaining paragraph Kant comments on a Lockean distinction between primary and secondary qualities and an opposed, Berkeleian idealism in the following points: (i) Primary qualities are held (by Locke) to belong to things in themselves, while others belong to appearances, and have no real existence apart from our representations.

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(ii) That I (Kant) assign even Locke's primary qualities to that latter class cannot be held to be a commitment to idealism. (iii) For my view is not, as in strict idealism, to impugn the existence of things which appear, but only to show that we cannot know things as they are in themselves through the senses. (iv) Perhaps to establish my nonidealist view I would have to say (with Locke) not only that objects conform to ideas but that the latter resemble the former; but I can make no sense of that. If (ii) is taken as a straightforward claim that all qualities are what Locke called "secondary qualities," it may seem to be a commitment to a Berkeleian idealism, but this overlooks two points. First, Kant does not use the phrase "secondary qualities" for his own account either in the Prolegomena or the Critique, and, second, he distances his own view both from Locke and from Berkeley. The disavowal of what Kant takes to be Berkeley's position is made in (iii), (iv), and in Note III (Ak. 4. 293), and the rejection of Locke is made clear in (ii) and (iv). Kant does not endorse either Locke's or Berkeley's position, but aims to outline a third view different from both. Nevertheless, in criticizing Locke's distinction Kant assigns all properties to the class of "qualities that have no real existence apart from our representations," and this contains a familiar ambiguity. That class may be taken to be that of mental events, "ideas" in the empirical sense, or that of items within possible experience, "ideas" or "appearances" in the transcendental sense. It may be objected to the latter that it reduces Kant's claim to triviality, but since he takes Locke's representative realism to be committed to things in themselves in (i) this is not so. The transcendental sense differentiates Kant from both Locke and Berkeley, and explains why he classes all sensory properties together without falling into idealism. It is consistent with earlier discussions in which Kant's conception of "minddependence" refers not merely to mental states, or inner experiences, but to what makes an ineliminable reference to our cognitive powers. That ambiguity explains not only how Kant distances his own position from those of Locke and Berkeley, but also why the passage is interpreted in the two radically opposed ways. It is all too easy to read into the text a commitment on Kant's part to some idealist conception of "secondary qualities," and to take him to assert an unqualified idealism in the face of his vehement denials and exasperation that he should be so misunderstood. He speaks of a transcendent metaphysics which aspires to things in themselves as "childishly chasing soap bubbles," and of a "twisted distortion" which confuses his transcendental idealism with the empirical idealism of Descartes and Berkeley. This is all reminiscent of the reply to Garve in the

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Prolegomena appendix and should be read in conjunction with that. Kant's intention must be to accept Berkeley's criticism of Locke's transcendental realism, but to reject Berkeley's inference from that to a "secondary quality" idealism which does impugn the existence of outer objects. His own position provides a third option, which rejects any combination of Berkeley's empirical idealism with Locke's transcendental realism and replaces it with the empirical realism and transcendental idealism outlined in chapter 9.

2.2. Things in Themselves and Appearances In Ralph Walker's Kant (p. 134) a comment is made on a passage towards the end of Prolegomena §13, where Kant expresses that vehement exasperation at having his doctrine misunderstood as a version of empirical idealism. Kant's rejection of such an idealism is expressed in the claim that it had never occurred to him to doubt the existence of those "things" which empirical idealism doubts. The problem, which arose earlier in distinguishing (1) and (3), is to decide which undoubted "things" mark Kant's divergence from a skeptical idealism. The alternatives are either "things in themselves" or "appearances," and Walker's claim is that Kant's commitment must be to the former. His view is that in the passage Kant claims never to have doubted the existence of things in themselves, although he concedes in a note that the claim is not made explicitly and that it is only "the context which makes clear that it is things in themselves Kant is speaking of." For Walker it is that undoubted commitment to the actual existence o f things in themselves which separates Kant from traditional idealism. The sentence in question reads: This idealism of mine concerned not the existence of things [Sachen] (doubts about which constitute idealism in the conventional meaning), for it had never occurred to me to doubt them,—it concerned only the sensible representation of things [Sachen] among which are space and time; and of these, and in general of all appearances, I have shown only: that they are not things [Sachen] (but merely modes of representation), and not properties belonging to things in themselves.

Walker's concession, that Kant does not explicitly commit himself to the existence of things in themselves, is correct. Kant refers explicitly to things in themselves only in the final clause, and otherwise refers only to "things" (Sachen) which might refer either to things in themselves or to appearances. That final reference to things in themselves is made in order to deny that space, time, and appearances belong to them. If it never

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occurred to Kant to doubt things in themselves in these terms, then he is committed not to spatiotemporal objects but to things which have no spatiotemporal, or sensory, properties at all, that is to things accessible not to sensibility but to pure reason alone. In these terms the things (in themselves) which conventional idealism is said to doubt are those nonspatiotemporal things inaccessible to the senses. Such a picture is almost totally at odds not only with Kant's denial that he has any positive knowledge of things in themselves, but also with his description of conventional idealism. It was noted earlier that for Kant traditional idealism, from which his own view is to be distinguished, is identified either as the view that the senses provide only illusion, and only reason yields truth (Ak. 4.374), or else that nothing exists save thinking beings and their ideas (Note II). If Kant's own view contains no doubt about the existence of things in themselves accessed through reason and not the senses, then it is identical with the former idealist position, and yet it is that form of idealism of which his own position is said to be the opposite. Similarly, since his own doctrine of empirical realism includes the existence of outer, or spatial, things (that is, appearances), it is also the opposite of the other idealist belief that only thinking selves and their ideas exist. These considerations indicate decisively that what Kant never doubted was the existence of spatiotemporal things in experience which he later proves in the Refutation of Idealism, and that he not only doubted the existence of nonspatiotemporal things in themselves but regarded them as tempting illusions. Kant represents empirical idealists as doubting sensible knowledge of empirically outer things, which he himself does not doubt, and accepting knowledge of things in themselves through reason, which he rejects. These conflicts with the context of Kant's evident position are so striking that it might be asked how the context could make it clear that Kant never doubted the existence of things in themselves. The answer may be that the use of Sache is taken univocally to signify transcendental thing in itself, even though such an identification cannot be reconciled with the claim that conventional idealists doubt the existence of such "things" as Kant conceives them. The particular sentence is not easy to construe, but that very difficulty counts against a clear indication that when Kant uses Sache he just means "thing in itself." He seems to draw a distinction between Sachen in the opening remarks about idealism and Sachen an sich in the final clauses, and the background context reinforces that. We have to take it that what Kant never doubted, unlike the idealists, was the existence of spatiotemporal objects of experience, that is, appearances, and not things in themselves.

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2.3. Identities and Equivalences In Rae Langton's Kantian Humility (pp. 158-61) there is an extended analysis of this same passage in the Prolegomena. It begins by drawing attention to a number of identities (p. 158) or equivalences (p. 159) which the passage is taken to assert. A fair sample of these can be given in the following sentence: (A) Things are given to us as objects of our senses situated outside of us, but of what they may be in themselves we know nothing; we know only their appearances, that is, the ideas which they effect in us when they affect our senses. (Ak. 4.289)

The following identities or equivalences are claimed to be asserted in that sentence: (1) Objects of our senses = things that are unknown to us as to what they may be in themselves. (2) Objects of our senses = appearances of things that are unknown to us as to what they may be in themselves. (3) Appearances = representations produced in us by things that are unknown as to what they may be in themselves. If these identities were straightforwardly asserted in that sentence then Kant's position would be impossible. Langton draws that conclusion and underlines it by demonstrating that it is a consequence of these identities that for Kant: (4) Representations = things that are unknown to us as to what they are in themselves. The evident absurdity could be taken a step further for we might just as well write: (5) Things that are unknown to us as to what they may be in themselves = things in themselves, and then it would follow that for Kant: (6) Representations = things in themselves. Langton argues from these consequences that Kant's position has to be adjusted, but in the light of this absurd consequence12 it is more plausible

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to argue that the interpretation has to be adjusted. The claimed equivalences or identities cannot be taken at face value. The quoted sentence can, after all, be quite naturally construed in the following way: (Empirical) things are (sometimes) given to us as outer, spatial objects of the senses, but of what they may be in themselves (apart from that sensible access) we know nothing; what we know are only "appearances" (of 1 3 those empirical objects), that is, the ideas (in a transcendental sense) which they effect in us. The decision between those alternative conclusions rests on the acceptability of the literal identities or equivalences taken from the original sentence. It may be said on one side that the sentence straightforwardly asserts those identities, or on the other side that the background to Kant's position shows that the sentence does not assert them. Two background factors are important; first, that the distinction involves philosophical positions which Kant rejects, especially those of Leibniz and Locke, and second, that Kant's distinction between appearances and things in themselves introduced in the preface Bxxvi-xxvii is to a first approximation an intensional, not an extensional,14 distinction which reflects those philosophical positions. Both points indicate that the terminology invokes different philosophers' conceptions of objects as "appearances," accessible to the senses, or "things in themselves," accessible to reason alone. According to Kant past philosophers, such as Leibniz and Plato, had mistakenly thought that we could know truths about objects things in themselves through reason alone. His view by contrast is that we can know objects only as appearances through sensibility within the sphere of possible experience. The point was underlined in the discussion of Walker since these divergences define the distinction Kant records between Eleatic idealism and his own account. It was also underlined in the earlier discussion of B45 and B62 in chapter 9.2, in which Kant denies a genuine "representative" relationship between appearances and things in themselves. Consequently the "extensional/intensional" distinction does not adequately capture Kant's account of them as different ways of conceiving objects. They are not different aspects or properties belonging to given objects (chapter 2; 2.4, 3.2.2), but can be understood as referring extensionally to objects of different kinds, namely to "objects of the senses" (appearances) and "objects of reason" (things in themselves). The "intensional/extensional" distinction is normally drawn within a given domain of objects, so that different intensional references can identify the same object in that given domain, but Kant's distinction is more complex and

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implies two distinct domains, the domain of possible experience and that of reason. The distinction would be understood in the normal way if the given domain of objects is specified as that of ordinary objects of experience such as tables and thoughts. Then the difference is that between taking those objects to be either necessarily related to sensibility (appearances) or related only to reason without appeal to the senses (things in themselves). But Kant's use of the distinction implies that these references may, in the hands of some philosophers, be not to the same "objects of experience" but to distinct objects in different domains, namely objects of sense and objects of reason.15 The contrast is then not between two different ways of conceiving the same, given objects of experience but between two distinct domains of objects, appearances/objects of experience on one side and things in themselves/objects of reason on the other. The intensional distinction then relates not to the same domain but to different extensional domains; the given, ordinary, world of experienced objects, and the Leibnizian or Platonic world of objects of reason, monads, forms, or things in themselves. Kant's use of the distinction carries with it a philosophical background and a diagnosis of philosophical error, which emphasizes the basic rationalist fallacy and is the basis for the Dialectic's account of philosophical illusion. Since he believes that the only objects able to provide us with knowledge are objects of experience he regards it as an error to attempt a legitimate reference to objects of reason outside that domain of possible experience. The claimed error of attempting such a reference to a world of things in themselves is oudined in the Aesthetic at B61-62 1 6 in criticisms of the Leibniz-Wolff philosophy. At B61-62 the claim is that Leibniz had confused a purely logical comparison of degrees of clarity in our ideas with an ontological distinction between different kinds of sensible and intelligible objects, that is, different domains of sense (appearances) and reason (things in themselves). The claim is that Leibniz's underlying monadic reality is different in kind ("different toto caelo," B61) from sensible reality, even though Leibniz conceived the latter as only a more confused representation of the former different from it only in degree of clarity. From Kant's point of view, however clear our sensible knowledge becomes, we can never break out of possible experience and can never attain any knowledge of things in themselves through reason alone. Even the profound knowledge of the physical world gained from Newton does not, according to Kant, provide such a view of an underlying reality. That denial o f the Leibnizian picture is made explicit at B313-14, 1 7 so that even Newton and even pure mathematics provide us with no access to the supposed world of things in themselves.

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Whether this is a fair account of Leibniz or not, it is Kant's picture of a philosophical difference between our knowledge of appearances, accessed through the senses and constituting the domain of possible experience, and an opposed idealist claim about knowledge of things in themselves achieved through reason alone. The issue is not whether Kant or Leibniz is right, or even whether Kant's account of Leibniz is correct or fair, but whether given these alternative views of the nature of objects of knowledge Kant's sentence (A) can reasonably be taken to identify the variously described objects. The discussion shows that the question is complex and cannot be answered by that simple identification. Evidendy the two descriptions, "appearance" and "thing in itself," cannot mean the same or be intensionally identical in that way. The preceding comments show that it is at best misleading to regard them as either extensionally equivalent or distinct because there are two different cases. In one the descriptions are taken to refer to the same domain of objects of experience, but in the other they are taken to refer to distinct objects in distinct, sensible and intelligible, domains. On Kant's view of the underlying philosophical issues there is an extensional equivalence in the former case, but not in the latter. In the latter case when Kant says that we know objects of the senses but have no knowledge of them as things in themselves he is not asserting, but denying, that we can extensionally identify objects of the senses with things in themselves. He is asserting that to construe those objects of the senses as things in themselves, to identify them in the way Leibniz does, is an error. In the former case the two references may be extensionally the same but only because, for Kant, it is a philosophical error to think that we know things in themselves confusedly through appearances. "It is not that by our sensibility we cannot know the nature of things in themselves in any save a confused fashion; we do not apprehend them in any fashion whatsoever" (B62). If it is objected that Kant has no right to assume the unquestioned existence of objects of experience there are two sufficient responses: First that in his descriptive inventory he is entided to make that assumption, since the project does not primarily address a traditional normative skepticism about such objects. Second that the issue here is not whether Kant is right or justified, but only whether his conception of the issues would support the kind of identification of appearances and things in themselves in A on which Langton's argument rests. The answer to that latter question is that the philosophical, and logical, background makes clear that Kant could not, in the Prolegomena passage, have identified appearances with things in themselves intensionally or extensionally. Nor can the relevant expressions be substituted salva veritate everywhere. Outer objects of the senses are, for Kant, transcendentally "mind-dependent" and knowable, but things in themselves are not.

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Langton's associated account of Kant's attitude to primary and secondary properties is also open to criticism. She takes it, on the basis of a discarded section from A28-29, that Kant accepts only Locke an primary qualities as "real" properties of objects, and ascribes a "scientific realism" to him on that basis, but two considerations cast significant doubt on this account. First, that the A28-29 passage was deleted from B, while a specific denial of the same point is allowed to stand in a note at B69-70. Second, that in the discussion in Prolegomena §13 Kant does not endorse the term "secondary quality" and can consequently reject both Locke's and Berkeley's accounts. The passage deleted in B at A28-29 says: " . . . the good taste of a wine does not belong among the objective properties of the wine . . . but to the special character of the senses in the relevant subject. Colours are not properties of bodies . . . but only modifications o f . . . sense. . . . " He goes on to insist on the important contrast between a posteriori sensations of color and a priori intuitions of space, in order to prevent our understanding the latter transcendental claim by assimilating it to the former. It is this contrast which is underlined in the B replacement in the note to B69-70: "The predicates of the appearance can be ascribed to the object itself, in relation to our sense, for instance, the red colour or the scent to the rose." Once Kant has made explicit his distinction between the empirical and transcendental uses of "appearance" and "thing" or "object" he accepts that empirical objects such as roses, which are "the things themselves" but evidently not "things in themselves," sometimes have the color and smell we ascribe to them. We might conjecture that the earlier passage was deleted because it conflicts with that more sophisticated account of appearances and objects. The second point, relating to the Prolegomena passage, conflicts with the facts that Kant himself does not endorse Locke's "primary/secondary" terminology, and that he assimilates all qualities to his version of the "secondary" qualities. Kant's position, as I have suggested, denies Locke's conception of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities, and in particular denies legitimate knowledge of the former, but he does not draw Berkeley's inference that all qualities are secondary in Locke's sense. Instead he claims that once primary qualities are rejected all qualities "have no existence apart from our representations," that is, all qualities are in some transcendental way "mind-dependent." Such a claim has misled commentators into assimilating Kant's position and Berkeley's, but since neither Locke nor Berkeley employs the distinction between the "empirical" and the "transcendental" his position cannot be assimilated to either. Kant's central point is to reject both Locke's transcendental realism and Berkeley's empirical idealism. If there were no further account to be given of that background distinction, or of Kant's alternative theory of empirical

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realism and transcendental idealism, or of the complexities in separating intensional and extensional uses of "appearance" and "thing in itself," then Kant would have to be convicted of the transparent absurdities ascribed to him by his Garvean critics. A more careful reading of what is admittedly a complex text shows that there are such alternative accounts.

P A R T

I I I

The Analytic of Concepts

Introduction to the Analytic of Concepts

Just as the Aesthetic aimed to isolate those a priori elements in our experience which belong to sensibility, so the Analytic of Concepts aims to isolate the a priori elements belonging to understanding. The latter elements are initially identified as particular concepts or categories, although their role is later specified in the Analytic of Principles through the judgments or principles in which they are used. Kant's position insists on the need for concepts in our fully developed experience, but it goes beyond an empiricist reference to the "workmanship of the understanding" in constructing concepts from a posteriori sense experience. Kant's claim, to be established in the metaphysical and transcendental deductions, is not merely that concepts express our experience but that certain concepts, the categories, make possible or constitute that experience and are necessary for it. Throughout the Analytic of Concepts Kant has consequendy two related tasks. The first is to identify the a priori concepts, "if there are any" as he says at A95, and the second is to explain their distinctive role. In both tasks Kant makes a fundamental appeal to logic, but that appeal is qualified in several ways. Kant's primary interest is in what he calls "transcendental" logic and not merely general formal logic. Although formal logic is used as a guide to the a priori categories, it is also associated with characteristic errors, such as that of confusing logical and real possibility, or being taken as an "organon" rather than as a "canon." As an organon it would supply sufficient conditions for material truths, which Kant thinks it cannot do, but as a formal canon it merely certifies the validity of arguments as a necessary condition of establishing truths. That distinction, between merely "formal" claims and their illusory "material" counterparts (B88-89), plays a general and important part in what is called a "logic of illusion" and is extensively discussed in the Transcendental Dialectic. Even in transcendental logic the a priori elements of understanding have, for Kant, a "formal" role which is only misconceived as a "material" ontology. The point 223

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is captured in the replacement of a "proud ontology" with a mere "analytic of concepts" (B303). In the Metaphysical Deduction Kant supports his use of judgment forms as a guide in identifying categories by claiming that judgments are prior to concepts, or that concepts depend on judgments and their forms. In the tradition philosophers had emphasized that judgments were composed of, and so depended upon, subjudgmental concepts. Kant, with more recent philosophers such as Frege and Quine, qualifies and corrects that natural view by insisting on a dependence in the opposite direction. The two dependences in opposite directions between judgments and subjudgmental concepts are entirely compatible and together form a typical Kantian mutual dependence. Concepts require a use in judgments, and judgments require concepts for their completion. The concepts initially identified as prospective categories are shown to function as "conditions of a possible experience," or as "conditions of the possibility of objects of experience," later in the Analytic of Principles. That summary of Kant's aim raises an important question for the Transcendental Deduction. If the Metaphysical Deduction identifies potential categories, and the Analytic of Principles establishes their role in experience and their a priori status, what is left for the Transcendental Deduction to do? The question is important because it places implicit limits on the scope of the Deduction and underlines a conflict between ambitious and modest accounts of its argument. The Deduction cannot properly trespass on the role of the Analytic of Principles by dealing systematically with the specific concepts listed in the Metaphysical Deduction, and the A and B texts do not deal with them in detail. In that way the Transcendental Deduction aims modestly at an account of categories in general and not ambitiously at a detailed account of each. It provides a general explanation of the role for categorial concepts whichever they may turn out to be. Yet to insist on modest and limited aims for the passage may seem to conflict with its formidable reputation as the centerpiece not only of the first Critique but of the whole Critical corpus. Kant encourages more ambitious accounts by talking of the "necessity to recognize its role," its "inevitable difficulty" (B121), and of its having cost him "the greatest labour" (Axvi). I argue that the contrast between modest and ambitious accounts has various dimensions, and that Kant's claims fall generally within the scope of the modest accounts. Its merits are not those of an ambitious and spectacular failure, which it is often claimed to be, but of a valuable and more modest pointer in the right direction for a reformed philosophy. Commentators have typically followed Kant in taking the Deduction to offer a profound, and profoundly difficult, philosophical exercise, but they have disagreed about its aim, its procedures, and its ultimate success. For

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some it is an exercise in a traditional normative epistemology which offers a philosophical justification for our knowledge of objects, or for our belief in the real existence of an "independent" world. Since those "objects," and that "independent" world, are often identified as outer, that is, spatial or physical, objects the passage may consequently be understood as Kant's definitive answer to traditional idealism. Understood in that ambitious way the passage would implausibly duplicate the later Refutation of Idealism (B274-77). In that case the introduction in B of that formal Refutation might have been expected to lead not to the revision in B of the A argument but to its deletion. This points again to a more modest conception of "object" and of "objectivity" in the argument, which, I argue in chapter 14, does not concern what have been called "weighty" objects. In a similar way I claim that the Deduction is not designed ambitiously to provide sufficient conditions for, or to guarantee, our knowledge of an independent reality, and that it deals only with conditions necessary for a viable experience. It is designed not to answer the challenge of traditional skepticism but to describe the fundamental structure of our experience. Although the Transcendental Deduction is not an antiskeptical exercise of that ambitious sort it is related to one particular form of skepticism. Kant's primary aim in the passage is to defeat an empiricism which denies the existence of, and any possible role for, a priori concepts. The central aim is to show how it is possible for a priori concepts, independent of experience, nevertheless to play a legitimate immanent role in experience. That limited, modest aim is expressed clearly at A128-29: This is all that we were called upon to establish in the transcendental deduction . . . namely to render comprehensible this relation of understanding to sensibility . . . and so to all objects of experience. The objective validity of its pure a priori concepts is thereby made intelligible and their origin and truth determined.

The aim is to show generally how such a role is possible in a connection between a priori concepts and their instantiation in our sense experience. That the specific concepts listed as categories in the Metaphysical Deduction really fulfill that general role in experience is shown not in the Deduction but in the Analytic of Principles. Since both A and B versions of the Deduction appeal to our psychology and our fundamental cognitive powers the argument may also be regarded ambitiously as Kant's defense of the claim that "the mind makes nature." In the Deduction Kant talks, in a consciously figurative way, of the understanding as "legislating for nature," and of our "imposing laws on nature" (A127-28). It is not surprising that the passage is sometimes taken to reveal that ambitious traditionalist picture of transcendental idealism, but I argue

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that these views misrepresent Kant's aims and his overall theory. Once it is recognized that Kant himself rejects a literal, causal psychological account of "the mind making nature" as an explanation of his version of idealism the striking image of our "imposing laws on nature" has to be understood in a more modest way. In chapter 14,1 consider Kant's conscious attention to that issue in his account of what he calls the "subjective Deduction." If that is to be understood as a psychological project then Kant's view, in line with his general renunciation of psychology, is that it is inessential to his real purpose. In the 1930s a discussion arose about the formal argument in the Transcendental Deduction between Vaihinger and Kemp Smith, who claimed on historical and textual grounds that the passage was an objectionable "patchwork," and Paton, who denied this. This raises a further division between an ambitious account which represents its argument as a continuous, unified, but puzzlingly incomplete, formal deduction. Such a view may concede that Kant failed adequately to complete the proof and even attempt to supplement the steps with additional premises and subsidiary inferences, but most commentators who take this ambitious view regard the argument as unsuccessful. I shall claim that the central texts are not monolithic in that formal, dogmatic rationalist way and are not intended as a strict deductive argument. Parts of the argument, like any philosophical exercise, can be formally presented, but other more modest and more appropriate models have been suggested. Henrich has drawn attention to the legal model of Deduktionsschriften in eighteenth-century German law courts, and Hinske stresses Kant's commitment to a functional model in which the parts of the argument work together like the limbs of an organism. These are better models than that of an overall logical deduction, though even they are limited. Kant's overall argument is a patchwork of diverse considerations, but not one which constitutes an objection to his claims or his procedure. In chapter 11, I examine one dimension of the distinction between modest and ambitious claims for the argument, namely Kant's complex attitude to skepticism. In chapter 12,1 outline and discuss Kant's preview of the Analytic of Concepts and the Metaphysical Deduction, and in chapter 13 summarize the central points of the A and B versions of the Transcendental Deduction. The discussion is guided by Kant's preliminary account of the Deduction in §§13-14 which remains substantially unchanged in both editions. In chapter 14 three procedural issues are discussed. First is Dieter Henrich's claim that the B version is superior to A because it incorporates Kant's "two-step" inference in the account. Second is the issue about the role of psychology in the argument and the "subjective" deduction. Third is a review of different ambitious and modest aims which commentators have attached to the Deduction, including a discus-

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sion of what have been called "weighty objects." In the two final chapters, 15 and 16,1 consider first Kant's notion of a "conceptual unity" and second his notion of "personal unity" as twin parts of what he understands by "transcendental apperception." Two central points of discussion in those final chapters have to do, respectively, with Kant's notion of "objectivity," and his initial treatment of the self and self-knowledge. The issue of objectivity brings with it a discussion of Kant's requirements for acceptable notions of truth and reality. The issues of self-knowledge concern Kant's distance from a Cartesian "cogito," and his complex account in B of the psychology, the epistemology, and the metaphysics of the self. The former issue is related to contemporary discussions of a "quest for reality" and of "antirealism"; the latter is related to some contemporary debates about a "unity of consciousness."

[11] Kant and Skepticism

Despite the fact that Kant has been frequently taken to be a normative epistemologist with the primary aim of challenging or refuting skepticism, he would certainly have qualified and probably rejected such an interpretation. Kant's attitude to skepticism is more complicated than that naive interpretation suggests for at least two reasons. His own revolutionary project, as a descriptive metaphysics of experience, does not directly address traditional skepticism, and traditional skepticism is itself a complex network of ideas covering diverse topics and different grounds for doubt.1 That descriptive project can be pursued without directly involving any forms of skepticism, and it is not clear how it is intended to engage with traditional skepticism, or which versions of skepticism are targeted. It is not clear that Kant wished to refute a general skepticism about knowledge, or that his own positive account of experience was intended to guarantee scientific or everyday beliefs against skeptical attack. Nevertheless, one influential account of his philosophy represents its principal goal as offering such a guarantee by means of distinctive transcendental arguments. Kant undoubtedly addresses some skeptical issues in the Critique but also, as I indicate, dismisses some traditional versions of skepticism out of hand. These complications make it necessary to separate the two kinds of case, and to understand how Kant attempts to deal with the forms of skepticism he does take seriously. Because the issue involves the notions of "objectivity" and "objective reality" in the Transcendental Deduction I offer a preliminary survey of the issue at this early point, but it has implications for Kant's overall project and for all major sections of the Critique. I consider in 1 Kant's complex attitude to skepticism and "skeptical method,"; in 2 his view of skepticism and common sense; in 3 the supposed role of transcendental arguments against the skeptic; and in 4 a summary account of his strategy against empiricist skepticism. 229

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1. Skepticism and Skeptical Method Kant's general view of philosophical skepticism has already been expressed through his reversal of a philosophical skepticism in which doubt is cast by philosophy on knowledge in other areas or disciplines. Kant accepts knowledge in science and directs his doubts against the authority of philosophy to question knowledge in other areas. There are for Kant serious and resolvable issues about the character of knowledge in the sciences which carry over to the character of similar, a priori, knowledge in philosophy, but this is not a traditional skeptical doubt. The serious issues for him concern the structure, articulation, and classification of scientific and philosophical claims and systems. Kant accepts a genuine status for scientific knowledge in order to make the comparison with, and provide a model for, a reformed philosophy itself. Consider these passages: There is no need of a critique of reason in its empirical employment because in this field its principles are always subject to the test of experience. Nor is it needed in mathematics where the concepts of reason must be exhibited forthwith in concreto in pure intuition so that everything unfounded and arbitrary in them is at once exposed. But where neither empirical nor pure intuition keeps reason to a visible track, when, that is to say, reason is being considered in its transcendental employment in accordance with mere concepts it stands so greatiy in need of a discipline to restrain its tendency towards extension beyond the narrow limits of possible experience, and to guard it against extravagance and error, that the whole philosophy of pure reason has no other than this strictly negative utility. (B739; see Bxxv-xxvi; B858-859 2 ) Geometry . . . proceeds with security in knowledge that is completely a priori and has no need to beseech philosophy for any certificate of the pure and legitimate descent of its fundamental concept of space. (B120) Pure mathematics and pure natural science had no need, for their security and certainty, of such a deduction as we have just completed. The former is based on its own self-evidence, and the latter, despite its origin in pure sources of the understanding, is based on experience and its thoroughgoing confirmation. . . . Both sciences had no need of the investigation to be undertaken for themselves; it was carried out for another science, namely metaphysics. (Prolegomena §40; Ak. 4.327)

These quotations make plain that for Kant what is in doubt, and what needs to be validated, is philosophy itself. It is part of his belief in the need for reform in philosophy that it should undergo an examination in order to establish and circumscribe its legitimate authority. Kant's reversal of that skeptical tradition is not the result of some argument, but expresses his dissatisfaction with the lack of progress and clarity in school metaphysics and his wish for a more fruitful program in philoso-

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phy. It points to the need for reform and guides his revolutionary project and its method of investigation. His view is that philosophy cannot proceed in its customary way until its credentials and authority have been properly examined in a comparison between science and philosophy The point is made forcefully in a quotation cited earlier from the Prolegomena preface. My intention is to convince all those who find it worth-while to pursue metaphysics: that it is unconditionally necessary to set aside all their previous work, to disregard everything in it that has been done up to now, and before anything else to ask the question: "Is any such thing as metaphysics even possible?" (Ak.

4.255)

The passage testifies to the radical nature of Kant's proposed revolution in metaphysics, and underlines his legitimate complaint against Garve that he never looked beyond the standards of a "school metaphysics" endorsed by both traditional dogmatists and skeptics (chapter 1). The authority claimed by dogmatic rationalists was their insight into truths beyond any possible sense experience through reason alone, and the authority claimed by skeptical empiricists is their right to question, and reject, claims to knowledge in the established sciences. Kant was not prepared to accept either authority, although he had more sympathy with the empiricists (B513-14, B788-89). Kant does not dismiss all forms of skepticism in that programmatic and unargued way An idealist skepticism about the external world is explicitiy addressed and formally rejected in the Refutation of Idealism at B274-79, but the quotations already indicate that Kant has a generally dismissive attitude to a general philosophical skepticism. In some places the clear message is that skepticism is a wholly futile exercise not worth dignifying with an argumentative response. There is a principle of doubt, consisting in the maxim of considering knowledge with the aim of. . . showing the impossibility of achieving certainty. This is the sceptical mode of thinking or scepticism. It is opposed to the dogmatic mode, or dogmatism, which places a blind trust in the capacity of reason to spread itself a priori through mere concepts without criticism in the hope of apparent success. Both methods . . . are faulty. There are many types of knowledge which we cannot treat dogmatically, and on the other side scepticism inhibits all our efforts to achieve certainty by casting its doubt on all claims to knowledge. The more damaging such scepticism is the more useful . . . is the sceptical method, by which I understand the manner of treating something as uncertain, bringing it to the highest pitch of uncertainty in the hope of getting on the track of truth. This method is properly a suspension of judgement. It is valuable to critical thought as a means of investigating the sources of our claims

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or objections and the grounds on which they rest. It is a method which holds out the hope of achieving certainty. There is no place for scepticism in mathematics and physics. Only that knowledge is vulnerable which is neither mathematical nor empirical, that is, pure philosophy. Absolute scepticism represents everything as illusion. It thus distinguishes illusion from truth, presupposes a criterion for the difference, and so some knowledge of truth, and thus contradicts itself. (Logic, Ak. 9.83-84)

Kant reinforces his priority of questioning philosophy before allowing skepticism a free rein to question other knowledge, but also importantly distinguishes "skepticism" and a "skeptical method." The former is treated as damaging in its exclusively negative aim of denying knowledge or certainty, and is dismissed with the brusque claim that it contradicts itself. That dismissal is all the more peremptory since the argument in support of it is not obviously valid.3 That summary response is agreeably robust in rejecting one form of philosophical excess and indicates that it does not deserve a more carefully argued refutation. Skeptical method on the other hand is commended as Kant's own technique not for arbitrarily denying but attaining knowledge by refining and strengthening current beliefs in specific ways. The same points are underlined in the Critique. This is the great utility of the sceptical mode of dealing with the questions pure reason puts to pure reason itself. By its means we can deliver ourselves at but a small cost from a great body of sterile dogmatism, and set in its place a sober critique, which as a true cathartic, will effectively guard us against groundless beliefs (B513-54) While the Transcendental Dialectic does not by any means favour scepticism it certainly favours the skeptical method. (B535) To allow ourselves simply to acquiesce in these doubts and thereupon to set out to commend the conviction and admission of our ignorance not merely as a remedy against the complacency of the dogmatists but likewise as the right method of putting an end to the conflict of reason with itself is a futile procedure (B785)

For Kant a method of doubt is valuable in rejecting dogmatism and as the basis for Kant's proposed therapy in the Dialectic, but what might be called "philosophical" skepticism itself is idle and futile. In other passages Kant has more pointed objections to skepticism. All objections divide into dogmatic, sceptical, and critical. . . . Dogmatic and sceptical objections alike lay claim to such insight into their object as is required to assert or deny something in regard to it. (A388)

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For Kant both dogmatist and skeptic claim knowledge where they can have none, in the realm of things in themselves beyond any possible experience of ours, and the difference between them is that the former asserts claims in that realm while the latter denies them. Kant's critical view is that in such speculative cases we cannot know either way and should reject both dogmatic and skeptical claims and this is a basic Kantian strategy in the Dialectic for diagnosing and treating philosophical illusions.4 In the Dialectic an important proviso is made for the practical and moral, rather than the speculative and theoretical, Ideas of reason, and that is considered in discussion of the Dialectic. For the present I focus exclusively on the speculative claims.5 If we call the general skepticism that Kant dismisses a specifically "philosophical" skepticism, then the passages express a refusal to take philosophical skepticism seriously, not because its arguments are inadequate or refutable, but because it is absurdly motivated and yields unwelcome, counterproductive consequences. Its motivation is represented as the arbitrary and exclusively negative denial of any knowledge or certainty, and its futile and counterproductive consequences are to inhibit genuine enquiry by focusing attention on issues which are in principle undecidable and not worth debating. It distinguishes what has been called an "idle" skepticism from the more useful skeptical method.6 The two criteria for "idle" skepticism, a negative motivation to reject every form of knowledge and a method of achieving that goal by making knowledge unattainable, have the consequence of rejecting any claim to knowledge. Perhaps few philosophers in the tradition have consciously adopted such a motive, but there is no doubt that some have committed themselves to its negative consequences. It might be thought that contemporary philosophers endorse neither such motives nor their consequences, and yet it is not difficult to find cases where the latter criterion is satisfied. Anyone who canvasses skepticism about knowledge in general by requiring that it is justified only where all possibilities of error have been eliminated is at least in danger of falling into that category.7 It is quite evident that in empirical circumstances there simply is no way in which that criterion can be met whatever kind of possibility is canvassed. To require that it must be satisfied in genuine knowledge is inevitably to deny the achievement of any empirical knowledge. With that background, Stroud's claim that "the sceptic will always win going away"8 is bound to hold. I consider in 3 some recent responses to these skeptical issues. Kant's point indicates that the skeptic's victory in this case is hollow and futile, and he underlines that attitude in his comments on Leibniz in the Amphiboly Skeptics might say that to disregard the requirement of eliminating every possibility of error just shows how slipshod our ordinary standards are, and bemoan the failure ever to achieve genuine knowledge.

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Others may take the view that the standard proposed is inappropriate and unachievable, think it foolish to bemoan our inability to achieve it, and regard a skepticism which canvasses it as "idle." Kant comments on this in the following passage: "If by the complaints—that we have no insight whatever into the inner nature of things—it be meant that we cannot conceive by pure understanding what the things which appear to us may be in themselves, they are entirely illegitimate and unreasonable" (B333). He recognizes that we may, like Leibniz, be tempted by the goal and be "eager to explore" those hidden inner natures (B334), but he insists throughout the passage that it is futile to aim at such an unachievable goal. When he talks at B517 of empirical experience as setting the standard for truth or knowledge he implicitly rejects the skeptical standard of eliminating every possible error. These remarks, coupled with his dismissive attitude to "philosophical skepticism," indicate that he did not take these issues as seriously as the tradition or some contemporary philosophers. I think he is right in this but the point has not been demonstrated. To reject these forms of philosophical skepticism is, as Kant insists, not to reject all forms of philosophical enquiry. If the enquiry is designed to find a satisfactory analysis of some concept, or to resolve an issue about concept dependence in a transcendental topic with the prospect of a determinate outcome, no such objection can be raised. If questions are raised in a context where either the criterion for their resolution is already clear, or where attention focuses on finding agreement about such a criterion, there is a hope of such an outcome. Because these cases focus on the prior question of agreeing on the criteria for resolving the problems they would be included in Kant's approved deployment of "skeptical method." His point about idle skepticism is that it may seem profound and unanswerable because it offers no clear criterion to determine what would justify knowledge or settle the doubt. The objection is to cases where either the criterion to be satisfied is evidently impossible to achieve, or where no clear criterion is in prospect so that the issue becomes confused and oscillates between dogmatism and skepticism without ever finding a resolution. Such a situation and such an outcome are what Kant describes in the Prefaces (Bxv), the Dialectic (B492), and the Doctrine of Method (B775) as the "mock debates" and futile arguments into which metaphysics has disreputably fallen.9 Idle skepticism is a paradigm case for Kant of the disreputable character of a routine school metaphysics.

2. Kant's View of Skepticism and Common Sense Any philosophical argument characteristically involves questions of justification, and any such question may be said implicitly to cast doubt on the

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questioned item. Kant's interest in both skepticism and skeptical method is more pointed, and two skeptical issues already identified mark that more pointed interest. Kant is certainly concerned with a traditional idealist skepticism about our knowledge of the external world in the Refutation of Idealism, and he is concerned with a skeptical issue about philosophy's authority to raise doubts about the sciences. Though he is interested in both issues he approaches them from opposite directions. The former idealist issue is addressed with the aim of refuting a skepticism about our knowledge of the external world, but in the latter he endorses a skepticism towards traditional philosophy. In the former he argues consciously against skepticism but in the latter he supports a skeptical doubt. Both issues concern peculiarly philosophical issues, but Kant also raises the question of their relation to common sense and everyday belief. In the Prolegomena preface he makes clear that an appeal to common sense, to what he calls "common human understanding," is not sufficient to refute a Humean skepticism, and he makes unflattering remarks about both common sense and those who deployed it against Hume (Ak. 4.258-62). 1 0 I have separated that appeal to common sense against Hume, which Kant rejects, from his evident appeal to ordinary experience for the purposes of his own metaphysical project. In order to identify and isolate the salient features of experience in a transcendental topic, as a priori or a posteriori, as fundamental Grundelemente or not, as belonging to sense or to understanding, Kant has to take experience as it is. This is not to use it as an antiskeptical resource but only as a datum from which his philosophical enquiry derives its basic material. His project, understood in these terms as a descriptive metaphysics of experience with its "inventory" of the a priori elements in experience, is skeptically neutral. Understood as an endorsement of common sense in order to criticize Hume's skepticism, it begs the question and conflicts with his objections to Reid, Oswald, and Beattie. In the two cited cases, skepticism about outer objects and science, Kant identifies issues of a peculiarly philosophical kind. Ordinary common sense is not much exercised by an idealist skepticism about the external world or by the issue of philosophy's authority to raise doubts about the sciences.11 Kant's intended reform of philosophy might interest those already concerned with metaphysics but it marks only a distant relation and oblique threat to commonsense beliefs. Such an account is partly disputed by Paul Guyer in his "Kant on Common Sense and Scepticism" (2003, 1-37). 1 2 His view is that Kant's interest in skepticism engages even common sense and is governed by what Kant calls a "natural dialectic of reason." I consider only the speculative and theoretical, and not the practical and moral, issues and summarize his central claims:

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Kant organises the exposition of his entire philosophy as a response to scepticism as he understands it. . . . [In the Dialectic the target is a] Pyrrhonian scepticism engendered by the natural dialectic of human reason. . . . [These issues are] . . . never a product of mere philosophical theory (as empiricism's scepticism about the concept of causation might be thought to be) but are natural and unavoidable products of human reason. This account will certainly be part of philosophy, not common sense, although it must be accessible and ultimately acceptable to common sense. (Guyer 2003, 3-7)

Guyer is right to stress the Dialectic's discussion of skeptical issues in the Antinomies, the conflicts of reason with itself, and he is right to say that those issues are not purely philosophical. The cosmological Antinomies arise out of physical science and exercise theoretical scientists as well as philosophers. But their scientific origin, and the dogmatic belief in the power of reason to provide definitive answers to their questions about the beginning of the universe or the infinite divisibility of matter, do not make them matters of commonsense belief. Common sense rarely has convictions on these matters, and Kant's interest in the issues is in part to be determinedly skeptical about the power of reason to provide any such resolution. In chapter 2 6 , 1 show that Kant's resolution of the Antinomies does not deny the ability of science to raise and answer their cosmological questions, but turns on the mistaken attempt of philosophers to answer the questions by reason alone. What is spurious is the dogmatic understanding and purported resolution of the issues, not the scientific issues themselves. A properly critical reason can show in this way why the philosophical issues are unresolvable, but this is itself a higher-order philosophical enterprise. Reason in this context is not a common sense faculty but one involved in high-level theoretical thinking, whether scientific or philosophical. Much of what Guyer says is undeniably correct and yet it puts the skeptical issues, and Kant's antiskeptical response, at the forefront of the Critique's interests in a way which I have denied in the speculative sphere. I have argued that Kant's central project is not that of an attack on skepticism in general but of a descriptive metaphysics which discloses the a priori structure of our immanent experience. The project has implications for skepticism, but it is not driven solely or primarily by that goal, is targeted at specific skeptical issues, and draws a clear distinction between the practical and the speculative contexts. Guyer claims that the same relation holds between common human reason in both speculative and practical contexts, but in the passage from which he quotes in the Grundlegung Kant separates them quite sharply: "In this way common human reason is

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impelled not by some need of speculation (which never touches it so long as it is content to be mere sound reason) but on practical grounds . . . to take a step into practical philosophy . . ." (Ak. 4.405). The suggestion is that in the practical context there is a serious skepticism about moral principles affecting ordinary experience and conduct which is not matched in speculative matters. In both cases Kant allows that the philosophical issues arise for "common human reason when it cultivates itself" but it seems that the interest in such cultivation is closer to ordinary practical than to speculative experience. Ordinary people naturally sometimes wonder about the ground for supposed moral demands made on them in a way in which they do not wonder about the indivisibility of matter or the existence of an external world. It is trivially true that if philosophy offers an account, skeptical or nonskeptical, of our ordinary or scientific experience then this will make claims about that experience, but it doesn't follow that those claims are commonly endorsed by ordinary experiencers themselves. Guyer is right to stress that such claims are part of philosophy rather than common sense, but he seems to hold that philosophical skepticism will have implications for, and seriously threaten, our common sense beliefs. It is not clear that even philosophers should accept that implication, but it is clear that common sense does not. Does anyone, even among philosophers, really believe that idealist skepticism seriously threatens our ordinary beliefs about the external world? Typically such lurid skeptical claims are interpreted to mean not that our common beliefs are seriously dubious, but that we are unclear how to analyze or explain them philosophically. That uncertainty belongs to philosophers rather than to common sense, and it doesn't follow from the philosophers' uncertainty that the common sense beliefs are uncertain. Kant's own account of the philosophical commitments of common sense is more complex than, and rather different from, Guyer's account. When Kant considers the "interest of reason" in the conflicts of the Antinomies he draws a sharp distinction between the speculative and practical concerns of common sense and in the former represents common sense as thoroughly dogmatic and hostile to an empiricist skepticism. The former claim is surely right: common sense typically may have an interest in a supernatural God as creator of the universe, or in applied moral issues, where it has littie in philosophical controversies about idealism or physical cosmology. The points are well expressed at B500-502: The common understanding, it might be supposed, would eagerly adopt a program which promises to satisfy it through exclusively empirical knowledge . . . in preference to the transcendental dogmatism which compels it to rise to concepts far outstripping the insight and rational faculties of the most practised

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thinkers. But this is precisely what commends such dogmatism to the common understanding. For it is then in a position in which the most learned can claim no advantage over it. (B500-501) Thus indolence and vanity [on the part of common understanding] combine in sturdy support of those principles . . . (mere Ideas about which no one knows anything) . . . although the philosopherfindsit extremely hard to accept a principle for which he can give no justification, still more to employ concepts the objective reality of which he is unable to establish, nothing is more usual in the case of the common understanding. . . . it never occurs to it to reflect upon the assumption; and accepts as known whatever is familiar to it through frequent use. For the common understanding . . . all speculative interests pale before the practical. . . . (B502)

Throughout the section Kant admits that common sense and common understanding do not have much interest in the natural dialectic of human reason, but he also goes beyond that claim. Common sense is said to accept dogmatic rationalist principles because they offer an apparent foundation to cling to in support of religious and moral convictions and put ordinary folk on an equal level with the learned. Insofar as common sense has preferences in these philosophical matters they are, according to Kant, in favor of dogmatism and against skepticism. The commonsense beliefs themselves are not dogmatic, but common sense has a natural tendency to impose a dogmatic gloss on them for the given discreditable reasons. Philosophy is of use to common sense not in order to guard ordinary folk against skepticism, but to protect them from their natural dogmatism. If philosophy is needed to correct their views, it is needed as a skeptical antidote to, rather than as a justification for, those dogmatic tendencies.13 The passage reinforces Kant's tripartite distinction between dogmatist infancy, skeptical adolescence, and Critical maturity in philosophy. The first step in matters of pure reason, marking its infancy, is dogmatic. The second step is sceptical:; and indicates that experience has rendered our judgement wiser and more circumspect. But a third step, such as can be taken only by a fully matured judgement, based on assured principles of proved universality, is now necessary, namely to subject to examination, not the facts of reason, but reason itself in the whole extent of its powers. . . . This is not the censorship but the criticism of reason, in which not its present bounds [Schranken] but its determinate limits [Grenzen] . . . are demonstrated from principles. (B789)

It confirms the view that to disentangle those tempting alternatives requires a complex contribution from a more critical philosophy than "school metaphysics." Kant's central interests are not in justifying common beliefs against philosophical skepticism both because his primary pro-

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ject is a descriptive metaphysical inventory and because not all common sense beliefs are defensible (B883 1 4 ). The primary project has more remote implications for traditional skepticism, and these are considered in 4, but the project itself is not directed at normative skeptical issues.

3. Transcendental Arguments and Skepticism Since the publication of Strawson's Individuals much interest has been shown in its strategy against a skeptical doubt about the ascription of identity without continuous observation (1959, 34-36). The strategy has been generalized to become a general refutation of skepticism and is extensively associated with Kant under the title of a "transcendental argument." The underlying suggestion has been that Kant's primary interest in the Critique of Pure Reason was to develop a new strategy of transcendental argument against skepticism of the kind that Strawson oudined. In later work Strawson (Skepticism and Naturalism) gave up his earlier conviction in the strategy's ability to refute the skeptic, and turned to the skeptically neutral metaphysics and a view of skepticism as "idle" which I have ascribed to Kant. But commentators on Kant continue to ascribe his original "transcendental" strategy to Kant and even to believe in its success. Discussion of the issues has focused more on questions of formulating the strategy, and of assessing its success, than on the correctness of its ascription to Kant, but it is the latter issue I mainly consider. In 3.1,1 examine some of the claims made to oudine and support the strategy, and in 3.2 the responses to it of the philosopher who has perhaps shown most interest in it, namely Barry Stroud. I argue that the strategy is radically unclear, that it cannot be successful, and that it has almost nothing to do with Kant.

3.1. Contemporary Transcendental Strategies I identify some characteristic ways, from Strawson and later commentators, of identifying the original transcendental arguments against skepticism. There is no doubt that this is our conceptual scheme, [and] a condition of our having [it] is the unquestioning acceptance of particular-identity in at least some cases of non-continuous observation . . . [with] satisfiable and commonly satisfied criteria for the identity of some items [not under continuous observation]. [The sceptics'] doubts are unreal not simply because they are logically irresoluble doubts, but because they amount to rejection of the whole conceptual scheme within which alone such doubts make sense. The alternative [that] . . . we do not really, or should not really have, the conceptual scheme we do have

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is absurd. For the whole process of reasoning only starts because the scheme is as it is; and we cannot change it even if we would. (Strawson 1959, 35-36) Either the sceptic's claim cannot be comprehensively formulated or else it is mistaken. (Harrison 1989,43) The sceptic employs concepts that make sense only on the tacit assumption of conceptual connections he explicitly rejects. The doubt could not be stated unless it were unfounded. The sceptic quietly presupposes our framework while rejecting it or its condition. The doubt is senseless or nonsensical. (Glock 2003, 35ff.) The conditions doubted provide the general structure of any experience we can make intelligible to ourselves . . . nothing could ever lead us to change our minds on such fundamental matters. (Stroud 1994a, 235, 240) The sceptic's standard for being sure, Strawson said, 'is set self-contradictorily high.' . . . This is not a form of verificationism. 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. . . . 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. (Forster 1989a, 17-18)

There are some differences of emphasis between the original and the later claims. In the former the significant references to the actual character of our scheme with its empirically satisfied criteria may suggest an appeal to common sense against skepticism which was later rejected as question-begging. The later accounts are less explicit on the issue although they may retain hints of the same approach in their insistence on the character of our actual conceptual framework. The earlier version, with its reference to "empirically applicable criteria," was sometimes taken to include an appeal to "verifiability" as a criterion for "meaning" which was also criticized. Later versions are less explicit about that too, and Forster explicitly denies the reference to verifiability. Nevertheless the passages make extensive claims about the unintelligibility, meaninglessness, or nonsense of the skeptical doubt even if they do not rely on a verifiability criterion. The three new grounds for these claims concern the structure of the underlying conditions and their relation to our experience, a more general incoherence in the skeptics' acceptance and rejection of our scheme, and the impossibility or absurdity of changing that scheme or our minds. Some of these are further pursued in Stroud's more recent discussions and discussed in 3.2. I concentrate here on those three different grounds for the antiskeptical conclusion, each of which is open to objection. The aim is not to support skepticism but only to show how these lines of argument are open to such well-known criticisms that it is hard to understand their current appeal.

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Reference to the underlying structure of experience without an appeal to the meaninglessness or unintelligibility of doubting it is too weak and vulnerable. It must rest either on a theory of meaning which remains unspecified, or on some other claim about the structure of experience. To identify that structure in a descriptive metaphysics is unobjectionable, but without some addition the claim seems to do no more than restate what is the case in our experience and revert to an appeal to common sense. The skeptic will reply that what is at issue is not the circumstances of our experience but their justification. If it is added that the underlying conditions are very important, even indispensable, so that without them our experience would be impossible, the skeptic may say that he denies neither their importance nor indispensability but their truth. What seems additionally to be needed is the claim that the skeptic's doubt is in some way unintelligible or meaningless, but that points again to the third line of argument. The second ground claims that the skeptics' position is incoherent since it both accepts and rejects the questioned scheme. The suggestion is that the skeptic makes use of our scheme in order to formulate the doubt, but then raises a doubt which effectively rejects the scheme itself. It would be natural to reply that to raise any doubt, legitimate or illegitimate, must make use of the concepts which express what is doubted. That requirement is not so much an objection to raising the doubt as a job description of the skeptic. The argument attempts to distinguish between legitimate questioning and a skeptic's illegitimate doubt but even the former will be open to the same objection. Any expression of doubt makes use of the concepts put into question. It may be said that the skeptic's case is different because his doubt takes the relevant concepts to be meaningful but then deprives them of that meaning, or because it ranges over the whole of experience rather than some specific sector in it. The former response moves the discussion again to the third argument, but it is not obvious that such doubts have the claimed consequence. The skeptics' intention is to allow the original claims and the doubts to be meaningful but to question the truth of, or justification for, the former claims. The latter proviso seems no better. If the skeptic's arguments were sound they would presumably be sound however widely they ranged. There is something extravagant about querying the whole of our cognitive experience but the same extravagance arises in querying our justification for many less general but well-established beliefs within experience. A skeptic is more likely to be stimulated than inhibited by a shocked response to the doubt. The third argument might rely on the claim that the skeptic's doubts are meaningless on the basis of some independent theory of meaning, or on the belief that it is impossible to change our conceptual scheme. Difficulties here are that the doubts seem only unwarranted or extravagant

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but not strictly meaningless, and that we lack an adequate theory of meaning that might support such a claim. There is no reason to think that the external world does not exist, or that there are no other persons than myself, but without an independently established theory of meaning there is no good reason to think these suppositions meaningless. Appeals to a verifiability theory of meaning have been generally rejected and the claim that we cannot change our scheme is patently inadequate. The skeptic is generally not interested in recommending that we should change our scheme, but only in claiming that we lack adequate justification for a belief in it. An inability to change a given position may be an indication not of truth or justification but of addiction or stubbornness. These transcendental arguments against skepticism are evidently far from conclusive and the arguments follow familiar and well-trodden paths. They suggest that the issues really are undecidable and futile, but I make only three summary points about Kant's relation to them. First, if Kant is engaged in an inventorial metaphysics of experience, he is not immediately involved in these general skeptical arguments at all. It was noted in 1 that Kant dismissed a general, and "idle," philosophical skepticism but addressed more specific skeptical targets such as a Cartesian doubt about the external world or a Humean doubt about the status of the concept of a cause. These more specific targets and his responses need to be identified and understood, but it is not clear they offer a general prescription against skepticism of the kind advocated in these contemporary transcendental arguments. Second, there is no reason to think that Kant's specific concern with his skeptical issues turns on meaning. In the Refutation of Idealism and the Second Analogy the argument turns on a claimed dependence between concepts, but that concept dependence is for Kant not semantic, and the argument makes no appeal to a theory of meaning. Kant regards some philosophical issues, in the Antinomies and Dialectic, as "futile" and "empty" (nichtig und leer15), but there is no good reason to regard these as equivalent to "meaningless." Third, it is not clear that Kant regards an experience without our a priori presuppositions as either unintelligible or impossible. He focuses on the case of human experience with its cognitive requirements, recognizes that ours is not the only possible world, and admits that deviants from the human case are both possible and intelligible. 16 If Kant's transcendental arguments have an indirect relevance to skepticism then their role is different from these contemporary versions.

3.2. Stroud's Discussions of Transcendental Arguments In many papers and books Barry Stroud has influentially examined and discussed skepticism, with particular reference to Kant's and Strawson's tran-

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scendental arguments. Those discussions have been critical of both Strawson and Kant, although he has also sought to express what those transcendental arguments, properly formulated, might achieve. I offer a brief summary of the oudines of that extensive discussion in order to measure it against Kant's position. That discussion has concentrated on two general, related philosophical questions: do we really know what we claim to know? and is it possible to access "reality"? The questions are presented throughout as "deep," "profound," "gripping," revealing the character of philosophy and human nature and impossible to disregard. They focus generally on knowledge of an external world or physical reality as they explicitly do in The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism and The Quest for Reality. The discussion demonstrates Stroud's two different approaches to these skeptical issues. Initially (in "Transcendental Arguments," 1968) the outcome was a criticism of attempts to rebut skepticism through Strawson's transcendental arguments. That outcome was evident also in The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, in which a number of hostile criticisms of skepticism offered by Moore, Austin, Carnap, and Kant were rejected. More recendy (in Parrini, Kant and Contemporary Epistemology, in Stern, Transcendental Arguments, and in Glock, Strawson and Kant) the aim has been to identify a form of "invulnerability" against skepticism which transcendental arguments may have attempted to express. Stroud's clear conclusions remain that skepticism has not been refuted in any of these "transcendental" arguments, but that the attempt to engage with skepticism about knowledge and reality is an unavoidable, profound, and central part of philosophy I comment briefly on both phases. The first phase contains a central underlying argument in support of a Cartesian doubt about the external world. It can be put bluntly by saying that it is a requirement for genuine knowledge that the knower should have eliminated all possibilities of error. Certain possibilities are not even considered, let alone eliminated. (Stroud 1984, 72) I emphasise a mere possibility here. . . . He might fail to know in that situation precisely because he has not eliminated that possibility. (Stroud 1984, 62-63) The human possibility of error seems to be a constant challenge, or to be somehow generated into a constant challenge, to human knowledge. (Stroud 1994a, 241)

This is supported (in The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism) with such examples as those of the partygoer and plane spotter where that requirement is said to be evident. The former case is that of one who with irre-

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proachable evidence claims to know that John will come to a party to which he has accepted an invitation, but who has not checked the possibility of John's being hit by a meteorite. When John fails to turn up, the lack of genuine knowledge is explained in terms of a failure to eliminate all possibilities. The latter is of a trained observer whose instruction in identifying a type of enemy plane has omitted to mention the existence of another type virtually indistinguishable from the first in standard conditions of observation. When the observer misidentifies the plane, even though he has correctly followed the instruction manual, he is also said to lack knowledge through the omission of the alternative possibility. Much of the remaining discussion argues against attempts to resist these examples. Critics of skepticism, among which are Kant, Moore, Carnap, and Austin, are said to be motivated by "ignorance, impatience with abstract thought, or a belief that they know where the sceptic has gone wrong" (1984, viii). Stroud insists that the possibility at issue is not merely, or necessarily, logical possibility. To require, for these cases of knowledge, that John's arrival at the party should be logically necessary is plainly absurd. The argument from semantic verifiability is set aside. It is claimed that although it would be "outrageous" to complain that the meteorite possibility had been overlooked, this is relevant only to the pragmatic appropriateness of making the original claim to knowledge and not to the question of its truth or falsity. The view that the standard of eliminating all possibilities deviates from ordinary criteria is denied, although Stroud notes the extraordinary character of the idealist view that everything we claim to know about the external world, including the existence of mountains in Africa, is due to our minds. He recognizes the attempts of philosophers, like Kant and Carnap, to separate different "internal/external" or "empirical/transcendental" uses of ordinary words in such claims, but thinks such distinctions unclear and inadequate. The point was noted and addressed in chapter 5. He recognizes some ambiguities in what has been called an "absolute conception of reality"17 but believes that it drives a legitimate and important exploration of what zV fundamentally real in our experience. This issue is considered later in chapter 15.2.1. Many of Stroud's particular arguments can be resisted. Even if it is absurd to require for knowledge of a synthetic truth that it should be logically necessary, the requirement of the elimination of all possibilities of error might also be thought inappropriate for empirical claims. Typically such elimination is characteristic of valid deductive arguments, even where the conclusion is not logically necessary, and it might be said that it is equally inappropriate to measure empirical evidence on a standard appropriate for deduction. There is some anomaly between these standards and ordinary cases, and the distinction between pragmatic appropriateness and

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truth is not sufficient to overcome it. Stroud's cases sometimes rest not only on the failure to eliminate all possibilities but also on the actual falsity of the claims. If John did turn up at the party, would we still deny that it was known that he would merely because meteorites had not been considered? If the plane spotter with a gap in his instruction nevertheless correcdy identified the plane because the other type is not flying in this region, would we deny that he knew its type? The issue is not so much whether Stroud is right or wrong but how one would determine which views are right or wrong. To each of the responses there are undoubtedly further steps that can be made, but the basic issue is not whether the discussion can be continued, which is undeniable, but whether it can ever be decided. Two related criteria in Kant's dismissal of "idle" skepticism were the motive to deny any knowledge at all and its association with the lack of any criterion which would setde the issue. It was also suggested that the criterion could be extended to cover the case where no attempt is made to formulate such a criterion so that the issue continues to be discussed without considering the necessary prior question of the criteria for its resolution. That is the central point in Austin's recognition that "real" gets its sense from some specific contrast, and that a skeptical trick is to ask about reality without such specification.18 We may have no difficulty in deciding what is real under certain specified conditions but may feel completely at a loss when faced with a request for an unconditional criterion for reality. The point is relevant to the standard of eliminating every possibility of error, since it is conceded that not all such possibilities need to, or can, be eliminated. Austin's point is that before the issue is further discussed it has to be decided what kinds of possibility are relevant, and that without an answer to the prior question the skeptical debate is not worth pursuing. Of course—this may seem perhaps hardly worth saying, but in philosophy it seems it does need to be said—we make a distinction between 'a real x' and 'not a real x' only if there is a way of telling the difference. . . . A distinction which we are not in fact able to draw is—to put it politely—not worth making. (1962, 77)

It is the central point of Carnap's complaint that the tradition had embarked on a debate about the "reality" of "things" and "numbers," recognizing that the relevant terms were not used in standard ways but without explaining what the new, nonstandard uses were.19 His conclusion that the new questions were "meaningless" rested on that procedural fault rather than on a verifiability test for meaning. It motivated his "challenge" to the disputants in such cases to decide on the criteria for resolving the question before embarking on it.

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Austin's and Carnap's opposition to the conviction that these traditional questions are profound and worth pursuing suggests that they represent idle skepticism, but Stroud himself points to such a conclusion. When he says that the "sceptic will always win going away" there must be a strong suspicion that the issue cannot be resolved either through a lack of relevant criteria for its resolution, or any prospect of agreeing on them. 20 Stroud summarizes his position in The Quest for Reality: If we cannot carry off the feat of unmasking all the relevant beliefs and perceptions, we will have found . . . no reason to abandon our everyday judgements about the colours of things. . . . Even if we cannot abandon all those beliefs and still find that human beings perceive colours and believe that objects are coloured, that does not imply that anyone's beliefs about the colours of things are true. I do not mean to suggest that perhaps those beliefs are not true or that there is reason to doubt them. If what I have argued is right, everyday judgements about colours . . . are left completely untouched by the unmasking metaphysical project. . . . But to conclude from that failure that our beliefs about the colours of things must therefore be largely true would be to draw a nonpsychological conclusion about the world . . . from certain psychological facts of belief. (2000, 193-94) (Cf.: "There would so far be nothing on that horizon that even looks like a threat. But still, we might feel the need to ask, do we know the things we believe . . . or not?" [Stroud 1994a, 250])

We are asked to take seriously the failure of the only available arguments for doubting that colors are real coupled with the refusal to say that they are real, on the open-ended ground that they may not be. On the face of it the outcome contravenes Austin's and Carnap's insistence on the need to clarify the prior question of the appropriate criteria for "real" and reinforces the former's view of skepticism as an open-ended "mass of seductive fallacies." The passage shows that Stroud's primary interest is in the nature of reality rather than the prior criterion with which to understand what we mean by "real." His view is that the nature of reality is profoundly difficult to determine, and not that in the absence of that prior criterion we do not yet even understand what we are looking for. His position faces a dilemma. If the issues are radically inconclusive, then the only rational alternatives are either to abandon them or else to locate criteria to settle them. What seems irrational is to recognize their inconclusive character but continue the arguments without considering that prior criterion. In the second, more positive, phase of Stroud's discussion, the suggested pragmatic invulnerability of fundamental beliefs draws on Moore's pragmatic paradox of saying " P but I don't believe it," that is, of someone's actually asserting P and at the same time denying any belief in it. Stroud claims that this is "analogous" and "structurally sim-

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ilar" to a transcendental argument which identifies a necessary presupposition of any thinking or experiencing. It produces "pretty much the same sense" as that in which someone who says he is speaking must be saying something true (1994a, 232, 245). Even in this second phase Stroud denies that such necessities satisfy the skeptic by guaranteeing the truth of any of the particular beliefs. The analogy with Moore's paradoxical utterances does not guarantee or establish that either of the clauses in the paradoxical utterance is true. It marks only the kind of pragmatic invulnerability in which asserting one clause but denying the other is pragmatically absurd. Stroud's second phase argument can be seen as a development of Strawson's original claim that the skeptic commits a fault in both accepting and rejecting the conceptual scheme about which he expresses doubt. The skeptic is represented as one who asserts certain facts expressible within our conceptual scheme together with a denial of one of their implications. The weakness of the original claim arose because the skeptic's position is no more paradoxical than accepting the expressive forms of some language but denying doctrinal truths expressed in it. Stroud's model from Moore attempts to avoid that weakness by representing the skeptic's position as one who asserts "I am not speaking." It is doubtful whether Strawson's, or the later versions quoted above, had this kind of pragmatic paradox or invulnerability in mind, but it is even more doubtful if it was what Kant had in mind. Two particular illustrations of Kant's position, from the "cogito" and the Refutation of Idealism, show that he did not rely on this pragmatic paradox. Moore's paradoxical structure evidently can be applied to Descartes's "cogito" because it deals with specific utterances or assertions, but Kant's version at B132-3 3 is different and more complex. It is not a claim only about occasions of uttering "I think" but about its status in experience as a necessary possibility. Kant's claim is not that I am assured of my existence every time I utter "I am thinking" but that my experience would be jeopardized if it was not possible for me to add the prefix "I think" to my thoughts. If Kant is right one who denies that it must be possible for the "I think" to accompany my representations is mistaken, but that denial does not look even analogous to saying "I'm not speaking," or to saying "I am thinking but I don't exist." When Kant comes in the B Refutation of Idealism to reject idealist skepticism about external objects his argument makes no reference to that Moorean paradox. The argument claims to show that a skeptical idealist makes the mistake of supposing that there could be a viable inner experience without any reference to outer experience. The mistake is not a failure to recognize that to say "There could be a viable inner experience without outer experience" has the pragmatic absurdity of "I am not speaking."

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Stroud presumably holds that although these skeptical claims do not have the same form as the paradoxical utterances they have something of the same character, for Kant, in being demonstrably mistaken a priori. Their having something of that character may be a consequence of the a priori demonstration. Stroud criticizes Kant for failing to distinguish the character of this invulnerability from the a priori way of establishing it, but this is evidendy a misunderstanding (1994a, 234). There is no reason to suppose that Kant recognized, let alone insisted on, the pragmatic paradox, but his a priori proofs are a purported demonstration of the special status of his claims. Whether Kant's a priori proofs in the Analytic of Principles are correct is considered later, but Stroud's criticisms do not concern the character of those proofs at all. He focuses on a pragmatic character which Kant does not mention and neglects the distinctive status which Kant's proofs do attach to it.

4 . Kant's Positive Response to Skepticism The discussions of Guyer in 2 and of Stroud in 3 deny claims about Kant's strategy against skepticism, but do not say more constructively what his strategy is. Evidendy Kant does not take seriously or directly address all forms of traditional skepticism, but is concerned with some of those forms in central sections of the Critique, such as the Transcendental Deduction, the Second Analogy, and the Refutation of Idealism. Those arguments will be considered in detail in their contexts, but there is no presumption that they all address the same forms of skepticism. The Refutation of Idealism most direcdy addresses Stroud's interest in an idealist skepticism about the external world, and the Second Analogy addresses a Humean skepticism about causality. The Transcendental Deduction might be thought to address a different, more general, skepticism about knowledge and objective reality, and as a preparation for the discussion of that section I consider how it relates to skeptical issues. Kant's primary target in the Transcendental Deduction is evidently a Humean, empiricist doubt or denial of a priori concepts in experience. Part of Kant's response to that Humean position is given in the analytic apparatus which establishes the synthetic a priori classification of judgements claimed in chapter 3 to be skeptically neutral. The formal classifications of judgements may not involve an antiskeptical argument, but the issue in the Deduction is more epistemological than formal. It raises the q u e s t i o n s whether there are a priori concepts, and if there are (A95), how they can operate in a posteriori experience. Kant rejects the idea, central to w h a t I have called the basic rationalist fallacy, that they might operate by giving us

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access to, and providing knowledge of, transcendent things in themselves (A104-5 21 ). The positive task is to make intelligible how a priori concepts, independent of experience, whose existence empiricists deny, may nevertheless operate in experience (A128). This involves explaining both the general role of categories and their relation to intuition in which they can be instantiated and their use realized. That issue by itself might seem to be technical and of interest only in discussing and correcting empiricism, but Kant makes it clear that empiricism is, for him, the primary source of skepticism. He notes that some empiricists, such as Locke, had inconsistendy canvassed dogmatic claims, while the consistent empiricist is the Humean sceptic (B127-28). Kant underlines this general issue at B788-89 where he associates rationalist dogmatism with the infancy of philosophy, his own Critical philosophy with its maturity, and empiricist skepticism as an unstable adolescence. This expresses Kant's preference for empiricism over dogmatic rationalism in a figurative way, and in earlier quotations it has been made plain how this development progresses. Skeptical questioning, and an empiricism from which it derives, have a use in rejecting the pretensions of dogmatism (A378), but they are in danger of developing from a useful skeptical method into the idleness and futility of "skepticism." Scepticism is thus a resting-place for human reason, where it can reflect on its dogmatic wanderings, and survey the region in which it finds itself, so that for the future it can choose its path with more certainty. But it is no dwelling-place for permanent setdement. (B789)

If Kant's argument in the Transcendental Deduction addresses an empiricist skepticism it does so in a quite different way from the earlier unargued dismissal of idle philosophical skepticism. Kant takes seriously the need to support his opposition to a Humean denial of a priori concepts and of synthetic a priori judgments, and the Deduction addresses the associated objection: Even if there were a priori concepts, independent of experience, they could never have any serious, immanent use. Kant attempts to deal with that objection in the Deduction but his argument may be understood in different ways. Hume's skepticism about induction and causality is not explicidy mentioned in the Deduction but it is sometimes thought that the argument establishes the universality and necessary truth of metaphysical and scientific principles in opposition to Hume's inductive skepticism. The idea is that to establish those a priori concepts and principles is to establish a framework of necessary truths which defend our beliefs in the sciences and everyday life against a skeptic. Kant refers to a "transcendental affinity" of a priori elements and this may be understood as a guarantor of the lower-level empirical affinity exhibited in particular laws of

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natural science ( A l l 3 - 1 4 , A122, B152). Kant's argument is then designed to show against a Humean skeptic that those laws presuppose a transcendental affinity which in turn justifies our belief in those scientific laws. Understanding the Deduction in that way is characteristic of earlier appeals to distinctively transcendental arguments against skepticism, but it is open to a number of queries. If Kant blankly rejects skeptical doubts about mathematics and natural science at B739 and B120, and uses those disciplines as a model for the reform of philosophy itself, it is difficult to see why he should think it necessary to answer skeptical doubts about those claims in the Deduction. This already casts doubt on the interpretation and that conclusion is reinforced if Kant's own a priori elements are understood as necessary but not sufficient conditions for the possibility of our experience. 22 Kant's argument does not offer to guarantee our beliefs against a skeptic but only to identify an a priori structure necessary for those beliefs. Kant's claims are typically conditional rather than absolute, and they assert not that any possible experience must conform to our principles, but that our experience must conform to them. He allows the conceivability of other forms of experience than ours and accepts that other subjects with other cognitive apparatus may be subject to different conditions. His conditions of possible experience are necessary enabling rather than sufficient guaranteeing conditions even of our experience. The argument fares no better than the earlier interpretations of Strawson and Stroud in terms of its chances of success against a skeptic. To claim that a priori laws are presupposed in our beliefs and so justify those beliefs looks merely circular. If the a priori principles are not sufficient but only necessary conditions for our experience, then they assume the truth of the beliefs in question. To ascribe such a strategy to Kant against an inductive skepticism is to locate him firmly within the framework of a traditional antiskeptical normative epistemology, and it has been already questioned whether that is Kant's assumed framework. An alternative would be to employ the strategy noted earlier in Kant's evident intention to reverse the priorities assumed in traditional philosophy. In the case of the argument about "external object" in the Refutation of Idealism this is made explicit in Kant's strategy of turning idealism against itself. The argument precisely reverses the priorities accorded to inner and outer experience in traditional idealism by claiming that outer experience makes inner experience possible. I argue later in chapters 19 and 20 that the Second Analogy similarly reverses the priority which Hume gives to particular causal laws over the general causal principle (GCP). The GCP is not, as Hume would claim, simply an a posteriori generalization from the success of particular a posteriori causal laws, but has a priority over them. Kant's "reversal" strategy is to argue that the GCP is not dependent on the success of specific a posteriori causal laws, but that the latter are dependent

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on the GCP. Where Hume saw the GCP either as a useless inductive generalization from specific causal laws, deriving all its significance from them, or as a trivial analytic truth, Kant sees it as a substantial necessary condition for specific causal laws. In these typical ways Kant reverses the order of priorities in empiricism or idealism which lead to skepticism. He does not arbitrarily reverse those priorities merely in order to refute Hume's or Descartes's skepticism but argues independently for the antiempiricist and anti-idealist dependences. If those arguments are correct then we have no reason to base skepticism on the faulty idealist or empiricist assumptions. The Transcendental Deduction has the same pattern of reversing the empiricist priority in which general principles all depend solely on specific a posteriori evidence. The claim is that in some way specific a posteriori evidence depends on more general, and more fundamental, a priori concepts and their principles. If Kant's typical procedure of "going transcendental" has any force, then it shows that the empiricist priority is inadequate and gets the order of our experience the wrong way round. Kant does not deny that that there is a mutual dependence between a priori concepts and a posteriori sensory representation, but his claim corrects the empiricists' one-sided dependence of principles on a posteriori experience. It shows, if it succeeds, that the Humean query about a viable use for a priori concepts can be answered. That this is the right way to understand Kant's attitude towards empiricism and its associated skepticism is made clear in a section of the second Critique (Ak. 5.50ff.). At that early stage of the discussion of a priori practical principles Kant rehearses his conclusions about empiricism and Hume from the first Critique. There is no doubt of the dominant association for Kant between empiricism and skepticism: Universal empiricism reveals itself as a genuine scepticism. (5.14) In this way Hume's empiricism in principles also leads unavoidably to scepticism. (5.52) So with respect to all cognition having to do with the existence of things (mathematics being excepted) empiricism was first introduced as the sole source of principles, but along with it the most rigorous form of scepticism with respect to the whole of natural science. (5.51)

Kant immediately afterwards relaxes the proviso about mathematics, because he believes that although Hume did not simply assimilate mathematics and natural science the inevitable consequence of his empiricism is that mathematics also succumbs to skeptical doubt. Kant makes clear that his argument throughout the first Critique demonstrated the inadequacy

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of such skepticism by rejecting the assumptions of what he calls "universal empiricism," or "empiricism in principles," on which that skepticism rested. Hume's basic assumption . . . [was] . . . that he took objects of experience to be things in themselves . . . and so after removing empiricism from its origin I was able to overthrow the unavoidable consequence of empiricism, namely scepticism with respect to natural science, and then because scepticism in mathematics follows from the same grounds, with respect also to mathematics, both of which [disciplines] refer to objects of possible experience. . . . In this way I was able to eradicate total doubt of whatever theoretical reason professes insight into.23 (5.53)

There can be no doubt that this is Kant's primary step in correcting empiricism and its associated skepticism, but we might ask how the strategy works and how successful it is. It is designed to show that an empiricism from which skepticism derives rests on a mistaken, or so far unwarranted, assumption. It shows that we do not have to accept the empiricist premises which generate the skeptical conclusions, and it is limited in at least two ways. First it does not offer positively to guarantee the relevant beliefs, but only to show that they cannot be grounded in the way empiricists claim and which for them, if they are consistent, yields skepticism. As a consequence it is limited, even if successful in its own terms, to a demonstration of the failure of one, empiricist, form of skepticism. All that we can claim is that one basic source, for Kant the major source, of skepticism, does not have to be accepted, and is, if Kant is completely right, false. This is in line with earlier claims about the limited ambitions of Kant's strategy. Just as Kant does not offer a positive guarantee of the relevant beliefs, so he does not exclude all possible ways in which skepticism might be mounted and need to be refuted. Kant's target is a specifically empiricist skepticism and does not purport to establish the relevant truths against all comers.24 These restrictions on Kant's strategy allow his argument a better chance of success than the earlier accounts of transcendental arguments in 3, but they are not here recommended on that ground. They are recommended solely on the ground that Kant himself explicitiy oudines just such a strategy. The further question, whether Kant succeeds in proving that certain elements, concepts, principles, and intuitions, are a priori can be answered only by reference to his particular arguments, especially in the Analytic of Principles. The general strategy is to demonstrate in those proofs that the assumptions of "universal empiricism" should be denied and so to close off one central route to skeptical doubt.

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Apart from the specific skeptical issues in such passages as the Deduction, the Second Analogy, and the Refutation of Idealism, Kant's complex attitude towards general forms of skepticism can be summarized in the following claims: (1) He dismisses, without argument, a "philosophical skepticism"— "idle skepticism"—in contrast to a legitimate and valuable "skeptical method." (2) He accepts initially an empiricist skeptical method as an attack on the pretensions of rationalist dogmatism. This is to endorse a skeptical attitude to a rationalism which claims to establish transcendent truths beyond possible experience through reason alone. (3) He rejects subsequendy a universal empiricism by proving the existence and immanent role of a priori concepts in experience, and of their associated synthetic a priori principles. These claims, and the preceding argument, underline the diverse and modest aims of Kant's antiskepticism. (1) is modest at least in not offering a formal argument against idle skepticism, and (2) is modest in its rejection of rationalist pretensions. (3) is relatively ambitious in its detailed arguments against empiricism and its associated skepticism, but even its structure has been shown to be limited and modest in certain respects. It targets a specifically empiricist skepticism, and it provides necessary, not sufficient, conditions for our experience. Typically Kant criticizes skepticism for misunderstanding the order of priorities, or dependences, among the relevant concepts. In that strategy Kant follows his descriptive inventorial project of allocating concepts to their rightful places in our experience in order to show how the tradition had misplaced them. Kant's position, as the detailed arguments will later show, generally offers the reverse priority or dependence as a correction, rather than a blank denial, of the traditional order. He does not replace a bottom-up order with a top-down strategy, but supplements one-way relations with mutual dependences. The claim that concepts depend on judgments does not deny that the latter also depend on the former; that inner experience depends on outer is compatible with the claim that outer experience depends on inner sense; that our experience depends on a priori concepts does not deny that it also depends on what is given a posteriori to sensibility.

[12] The Transcendental Analytic and Metaphysical Deduction

er the Aesthetic, Kant divides the rest of the Critique into a Transcendental Logic (B74-733), which includes both the Analytic and Dialectic, and the Doctrine of Method (B733-884). The Aesthetic considered the a priori contribution to experience made by the senses; the Analytic examines the a priori contribution made by the understanding. Kant appeals to the same "abstraction" procedure in both cases (B87). In this chapter I begin to consider the first of those large sections, the Transcendental Analytic, which itself contains three major sections: the Metaphysical Deduction (B74-116), the Transcendental Deduction (A84-130; B129-69), and the Analytic of Principles (B169-349). I consider here the Metaphysical Deduction, but need to preface it with two preliminary comments, first on Kant's introduction (B74-91) to the Transcendental Logic, and second on the architecture of the three major sections of the Analytic.

1. Two Preliminary Comments 1.1. Introduction to Transcendental Logic (B74-91) Kant famously outlines at B74-76 the relation between sensibility and understanding, noted above, which issues in the claim, "Without sensibility no object would be given to us, without understanding no object would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind." Kant associates sensibility with receptivity, a power to be causally affected by objects of experience,1 and associates the understanding with spontaneity, described as "the mind's power of producing representations from itself." A priori concepts, unlike a posteriori concepts, cannot be learned from experience and so point towards such a spontaneity, but we have also a spontaneous power to combine concepts in judg255

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ment. The relation between the two faculties which makes them both essential for knowledge is stated by Kant without any argument or evidence. It has to be taken as an inventory entry for two fundamental and interrelated capacities of human beings in providing their knowledge and experience. It has been regarded as one of Kant's most striking insights, as a rejection of a myth of the given, and as a claim that concepts or a "space of reasons" cannot be even notionally separated from sense experience.2 Qualifications to these claims were made in chapter 10. In requiring both sense and understanding Kant at one point clearly allows that more flexible relation in which it is not a requirement that all knowledge contain immediately both a concept and a corresponding intuition. Kant says: "Intuition and concepts constitute, therefore, the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge" (B74). The stated requirement is that there should be an intuition "in some way" corresponding to the concept rather than that every such concept must be immediately associated with a corresponding intuition. Kant also distinguishes between different kinds of logic, and in particular makes two fundamental divisions between general and transcendental logic on one side, and between general logic as a canon and as an organon on the other. The two distinctions are simpler to grasp than their formidable titles suggest. General logic includes what we would call "formal logic," that is, a discipline which at its center licenses and develops inferences valid in virtue of their form.3 Despite differences between eighteenth-century and twentieth-century conceptions of formal logic, syllogistic in Kant's time and propositional, predicate, and modal logic in ours represent systems of such general formal logic. Transcendental logic, by contrast, is Kant's name for his own philosophical examination of the a priori contribution made to experience by the understanding. For Kant general logic abstracts from the content of judgments and has no concern with the nature or provenance of the items designated in such contents, but transcendental logic is not purely formal, and is concerned with those aspects of judgment contents. It is concerned above all with the identification and explanation of those a priori concepts which represent the understanding's distinctive contribution to experience. General logic is simply logic, while transcendental logic is linked to a distinctively Kantian metaphysics or "transcendental topic." The second distinction between treating general logic as a canon or as an organon is evaluative. Kant holds that it is a fundamental mistake to treat general logic as an organon, and that this error is associated with the Dialectic's critique of pure reason. In chapter 2 it was emphasized that in the prefaces Kant recognizes two faces of reason, one legitimate and one

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illegitimate. He now elaborates that view by associating the two faces with, respectively, a correct use and a misuse of formal logic. To treat formal logic as a canon, that is, as a discipline which does no more than license inferences as formally valid or invalid, is to use it legitimately and correcdy. To treat it as an organon which provides a sufficient condition for truth is illegitimate and a misuse of logic. As a canon logic provides no more than a necessary condition of truth, and that is a legitimate recognition of its limitations. The general error, then, is to mistake what is only a minimal requirement for truth as sufficient for it, or to treat consistency as if it were truth. The former distinction, and its related account of transcendental logic, is on one side unexceptionable. It is quite clear that Kant's transcendental enterprise is not a part of formal logic. We might ask why Kant thinks that it is part of any form of logic, and Beatrice Longuenesse's Kant and the Capacity to Judge throws light on this, but the tide is less important than the nature of Kant's enquiry.4 The second distinction is more interesting for two reasons; first because it points to Kant's basic diagnosis of dialectical illusion, and second because, perhaps unexpectedly, it treats logic as a source of philosophical error. The diagnosis is given at B87-88 and repeated in the Dialectic and elsewhere (B186-87; B648): But since it is very tempting to use these pure modes of knowledge of the understanding and the principles by themselves, and even beyond the limits of experience, . . . the understanding is led to incur the risk of making, with a mere show of rationality, a material use of its . . . formal principles and of passing judgments on objects without distinction . . . on objects which are not given to us and perhaps cannot in any way be given. . . . it is misapplied if appealed to as an organon of general and unlimited application, and if consequendy we venture with pure understanding alone to judge synthetically, to affirm, and to decide regarding objects in general.

Although principles of logic and of pure understanding are not the same Kant uses the same contrast between a "canon" and an "organon" to outline the danger. The suggestion is that we may be misled through pure logic to believe that we can establish truths about objects beyond our experience via the intermediary notion of an "object in general" (Cf. B43-45, B50-52). Kant targets in this way the procedures of rationalist philosophers who, like Leibniz or Wolff, claim to establish such synthetic truths through pure reason or logic alone.5 The belief that a causal principle of sufficient reason might be established purely on such a rational, logical basis in the way that Wolff proposed would be an historical example of what Kant had in mind. In rejecting such procedures Kant undoubtedly borrows from Hume the empiricist principles which cast doubt on them (B496).

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The second idea, that logic itself somehow contains the temptation to such errors, may seem unwelcome but is correct. Logic has limitations like any other discipline, and to overstep them may be a form of intellectual pathology with special relevance to philosophy. Both in the Critique (B82-83; B 4 5 1 - 5 2 ) and Logic (Ak. 9.84 6 ) Kant treats a traditional skepticism about truth as an example of such error. Traditional skepticism, considered in chapter 11, typically appeals to deductive standards, since its characteristic procedure is to show that the doubted beliefs are not licensed by a formally valid argument, or cannot be guaranteed to be true and might be false. Apart from the fact that standards of logic may be inappropriate for some questioned beliefs, this is an example of making a necessary condition for truth into a sufficient condition. The former requires only that if a proof is given it establishes a valid connection between premises and conclusion, but it does not establish the truth of either premises or conclusion. Nor does deductive validity imply that a proof with those standards has to be given in order to validate a claim. Kant's view not only concedes a limit to logic, but also confirms his suspicion of traditional skepticism as an idle intellectual pathology. It underlines that reversal of the tradition in which Kant's skepticism is directed against the philosophical skeptic, and was referred to in chapter 11.3.2. In the same passage (B82-86) Kant indicates another false trail in philosophy arising from the traditional question about the nature or criterion of truth. He famously likens a request for a "general and sure criterion" of truth to the "ludicrous spectacle of a man milking a he-goat into a sieve," and goes on to call such a request "self-contradictory." Although he assumes as a standard attempt to answer the traditional question what we might call a "correspondence" theory, his argument is quite general and covers any attempt to provide that sure criterion. We have to respect Kant's evident wish to criticize such traditional theories of truth, and to place it alongside his other reversals of traditional philosophy, but Kant, like Davidson,7 seems to take the idea of truth as primitive. Because of the potential hostility to a correspondence theory of truth commentators have sometimes ascribed to Kant an alternative "coherence" theory, but the text indicates more plausibly a rejection of the request itself rather than a preference for some particular theoretical response to it. Later in the Transcendental Deduction Kant takes up a specific issue about the relation between beliefs and what makes them true, but this does not have the character of a traditional theory of truth. 8

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1.2. The Architecture of the Three Major Sections of the Analytic Evidently the three major sections, the Metaphysical Deduction, Transcendental Deduction, and Analytic of Principles, contribute to the aim of isolating a priori elements belonging distinctively to understanding, but commentators disagree about their specific contributions. I outline a minimal account of those contributions and leave the controversies for later discussion. In the first section, the Metaphysical Deduction, Kant intends to identify a priori concepts on a principled basis, in a way that parallels the identification of a priori intuitions in the Aesthetic. Kant's principled basis is an appeal to the judgment forms of general logic from which it is claimed the a priori concepts, categories, can be derived. It is sometimes thought even at this stage in the argument that Kant claims to have proved that these listed concepts are a priori categories,9 but this makes it difficult to see what the other sections contribute and in any case rests on two dubious translations in Kemp Smith's version. The two passages are: On this account we are entitled to call these representations pure concepts of the understanding and to regard them as applying a priori to objects. . . . (B105) In the metaphysical deduction the a priori origin of the categories has been proved through their complete agreement with the general logical functions of thought (B159)

In the former the word "entitled" and in the latter the word "proved" are not accurate translations. The former passage says only that the concepts are so-called (heissen) and not that they have been demonstrated to be so. In the latter, the word for "proved" is not the standard bewiesen but the weaker dargethan, which might be better translated as "shown" or "represented." Doubts about the translation of B159 increase with the variety of available alternatives10: In the metaphysical deduction the a priori origin of the categories was established (Pluhar) In the metaphysical deduction the origin of the a priori categories was established. . . . (Guyer/Wood) In the metaphysical deduction the origin of the categories was established a priori. . . . (Brandt)

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Kemp Smith and Pluhar regard the metaphysical deduction as "establishing" that the categories have an a priori origin, that is, are a priori. In Guyer and Wood's translation the categories' a priority is assumed and what is established is their origin in the logical functions, while for Brandt it is that origin which is established a priori. If either Brandt's, or Guyer and Wood's, translations are accepted, and there are good reasons for this, even the appearance of a proof of the a priority of the categories in the Metaphysical Deduction is illusory. Kant undoubtedly takes the principled basis for identifying categories to provide a prima facie case for their a priori character, since they are derived from forms of judgment rather than from their material constituents, but this does not yet establish that conclusion. What is additionally needed is a demonstration that forms of judgment are themselves a priori, and this is provided not in the Metaphysical but in the Transcendental Deduction at B129-31. In the light of that deferred argument I shall mark this feature of the Metaphysical Deduction by saying that it provides a prima facie case for the identification of candidate categories, but the issue is discussed in this chapter at 2.4 and 3. 11 In the Transcendental Deduction, the two versions of the A and B editions provide an argument which links the categories and self-consciousness through the term "apperception." What is undeniable is its intention to represent both of those aspects of apperception as mutually dependent and fundamental features of experience, but disagreement has arisen over the nature and form of such an argument. Is self-consciousness a Cartesian premise, like the cogito, on which the argument rests, or is it a requirement for experience given the role of categories? There is uncertainty over the exact meaning of "self-conscious," and over what it is for categories to apply to objects and have "objective validity" or "objective reality." There is disagreement over the "two steps" envisaged for the argument at B144, and also about the differences in the A and B versions. The account I have offered of Kant's metaphysics of experience suggests that he follows the familiar plan of mapping the general role of a priori concepts in experience, but the argument has also been taken as an attempt to refute skepticism about external objects. 12 For the latter commentators the argument claims to provide a guarantee against traditional skepticism that there are such external objects and that we can know them through apperception. For others the argument claims in the first instance to describe the relations of priority between such salient features of experience as concepts and self-consciousness, and makes no specific reference to the idealist problem of outer objects. Certainly the primary issue in the Deduction, as in the Aesthetic, is not traditional idealism's doubt about external objects but that of establishing that there are a priori elements in experience, concepts or intuitions, and that they have a

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legitimate and necessary function in our experience. For Kant a priori concepts pose an additional problem of their "objectivity" since they, unlike intuitions, are related only "mediately" to possible experience (B122-23). 1 3 Two relatively uncontroversial points can be underlined. The first is that, however the Deduction is understood in the end, it both trades on and distances itself from Descartes's version of the cogito. The cogito has just the two features, reference to the thinking self and to the conceptual content of thought, which Kant also emphasizes in his notion of transcendental apperception (B132-33). But Kant's conception of these elements, and of the cogito which contains them, is subder than that of Descartes and different in intention. One sign of these differences is provided later in the Paralogisms (chapter 25) where Kant warns against misunderstandings of his view which assimilate it to that of Descartes. Another difference lies in Kant's aim, in his metaphysics of experience, to isolate the fundamental items in experience rather than to justify that experience by deriving it from an indubitable foundation. Kant's a priori principles are fundamental rather than foundational, and do not function as unassailably certain first principles from which our knowledge can be formally deduced, constructed, or justified in a traditional normative, antiskeptical epistemology. They function as the governing rules under which our form of experience is necessarily played. The second is the generality of the argument throughout the Transcendental Deduction. In the passage Kant does not, except illustratively, deal with the individual concepts listed earlier as candidate categories in the Metaphysical Deduction. The point is important for the general architecture because it allows scope in the Analytic of Principles to complete the argument with a case-by-case examination of those listed categories. Although it leaves just the needed room for that case-by-case detail, it may be asked: What is it that is generally outiined in the Transcendental Deduction, and then established on a case-by-case basis in the Analytic of Principles? The answer has to go something like this: The Deduction outiines the role that it is possible for categories to play in experience. It offers a defense of the general view that a priori concepts, independent of experience, can nevertheless have application to objects in experience, and it makes way for the subsequent arguments in the Principles that this or that particular concept does play such a role in experience. The guideline in the Principles which demonstrates that role for the specific concepts is Kant's notion of a "condition of possible experience" or a "condition of a possible object of experience." The parity of status which Kant expressed in the Aesthetic between inner and outer sense is carried through at least up to the concluding stages of the B Deduction at B160-61:

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Thus unity of the synthesis of the manifold, without or within us, and consequentiy also a combination to which everything that is to be represented as determined in space or time must conform, is given a priori as the condition of the synthesis of all apprehension.

Although Kant distinguishes at some points in the Transcendental Deduction between the roles of outer and inner sense the argument is generally conducted under that principle of parity between the two modes of sense. The Deduction, like the Aesthetic, is not concerned exclusively with the relation between inner sense and outer objects, or with the idealist problem of our knowledge of the external world. It is concerned with the more general relation between thought and its objects, which arises both for inner, mental and for outer, physical objects. The point underlines the fact that Kant's resolution of his central problem how a priori concepts can have a role in experience turns on an elucidation of the notion of "objectivity" (A104). It deals with the objectivity of judgments, whether about inner or outer objects, and the objective reality or validity of the categorial concepts in them. The minimal structure of the three major sections, then, is as follows: in the Metaphysical Deduction Kant identifies certain concepts on a principled basis as candidate categories; in the Transcendental Deduction the notions of a category and of self-consciousness are brought together under the notion of "transcendental apperception" through their general role as conditions of possible experience; and in the Analytic of Principles each listed concept is examined on a case-by-case basis to show that they fulfill that role and make possible certain fundamental objects in experience.14 It cannot be assumed, and should be denied, that the "making possible" relation and the "conditions of possible experience" are causal rather than constitutive (Bxvii-xviii), or that they refer to causal processes in an occurrent psychology. Even in the prefaces Kant distances his project from psychology, and it is made explicit in the Deduction that the transcendental project is not causal (§14, B124-25). In the Aesthetic the principle of parity between inner and outer sense showed that the discussion is not directed merely at justifying belief in external objects, and that principle and its corollary remain true in much of the Analytic. Kant's empirical realism endorses the reality of objects of both inner and outer sense, and in the Deduction Kant is concerned primarily with the general relation between thought and experience whether that experience is inner or outer. Its aim is to identify, as a continuation of the metaphysical inventory, that part of the a priori structure of experience which belongs to understanding, to thought, and to concepts.

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2. The Metaphysical Deduction 2.1. Identifying Categories through the Priority of Judgments Kant's clue to the identification of categories rests on his general account of the distinction between intuitions and concepts, in which the former are immediately, and the latter mediately, related to their inner or outer objects. The associated distinction between the senses' receptivity and understanding's spontaneity is also invoked, as is the idea that concepts rest on "functions," that is, the "unity of bringing representations under a common representation" (B93). But the central point on which Kant insists is the relation between concepts and the judgments in which they figure. That relation is expressed initially by saying that "the only use to be made of concepts is to judge by means of them" (B93), and subsequently by defining concepts as "predicates of possible judgements" (B94). The notion of a judgment is represented as having a priority over the concepts used in it, and it is that priority which encourages Kant to look to the forms of judgment as a clue to the "functions of the understanding." Two provisos need to be made immediately. The first concerns another of Kemp Smith's mistranslations, in which at B94 Kant is represented as saying that "we can reduce all acts of understanding to judgements. . . . " The word for "reduce," however, is zuriickfuhren, which means only that concepts can be "traced back" to judgments. Kant is not canvassing the absurd idea that concepts can be analytically eliminated in favor of judgments, but only repeating the claim that judgments have a priority over the concepts which occur in them. Later the same mistranslation at A101 has had more serious consequences.15 That leads directiy to the second proviso. To claim a dependence in that direction, of judgments over concepts, is not to deny a dependence in the opposite direction, in a relation of mutual dependence, rather than one-way priority, between concepts and judgments. Judgments are composed of their constituent concepts and a complete judgment requires them for its content and identification. Kant's preferred priority is not a denial of a Fregean principle of composition, in which the semantic power of a judgment depends on the semantic powers of its constituent expressions. Nor is it a denial of the parallel syntactic point that sentences are composed of expressions for concepts in accordance with syntactic rules. A Kantian way of putting the point would be to say that the constituent concepts are required for the content of judgment, but that they presuppose a judgment form into which they can fit, but even that understates the intimacy with which concepts and judgments are related. Although we can

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abstract particular concepts from the judgments in which they figure, they can still be understood only as the contents of possible judgments. Concepts are essentially related to the judgments and judgment forms in which they materially figure, and Kant's definition of a concept as a "possible predicate" underlines that point. This appeal to a presupposed requirement in empirical experience is typical of Kant's antiempiricist procedure of "going transcendental." Kant's claim is, and is recognized to be, an improvement on earlier empiricist accounts of the relation between concepts and judgments in which only the "bottom-up" compositional relation of concepts to judgments was noticed. In earlier philosophers a judgment seems scarcely different from a combination of concepts, and so left out reference to essential features of judgment such as their assertive force, or their relational tie. A combination of concepts such as "the death of Socrates" does not amount to an assertion or judgment; as a nominalization of the judgment "Socrates is dead" it presupposes judgment but by itself makes no assertion. Kant's priority of judgments over constituent concepts exemplifies Quine's account of historical progress among empiricists in accounting for language in which eventually judgments are given a priority over their material constituents,16 but Kant evidently arrived at that position long before empiricists abandoned theirs. Empiricist accounts of language, like Locke's, typically cover both a linguistic appeal and related psychological and epistemological claims about, respectively, language learning and the foundations of experience. If a bottom-up compositional account of judgments is accepted as the whole truth, then it is natural to suppose that language is learned with the same order of priorities. Locke's account assumes a bottom-up taxonomy for language in which all concepts depend ultimately on the lowest level of discrete sense impressions, and in which no special provision is made for judgment and its distinctive features. It assumes that we learn individual concepts by performing operations such as abstraction on our sensory impressions, and then mysteriously add judgment forms to that repertoire as a means of using those concepts. Although Kant is not strictly concerned to provide a psychological account of language learning, and explicitly rejects such an account as adequate for categories, his priority of judgments over concepts corrects that empiricist view, and supports his general method of "going transcendental" (B118-19). There is in Kant no room for the idea that we might learn concepts without already having some grasp of judgment and its forms. Nor does Kant endorse a parallel bottomup epistemological foundation for experience in his descriptive metaphysics. Kant's account is holistic, not atomist, and certainly not empiricist. It relies on a mutual relation between lower-level a posteriori concepts and higher-level a priori forms of judgment.

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2.2. The Strategy of Appealing to Formal Logic Although Kant's account of concepts and judgments is on the right semantic lines it provides only a step in his metaphysical project of identifying fundamental concepts, categories, in our experience. His argument has two further claims, first that forms of judgment provide a strategy for identifying categories, and second that tactically formal logic provides an adequate classification of forms of judgment. The former argues that if judgments are prior to concepts, and what is distinctive about the former are the forms in which they combine concepts, then those forms provide the most fundamental ways in which we express our thought. Such a line of argument relating fundamental judgment forms from logic to fundamental concepts has some plausibility but no more than that. It makes an interesting, rather than conclusive, method for pursuing a descriptive inventory of the most general structure of our thought. It asserts a nontraditional priority for judgments over their constituent concepts but it does not establish the required a priority for judgment forms. Nor does it offer a decisive reason to rely on discriminations among judgment forms made in current logic. Its merits lie in a recognition that our experience includes not only objects but also such items as properties, relations, and states of affairs, and that no adequate inventory of that experience can be provided without resources from language to identify such items. Kant's more specific intention to identify categories through, or even with, fundamental judgment forms is open to objections other than a dubious reliance on his logic. Recent philosophy has a tradition in which logic and language are conceived as reliable guides to the formal structure of experience, and Kant's project has something in common with that view. In different ways Russell, Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Quine17 have all been prepared to endorse Kant-like views about a logical structure for experience but they would disagree with Kant on several issues. Quine would disagree with Kant's belief that judgment forms provide the most fundamental features of language, since he held, rather obscurely, that "the whole of science" rather than judgment is the "unit of empirical significance."18 But none of these recent philosophers understood the idea of logic as a formal structure in Kant's way. The most they would concede is that logic in general, and its preferred systems, provide the forms in which our experience, especially scientific experience, is expressed. There is no indication of Kant's idea that each form corresponds to a fundamental category.

2.3. The Tactical Outcome in the Table ofJudgment Forms Quine, along with most contemporary logicians, would also dismiss Kant's second claim that his formal logic provides an adequate classification of

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fundamental judgment forms. The principal objections to Kant's project derive not from those general aims, outiined in 2.2, but from its detailed execution. In particular the judgment forms which Kant takes from his logic have seemed to commentators at best dubious and at worst unwarranted. Some objections derive from the changes in formal logic since Kant's time which have either rejected some of the forms, or supplemented them with others. But difficulties arise also from his requirements that the tables should be "systematic" and "complete" and should, like metaphysics itself, yield an "exhaustive inventory" of the understanding's powers (B89, B105). It is not clear what these requirements mean. Kant plainly relies on what he knew of logic, but is the table of judgments systematic in covering all judgments on some internal principle of classification, as Klaus Reich believed?19 Kant himself says of the requirement that the system "is developed from a common principle, namely the faculty of judgement . . . " (B106), but this may indicate no more than the noted priority of judgments over their constituents. Do "completeness" and "exhaustiveness" require that no judgment form is omitted; or that no nonderivative form is omitted; or that the four major headings, quality, quantity, relation, and modality, yield an exhaustive classification; or only that we cannot identify a judgment which is not classified at some point in the scheme, or under each major heading (B107-8)? Kant speaks of a need to ". . . cover the whole field of pure understanding" (B89), but it is unclear what coverage amounts to. Some commentators, such as Bennett, criticize Kant for relying on his access to a limited group of Indo-European languages, and others, like de Vleeschauwer,20 have claimed that the judgment table is an arbitrarily chosen classification drawn from a variety of schemes known to Kant. It is not worth pursuing these issues. The table of judgment forms covers many of the forms contemporary logic recognizes but not all. Kant has no conception of the full range of binary propositional connectives, or of their reduction to one form, or of modern quantifiers, especially in their polyadic forms, or of the range and character of modal operators, or of nonstandard logics. His classification includes some forms, such as "infinite" judgments, which have no present place in formal logic. The table is complete only in a weak sense in which any judgment can be classified under one or other of the major headings.

2.4. Judgment Forms, Categories, and Synthesis The relation between the tables of judgment forms and categories raises problems. One is the trite objection that specific forms do not always

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express the relevant category. Plainly not all hypothetical judgments are causal, and this may seem to damage Kant's association of that judgment form and the category of cause. Another points to the passage at B102-5 which offers to explain the transition from judgment form to category. Kant introduces the notion of "synthesis" to make that transition, but his remarks are cryptically brief. He says: By means of analysis different representations are brought under one concept—a procedure treated of in general logic. What transcendental logic . . . teaches is how we bring to concepts not representations but the pure synthesis of representations. . . . The same function which gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition; and this unity, in its most general expression, we call the pure concept of the understanding. (B104)

The two general problems are connected in this way: The second distinguishes different orders of representation between subjudgmental concepts and others expressed distinctively by judgment. If Kant holds that each category is expressed by its associated judgment form, this is vulnerable to the first objection that the relevant forms do not always express the associated category. Commentators typically and rightiy note a distinction between "schematized" and "unschematized" categories which defuses the first difficulty (B186-87). For Kant categories in a schematized form must make some reference to sense features such as space or time in their application to experience. The category of cause is realized in experience by circumstances spatially adjacent, and temporally prior, to their effect,21 and this reflects the necessary realizing, instantiating role of sense experience. The pure concepts corresponding to forms of judgment, on the other hand, are meant to be unschematized and make no such reference to sensory intuitions of space and time. The suggestion is that for "cause" if we abstract from those spatiotemporal features, we obtain the more general notion of a "condition" expressed in hypothetical, or conditional, judgments. Even if the ordinary notion of a cause, in its schematized form, is not expressed uniquely by conditional judgments, nevertheless its unschematized ancestor is. Kant illustrates the same distinction between a purely logical conception of a substance, as something which can function only as a subject and not as a predicate, and its schematized descendant as something which persists through change in its properties. There is no great difficulty in drawing such distinctions over the whole range of judgment forms and categories. For the nonmodal categories, it is easy to distinguish abstract conceptions of sets and their members (quantity), of bare assertion and

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denial (quality), or of a condition, substance, and reciprocity (relation). The modal categories also have extensive specifications in various forms of modal logic representable as descendants of more general conceptions of modality. The catalogue is not complete either in matching all Kant's subheadings, such as "infinite" judgment, or in covering all the judgment forms we might regard as fundamental, but these are tactical rather than strategic problems. The second issue concerned Kant's explanation for that more flexible association between categories and judgment forms in the quotation from B104. That explanation links categories with a pure, a priori, synthesis, and also connects judgment with a synthesis in intuition. Two issues arise from these claims: (1) Kant's inference to an a priori or pure synthesis, and (2) the assimilation of unity in judgment and unity in intuition. (1) Kant's inference from the priority of judgment over concepts to the identification of a priori concepts or syntheses was earlier admitted to be invalid. Even if the former priority is accepted, it does not follow that judgments or their forms are a priori. It is one thing to allocate such priorities within experience and another to identify some item as prior to any experience. Even if it is accepted that Locke's empiricist account of language is deficient, and for Kantian reasons, we cannot infer that judgments have an a priori character or that their forms are associated with a priori concepts. What the accepted argument establishes is that we cannot represent, or learn, language in that empiricist way, because it misconceives the order of priorities among concepts and judgments in language, but this falls short of Kant's claim that judgment forms are themselves a priori. Two points can be made in response. First, it has been indicated already that Kant's argument in the Metaphysical Deduction does not by itself offer to prove that the listed concepts, associated with each form of judgment, are a priori. The suggestion that it provides a proof that the categories are a priori owed more to misrepresentations of Kant's text than to the text itself. The revised translations, by Guyer/Wood and Brandt, which refer to an a priori ground for the categories' origin in forms of judgment, rather than for their a priori character, do not even claim to establish that the listed concepts are themselves a priori. They allow Kant to appeal to the rational, a priori character of general logic as a guide to the identification of categories, but that falls short of establishing that the categories themselves are a priori. Second, it is evident that Kant thinks of formal features, both in the Metaphysical Deduction and the Aesthetic, as a priori and of their material correlates as a posteriori. There is a presumption that forms of judgment, prior to the material correlates of constituent empirical concepts, are a priori. Both points lead to the expectation that later sections of the Analytic are required to complete such a proof, and this expectation is initially fill-

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filled at B129-30. There Kant characterizes "combination" (Verbindung) as the "only representation which cannot be given through objects" and which "can never come to us from the senses." This indicates that "combination," as a distinctive feature of judgment, forms part of the a priori contribution from the understanding, and confirms the earlier suggestion that we must look to the Transcendental, and not the Metaphysical, Deduction for a general proof of the categories' a priority, and to the Analytic of Principles for specific proofs for each named concept. The two responses taken together indicate only that prima facie candidature for a priori status which was earlier claimed for the categories in the Metaphysical Deduction. They confirm the claim that the section licenses a principled a priori procedure from logic for identifying categories, but does not yet claim to establish that the listed concepts are a priori. (2) Kant claims at B104 that what gives unity in a judgment, presumably its logical form, also gives unity to the synthesis of (manifold) representations in an intuition. This can be associated with the more general point from B75, namely, that concepts and intuitions are together required to provide knowledge. The later claim makes a more specific connection between concepts and intuition, namely, that the formal unity of judgment actually is, or provides, the unity we find in intuitive synthesis. There are two distinguishable but related points: First, that forms of judgment carry over to what we intuit, and second, that this remains true of pure intuition and pure concepts. The former claim could be put by saying that what we perceive can be understood, or understood adequately, only in terms of the judgments we use to express it. The more specific point could be put by saying that since this is true of the a priori forms of judgment they provide with pure intuition a formal structure, a network or affinity, for our grasp of what we intuit or perceive in experience. To understand the range of our perception we cannot exclude the judgmental contents which we use in saying such things as "I see that the book is on the table." It is only when we deploy concepts to express, or designate, the content of our intuitions that we satisfy the requirements for knowledge, and we do so precisely in terms of the judgment forms which, for Kant, provide the only use we can make of concepts. We might interpret this as saying that what we perceive, or intuit, is not properly designated simply as a list of items, objects, which causally affect our senses, but has also to include the circumstances, situations, facts, or states of affairs characteristically expressed by judgments. The point was noted above. The judgments and their forms are, it might be said, just as much indispensable contributors to our understanding of what we perceive as are the constituent names or concepts deployed in them. That claim can be accepted while insisting also that different aspects of judgment—names, predicates, and forms—function semantically in different ways. It does not entail the

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objectionable view, discussed in Wittgenstein's Tractatusand Philosophical Investigations (chapter 3.2.3) that all such items function simply as names. Since Kant evidently thinks of forms of judgment as on a different level from their constituents, the suggestion is that the nonmaterial, nonempirical forms of judgment point to a structure for experience and intuition. What are perceived, or intuited, are not merely singular items, but things of the type of states of affairs which are designated necessarily in the forms of judgment which express them. What is intuited, what is real, has to include those formal designations as well as the material items which the constituent concepts designate. In this way, the suggestion is, a formal element is introduced into our experience and perception by the understanding in a way which parallels the formal structure introduced into our experience by the a priori spatiotemporal forms of intuition. That formal structure, due to the understanding in the most abstract features of judgment, is Kant's conception of the pure categories. It is worth noting how natural it is to express that point by saying that we, or our language and its fundamental concepts, impose such a structure on what we perceive. Such a claim, like the reference to rules of a game (chapter 4.3), should not be taken literally as causal and psychological rather than merely intentional. Nor does it need to imply that there is any way of identifying the material of what we perceive independently of its formal identification in judgments. It can be taken to express what has been said so far, namely that we can understand the conception of "what we perceive" only by deploying concepts and judgment forms from our language. In Kant's metaphysical inventory, as opposed to an operational psychology, the account should be understood in that latter, nonmetaphorical way. Nor, if Kant's project is such a metaphysics (B105), is he concerned primarily with skeptical, idealist issues about justifying a link between judgments or beliefs, and truth or reality. The project can assume that there is such a connection in order to identify the character and structure of our thought in representing it. In the Transcendental Deduction Kant raises a question about the relation between thought and reality and how it can be understood, but it is not a direct response to such a traditional skepticism.

3. Some Criticisms and a Concluding Summary Recent commentators often characterize the Metaphysical Deduction as a total failure in the light of twentieth-century formal logic, but others, such as Beatrice Longuenesse and Michael Wolff,22 have found some merit in it. I shall suggest that some of the familiar criticisms derive more from failures of interpretative practice than from faults in Kant. This is not to say that

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Kant is immune from criticism, but only that a more careful examination of his position indicates less vulnerable theses. The section has undoubtedly two faults: one of presentation and one of substance. Under the former Kant's position is often stated rather than argued; under the latter there is no doubt that the detailed execution of Kant's general plan is more dubious than the plan itself. I take it that some details in the plan's execution are not defensible, but argue that criticisms of the plan may be themselves inadequate. The general plan of the Metaphysical Deduction is clear. Kant appeals to our language and logic in identifying a structure for experience due to the understanding, and this is captured through the priority of judgments over their constituent concepts and the special role Kant attaches to forms of judgment. That conceptual structure from the understanding is intended to complement the intuitive structure provided in the Aesthetic by the spatiotemporal forms or modes of sense. For Kant, unlike many twentieth-century philosophers, language is not the only contributor to the metaphysical structure of experience,23 and his additional emphasis on other cognitive capacities provides a corrective to the danger of overemphasizing language. Kant's thesis, within the structure of language, that concepts depend on judgment, represents an advance over previous philosophy, and in "going transcendental" usefully corrects an earlier empiricist failure to recognize the distinctive importance of judgment. The additional claim, that there is a principled link between specific judgment forms and the categorial structure of our experience, is neither unmotivated nor quite implausible but it is also not totally clear. Beatrice Longuenesse has offered an historical explanation for that link by claiming that Kant's conception of formal logic was not a modern, postFregean conception and owed more to the model of the Port-Royal logic. In that tradition, as she says logic was understood as men's "reflections on the four main operations of their minds"—conceiving, judging, reasoning, and ordering—and already made the connection between the structure of our thinking and our forms of judgment (1998, 74). Such an historical explanation of Kant's procedure is unfortunately not enough to justify it, and Kant's own explanation, compatible with that historical model, can stand on its own. At B91 Kant explains the general procedure underlying his clue: "When we call a faculty of knowledge into play, then, as the occasioning circumstances differ, various concepts stand forth . . . and allow of their being collected with more or less completeness. . . . " The procedure is in general not unlike that recommended by the later Wittgenstein or by Austin in "A Plea for Excuses,"24 in which a complete network of related concepts for excuses is identified as a preliminary to a detailed investigation of their distinctive senses. The outcome in many of Kant's detailed taxonomies is not unlike the outcome of Austin's enquiry (B377 or B346).

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Kant's conception of the need for a general principle is not the same as Austin's and relies not on the dictionary but on an appeal to a rational general principle without which he thinks the investigation will be unsystematic and incomplete. Some philosophers may accept that our experience is governed in a Kantian way by spatiotemporal features and by such notions as "cause" and "substance," but think Kant's demand for a general principle as a clue to their identification unnecessary. Strawson's descriptive metaphysics in Individuals provided an investigation of fundamental concepts governing our experience but made no use of any such principled clue.25 It offered arguments to show that concepts like "cause" and "material object," and subject-predicate judgment forms, are fundamental to our conceptual scheme, but did not consider whether they exhaust the field. It is thus open to the objection Kant makes against Hume and Aristotle, namely, that they had not investigated the possibility of that wider field (B795, B91-92, B105-6). The sceptical errors of this otherwise singularly acute thinker [Hume] arose chiefly from a defect which he shares with all dogmatists, namely that he did not make a systematic review of all the various kinds of a priori synthesis. . . . he would then have found, to mention one of many possible examples, that the principle of permanence is [also] a principle of this character and that, like the principle of causality, it anticipates experience. (B795)

That systematic failure is responsible, Kant thinks, for Hume's empiricist inability to make a needed distinction, canvassed in the prefaces, between legitimate and illegitimate transcendental principles. Without such a distinction those principles will be at best problematic and consequently encourage an empiricist tendency towards skepticism. Kant's aim for a systematic rather than a piecemeal investigation, covering science as well as ordinary experience, is surely justified even if its execution is inadequate. It is not, as Longuenesse rightly says, "an unfortunate architectonic coquetterie"(1998, 71). There have been other criticisms of Kant's plan. Bennett26 rejects the idea of identifying categories through an inventory of judgment forms because the latter tells us nothing about the "indispensability" supposed to belong to them (1966, 80-83). The suggestion is that Kant holds these forms to be indispensable for any concept use, but that no mere inventory guarantees indispensability. Even the weak claim that any such use has to have one specific form from each of the four general headings is said to be inadequate. The argument is that a machine which operates with just three possible speeds, listed in its categorial inventory, cannot guarantee that the machine will use each of the three speeds at any time, or show that any of them is strictly indispensable.

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This line of criticism is obscure. Kant makes clear in the Prolegomena (preface, Ak. 4.258 ) 27 that his claims for the categories, and presumably therefore for forms of judgment, or for any of the fundamental elements in experience, do not rest merely on their indispensability but on their a priori character. But even if they did rest on some notion of indispensability, the cited conceptions of indispensability are unimaginative. The exhaustive list of three operating speeds for a machine will be fundamental for its character even if the machine is never used, or used only ever in one such mode. It could not sensibly be required for such indispensability that the machine is actually used with some, or all, of its speeds. Even if checkmates were never actually delivered in chess games at master level, instead of being very unusual, the concept would still form an indispensable, and relative a priori, aspect of the game. What motivates the criticism are the beliefs first that Kant is committed in the Metaphysical Deduction to a proof, or guarantee, that the concepts listed are a priori categories, and second that Kant's project would be irretrievably damaged if it merely lists the judgment forms used in our contingent experience. The former point is vulnerable to the noted mistranslations which wrongly give the impression that such a proof is already given in the section. That error is compounded by Bennett's objection that to regard the listed concepts as mere "candidates" for categorial status is to ascribe to Kant the view that these are only a "short list" which may not include all the categories (1966, 93-94). Kant plainly does not believe that the given list is incomplete, but the objection confuses "being a candidate" with "being on a short list." All applicants for posts are candidates but most are not short-listed, and it is possible to be a candidate in an examination where there is no question of a short list at all. The principled clue to the categories presents them as a complete list of candidates. They are not yet proved to be a priori categories and the proof needs the later arguments in the Transcendental Deduction and Analytic of Principles. The second motive is also inadequate. It may seem obvious that a survey of our contingent experience can disclose nothing more than a posteriori elements in it, but this is a mistake based on an empiricist prejudice. It is parallel to the fallacy Kant identifies at B1, in which we infer that whatever begins with experience must derive from it. In this context the fallacy is one in which we infer from the contingency of our experience as a whole that every specific contributor to it is contingent. Kant's persistent method is to survey our experience, as it contingently is, in order to abstract or isolate from it those elements which are a priori (B764-65). The aim may be mistaken or unachievable, but it is not vulnerable merely to an empiricist counterclaim. On the more positive side, the Metaphysical Deduction points in two interesting directions for further enquiry. Kant later considers the con-

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nection between judgment forms and categories in arguing for the latter's a priori character and for the connection at B104 between pure concepts and sense perception. Even at B104 Kant offers a brief general indication of that necessary connection, but in later discussions he attempts to clarify the claim. It is a vital problem for Kant to explain how a priori categories, not derived from our given a posteriori sense experience, can nevertheless apply to that sense experience. It is vital for Kant because he requires a contribution from both understanding and sensibility for genuine knowledge, because he has to explain how categories function, and also because he intends to argue that that function enables him to distinguish, as Hume did not, between legitimate and illegitimate transcendental principles (B75-76). That latter aim was heavily underlined in the prefaces, and is addressed initially in the Transcendental Deduction in claiming that a priori concepts have a legitimate use only in judgment and only in connection with sense experience. Legitimate transcendental principles involving a priori concepts have such a use which illegitimate transcendent principles lack. A second direction for further enquiry arises from the claim that what we perceive can be understood only through our linguistic, judgmental forms and their associated a priori concepts. This is both to indicate a noncausal, intentional sense in which we "impose" a structure on experience, and also to raise the general question about the role which language plays in that experience. It was shown earlier that Kant rejects a psychological or causal account of that imposition of structure on experience, but that denial raises the question how it should more positively be understood. In the discussion of the Aesthetic's conception of an "appearance" it was suggested that Richard Aquila's appeal to "intentionality" might provide an answer to that question, but the suggestion is even more apt in the Analytic. For the notion of "intentionality" undoubtedly has its primary use in relation to concepts and language. It indicates a relation in which thought is directed to, targets, or is about some purported reality, whether an individual, property, or state of affairs. That relation is further elaborated in the idea that such "direction" or "targeting" leaves room for failure, for the "intentional inexistence" of some targeted individual or the falsity of some claim.28 It allows us to identify targeted items as items "under some description," to characterize opacity of reference, and to understand referential failure and falsity. It is invoked in Kant's account in the prefaces of two ways of representing, or misrepresenting, the status of objects of experience, correctly as appearances or mistakenly as transcendent things in themselves. It is a factor, which enables us to speak of a "vicarious" experience, that is, of an experience identified in linguistic terms which the subject does not or cannot use. We may correctly say that someone tasted truffles, or saw the President of the U.S.A., even though they do not, or cannot, recognize the items in

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those terms. It describes a relation between thoughts and what thoughts are about which may be intelligible essentially, or only, in linguistic terms, and might constitute part of what we understand by experience and reality. It points to the need to clarify a notion of "objectivity" which is part of our concept of reality, and it begins to provide a relatively unmysterious, noncausal account of what Kant's "imposition" metaphor amounts to. The Metaphysical Deduction points firmly in the direction of these issues, but it is left to the Transcendental Deduction to take them up. That later section addresses directly issues about the a priori character of categories, their role and application to sense experience, and the more general problems about language and intentionality. In that exercise Kant is concerned with the general relation between thought and what it is about, its "objects" or "objectivity," and not the traditional idealist problem of justifying a relation between inner sense representations and outer objects.

[12] The Transcendental Deduction (i)

T h e Transcendental Deduction can be seen as the center of gravity not only of the first Critique but also of the whole Critical system. Transcendental deductions are considered throughout the later works, sometimes to provide them and sometimes to deny their possibility (B393, B697), but the essential character of a transcendental deduction is given in the first Critique. If its role is misunderstood or rejected there, then the whole Critical system is distorted or threatened. It is not surprising that so much controversy arises over the nature of that role and its subsequent evaluation. One recent example of such controversy has arisen from the belief that the passage provides a paradigm of Kant's so-called transcendental arguments against a traditional skepticism, such as that of an idealist doubt about our knowledge of an external world (chapter 11). Some commentators have responded by pursuing those lines of argument well beyond any claim that Kant might have made,1 others have accepted that interpretation of Kant but claim that it fails as an antidote to traditional skepticism, and still others deny that Kant's argument should be interpreted in that way. Other disputes arise from the structure of Kant's argument as a "deduction." If it is intended as a strict deductive argument, then its premises and conclusions need to be clearly identified before it can be evaluated, but commentators identify the premises and conclusions differently. It has also been claimed2 that the argument is not strictly deductive but should be modeled on legal disputes about the possession of titles called in the Germany of Kant's time Deduktionen and supported by Deduktionsschriften. Before these issues can be addressed it is necessary to outline the central claims in the text. I summarize in 1 the two preliminary sections (§13 and §14) common to the two editions, in 2 the first-edition version, and in 3 the second edition.

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1. Two Preliminary Sections: § 1 3 and § 1 4 ( B 1 1 6 - 2 9 ) In these preliminary sections Kant makes three related points: 1.1 on the need for such a deduction, 1.2 on relating a priori concepts to intuition, and 1.3 on the general role of a priori concepts in experience.

1.1. The Need for a Transcendental Deduction Kant's central point is to reject any "empirical" account of the acquisition of a priori concepts. That rejection is linked, as in earlier passages (Aix), to the claim that a Lockean psychology outlining the mere origins of concepts is inadequate for Kant's purposes, and it forms part of Kant's general intention to distinguish his transcendental enquiry from psychology. That latter enquiry could show only that we have particular concepts, and how they come to be learned and used, but it could not properly justify their a priori status or their use. Kant points out that we habitually use concepts, such as "fate" and "luck," whose justification and meaning are at best doubtfid. The distinction between "questions of fact" and "questions of law," and the terminology of "justification," in which Kant uses Rechtfertigung, Rechtmassigkeit, and Befugniss, all of which echo the legal metaphor (cf. B697, B732), fit naturally into Kant's account, but may also mislead. They may encourage the beliefs that Kant's project is primarily a refutation of a traditional skepticism, and that as transcendental and a priori it has no connection with the facts of experience. It should be recalled, however, that the primary and explicit target of the Deduction is skepticism not primarily about the existence of external objects, but about the existence and role of a priori concepts.3 Kant adds to that aim a skepticism of his own in rejecting the extravagant philosophical claim, in the basic rationalist fallacy, that a priori concepts refer to and provide knowledge of a supersensible world. The latter goal rejects any rationalist role for such concepts beyond sense experience, while the former claims a role for a priori concepts which goes beyond an empiricist conception of the a priori. Kant's primary aim is to show, against empiricist skeptics, that a priori concepts can have an intelligible role in experience, but to endorse an empiricist skepticism about a role for such concepts beyond sense experience. To support such a role for a priori concepts may be ultimately to show that other forms of traditional skepticism are unwarranted, but at this stage Kant's account is patently designed only to make intelligible the possibility, and proper role, of a priori concepts. The point is confirmed by Kant's remark in this context that a science like geometry needs no "birth certificate" or, we might add, Deduktionsschrift from philosophy (B119-20, B128).

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Kant accepts that we might provide an empirical account of our acquisition even of a priori concepts, so that their development cannot be wholly divorced from the facts of our experience. But he is surely right to say that such an account of the "occasioning causes" of their use could not justify their a priori status (B117). We might, like Mill, give similar illustrations of the empirical use of mathematics which would also fall short of any demonstration of its a priority. Nor would it be plausible to suppose that in Kant's legal model we are concerned only with questions of law and not with any material facts. The model of Deduktionen, of birth certificates and tides to land, was one in which a legal right was considered on the basis of the existing laws and the material facts in the case. Tides to land require accurate maps of the terrain with boundaries clearly established, just as Kant's project surveys our experience and draws boundaries between its different elements, and between experience as a whole and what lies outside it. The model indicates that some facts may be relevant, even if not decisive, but it also leaves open both which facts are material and what corresponds to the law in Kant's project. At this point the legal metaphor becomes exhausted and needs to be replaced with the less metaphorical elucidations offered under 1.2 and 1.3.

1.2. Relating A Priori Concepts to Intuition At this stage Kant offers litde to indicate how a priori concepts might relate to intuition, but insists only that such an explanation is ultimately required. If we assume that all knowledge requires some reference to sense experience, then any a priori concepts present an obvious problem in meeting that requirement. Ultimately such a modesdy empiricist assumption may need support,4 but in this passage Kant seems to make that assumption and then to address the problem of a disparity, of bridging the gap, between pure concepts and sense experience. Two important comments on that problem are made. The first concerns the a priori intuitions of space and time. Kant notes that the unavoidable demand for a transcendental deduction of a priori concepts arises not only for them but also for the concept of space. The objects, so far as their form is concerned, are given, through the very knowledge of them, a priori in intuition. In the case of the pure concepts of the understanding it is quite otherwise; it is with them that the unavoidable demand for a transcendental deduction, not only of themselves, but also of the concept of space, first originates. (B120)

Earlier it was noted that Kant's reference to "concepts" of space and time is not an error but an essential reflection of his view of philosophy as

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"conceptual." But the quoted passage may seem to provide another conflict with the Aesthetic through the claim at B119 that a "transcendental deduction of space and time has been already given." This was the reason for distinguishing in chapter 8 between the basic sensory conditions which enable us to institute geometry from those conceptual conditions required for its development. The suggestion is that such a developed use of the concept of space in geometry must itself require appeal to a priori concepts as well as a priori intuition. The Aesthetic oudines a precondition in sense experience, a sensory manifold, for the development of such a system and proves the a priori character of its central intuitions, but that development also requires a synthesis, a priori concepts, and rational proof procedures. That suggestion is pardy confirmed by the second comment. For Kant also expresses the disparity between understanding's a priori concepts and the senses' intuitions by claiming that a sense experience is possible even where a priori concepts are lacking. Moreover, Kant expresses the point by allowing that in such a situation the senses would still present objects (Gegenstande) to intuition. Objects may, therefore, appear to us without their being under the necessity of being related to the functions of understanding; and understanding need not therefore contain their a priori conditions. . . . But since intuition stands in no need whatsoever of the functions of thought, appearances would none the less present objects to our intuition. (B122-23)

Just as the earlier claim seems to conflict with the Aesthetic account of space and time so this passage may seem to be inconsistent with Kant's claim that we could not have experience of objects in intuition without categories (A112). Commentators may see this as another example of Kant's hopeless illogicality, but a reconciliation has been already canvassed. For Kant it evidendy makes sense to speak of intuition and of its objects even in the absence of the otherwise required conceptual apparatus, and it was argued in chapter 7.2 that this resolves the "blindness" issue through the notion of a vicarious experience. For the present I offer no further account of this, but insist only that it reinforces the suggestion that we can notion ally separate talk of intuition and its object, or content, in abstraction from those a priori concepts. In a similar way the abstract array of Euclidean points provided a model for an abstract sensory structure, a "manifold" of sense, notionally separated from concepts, in the Aesthetic arguments.

1.3. The Role of A Priori Concepts in Experience The problem about the relation between pure concepts and sense experience which Kant indicates under 1.1 raises also a related question about the

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role of such concepts in experience. It would be natural to say that until we know what their role is, or might be, we have no clear indication of how they might relate to sensibility, to intuition. For that reason the question of the general role of a priori concepts is prior to the question about the relation between those concepts and intuitions. Kant answers the former question at B124-2 5. There he considers two ways in which "synthetic representations" and "their objects" establish a connection. In the first the object makes the representation possible, and in the other the representation makes the object possible. The first case fits the standard examples in the Aesthetic where Kant speaks of sensibility as a faculty in which we are affected by objects, and plainly matches the assumption, to be challenged in the Critique, that all knowledge conforms to objects. The Critical Copernican experiment announced at Bxvi is to consider the consequences of supposing the opposite, namely that at least some objects conform to our knowledge. It is therefore no surprise that the first case is set aside as "merely empirical," and that Kant now concentrates on the second. The second rejects some ways of understanding the relation and replaces them with others. In the latter case representation in itself does not produce its object in so far as existence is concerned, for we are not here speaking of its causality by means of the will. None the less the representation is a priori determinant of the object if it be the case that only through the representation is it possible to know anything as an object. (B124-25)

The important points in the passage are first that Kant rejects the idea that a priori representations causally bring any object into existence, and second that the relation has to do with conditions of knowing something as an object. The "making possible" relation, which is ubiquitous throughout Kant's Critical writing, is not a causal but an epistemic relation, as earlier passages also showed (Bxvii). That relation is further clarified in the following passage: The question now arises whether a priori concepts do not also serve as antecedent conditions under which alone anything can be, if not intuited, yet thought as an object in general. In that case all empirical knowledge of objects would necessarily conform to such concepts, because only as thus presupposing them is anything possible as object of experience. (B125-26)

The Deduction evidently concerns the general relation of thought to its objects in experience rather than that between inner mental states and outer objects. The difference between the senses and understanding is now represented as a difference between what is known indeterminately as appearance and what is known determinately as an object of experience.

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That is not a material difference between two types of empirically identifiable object, such as inner and mental, or outer and spatial, since objects of experience are appearances, but a formal difference between two ways of characterizing whatever experience contains. In one such way we abstract from the contribution of the understanding in order to isolate the contribution from the senses and label it "appearance"; in the other we recognize the full-blooded character of experience and its discriminable objects as a combination of receptive sense and conceptual, spontaneous understanding. Later Kant draws this same distinction by contrasting "appearance" and "phenomenon": "Appearances, so far as they are thought as objects according to the unity of the categories, are called phenomena" (A 248-49). The important message is that Kant is not canvassing a material operation in which we causally bring about the existence of some new set of objects by an act of conceptual will. What he envisages is a set of formal conditions which make possible our knowledge and our cognitive discriminations among intuited, indeterminate appearances. The discussion of Kant's position in 1.1-1.3 clarifies his project by focusing attention on the existence and role of a priori concepts. Kant addresses immediately an empiricist skepticism about the existence and role of a priori concepts, and not an idealist skepticism about the existence of external objects. Categories are represented as conditions of our thought which make possible both inner and outer experience. Such an account is incompatible with the literal, that is, causal and psychological, model of the traditionalist "mind making nature." The project cannot be totally divorced from psychological considerations, but objections to that connection are defused by insisting that it is not essentially psychological but transcendental. The comments in the preface which distinguish the essential "objective" and the nonessential "subjective" deduction confirm that the project is not an empirical or causal enquiry in psychology (Axvi-xvii).

2. The First Edition Transcendental Deduction (A95-130) The A Deduction is divided by Kant into two parts, a "preparatory" section (A98-114) and a "systematic exposition" (A115-130). I follow this division in summarizing the discussion, but concentrate on the former to avoid unnecessary duplication.

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2.1. The Preparatory Section (A95-114): Synthesis

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In his introduction (A95-98) Kant repeats the requirement that a priori concepts should have some role in experience, even though they cannot be derived from experience. The claim is that this role can only be that "they serve solely as a priori conditions of a possible experience" (A95). Kant remains faithful to his procedure of "abstracting" from the empirical elements of experience in order to isolate any a priori concepts (B127). He points out that the possession of pure concepts enables us to construct fantasies which are either blankly impossible or quite outside our experience (A96). A priori concepts point not only to a necessary role in the constitution of experience, but also to the illusory face of reason in which such concepts are no longer restricted to that proper role and claim to transcend experience. This is an early indication of Kant's diagnosis and treatment of philosophical illusions in attempting to transcend experience in the Dialectic, which echoes Wittgenstein's remark about the "bewitchment of our intelligence by language" (Philosophical Investigations §109, chapter 24). Kant indicates the structure of the argument in speaking of "pure a priori concepts, if such exist..." (A95); he assumes the hypothesis that there are such concepts in order to outline their role in experience (B117-18). We do not need to require that the argument should be strictly deductive, but the aim is to prove "that by their [a priori concepts] means alone [can] an object be thought, [and that] . . . this will be a sufficient deduction of them and justify their objective validity" (A 96-97). The initial means of pursuing that argument is anticipated in the final paragraph (A97). There it is assumed, as at B117, that experience is a complex whole in which representations are connected, and the stated goal is to locate certain operations which are necessary for those connections. Those operations Kant now calls a "threefold synthesis" which leads direcdy to his central question about the "object of representations." Kant considers the operations of the threefold synthesis "not in their empirical but in their transcendental constitution" in order to distinguish his own interest from that of empirical psychology (A97). It is part of the "subjective deduction" which appears to, but properly does not, belong to empirical psychology (Axvi-xvii). That uncertainty about it is one reason for its poor reputation, reinforced by its deliberate omission from, or relocation in, the B version of the Deduction (B §§24-25 5 ). Kant's evident intention is to claim that his apparent excursions into empirical psychology are, properly understood, transcendental rather than empirical, causal, or

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psychological. His reason for rejecting, or relocating, the synthesis in B may have been not that he thought it wrong, but that he thought it misled readers into mistaking a properly philosophical enquiry for empirical, genetic psychology. The empirical threefold synthesis appeals to three interacting psychological functions, namely apprehension in intuition (or perception), reproduction in imagination (or recall), and recognition in concepts (conceptualization). It is now well understood that these are not separate phases in a full grasp of what is presented to us in experience, but mutually interacting functions in, and constitutive of, that grasp.6 Even intuitive apprehension is to be understood in its normal developed form as involving both recall and recognition, and Kant underlines this later. "Psychologists have hitherto failed to realise that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself' (A120n). The suggestion is that these functions are all necessary for that developed grasp in experience, and that claim begins to indicate how apparent psychology merges into philosophy. Kant is investigating not the causal mechanisms which realize these functions but the nonempirical necessity of their role in experience. In those terms it would be pointless to insist on an exclusive classification of the latter claims as either philosophical or psychological. They involve references to psychological powers and acts, but concern their noncontingent status, rather than their empirical, causal operation. But if Kant's claims about their status are correct, and they demonstrate fundamental principles of our cognitive powers, then they may be both distinctively philosophical and related to enquiry in empirical psychology. I note and defer two substantial questions which Kant's account raises: (1) Are these psychological functions necessary for experience? (2) What kind of necessity is involved in Kant's claims? For the present I draw attention to two controversial features of Rant's account. First, Kant expresses his view not only by insisting on the general necessity of these psychological functions but also by claiming that they correspond to more specific a priori operations. The point is made for each synthesis, for example at A99: "This synthesis of apprehension must also be exercised a priori, that is, in respect of representations which are not empirical." The point is important, not least because, as Kant explains, such an a priori exercise is required even for such elementary representations as space and time: if I were always to drop out of thought the preceding representations . . . and did not reproduce them while advancing to those that follow, a complete representation would never be obtained: none of the above mentioned thoughts,

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not even the purest and most elementary representations of space and time, could arise. (A102)

Kant is simply extrapolating from the general need for the threefold synthesis that it must hold also in a priori contexts, and even in those which involve pure intuitions. Second, Kant insists on the limitations of our use of these psychological functions, especially in a passage at A100-102. The suggestion is that the empirical associations we make in experience depend upon appearances actually being subject to the relevant coexistences or sequences. If cinnabar were sometimes red, sometimes black, sometimes light, sometimes heavy, . . . my empirical imagination would never find opportunity when representing red colour to bring to mind heavy cinnabar . . . our empirical imagination would never find opportunity for exercise appropriate to its powers. . . . Nor could there be an empirical synthesis of reproduction if a certain name were sometimes given to this, sometimes to that, object . . . independendy of any rule to which appearances are in themselves subject.

Kant uses this lurid scenario7 to argue for an "a priori ground of a necessary synthetic unity of appearances" which makes their reproduction possible. He elucidates that ground in two references, first to insist that appearances are not independent things in themselves but, in Kemp Smith's translation "reduce to determinations of inner sense," and second to claim that "experience as such necessarily presupposes the reproducibility of appearances" (A101-2). These aspects have encouraged a traditionalist interpretation of the following kind: Kant is involved direcdy in establishing against a traditional skeptic that we have a guarantee that appearances are themselves subject to regularity, or rules, and that they have the objective features, such as a reference to external objects, we take them to have. That guarantee arises from two appeals typical of the "mind making nature" doctrine, first to an a priori exercise of these psychological functions, and second to their exercise on our own representations in inner sense. The first point is taken to establish, against a skeptic, the certainty and truth of the basic a priori operations of synthesis, and this in turn is taken to guarantee our beliefs because those operations are exercised on material, inner representations, which are in our control. Such an account has the characteristic features of a traditionalist interpretation, and typically conflicts with Rant's own account. It assumes that Kant's justification is directed against traditional skepticism, and particularly against a traditional idealist skepticism about objectivity or external objects, and it assumes that the response turns on a guarantee of causal control exercised psychologically over our subjective ideas. These claims

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conflict with Kant's denial that his project is empirical, causal, or psychological, and with the suggestion that the Deduction is not primarily directed at those forms of traditional skepticism (B124-25). I add three points to indicate further that such an account is not Kant's. What has perhaps most strongly influenced that account among Englishspeaking commentators is Kemp Smith's translation of the sentence: appearances are not things in themselves but are the mere play of our representations, and in the end reduce to determinations of inner sense. (A101)

The word translated as "reduce," with its philosophical overtones, is auslaufen and has no such philosophical significance. It indicates only that in the end all knowledge rests on, or "runs out into," our inner sense as a river may run out into the sea. It does not entail, and should not encourage, any reductive phenomenalism which canvasses the translation of statements about external objects into statements about inner ideas or sense data. Kemp Smith's translation inevitably encourages that philosophical commitment but it is not warranted by what Kant says. Like the same translation ("reduce") of zuruckfuhren at B94, where Kant speaks only of the priority of judgments over concepts, Kemp Smith's unfortunate language explains why the passage may be misunderstood, but it does not license that misconstruction. Reference to Kant's "recurrent suggestion that outer objects are reducible to 'representations'" (Strawson 1966a ; 173) indicates how misleading that translation has been.8 A similar point may be made about Kant's inference from the lurid scenario, namely that there must be something, some factor, which makes possible the reproduction of appearances (A101). Kant's inference, a standard example of "going transcendental," is to something that makes reproduction possible. It is not an inference to some factor which guarantees that appearances follow patterns which we take them to follow, or that justifies our belief in external objects. The language is that of enabling not oiguaranteeing, and it fits the project of a transcendental topic but not that of a traditional antiskepticism. Instead of offering a guarantee to justify our experience it describes its central, necessary, features and identifies their necessary presupposition. Instead of attempting to guarantee, even broadly, the truth or certainty of our beliefs, it offers instead a structural map of the system of such beliefs in which certain elements are a priori, and necessary, and others are a posteriori, and contingent. Instead of a failed, and remarkably naive, response to traditional skepticism, it provides what Kant himself claims to offer, namely an inventory of the necessary features of experience. An alternative account of the argument would break the factors down in the following way: it is a requirement for experience that appearances be

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reproducible, for without that condition there could be only a chaos. Parts of that requirement are that we have the psychological power to reproduce or recall what is presented, and that what is presented contains some reproducible patterns. It is further required not only that we can recall what is presented but that we also recognize the patterns made available to us. Nothing in such an account guarantees success, and if reality were presented as a sufficiently disorderly chaos, then, as Kant says, "our imaginations might remain concealed . . . as a dead and unknown faculty" (A100). 9 Nor are the conditions typically, still less wholly, within our control. We do not in general choose to have, or exercise, the basic abilities of recall and recognition even though we may so choose on particular occasions. But even if all the conditions are met, and we have such abilities, it does not follow that we do, or profitably can, exercise them. Rant's belief that the psychological functions which are generally necessary for empirical experience are also necessary for a priori contexts should not be construed as an attempt to deny such limitations, and if it did it would fail. Neither our cognitive abilities nor philosophical argument can seriously offer a guarantee against such limitations. We should recall that Kant's central aim is to justify a belief in a priori items in experience, and not to use the expression "a priori" to stand for a guaranteed certainty against skepticism. The claim is only that a priori knowledge, in mathematics, for example, must be subject to the same necessary psychological requirements as a posteriori claims. That does not entail that mathematics is itself a psychological discipline but only that doing mathematics presupposes the same basic psychological operations as recognizing external objects.

2.2. The Object of Representations The same general points about the status of certain kinds of function in experience are made initially in the section on recognition in concepts. Recognition, like imagination and apprehension, is a necessary aspect of our experience, and holds for a priori as well as a posteriori knowledge. That this function has a special importance is indicated by Kant's excursion from A104 into the central question of the whole Deduction, namely, what do we mean by "object of representations"? This was the question which Kant had expressed in the famous letter to Herz of 1772 as a basis for changing the view of his 1770 Dissertation. Kant's answer in that letter has rightly been recognized by recent commentators, such as Beatrice Longuenesse (1998, 71) as a change from a causal to an intentional account of the relation. I summarize the central points in the ensuing discussion from A104-10.

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Kant recognizes a distinction between the generation of a concept and its outcome, but in the light of earlier points we can take it that the former are enquiries into the empirical aspects of generation, or synthesis, of concepts in an empirical Lockean psychology distinct from Kant's transcendental project (A104). The latter is directed towards the a priori status of categories and has no room for an account of the "occasioning causes" which explain their acquisition. Kant appeals to the notion of an origin for our concepts in the Amphiboly's account of transcendental reflection, and in his reference to the "origin and content" of concepts at B62, but these references cannot be merely to empirical, genetic origins. They concern what was earlier called the "provenance" of concepts, that is, the status they have in a transcendental topic and their metaphysical allocation to the correct faculties. Two answers to the central question, what do we mean by "object of representations"? are initially set aside. Kant rejects the belief that such an object could be wholly distinct from our cognitive powers, that is, wholly independent of our power of representation. The same point is made elsewhere, for instance, in the Logic: "Truth, it is said, consists in the agreement of cognition with its object. . . . Now I can compare an object with my cognition only by cognising it. . . . Such a circle was called by the ancients 'dialellus'" (Ak. 9.49-50). That rejected answer, echoed in Davidson,10 can be expanded to signify the rejection of any appeal to things in themselves and this is made explicit at A109, for they are defined in terms of their total independence of cognitive, including sensory, powers. This issue arose in the earlier context of the Aesthetic, and serves again to define one central divergence between traditionalist and revolutionary accounts. That earlier discussion in chapter 9.1.1-1.2 showed minimally that we cannot assume that Kant works within a traditional dualist framework in which items are exhaustively either empirical mind-dependent ideas or empirical mind-independent external objects. We cannot therefore infer from such a restriction that our knowledge is confined to subjective ideas, that is, to empirical states of consciousness. After those negative claims Kant offers a more positive account. The idea of an object is that of a stability or agreement in our knowledge, preventing it from becoming haphazard, arbitrary, or accidental (A104, A l l l , A114). It is the idea of an object in general, of a unity generated in accordance with a rule which makes the reproduction of the manifold necessary. The idea is illustrated with the concept of a triangle which represents a unity thought through its predicates. Evidendy the key notions here are those of "unity" and "rule," both appropriately associated with that of a concept. That relation between a "concept" and its correlative "object" makes no reference to the traditional contrast between inner, mental, and outer, spatial, experience. The same notions of "unity" and "rule" apply

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just as much to concepts of inner, mental items such as pains and thoughts. References to a triangle and a body at A106 cannot count against that standard parity between objects of inner and outer sense since they are merely illustrations from mathematics and perceptual experience. In chapter 14, I consider and reject the claim that "object" in the Deduction means exclusively "external," or "weighty," object and rescinds that parity. Kant has one final step to take from this account of concepts. As in the earlier cases he claims that the resulting necessities point to a required underlying transcendental condition, a "ground without which it would be impossible to think any object for our intuitions." That "original and transcendental condition" is now labeled "transcendental apperception," and characterized as "consciousness of self." The necessity of concepts, and the appeal to their objects, are now necessarily linked to self consciousness in a way which immediately, though not explicidy, refers to Hume. Consciousness of self according to the determinations of our state in inner perception is merely empirical and always changing. No fixed and abiding self can present itself in this flux of inner appearances. What has necessarily to be represented as numerically identical cannot be thought as such through empirical data. . . . This pure unchangeable consciousness [unity of consciousness] I name ' transcendental apperception\ . . . The numerical unity of this apperception is . . . the a priori ground of all concepts. . . . (A107; cf. B133-34)

This is a complex, intriguing line of thought. For the present I note only a link between concepts as rules of unity and unity of consciousness in relation to the self. For Kant a concept is a "unitary consciousness," and immediately points to a unity of whatever grasps the concept and has that consciousness (A103). Transcendental apperception as the fundamental ground of the threefold synthesis evidently has a complex twin reference to unity of concepts and unity of consciousness or self. The original and necessary consciousness of the identity of the self is thus at the same time a consciousness of an equally necessary unity of the synthesis of all appearances according to concepts, that is, according to rules which not only make them reproducible necessarily, but also in so doing determine an object for their intuition, that is, the concept of something wherein they are necessarily connected. (A108)

For Kant evidendy the personal and conceptual unities embedded in transcendental apperception are interrelated examples of a mutual dependence. The same claims are made in both editions, for example at B135 and A129. From A108-10 Kant summarizes his progress. Our concept of an object in general is not a reference to independent things in themselves,

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and can refer only to appearances. But the problem of the objectivity of appearances is precisely the problem of the Deduction. Kant uses the terminology of the "transcendental object = X " to stand for this problem, and explains that it signifies only a problem in explaining the unelucidated notion of "objective reality" in relation to appearances. He speaks of "relation to a transcendental object, that is, the objective reality of our empirical knowledge" (A109). The required elucidation is provided in the twin, mutually dependent notions of a unity of concepts and of consciousness anchored in transcendental apperception: appearances in experience must stand under the conditions of the necessary unity of apperception, just as in mere intuition they must be subject to the formal conditions of space and time. Only thus can any knowledge become possible at all. (A110)

Three points deserve to be noted about that conclusion, which is qualified and conditional. It does not claim that our knowledge is absolutely certain or guaranteed by the transcendental conditions, but only that if knowledge is to be possible at all then those conditions must obtain. Whether such a conclusion might satisfy some skeptics or not, it plainly is not intended to satisfy a skeptical demand for an absolute or unconditional guarantee of knowledge. The conclusion is also indeterminate with respect to the specific concepts which fulfill this function in our experience, and with respect to the unity of consciousness, and the self, necessarily linked to that function. These indeterminacies need further discussion, but it should be remembered that Kant's goal is the identification of the formal aspects of experience and not their material realizations in it (B88-89; B353-54, B518-19, B647-48). Kant's central aim is to forestall any inference from formal aspects of our experience to material items or objects, whether immanent in our experience or transcendent and beyond it. The account of a fundamental transcendental apperception is purely formal and similarly designed in abstraction from the specific circumstances in which that form is realized in experience. Just as Kant's Euclidean model offers an abstract account of our spatial experience indeterminate with respect to its empirical realizations, and a Euclidean kinematics offers a formal account of motion without physical causes, so the formal unities of concepts and consciousness are also indeterminate with respect to their empirical realizations. The necessary interconnection of concepts and intuitions, called an "affinity" at A l l 3 - 1 4 , is just such an abstract network of the governing principles of our experience. Those a priori principles and their constituent concepts, like the axioms of Euclid, do not identify specific objects in experience or transcendent objects beyond experience.

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(A110-15)

Kant summarizes the position and underlines those claims. Without a transcendental ground of unity, in transcendental apperception, our empirical syntheses would be "altogether accidental" ( A l l l , A114). Kant evidendy believes that our syntheses are not "altogether accidental," but that leaves it open what kind of necessity they are claimed to have. Their necessity might provide an absolute guarantee of the correctness of our beliefs or only a necessity dependent on the twin conditions of concepts and consciousness in transcendental apperception, but Kant's elucidation of the concept of "objective reality" rejects the former and insists on the latter. Just as the a priori causal principle cannot establish, or guarantee, that experience contingendy follows any particular causal sequence, so transcendental apperception cannot guarantee the course of our experience (A112, A127-28). The absolute conception of reality which Kant rejects is not the immanent reality of ordinary experience but a philosophers' distortion of that immanent conception. Kant adds, in an unusual mode of expression, that the categories should be understood as fundamental concepts "by which we think objects for [zu] appearances" ( A l l l ; cf. A106, A108). That new expression suggests a deviation from more traditional ways of understanding the relation between categories and a posteriori experience. One such way speaks of "appearances of objects," as if appearances were representative mental states and objects were what those states represented. If we are able to think, through categories, things which appearances are appearances of in that representative sense, we might suppose that those things were, contrary to Kant's views, independent things in themselves. Another way would be to talk phenomenalistically of objects as if they were constructs out of appearances. In both of those traditional relationships it would be natural to use other forms than the preposition zu, such as the genitive " o f " or the preposition aus. Use of zu suggests quite different models which reflect Kant's independent rejection both of that "representative" relation and of phenomenalism.11 It suggests an alternative account in which categories are conceived rather as a grid superimposed on, and making determinate, what is presented indeterminately to sensibility so that we can spell out and read what is presented as a genuine, full-blown experience. Kant speaks elsewhere in a similar way of categories as "merely rules for the exposition of appearances," as "keys to possible experience," and uses the earlier image (B303, B370-71). "Plato realised that our faculty of knowledge feels a much higher need than merely to spell out appearances according to a synthetic unity in order to be able to read them as experience" (B371). In the theoretical context a synthetic unity enables us to spell out indeterminate

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appearances and read them as experience. The "higher need" goes further than this but only in the practical, moral context.

2.4. The Systematic Exposition

(A110-30)

Kant's systematic exposition repeats what has gone before. A distinction is drawn between what we might call a "top-down" (A116) and a "bottom-up" exposition (A120), but it is clear that the two provide in the end just the same picture. It is essentially a picture in which the empirical acts of the threefold synthesis are treated in a transcendental, nonempirical way as necessary conditions for empirical experience and a priori knowledge in science or mathematics. They are formal conditions, dispositional necessities for experience and not particular material events either in experience or beyond it. No such particular events are necessary, but it must be possible for such events to take place. Underlying these necessities Kant pinpoints the same transcendental apperception, with its twin appeals to unity of concepts and of consciousness. Productive imagination is now distinguished from reproductive as a more fundamental exercise of a psychological function (A118). The familiar figurative claims with qualifications are made that however exaggerated, absurd, and strange it may sound the affinity of appearances in formal nature, its order and regularity, and its laws we introduce through the role of understanding as the "lawgiver of nature" (A123, A125, A126, A127). Kant again relieves some of the apparent strangeness by insisting that our legislative powers extend over only the formal, not the empirical, aspects of nature. Our experience is in some way "mind-dependent" but there is no suggestion that our minds construct the mountains in Africa.12 Two final points should be emphasized; one has to do with the status of Kant's move to a transcendental account, a transcendental Grundy from the empirical circumstances of experience, and the other with Kant's final conclusions. The former is underlined in a long footnote to the claim that "pure apperception supplies a principle of the synthetic unity of the manifold in all possible intuition" (A117). The point is parallel to the better known claim at B132-33, but now expressed as: "The synthetic proposition that all the variety of empirical consciousness must be combined in one single (unitary) self consciousness is the absolutely first and synthetic principle of our thought in general." This may make it look as though Kant envisages a further, deeper kind of self-consciousness than that which we recognize in empirical circumstances, but he goes on to make an important proviso about such a view. Of such a "transcendental consciousness," the "bare representation of T'" he now says:

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Whether this representation is clear [empirical consciousness] or obscure, or

even whether it ever actually occurs, does not here concern us. But the possibil-

ity of the logical form of all knowledge is necessarily conditioned by relation to this apperception as a faculty. (My emphasis)

This proviso suggests that the move to a "transcendental consciousness," like that from the empirical to a transcendental constitution of the threefold synthesis, is not to some supposedly deeper, hidden level of consciousness than the empirical but rather to an account of the necessary role which consciousness plays as a condition of empirical experience. The transcendental references are not to any actual occurrences, which belong to an empirical consciousness which is clear and can be exemplified in experience, but rather to general dispositions or abilities necessary for that empirical exemplification. The point was made above through Kant's fundamental distinction between "formal" transcendental and "material" transcendent claims. The central claims about unity of consciousness might be understood in either of two ways13: (1) For us to have an (occurrent) empirical consciousness it is necessary also to have an (occurrent) deeper consciousness of the self which reveals its identity. (2) For us to have an (occurrent) empirical consciousness it is necessary that we should be able to recognize a unity both in thought and in self-consciousness. Claim (1) represents Kant as answering a skeptic like Hume by claiming that we have a priori knowledge of our self-identity as presented in some privileged occurrent act of consciousness, but (2) makes no such claim and instead points to a formal requirement of unity in consciousness which may be realized empirically in different ways on different occasions. Kant's provisos point towards (2) rather than (1), so that (2) provides for consciousness a parallel to the account given above for the threefold synthesis. The point of "going transcendental" is not to locate some privileged event in experience or some deeper, hidden occurrence beyond it, but only to express a condition under which empirical events in experience are possible. "Going transcendental" is different from "going empirical" but it is not to be equated with "going transcendent." Kant draws a variety of conclusions from his discussion. He suggests sometimes that he needs only to explain a role which a priori concepts might have in order to show that a priori concepts can function in relation to experience, and sometimes that he has actually demonstrated that a priori concepts exist with such a role (A128). He seems sometimes to

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consider categories and their role quite generally and occasionally to consider specific concepts listed in the Metaphysical Deduction. He speaks of the categories' objective validity, of their objective reality, and of their origin and truth as determined in the argument (A128). In the final summary he points to other ambiguities, and excludes two possible ways of accounting for a priori concepts (A128-30). In the first they are construed as aspects of (objective) things in themselves, and in the second they are construed as (subjective) aspects of the self. The former is ruled out by virtue of the fact that concepts derived from independent things in themselves could not be a priori, which reflects the same arguments in the Aesthetic. The latter is ruled out on the ground that it could not properly relate a category to any object "distinct from our representations" and might allow such concepts to be empty. The general conclusion is that neither of these apparently exhaustive options is feasible, and this could be put by saying that a simplistic contrast between what is objective (things in themselves) and what is subjective (mental events) is not exhaustive and should be rejected.14 Yet the passage may naturally be taken as an example of Kant's transparent inconsistency. Of a priori concepts he says (A129): And if we derived them from the self, that which is in us could not determine the character of an object distinct from our representations, that is, could not be a ground why a thing should exist characterised by . . . our thought, and why such a representation should not rather be altogether empty.

Once that account is rejected Kant offers his solution, that if we deal only with appearances and not things in themselves, then it is possible to accommodate a priori concepts: since a mere modification of our sensibility can never be met with outside us, the objects, as appearances, constitute an object which is merely in us. Now to assert in this manner that all these appearances . . . are one and all in me, determinations of my identical self is only another way of saying that there must be a complete unity of them in one and the same apperception.

On the face of it, and within the same paragraph, Kant both asserts and denies that the objects of our knowledge are "in us" or "belong to the self." Should we just register yet another hopeless inconsistency, or ask if there is a reasonable way of resolving the apparent conflict? I repeat that the whole passage can be taken as a rejection of that exhaustive choice between (objective) "thing in itself' or (subjective) "mental event," but that may be thought to require more detailed support.15 Three such supports can be identified. The expressions "modification of sensibility" and "in us" were earlier construed in a way which made no

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commitment to the traditional idealism implicit in that exhaustive contrast. To talk of "appearances" transcendentally, as in this passage, has been similarly construed without such a commitment. It should be recalled that the issue over these expressions was not whether Kant used them in different, empirical and transcendental, senses, since that was conceded, but only how to construe that difference. The case against traditionalism rested on an adequate understanding of Kant's threefold contrast between "empirical," "transcendent," and "transcendental" in chapter 5. Finally the passage itself offers an account of the expression "determination of my identical self" which makes no such explicit commitment. That phrase is said to amount to nothing more than the claim that there must be a "complete unity of appearances in one and the same apperception." This is to require for genuine knowledge and experience that subjects can determine what is presented to their senses through a unity of both concepts and selfconsciousness. If that phrase is approached without assuming the framework of traditional idealism there is no good reason to impose that doctrine on it.

3. The B Transcendental Deduction Commentators have taken different views about the changes in the Deduction from A to B. Some take the changes to be substantial and others, like Kant himself, take them to be merely presentational. Some commentators who believe that the second version differs substantially from the first accept Dieter Henrich's claim that only the B version is tenable, while others prefer the A account. Henrich rests his case on the distinction in B, considered in chapter 14, between two steps in the argument with first a "beginning . . . of a transcendental deduction" up to B144 and its apparent completion from B159. 1 6 I summarize the central points in the B version and argue in the next chapter that there is no substantial difference between the two editions and that Henrich's case is inadequate. Some of the changes are indisputable. The threefold synthesis no longer occupies its preliminary place in the text, although some similar references are made towards the end at B150ff. and B159-64. The notion of a "combination" (Verbindung, conjunctio) which occurred infrequently in A is now given prominence at the start of B (A118; B129-30). 1 7 That prominence in B is effected to some extent at the expense of the notion of "synthesis," which was central in A. But synthesis still figures importandy m B, as do the claims that synthesis has a basic priority in experience, or that analysis presupposes synthesis (B133, B138). The references to the self, to self-identity, and to unity of consciousness are more prominent in B, even though the same points are also made in A. As in A, Kant divides

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the B text into two parts, the first from B129-46 and the second from B159-70, but it is not suggested in B that the two are, respectively, a preliminary and a systematic account. Between B146 and B159 Kant considers two central issues; first, the limitations imposed on the scope of a priori concepts, even in mathematics, and second, the implications of his account for our underlying cognitive psychology. The former constitute Kant's acceptance of a modest, but not universal, empiricism. The latter implications involve a discussion of our conception of the self which has no close parallel in A, and anticipates the later Paralogisms (B152-57). I oudine the central points under three headings: 3.1, the initial arguments (B129-50); 3.2, the cognitive psychology of the self and apperception (B150-58); and 3.3, the concluding arguments (B159-70).

3.1. The Initial Arguments

(B129-50)

Kant's new emphasis on "combination" does not replace the preference for "synthesis" in A, but it moves the argument towards what Kant had earlier (A103-4) called the "outcome" of understanding's activity and away from its "generation." To make a judgment is to combine representations, but we may, objectively, represent a judgment as a combination of representations independendy of any particular act of combining or judging. To use the terminology in those ways moves the focus away from concept formation, or learning, towards judging and judgment and towards Kant's view that knowledge would be impossible without the ability to judge.18 So far the point adds litde to the claim in the Metaphysical Deduction that judgments are prior to concepts, but Kant now links that claim more explicidy with his inventory of what is a priori in experience. Combination, of all representations, is "the only one which cannot be given through objects" (B130). It is an "act of the self-activity of the subject," and involves the concepts of a manifold, its synthesis, and the latter's unity. The characterization of judgment forms as a priori is captured in a succinct claim and an inference from it: Combination is representation of the synthetic unity of the manifold. The representation of this unity cannot, therefore, arise out of the combination. . . . This unity which precedes a priori all concepts of combination, is not the category of unity. . . . We must therefore look yet higher for this unity, namely in that which itself contains the ground of the unity of diverse concepts in a judgement, and therefore of the possibility of the understanding. (B131)

One specific conclusion in the argument is undoubtedly valid. If all judgments express a unity, then that cannot be the category of unity which is

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associated not with all judgments but only with those of a certain quantitative form. The general form of the argument is less clear but is the same as that in A where Kant repeatedly insists on a "higher" transcendental ground for some necessary feature of experience. It is that same form of argument in which "going transcendental" represents, rightly or wrongly, an antiempiricism. The content of the argument differs from anything explicit in A by virtue of its claim that combination and its necessary unity cannot be given through objects and so must be a priori. It supplements the noted lack of such an argument in the Metaphysical Deduction. The required, "higher," transcendental ground is made clear in the following pages. It is expressed initially in the famous modal claim: It must be possible for the T think' to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me. (B131-32) That claim is made also at A116 although Kant did not there use the Cartesian cogito formulation or emphasize what is now called the "selfactivity of the subject." In line with the earlier distinction between the "mode" and "content" of the senses Kant's conception of the "I think" can be represented as the fundamental mode, or operator, of the understanding. It stands as a fundamental expression of a subject's propositional attitudes, of the necessity for such attitudes in a genuine experience, and points to the conditions which those attitudes presuppose. For the manifold representations would not be one and all my representations if they did not all belong to one self-consciousness. . . . Only in so far as I can unite a manifold of given representations in one consciousness is it possible for me to represent to myself the identity of the consciousness in these representations. Kant associates these claims with the general thought that analysis presupposes synthesis, and with a Humean conception of a disunited, multicolored self both of which were expressed in A (B133, B134, A107). The transcendental unity of apperception expresses the requirement that in any experience representations must belong to one self-consciousness. The section ends with a repetition of the earlier claim that both intuitions and concepts are required for knowledge, and that this is a consequence of our human lack of what is called an "intuitive intelligence" (B74-75, B135, B139, B145). Just as space and time were represented, in the Aesthetic, as a priori conditions of sense-experience, so Kant now represents transcendental apperception as a parallel a priori condition of the understanding and thought. Just as all sense experience is subject to space and time, so com-

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bination requires that all representations are subject to conditions of a transcendental apperception which is our ability to combine or judge. This is now associated with the earlier (A104 f.) explanation of what it means to be an "object of representations." This knowledge consists of the determinate relation of given representations to an object; and an object is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united. Now all unification of representations demands unity of consciousness in their synthesis. Consequently it is the unity of consciousness that alone constitutes [ausmacht] the relation of representations to an object, and therefore their objective validity. . . . (B137)

Some commentators read ausmachen and the associated relation as a sufficient condition of objective validity, but it is more natural to read it as only a necessary condition.19 It is that final necessary condition which, without other contingent obstacles, enables us to talk of objectivity. Kant now repeats the earlier point from A that although space and time are given to us a priori in sense experience knowledge of them is possible only through the understanding's unity of combination. He again insists on the twofold account of such a system as geometry, namely a reference first to the a priori intuitive "manifold" of space and second to its combination or synthesis in judgment through the understanding, represented earlier as a distinction between the "institution" as opposed to the "development" of geometry (cf. B146-47; chapter 8.2.1). In a similar way just as the intuitions of space and time do not constitute knowledge without a contribution from understanding, so the bare representation of the self in pure apperception, "I am," contains no manifold without some contribution from intuition. This point has importance later for Kant's account of the self and his criticism of Cartesian, or rationalist, psychology in the Paralogisms (chapter 25). Kant distinguishes three dimensions in which these points might be expressed and which indicate his real interests. They have an empirical and a transcendental dimension, a subjective and objective aspect, and concern either the generation of representations or the outcome of that operation (B139-40, A103-4). Kant's real interests are not in the empirical circumstances of our experience but in the claimed transcendental conditions which make those circumstances possible. The interest is particularly not in the empirical and subjective psychology of our generation of ideas but in the outcome of those operations in objective judgment and their transcendental conditions. This may seem to draw a distinction between A and B, since the former puts the question about the meaning of "object of representations" while the latter focuses on the idea of objectivity in judgment. That difference is minimized by considering that even in A what Kant

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regards as die correct answer appeals to our use of concepts to judge objects in immanent experience and not transcendent objects in themselves beyond experience. It is a consequence of those points that the notion of an object concerns only a manifold of intuition without differentiation between outer or inner intuition. Objective judgments can be made just as well about inner as outer experiences or objects, and their transcendental conditions will be exactly the same. At B137 Kant provides a definition of "object" which makes no differentiation between inner and outer intuition and reinforces the noted "parity" in the argument between the two senses20: "and an object is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united." At the start Kant makes no explicit distinction between inner and outer intuition, or inner and outer objects, but covers both cases of an inner and outer manifold of intuition, and the same parity is expressed at the end: "Thus unity of synthesis of the manifold, without or within us, . . . is given a priori as the condition of the synthesis of all apprehension— not indeed in but with these intuitions" (B160-61). Kant's interest in objectivity in the Deduction is not in the relation between inner intuitions and outer objects, but in the conditions which allow us to make objective judgments about both inner and outer objects. Kant allows that within language there is an empirical distinction between "subjective" and "objective" aspects. He draws distinctions between subjective word associations and objective meaning, and between objectively valid judgment and connections "according to laws of association": To one man, for instance, a certain word suggests one thing, to another some other thing; the unity of consciousness in that which is empirical is not, as regards what is given, necessarily and universally valid. (B140; cf. A101) In the latter case all I could say would be 'If I lift a body it feels heavy'; but not Tt, the body, is heavy'. To say 'The body is heavy' is [to assert] that the ideas are combined in the object no matter what the state of the subject may be. (B142)

Kant's distinction between subjective associations and objective judgments parallels the distinction in the Prolegomena §18 between judgments of experience and judgments of perception.21 Commentators have found both ways of drawing the distinction puzzling, but both point towards a notion of objectivity which does not rely on differences between inner and outer objects. Objectivity as a property of judgments has to do with their susceptibility to true/false evaluation rather than with the different topics or objects of inner or outer sense.

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3.2. Initial Conclusions and Implications

(B143-50)

From B143-44 Kant summarizes the formal argument in the preceding sections, and then from B144-46 he adds two comments on it. The formal argument concludes that the sensible manifold of intuition is "necessarily subject" to the unity of apperception by means of the logical functions of judgments. This means that all sense manifolds must be "determined" in respect of some logical judgment form if knowledge is to be possible, and since these forms express categories it follows that intuitive manifolds are necessarily subject to categories. Kant now makes two comments on this position, the first of which echoes Henrich's account of the "two steps" in the Deduction. First he claims that in this "beginning" of a deduction he has "abstracted" from specific modes of intuition; second he notes a fundamental limitation in the account, namely that it involves the peculiarity of human understanding that it is distinct from our sensibility. The first comment indicates that a further step is needed to complete the deduction, and that this will be taken in §26 (B159-65). The second comment confirms another general feature of Kant's discussion, namely that he is well aware of the restrictions of his account to specifically human discursive thought. Kant adds a consequential restriction namely that we can provide no further explanation of this peculiarity: It is simply given as a basic fact of human experience.22 Kant is evidently equally conscious of the contingent limitations on our experience and on philosophy's interest in it. Two sections, §§22-23, underline the limitations of pure a priori concepts. Earlier at A96 and even in the context of mathematics Kant allows that understanding can fabricate conceptual fictions and a priori claims which have no "objective reality." They may articulate only logical possibilities in the abstract spatiotemporal form of appearances but are then mere "forms of thought" lacking any application in experience. A priori concepts consequently "serve only for the possibility of empirical knowledge or experience" (B147). That a priori concepts by themselves do not yield knowledge has the consequence that they do not provide knowledge of things in themselves, that is, of any supposed "objects of a non-sensible intuition" (B149). That basic rationalist fallacy of inferring from a priori truth to nonempirical objects is, once again, firmly underlined. The point has implications which go beyond the account of mathematics. It begins to provide some argumentative support for Kant's minimal empiricism and his preference for empiricism over rationalism. The argument rests on the premises that any synthetic knowledge requires the possibility of intuitive instantiation which for us must always be sensible. It notes that to be "a priori" is no guarantee of genuine knowledge even in mathematics, and consequently no guarantee of certainty against a tradi-

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tional skeptic. The search for a priori elements in experience is detached from the traditional philosophical project of refuting skepticism in the way suggested in chapter 11. Kant's account of mathematics is both antiPlatonist and antiempiricist. It insists against Platonism that knowledge in mathematics is tied ultimately to empirical intuition, and against empiricists that its judgments cannot all be either analytic or a posteriori. Kant notes a contrast between a priori intuitions and a priori concepts that the former are patendy restricted to our form of intuition, but the latter are not restricted to our intuition and have a potentially wider scope. That wider scope for a priori concepts, that they are capable of representing worlds beyond those which we can intuit and know, encourages the rationalist fallacy and is responsible for the dialectical illusions of reason. Kant begins here not only to delineate more precisely the Prefaces' unacceptable face of reason, but also to diagnose our readiness to succumb to its temptations. The important point, for Kant, is that the wider scope for a priori concepts has no cognitive benefit, for only "our sensible and empirical intuition can give them body and meaning" (Sinn und Bedeutung) in providing an instance to which they could apply (B149). That wider scope brings no cognitive advantage and is even seriously disadvantageous since it tempts us towards dialectical illusion. In the Dialectic Kant adds the further important qualification that that wider scope, disadvantageous in the speculative context, brings real benefits in the practical context. Plato's account of mathematics is claimed to be erroneous but his view of morality is not (B371-75).

3.3. Intermediate Arguments: The Cognitive Psychology of the Self and Apperception (B150-59) After B150 (§§24-26) Kant addresses what he calls "The application of categories to objects of the senses in general." The passage offers, as Henrich argues, a further step in the argument from §§20-21, where Kant speaks only of "a beginning of a deduction" (B144), but the character of that further step is unclear. Even to say that up to B144 Kant has argued only generally that intuition must be subject to categories and needs a further account of how this is effected leaves the second step uncertain. The required further connection might be interpreted psychologically, semantically, epistemically, or in terms of intentionality. A psychological interpretation is dubious in the light of Kant's provisos about both empirical and transcendent psychology, but the passage focuses on psychological factors such as "inner sense," "empirical apperception," "reproductive" and "productive" imagination. A semantic or intentional account might offer some explanation of the relation between concepts, especially a priori concepts,

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and their realization in intuition, but will seem inadequate if Kant is engaged in an epistemic antiskepticism. If the account is an epistemic attempt to guarantee, or establish, against a skeptic that our view of reality is secure then this is vulnerable to the claim that his project is primarily a descriptive metaphysics. Three specific points elaborate these general puzzles. Kant places considerable new weight on the role of productive imagination in providing what he calls a "synthesis speciosa" or "figurative synthesis" (B151). For Kant this is the fundamental way in which understanding affects inner sense to determine a related intuition. He now claims that only productive imagination, and not reproductive, belongs to transcendental philosophy rather than to psychology, a claim he had earlier both asserted and denied (B118, A102). Such an account is open to two difficulties which Kant addresses. It is first unclear how understanding might have an effect on inner sense, and second what implications this has for our notion of the self. The former issue requires Kant to distinguish sharply between inner sense, empirical, and transcendental apperception, and to be more specific about the role which understanding can play in its "determinative" power over inner sense. The point pursues Kant's essential division between the passive role of sense and the spontaneous role of understanding, in which the active function of understanding affects inner sense and so makes determinate what is presented in intuition (B154). The suggestion is, in accordance with the "blindness" claim, that sense provides us with an inarticulate, undifferentiated manifold which it is the task of understanding to articulate, unify, and differentiate into discriminable types, the most fundamental of which will be categories. Such claims seem, despite Kant's disclaimers, to belong to empirical psychology, and they are also fundamentally unclear in canvassing a causal relation between understanding and inner sense. Kant addresses the puzzles in the second issue about the implications for our notion of the self. One question asks how the self can be both active and passive, and a second asks whether our knowledge of the active, spontaneous self is that of a thing in itself or only of an appearance. In his response Kant distinguishes three ways of talking about the self: The self as appearance, the self as thing in itself, and the mere recognition of one's existence, "that I am." This adds to the familiar contrast between self as appearance and as thing in itself a further distinction between the assertions of the bare existence of the self and of its having a property which is important later in the Paralogisms (chapter 25). Kant consistently maintains the official view that knowledge of the self is no different from any other genuine knowledge in relating only to appearances and not to things in themselves. Even the active, determinative role of understanding, as an

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aspect of the self, allows no knowledge of the self as a thing in itself. These responses have rarely satisfied commentators,23 who have held that Kant's commitment to a noumenal self, as it is in itself, conflicts with his official denial of any such knowledge.

3.4. Concluding Arguments

(B159-70)

Kant sums up the position reached by B159 in the following way: In the metaphysical deduction the origin of the categories has been shown [ dargethan] a priori through their complete agreement with the general logical functions of thought; in the transcendental deduction we have represented [dargestellt] their possibility as a priori modes of knowledge of objects of an intuition in general. We have now to explain the possibility of knowing a priori, by means of categories, whatever objects may present themselves to our senses not indeed in respect of the form of their intuition, but in respect of the laws of their combination, and so, as it were \gleichsam\ of prescribing laws to nature, and even of making nature possible.

Kemp Smith's translation of the first sentence was shown in chapter 6 to be dubious, and I have amended its reference to a "proof." In the case of both dargethan and dargestellt it is possible, and preferable, to regard Kant as recording what has been represented in these passages, whether it has been strictly proved (bewiesen) or not. The concluding passage implements Henrich's second step in a two-step proof in the Deduction, but the ambiguous character of that step is not obviously clarified any further. Kant says at B161 that the step shows how categories as "conditions of the possibility of experience , . . are therefore valid a priori for all objects of experience," but his added comments mainly offer a parallel to the earlier claim of the necessity conformity of intuitions to their a priori forms. Kant repeats the §14 claim that there are only two ways in which objects connect necessarily with concepts, namely, either the former make the latter possible or the latter make the former possible, and implies again that the latter is not a causal relation (B167). The understanding, "as it were," prescribes laws to nature but cannot trespass on the a posteriori circumstances which determine specific laws (B163-65). The figurative character of the "prescription" and its limitation to underlying forms of law, to natura formaliter rather than natura materialiter\ is reemphasized. The structural framework of categorial rules, or laws, but not their specific realization, enables the categories to "discharge their function" (B160; A126). Special laws, concerning those appearances which are empirically determined, cannot in their specific character be derived from the categories . . . but it is the

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a priori laws that can alone instruct us in regard to experience in general, and as to what it is that can be known as an object of experience. (B165) 24

How categories achieve this, how they discharge this function, is said to be shown more fully in the next section, the Analytic of Principles (B167). The Deduction's second step falls short of that further exercise. Kant considers, but dismisses, the possibility of a third relation between categories and experience, namely that categories are dispositions implanted by God and so ordered that what we experience harmonizes with their laws. He calls this a "pre-formation system of pure reason" and summarily rejects it for the same reasons he had in the 1772 letter to Herz, where the doctrines of innate ideas and preestablished harmony are called "the most absurd that one could canvass" because they "licence every whim and fantasy [ Hirngespinnst]."25 Kant consistently rejects Leibniz's monadology with its doctrines of a preestablished harmony and of innate ideas. Kant returns in this passage to his A edition "synthesis of apprehension" and also to the a priori intuitions of space and time (B160). He offers examples of the determinative relation of categories to sense, in the apprehension of a house and the freezing of water. For the present I note only that these homely cases, which Kant evidently treats as paradigmatic of the relation, do not belong to any developed science.26 They reflect standard examples from ordinary experience, even though they contain implicit references to the a priori concepts "quantity," or "magnitude," and "cause." It was noted earlier that Kant approaches space and time in different ways in the Aesthetic and the Analytic. What he now says reinforces the account given earlier in chapter 7.2 of the abstract, theoretical, notional separation of pure sense from understanding. In the Aesthetic I have treated this [intuitive] unity as belonging merely to sensibility, simply in order to emphasise that it precedes any concept, although as a matter of fact, it presupposes a synthesis which does not belong to the senses but through which all concepts of space and time first become possible. For since by its means (in that the understanding determines sensibility) space and time arefirstgiven as intuitions, the unity of this a priori intuition belongs to space and time and not to the concept of the understanding. (B160n)

In the final paragraph he offers a concluding summary of the Deduction: The deduction is the exposition of the pure concepts of the understanding . . . as principles of the possibility of experience—the principles being taken as the determination of appearances in space and time in general and this . . . as ultimately following from the original synthetic unity of apperception. . . . (B168-69)

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The survey of the Transcendental Deduction indicates the major questions to be answered about its aims and its success or failure in achieving them. Kant plainly offers an account of the role of categories in experience culminating in the fundamental notion of transcendental apperception. That role looks backward to the judgment forms in the Metaphysical Deduction and forward to the detailed proofs of the categorial principles in the Analytic of Principles. It raises procedural questions about the structure of the argument in the Deduction, and substantive questions about the nature of transcendental apperception and its incorporated notions of categories and the self. In chapter 14, I examine those procedural issues before considering in chapters 15 and 16 the substantial claims about the twin aspects of transcendental apperception.

[ 1 2 ]

The Transcendental Deduction (2): Three Procedural Issues

X consider three preliminary issues about the goal and structure of the Transcendental Deduction. 1. The two steps of the B Deduction. 2. The distinction between a "subjective" and an "objective" deduction and the appeal to psychology. 3. Modest and ambitious accounts of the argument.

1. The Two Steps of the B Deduction Commentators have in recent times paid much attention to Dieter Henrich's view that the "only tenable" version of Kant's Deduction is given in B and consists of two importantiy different steps.1 It is undeniable that in B, but not in A, Kant explicidy contrasts the "beginning" of the deduction up to §19 and a completing step indicated in §26, but different commentators explain that contrast in different ways. Kant's own ways of accounting for the division are contained in the following passages: B144: . . . the empirical consciousness of a given manifold in a single intuition is subject to a pure self-consciousness a priori, just as is empirical intuition to a pure sensible intuition . . . a priori. . . . in the above proposition a beginning is made of a deduction of the pure concepts . . . [in which] I must abstract from the mode in which the manifold for a given intuition is given. . . . B144-45: In what follows (cf. §26) it will be shown, from the mode in which empirical intuition is given in sensibility, that its unity is no other than that which the category (according to §20) prescribes to the manifold of a given intuition in general. Only thus, by demonstration of the a priori validity of the categories in respect of all objects of our senses, will the purpose of the 307

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deduction be fully attained. . . . I could not abstract from . . . the feature, namely, that the manifold intuited must be given prior to the synthesis of understanding and independently of it. B159-60: In the metaphysical deduction the [a priori] origin of the categories has been shown [dargethan, proved] [a priori] through their complete agreement with the general logical functions of thought; in the transcendental deduction we have shown [dargestellt, represented] their possibility as a priori modes of knowledge of objects of an intuition in general. We have now to explain the possibility of knowing a priori, by means of categories, whatever objects may present themselves to our senses, not . . . in respect of the form of their intuition but in respect of the laws of their combination . . . and so of making nature possible. B160: In the representations of space and time we have a priori forms of outer and inner sensible intuition. . . [to which] synthesis of apprehension of the manifold of appearance must always conform. . . . unity of synthesis of the manifold is given a priori as the condition of the synthesis of all apprehension—not indeed in, but with, these intuitions. . . . This synthetic unity can be no other than the unity of the combination of the manifold. . . . in accordance with the categories in so far as combination is applied to our sensible intuition. . . . All synthesis therefore, even that which makes perception possible, is subject to categories; and since experience is knowledge by means of connected perceptions the categories are conditions of the possibility of experience . . . and therefore valid a priori for all objects of experience. Henrich offers an account of Kant's position in the following claims: In step 1 intuitions in general are shown to be subject to categories "insofar as they (intuitions) already possess unity." In step 2 that restriction is relaxed when it is shown that categories are valid for all objects of the senses (B159, "whatever objects present themselves to our intuition"; B161, "valid a priori for all objects of experience"). The connecting argument is represented in this way: The result of §20 is valid only for those intuitions which already contain unity. Wherever we find unity this is made possible by categories, and determined in relation to them. In our representations of space and time we have intuitions which already contain unity . . . and at the same time include everything that can be present to our senses . . . so every given manifold without exception is subject to categories. (1969, 645) In step 1 Kant is said to canvass only a partial congruence between categories and intuitions in general, which abstracts from the mode in which such intuitions are given to us (B144). Step 2 takes those modes of our intuition into account so that the argument when completed denies any possible incongruence between categories and our intuitions.2 The out-

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come offers a normative proof against a skepticism which rests on the bare possibility of such incongruence. There is much that is undeniable in Henrich's account but the issue and subsequent discussion have left many unclarities. One unclarity in Henrich's step 1 is whether for him the principle still holds that unity is provided only by categories. Henrich ascribes that principle to Kant, but since he speaks also of intuitions already possessing unity it is not clear whether intuitions may already possess a unity independent of categories. Kant's position is decisively expressed in the above quotations. At B144-45 the unity of intuition is plainly attributed to the category, and in the note to B144 Kant talks of a unity of intuition already (schon) including a synthesis, but does not speak o f intuitions themselves already having unity. What he implies there, and says later at B145, is that we have to assume that intuitions are given prior to synthesis and independent of it, but this is no more than an expression of Kant's persistent claim that the two artificially abstracted cognitive powers, sensibility and understanding, make their own independent contributions to experience (B75-76). It does not entail that the abstracted contribution of sense already possesses a unity independent of the understanding, or that the senses contain a unity which is not related to synthesis. These passages make it clear that for Kant synthesis and unity belong to understanding and not to the senses (cf. B120). Kant's text may seem, mistakenly, to express a different message at B160-61: But space and time are represented a priori not merely as forms of sensible intuition, but as themselves intuitions which contain a manifold [of their own] and therefore are represented with the determination of the unity of this manifold [see the Transcendental Aesthetic]. . . . Unity of the synthesis of the manifold is given a priori . . . not indeed in, but with, these intuitions. . . . (footnote: In the Aesthetic I have treated this unity as belonging merely to sensibility, simply in order to emphasise that it precedes any concept, although as a matter of fact, it presupposes a synthesis which does not belong to the senses, but through which all concepts of space and time become possible.)

Kant consistently ascribes a "manifold" to sensibility and a "synthesis" to understanding, and even here it is still a "manifold" which belongs independently to them and not a "unity" of synthesis. Kant makes the point rather firmly in saying that that unity of synthesis is given not in, but with, these intuitions. The language indicates that what we ordinarily perceive comes with our conceptual apparatus and is understood in that way, but that in Kant's inventory the abstracted conceptual synthesis belongs to the understanding and is not therefore in sensibility already Our presented

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experience is a synthesized spatiotemporal unity with its a priori elements given, but its unity has to be abstracted and ascribed in Kant's transcendental topic to understanding not to sensibility. A clear account of Kant's project as that of accepting our ordinary experience and isolating its sensory and intellectual, a posteriori and a priori, elements, resolves the problem. A second unclarity arises from the formal nature of the inference from step 1 to step 2. Henrich sometimes represents this as an inference from a partial account to a complete account, from a restricted account to one in which the restriction is relaxed, or from a claim about some of our intuitions to a claim about all of them. If the inference were of those forms, from a subset of items to the whole set, then it would be invalid without additional premises. If the inference goes instead from what is true of intuition in general, namely its subjection to categories, to what is true of particular intuitions, then it may be valid but trivial, as Manfred Baum suggested.3 Even in that latter case the inference is ambiguous and might cover any of the following: (1) From intuition generally to particular modes of intuition. (2) From intuition in general (space and time in general) to particular intuitions (particular spaces and times). (3) From intuition in general to particular (intuited) appearances in space and time. (4) From intuition in general to particular (intuited) objects of experience in space and time, and in respect of their "laws of combination." Summarily (1) is valid and trivial; it merely infers truths about particular members of a set from truths about all its members. (2) is invalid because there may be truths about forms of intuition collectively, such as "space is infinitely extensive," which cannot be distributed over particular spaces and times, but if that case is arbitrarily ruled out, then (2) collapses into (1). (3) and (4) are neither valid nor trivial. There is no generally valid inference from truths about an inhabited region to truths about the inhabitants of those regions. It does not follow from the truth that polar bears inhabit a cold region that they are themselves cold. Kant's own position is closer to (3) and (4) than to (1) or (2), but it is (4) which Kant's text insists on at B160. The two steps in the Deduction relate categories first to intuition in general, and second to objects of experience in our intuitive modes of space and time with respect to their perception and laws of combination. In Kant's summary of the argument at B150 the transcendental deduction up to that point in step 1 is said to

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demonstrate categories' "possibility as a priori modes of knowledge of objects of intuition in general." The conclusion in step 2 is that expressed at B160, namely that "categories are conditions of the possibility of experience . . . and valid for all objects of experience." It would be misleading to represent this as a step from a partial to a complete account, or from a restricted to an unrestricted account, or from some of our intuitions to all of them. A step from intuition in general to our intuition, to our sensory modes of instantiation, is not one from part to whole, or from what is restricted to what is unrestricted, but more like the reverse of these. It is a step from what is unrestricted, namely, intuition in general, to what is restricted, namely, our modes of intuitive instantiation. Kant's key move is from intuitions to objects of experience and their laws of combination, and to the "mode in which empirical intuition is given" in perception (B145). These points confirm the earlier architecture of the Analytic, in which the Deduction is to show the possibility of categories' relation to, and role in, experience, and not yet to demonstrate exactiy what that role is for each listed concept. The basic problem for the Deduction was to explain how it is possible for a priori concepts, not derived from experience, nevertheless to relate to experience, and Kant's initial conclusion is that appearances and objects of experience are "subject to categories," that is, can be unified by such a priori concepts in performing that governing, determining role. The conclusion is extended in the conditional claim that if knowledge is to be possible for us then that role must be carried out by categories. Their unity of synthesis is not merely borrowed from experience but determines and governs it, and in step 1 that role is achieved through the link between categories and forms of judgment. Kant admits at B167, quoted earlier, that the more detailed explanation of how in each case that unification is effected in experience is carried out in the Analytic of Principles, not the Deduction. The Deduction supplies in step 2 a general argument for categories' applicability to objects of experience, through that determining role within the scope of our modes of intuition, but the Analytic of Principles shows how each listed category implements that general possibility. Such an account corresponds well with Kant's own claims and is compatible with the descriptive metaphysics of experience canvassed earlier. Henrich's ambitious assumption that the Deduction supplies an antiskeptical proof of, or justification for, our knowledge of objects of experience is not obligatory. The Deduction can be understood more modestly as an attempt to show primarily how it is possible for a priori categories, "if there are any," to relate to a posteriori experience. The conclusion is that such a relation is possible so long as categories have that constitutive, determining role as necessary conditions for objective experience.

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Henrich also claims that the B Deduction differs substantially from A and is the "only tenable" version but the differences are not easy to see. The A Deduction draws no explicit distinction between the two steps in B, but it does not follow that the distinction is absent from A. The "Brief Outline" offered at B168-69 could easily find a place in A, and the same specific conclusions are plainly expressed at various points in A: In other words appearances in experience must stand under the conditions of the necessary unity of apperception just as in mere intuition they must be subject to the formal conditions of space and time. (A110, cf. B164) This is all we were called upon to establish in the transcendental deduction of the categories, namely, to render comprehensible the relation of understanding to sensibility, and by means of sensibility, to all objects of experience. (A128, cf. B161)

Similarity in conclusions does not entail similarity in the arguments for them, but it is also difficult to identify clear differences of that kind between A and B. The ingredients in the arguments for the first step in B include these central items, but it is undeniable that they are present in A in some form: (a) the argument that Verbindung (combination) is an a priori concept, together with its realization in the forms of judgement (B130) (b) the complex modal requirement for the "I think" which marks the transcendental move to the self (B132) (c) the recognition of the conceptual, as well as personal, unity in apperception which introduces the idea of "objective judgement" (B139-42) Verbindung occurs at A l l 8 and A120, even though more emphasis is placed in A on "synthesis" and Verkniipfung. "Synthesis" might be regarded as closer to what Kant calls the "generation" of judgment rather than its "outcome," but that contrast and the preference for the latter was already made clear in A at A104. A does not explicitly associate Verbindung with the a priori, but the link is undoubtedly present as it is in the Metaphysical Deduction. Kant makes no explicit reference to the cogito in A, but there can be no doubt that the requirement of a personal unity in transcendental apperception is present at A106-7 and A123-24. In A Kant emphasizes the connection between concepts and rules rather than the requirements of objective judgment, but those concepts and rules enable us to understand the notion of an "object" or of "objectivity" only

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through their use in judgment and the idea of agreement in judgment (A104-6). Both arguments reject conceptions of "object" and "objectivity" as wholly independent of our cognitive resources, that is, as wholly mind-independent things in themselves, and both replace that faulty conception with the idea that objectivity is constituted by concepts and conceptual rules exemplified in judgments about immanent experience. The characteristic feature of the second stage of Kant's argument is the specification of our modes of sensible intuition, namely space and time, and of the "objects of experience" which categories may constitute with those modes in empirical perception. The distinctive items in the passage are the references to "prescribing laws to nature," specific examples of that relation, such as a house and water's freezing, the parallel between forms of sense and forms of thought, the repetition of the noncausal sense for the "making possible" relation from §14, and the relation of categories to perception through a synthesis of apprehension (B160, B162-63, B164-65, B166-67). The same features connecting categories with intuitions of space and time occur in A. Prescribing laws to nature is present at A114 and A125-28; the relation of categories to the synthesis of apprehension and empirical perception is considered at A97-98, A114, A120; examples of conceptual rules for a priori contexts are given at A105, and for empirical contexts at A106 and A112; the concluding passages at A124-26 and A128 generalize the claims to all objects presented to the senses and to objects of experience. Both accounts represent a combination of categories and spatiotemporal modes of intuition as "constituting" objects of experience through judgment. Both offer an analysis of the notion of "objectivity" required for our conception of an "object of experience," and both reject an appeal to transcendent things in themselves in favor of that conceptual role. Both anticipate, but do not exhaust, the fuller specification of that role for each category in the Analytic of Principles. Both leave uncertainties about the force and success of their arguments. It is not obvious that the B account of "subjective" and "objective" judgements in §19 is superior to the account of "objectivity" at A104-5. 4

2. The Distinction between a "Subjective" and "Objective" Deduction, and the Appeal to Psychology The apparent intrusion of psychology into Kant's transcendental project arises throughout the Critique, but a particular issue of this kind arises in the Deduction. This is not only because of the apparent psychology of the threefold synthesis in A and of §§24-25 in B, but also because Kant

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anticipates, and attempts to resolve, the problem in the A preface (Axvi-xvii). In this section I confine myself to the question: How should we distinguish what Kant calls in the A preface the "subjective" and "objective" Deductions? I consider later other issues about psychology and the self at B150-60. In the preface at Axvi-xvii Kant offers an explanation of the distinction between a subjective and an objective Deduction, and refers to his Transition to the Deduction in §14 at A92-93. In that latter passage Kant importantly denies that the "making possible" relation is either empirical, causal, or psychological. It provides decisive evidence for the rejection of the naive literal account of the "mind making nature." In the preface Kant summarily makes these points: (1) An objective Deduction renders intelligible the objective validity of a priori concepts, and is essential to the project. (2) Investigation of the understanding itself, its possibility, and the cognitive powers on which it rests belongs to the subjective Deduction, and is, though important, inessential. (3) The subjective Deduction appears, mistakenly, to enquire into causes of a given effect, and would then be merely hypothetical, and a matter of opinion. Properly understood, however, it does not have this character and what is said at A92-93 should be sufficient to show this. We can understand Kant's position in the following way: The objective Deduction considers how it is possible for a priori concepts, independent of experience, nevertheless to relate to experience. Such an issue concerns a role for a priori concepts which allows them to have this apparently paradoxical character, and an answer which Kant evidently gives is that a priori concepts constitute and regulate experience, and so make possible certain objects of experience. We could take "constitution" to be a psychologically causal relation, take "a priori" to mean "innate," and then enquire into the psychological mechanisms used in learning those concepts, or exercising them in experience, but Kant persistently denies that his project involves such an account.5 His problem is not part of empirical psychology, does not concern the way we learn concepts, and does not equate "a priori" with "innate," but that does not mean that it renounces any reference to the cognitive powers necessary in our experience. Kant's transcendental enquiry has a parallel psychological aspect but it cannot be properly understood as either an empirical, genetic, or transcendent psychology. Kant's interest is in providing a legitimate "birth certificate" for categories which justifies their a pri-

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ori status and their use in an "objective deduction" (Axvii). If there is a nonpsychological account of the "constituting," or "making possible," relation to be given, then we can distinguish between an objective constitution relation and its subjective counterpart in our mental economy. Nor is it difficult in the light of earlier remarks to give at least an initial sense to such an objective constituting relation. If Kant's project is seen primarily as a metaphysics of experience in which its fundamental features are identified and related to each other, then it offers an objective picture of that structure. It maps the structural features of our experience and shows which of them deserves to be regarded as a priori. The constituting role of any such a priori features is reflected in their priority in experience and in their making possible salient regions of that experience. Kant's own preferred expression for such a relation is to describe a priori concepts as conditions of the possibility of experience or of objects of experience, and earlier it was suggested that the intentionality implicit in the Metaphysical Deduction clarifies that relation. The account of a structural map of experience, the associated conception of a transcendental topic, and the appeal to a constitutive intentionality within it, point towards an objective deduction which cannot be classified as empirical psychology even though it uses psychological vocabulary.6 Two related background points might usefully be made. The first is to notice the extent to which the popular description of Kant's transcendental idealism as "the mind making nature" is at odds with these aspects of Kant's account. To speak of the mind making nature is to speak of a causal psychological relation, which Kant specifically excludes from his transcendental project. It naturally encourages the idea that Kant's interest must be in some form of nonempirical, transcendent psychology in which subjects stand outside independentiy given material and shape or create it in accordance with their innate mental powers. The second is to notice how the issue and that latter temptation are involved in Strawson's dismissal of the "imaginary" subject of transcendental psychology (chapter 7.3). For Strawson's understanding of that imaginary subject was a popular version of Kant's idealism, of the mind as a transcendent cause making nature. But even if that transcendent conception of Kant's transcendental psychology is set aside, the following questions remain: How can a "transcendental psychology" be understood in relation to the "objective" Deduction and yet avoid reference to empirical causes of a given effect? How are the "subjective" and "objective" Deductions related? Two apparently different answers to these questions have been given by Patricia Kitcher and Andrew Brook. Although both rightly reject Strawson's complaint about the "imaginary subject" of transcendental psychology, they disagree about the roles of the subjective and objective Deductions. For Kitcher all the central questions in the Deduction concern

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psychological functions, so that the distinction between the objective and subjective accounts is no more than a difference of emphasis in which the former provides a more abstract formulation of specific realizations of those psychological functions. On the objective side we start with different forms of object cognition and try to decompose these tasks into their essential sub-tasks. The subjective Deduction examines the same problem from the point of view of the subject. (1990,65) At all levels the constructive syntheses required for basic cognitive tasks reveal possibilities for mental structures to influence cognition; and, at all levels, [they] place a requirement on the subject. Any subject capable of performing those tasks must have cognitive states related by synthesis. This is why the objective and subjective Deductions are inseparable and can be distinguished only in terms of focus. (1990, 90) [Kant's ambivalence] toward the subjective Deduction rests on an understandable confusion between a highly abstract description of capacities a mind must have to carry out various cognitive tasks and speculating about the psychological mechanisms that realize those capacities. . . . (1990, 65) Brook offers a different account in the following passages: Since the objective Deduction is about the conditions of representations having objects a better name might be 'deduction of the object', . . . [and for the subjective Deduction]' the deduction of the subject's nature'. [That latter] enquiry was inessential to Kant's main Critical project, defending the synthetic a priori credentials of physics in the objective Deduction. From this point of view anything uncovered about the nature and functioning of the mind would be a happy accident. (1994, 106) [The] subjective and objective deductions are not separate . . . the former is part of the latter. The objective deduction is about the application of categorial concepts to the raw material of represented objects. The subjective deduction is about what the mind must be like in order to do so. . . . Since the categories must be applied there will always be a subjective element. (1994, 120) Kitcher represents both objective and subjective Deductions as inseparable, having to do with "object cognition" in psychology or cognitive science, and differing only in emphasis and in degree of abstraction. Those differences involve three aspects; one is the difference between talking of the tasks and subtasks of object cognition either independently of subjects or from the subjects' point of view; another is the difference between psychological capacities and the occurrences in which they are realized; and a third is the difference between an abstract description of, and a less abstract

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speculation about, the mind. I have emphasized that Kant's transcendental interest in psychology concerns those capacities rather than corresponding acts or occurrences, and concerns their fundamental role in experience, but other distinctions in Kitcher's account are less easy to accept. It might be asked how we can draw the distinction between object cognition independent of subjects and from the subjects' point of view when it is also claimed that at all levels the account places requirements on the subject. It is not clear how to reconcile the claim that mental structures influence cognition with Kant's belief that he does not trade in empirical causal relations, or how to relate a speculation about the mind to Kant's belief that the subjective deduction is not, strictly, a matter of speculative opinion at all. It seems hard to reconcile Kant's separation of the subjective deduction from his own essential transcendental interest with the claims that both are concerned with psychology but only at different levels of generality. Other questions arise about the assumption that even the objective Deduction is no more than a branch of psychology, and about the sense attached to "object" in "object cognition." If there is room, as Kant claims, for a nonpsychological account of the "making possible" relation, then Kitcher's scheme seems to leave it out. If "object cognition" has to do only with external objects, then her scheme conflicts with Kant's parity principle, still in effect even at the end of the Deduction (B160-61). Brook's claims also raise questions. He implies both that the objective Deduction can be detached from any "happy accident" dealing with the mind's features, and yet that the subjective Deduction is actually part of the objective. It is not clear how the objective Deduction, which is about the "conditions of representations having objects," can really dispense with any reference to the mind whose representations these are. And it might be queried whether the objective Deduction is primarily about the character of physics when there is scarcely any mention of that discipline, or its principles, in the text.7 I raise these queries about both accounts not to claim that they are unanswerable, but only to indicate that the differences in the two accounts point to unresolved problems. The central difference between Kitcher and Brook, in these passages, is that while the former treats both subjective and objective Deductions as essays in psychology differing primarily in their focus and degree of abstraction, the latter sees the objective Deduction as not primarily psychological at all even though it can be supplemented with a subjective element. I agree with Brook that there is an objective Deduction which does not belong primarily to psychology, but disagree with him that the subjective Deduction is no more than a "happy accident." I agree with Kitcher that Kant has an essential appeal to psychological notions, but I disagree with her in classifying that appeal as no more than an abstract psychology or cognitive science.

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Kant's conception of psychology, like that of science generally or of any properly constituted region of experience, represents it as governed by a priori principles, and he evidentiy regards the mapping of those principles as a philosophical task. Kant's project is that of a metaphysics of science, and indeed of morality, politics, law and other areas, as well as of ordinary experience.8 Psychology is also governed by such principles, and Kant's transcendental psychology can then be understood as the identification of those principles and their relations within the overall map. These points are made clearly in the Prolegomena: Moreover physics is concerned with objects of outer senses and so is not an example of a general natural science in the strict sense, which brings nature in general under universal laws whether they concern the object of outer or inner sense [the object of physics as well as of psychology]. (Ak. 4.295) The principles of metaphysics . . . must never be taken from experience, for they are not physical but metaphysical, and lie on the other side of experience. So neither outer experience, the proper source of physics, nor inner, which provides the principles of empirical psychology, provide the grounds of metaphysics. (Ak. 4.265) Despite the fact that later (in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science) Kant qualifies the status of psychology as an empirical science on the ground that mathematics cannot be applied to it, he evidentiy accepts that it is governed by principles distinguished from its underlying metaphysical grounds.9 Familiar objections will be made to this account. One claims that the picture is "anodyne" in failing to take into account the supposedly distinctive "transcendental idealist" imposition of a shape on what is materially given by the mind in literally creating nature. It will be said that this cannot be represented within such a map of nature, since it expresses a causal influence on the production and character of nature itself. The mind itself is outside nature and beyond experience, but transcendental idealist theory can somehow discover and represent that outside influence as a thing in itself, even though the same theory tells us we can know nothing of it. The general account given so far of Kant's project is at odds with such a picture. In his transcendental enquiry Kant does not employ the empirical distinction between inner and outer experience, between minds and external objects. He identifies a sense in which all immanent experience, inner and outer, is mind-dependent as the residual truth to be found in traditional idealism. Kant's metaphysics catalogues and separates the a priori/a posteriori, the sensible/intelligible, features of our experience immanentiy from within. It is not necessary for him to stand outside, or beyond, that expe-

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rience. He can consistently deny any knowledge of those transcendent realms, and insist again that his place is not the "windy transcendent metaphysics" of traditional idealism but the "fruitful bathos of experience" (Ak. 4.373n). Another, more specific, objection to that traditionalist picture has already been emphasized. It operates with an exhaustive distinction between what is empirical and belongs to experience and what is transcendent and beyond experience, but it was shown in chapter 5 that Kant's apparatus is more complex. It implies a threefold, not a dual, distinction between what is empirical, or immanent, and belongs to experience; what is transcendent and beyond any possible experience; and what is transcendental and belongs to a general metaphysical account of experience as a whole. When Kant speaks in the Prolegomena in the quotation of metaphysical interests as "lying beyond [jenseits] experience" we should not assume that this means only "transcendent" (Ak. 4.265). Even legitimate metaphysical claims about experience as a whole lie on the "other side" from the empirical bases of sciences like physics and psychology. Kant acknowledges in this way the higher order character of philosophy with respect to science, but does not regard metaphysics itself as concerned legitimately with transcendent realms beyond any possible experience. There is no good reason to think that Kant's transcendental references to minds place them as transcendent items outside nature. A different objection is that even if Kant has room for a transcendental psychology within his metaphysics he is not consistent in speaking sometimes of causal relations in that psychology. At B152, for example, he speaks of a transcendental synthesis of the imagination as "an action [effect, Wirkunj,j] of the understanding on sensibility . . . " and similar claims are made throughout the psychological excursion from B150-60. These causal connections are not specific or empirical and concern general links between fundamental psychological capacities. They can be understood in Kitcher's way as high-level abstract representations of those fundamental capacities and their interactions, but this is not to retract the earlier objection. That objection did not deny that Kant has room for such psychological references but claimed rather that she left no room for any other account. B150-60 and A97-105 address the psychological aspects of our experience but do not exhaust Kant's interests in the Deduction. They are, as Brook implied, a part of the objective Deduction so long as they are not taken to be reports of actual causal relations between mental events. The structural map of those fundamental capacities can legitimately include their causal interactions in general without impugning the difference between Kant's project and empirical psychology.

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3. Modest and Ambitious Accounts of the Transcendental Deduction: A Preliminary Survey As a preliminary to a resolution of the issues in the Transcendental Deduction I contrast two opposed accounts of its argument. One is ambitious and traditionalist while the other is modest and revolutionary. Both accounts contain a complex package of claims, and it is possible to detach separate items from each package and repackage them in variant forms, but to represent the stark opposition underlines the contrast and represents real conflicts among interpreters. The key points at which they differ concern the monolithic form of the argument, its targets of a traditional skepticism about external objects or the self, and its appeals to "objective validity" and "objective reality." At the centre is a question whether the argument is designed to provide a sufficient condition and a guarantee of knowledge in response either to skepticism in general or to idealist skepticism about external objects The ambitious argument deals with the specific concepts listed in the Metaphysical Deduction and offers to prove both their a priority and their actual application, their objective reality, in experience. Ideally the argument would be strictly deductive from some self-evident premise such as the indubitable Cartesian cogito or some synthetic a priori truth, and would provide sufficient conditions for questioned aspects of our experience, and a guarantee against a skeptic of the truth of our beliefs about external objects and persons. It assumes that Kant's appeal to a priori necessities is designed as a refutation of skeptical doubt, and provides a paradigm example of a supposed Kantian transcendental argument against skepticism in general or idealist skepticism in particular. It would rest, like Descartes's "cogito," on a supposed unassailable foundation in order to reconstruct a justified knowledge of an objective, perhaps "absolute," reality.10 The modest argument deals not with specific a priori concepts but with the possibility, and role, of categories in general, and its central task is to establish not that any particular categories actually apply to experience but only how they can do so compatibly with their a priority and independence from the senses. It would provide only necessary, not sufficient, conditions for the possibility of experience, and so would not attempt to guarantee our experience against traditional skepticism. More specifically it is not directed at traditional skepticism about external objects or persons but at a more general objectivity concerning the transcendental conditions under which we can express judgments evaluable as true or false. Such an evaluation would be required for our conception of an immanent, not absolute, reality. It assumes a parity between inner and outer experience, and seeks to understand the general relation between thought and experience rather than that between inner experience and outer objects. The argument is not

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monolithic like Descartes's in the Meditations, not direcdy targeted at traditional skepticism, and does not seek to prove or guarantee our conception of objective reality.

3.1. A Deduction The term "deduction" has encouraged the idea that the passage contains a monolithic and strictiy deductive argument from some self-evident premise often identified with Kant's appeal to the "cogito," the "I think," in the B version. This is to represent Kant's problems within a Cartesian framework, and the argument as a deductive proof of the existence of the external world from the idealist premise of the certainty of at least one basic mental state.11 Stroud speaks of the argument as identifying the conditions required for experiences united in a single consciousness (2003, 118). Strawson speaks of a "truly sovereign premise" in the argument expressing the "unity of diverse experiences in a single consciousness" and arguing that it requires "experience of objects" (1966a, 74, 98). These claims encourage a dubious assimilation to a Cartesian rationalist style of argument and overlook transcendental apperception's appeal to a mutual dependence between self-consciousness and categories. There are decisive reasons not to take this Cartesian rationalist model for the Deduction at face value, not least because Kant's argument does not begin with the assumption of a self-evident premise along Cartesian lines.12 The A version begins with the threefold synthesis and argues in accordance with the "abstraction" procedure toy not from, the personal unity in transcendental apperception. The B version begins with the claimed a priori character of Verbindung and argues from there to the same personal unity. The mutual dependence in transcendental apperception between self-consciousness and categories is then further explored in the connections between categories and intuitions in imagination, and in the characterization of the self and its cognitive powers. Kant makes no use of the characterization of the cogito as "indubitable" and his appeal to it does not refer to the occurrence of any such privileged experience, but talks in a more complex modal form of its necessary possibility. Such a view is supported in the Paralogisms where Kant rejects in the strongest terms a parallel between his own position and that of Descartes (chapter 25). Even initially Kant's appeal to the "cogito" and the arguments surrounding it are quite different from those of Descartes. The argument may still be regarded as a strict deduction from some self-evident premises, but even that minimal claim is rejected by Henrich's assimilation of the Deduction not to a Cartesian deductive argument but to the legal Deduktionsschriften used to validate titles and ownership in

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Germany.13 Kant's own appeal to legal imagery, and to the need for a legitimate tide for a priori concepts, fits naturally into such an account, but the relevant legal procedures are more complex than a deductive proof and invoke such facts as those of birth or land boundaries. The model of the Deduktionsschrift points in the right direction but it does not by itself resolve the question of the title or the relevant facts at issue. One suggestion is that the quaestio iuris is not that of the traditional skeptic seeking a justification for our beliefs about reality or external objects, but only that of the empiricist who questions the existence of a priori concepts and synthetic a priori principles. In that case the facts are those of our given ordinary and scientific experience, and the question of law is whether in that experience there can be a reference to a priori concepts. The question turns on the outcome of Kant's transcendental topic, his inventory of elements in our experience as belonging to sense or understanding and as a posteriori or a priori. Such an account matches Kant's own description of his project, but it is neither monolithic, nor deductive, nor Cartesian. In the course of the discussion Kant offers specific deductive arguments, such as the proof in §15 that Verbindung is an a priori concept, but also additional comments on the character of mathematics and the connections between empirical apperception, inner sense, and imagination. To stress the deductive character of the argument is to disregard its complexity and its distinctive appeal to transcendental presuppositions of our experience.

3.2. Objective Validity and Objective Reality If the premise and the logical method of Kant's argument are in doubt the same is true of the conclusion. Sometimes the argument is taken to establish the categories' "objective validity" and sometimes their "objective reality." 14 Sometimes it is taken that Kant directs his argument specifically at the concepts listed in the Metaphysical Deduction as categories, and sometimes it is taken to be directed only at the role of categories in general however they might be identified. It is clear from the text that the argument in the Transcendental Deduction does not deal with the specific concepts listed earlier, but it is not clear how we should distinguish between the categories' "objective validity" and their "objective reality." Kant undoubtedly appeals both to "objective validity" and "objective reality" in outlining the role for categories, but commentators differ in the significance they attach to that distinction. In Henry Allison's Transcendental Idealism the distinction is used to differentiate the two steps of the B Deduction, taking the first to deal with objective validity and the second with objective reality. For him the former is a "judgmental" property, that

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of "being capable of truth or falsity," while the latter has an "ontological" sense and says of a concept that "it refers, or is applicable, to an actual object." Allison is undoubtedly right to contrast Kant's ascription of objectivity to judgments and to concepts, and to admit that Kant's use of "objective validity" and "objective reality" is not entirely consistent (cf. A104-5 and B142). At B137 Kant uses "objective validity" of a relation of representations to objects where "objective reality" might have been expected. At A109 Kant speaks of the concept of a transcendental object as conferring "objective reality" on empirical concepts, even though the former has "no determinate intuition." It might be objected to what I have called the "modest" argument in the Deduction that it accommodates the categories' objective validity but fails to take into account essential arguments for the stronger notion of their objective reality. If Henrich's step 2 is designed to show not only that there is an intelligible role for a priori concepts in experience (validity), but also that they apply to actual objects (reality), then that modest account will seem inadequate. Kiihn, on the other hand, takes the view that there is no significant difference for Kant between "objective validity," "objective reality," and "real possibility." I offer three summary points to resolve the issue. First despite Kant's uncertain use of "objective validity" and "objective reality" in the Deduction a general distinction between them is evident later. Characteristically in the Dialectic Kant denies "objective reality" to "Ideas (of reason)" (Ideen), which have for us no possibility of instantiation in experience. In these passages Kant definitely claims that there is for us no actual object corresponding to those Ideas (B593, B597, B663-64). We might, therefore, expect that to establish the objective reality of categories is to establish the actual existence of objects corresponding to them. Second, however, if that entails a demonstration for each category of the actual object which it makes possible, it is quite clear that no such demonstration is provided in the Deduction. The most it can do is to show that categories in general must be realized in sensibility if objective experience is to be possible. There is no account of the way specific categories implement that general requirement for objective reality except in the Analytic of Principles. If Henrich's second step in the B argument is intended to prove that stronger sense of "objective reality" for particular categories, then it simply does not correspond to Kant's text. Allison's distinction spans just this gap when he says of the "ontological" sense for a category's "objective reality" that it then "refers, or is applicable to, an actual object." The Deduction does not show for each category that it refers to an actual object but only how in general such concepts are able to apply in experience by fulfilling their determining role. It shows how categories may apply to objects in experience through their

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instantiation in the a priori intuitions of space and time. In that case the second step in the Deduction would not then outline the detailed relation between each category and spatiotemporal intuitions, but only point towards the Principles where that exercise is undertaken. Perhaps Henrich's two steps claim no more than this and if so they are compatible with the modest account.

3.3. Skepticism Nor does Kant seem to provide an antiskeptical argument to justify knowledge of external objects and persons in the Deduction. Specific references to the concept of a "body" at A106, and to houses and frozen water at B162, are illustrative examples from which we cannot argue that Kant is concerned only with such outer objects. Illustrations of other items such as the mathematical figure of a triangle at A105 should remind readers that categories make possible discriminations not only among outer objects but also among abstract items in geometry and kinematics. These are in any case mere illustrations and Kant's interest in the Deduction is not at the detailed level of particular cases or of particular candidate categories. These points might be resisted if Kant's text in the Deduction made it clear that "object" and "objectivity" had to do with outer objects, and there is a widespread belief that this is so. Terence Irwin makes the point in his "Morality and Personality: Kant and Green": However exactiy the argument goes, the Transcendental Deduction includes an attempt to find the necessary conditions of [the] unity of consciousness, and argues that one of the necessary conditions is the belief in the existence of external objects. (1984, 34.)

Others such as Quassim Cassam and Barry Stroud report it in somewhat different terms. Cassam says that "for both Strawson and Evans objects in the weighty sense are physical objects" (1997, 111), and Stroud says that "experience for Kant is possible only if it is experience of objects in a fairly weighty sense" (2003, 117). The idea that objects may be "fairly" weighty begins to suggest some ambiguity in the classification of "weighty" objects. The belief goes back in the immediate past to the views of Bennett and Strawson both of whom insisted on the reference in the Deduction to "weighty" or "outer" objects. Strawson rejects the idea that Kant's "objects" may be no more than "instances of a concept," and his central criterion for "weighty" objects represents them as outer objects distinct from a subject's states of consciousness:

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To know something about an object . . . is to know something that holds (1) irrespective of the occurrence of any particular state of consciousness, (2) irrespective of the occurrence of any particular experience of awareness of the object as falling under the general concept in question. [(1) and (2) are my labels for the two clauses.] (1966a, 73)

Bennett's criterion separates oneself and one's inner states from "objects" where it is also natural to treat the latter as outer objects, and he, like Strawson, appeals to the Analytic of Principles. What Kant proves in the Principles Chapter, and what he repeatedly offers to prove in the Transcendental Deduction is that all experience must be of a realm of items which are 'objective' in the sense that they can be distinguished from oneself and one's inner states. (1966, 131) This last element in the notion of objectivity is not clearly stated until the Principles are reached. It is necessary to anticipate them to this extent. (Strawson 1966a, 98n5)

I want to raise two interpretative and two philosophical objections to these claims. The first interpretative objection arises if we ask whether the references to weighty or outer objects are not made in the Analytic of Principles rather than in the Deduction. Kant's formal argument against an idealist skepticism over outer objects is presented in the B Refutation of Idealism and presupposed in the B General Note on the System of Principles. It might be expected that the Transcendental Deduction would not merely duplicate those later claims. If the support for a reference to weighty objects comes only from the Analytic of Principles, as the quotations suggest, then it is interpretatively wrong to read the Deduction in those terms. The Deduction's suggested appeal to "weighty" objects would have to be conceded if the text made it clear, but the second interpretative difficulty is that the text does not make this clear. Kant talks of "objects," without explicit commitment to their being external, at A104-5, A106, A108-9, A118, A127, B130, B139 1 5 among other places, and I have been unable to find any passages in the Deduction which explicitly make that commitment. At A l l 9 Kant's central argument about the unity of apperception represents it as underlying " a l l objects of possible experience." In the central argument at A104-5 about the conception of an "object of representations" there is no exclusive reference to outer objects, but only to the more general relation of "knowledge to its object." The concept of an object, said to be constituted by a "unity" manifest in a required agreement between judgments, is not restricted to outer objects. The argument culminates in the quite explicit claim at

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B137: "an object is that in the concept of which the manifold of intuition is united" where no restriction is made to outer objects or to an outer manifold of intuition.16 There is simply no good textual ground for the claims that in the Deduction Kant is exclusively concerned with external objects, and that his understanding of "objectivity" has to do only with those objects. The philosophical objections arise if we ask whether it is quite clear what "weighty" objects are, and how the suggestion came to be made at all. The two questions are closely related but I consider first some of the ambiguities in the criteria for weighty objects. The intention in the passage quoted from 1966a, p. 73 seems to be to distinguish between states of consciousness and external objects, but the given criteria are ambiguous and do not succeed in drawing that distinction. The difficulties arise from the "irrespective" clauses (1) and (2). Clause (1) has an ambiguity in what counts as a "particular state of consciousness." A "particular" state of consciousness might trivially be that "particular" state, but it is possible to access durable states of consciousness at different particular times and in different particular ways. In those cases at least such states can be said to occur "irrespective of any 'particular' state of consciousness." Those states of consciousness will not be significantly different in that respect from outer objects which can also generally be accessed through different particular experiences none of which is individually necessary in order to have knowledge of them. That understanding of clause (1) is different from the criterion in clause (2). Certainly the occurrence of any state of consciousness is separable from experience of awareness of it as falling under a general concept. A dumb animal is trivially "aware" of its pain in feeling the pain but it will not be "aware" of it as a pain or as anything else. States of consciousness generally will in that way be separable from a subject's experience of awareness of them as that type of state. It may be said that the criterion requires that the subject "knows something about an object," but it is arguable that the dumb animal knows what it is suffering even if it cannot express it. The consequent problems are that under both criteria even states of consciousness will satisfy the criteria for being weighty "objects." Under (1), if the criterion is not to be trivial, some states of consciousness will satisfy the test for being weighty "objects" so long as they are sufficiently durable. Under (2) since having any state of consciousness can be distinguished from being aware of it as of a certain kind, states of consciousness will also be indistinguishable from weighty objects. The argument rests on the idea that there are states of consciousness indistinguishable from awareness of them whose esse is percipi and on the claim that experience of that class of states lacks certain features essential for a genuine experience (1966a, 100). What is lacking is a contrast

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between a subject's experiences and an objective order of outer, weighty, objects of which they are experiences. The minimum implied is that some of the concepts under which particular experienced items are recognised as falling should be such that the experiences themselves contain the basis for . . . the distinction between the subjective order and arrangement of a series of such experiences . . . and the objective order and arrangement of the items of which they are experiences. (1966a, 101)

Reference to weighty objects allows a subject to escape from the deviant case in which its experiences are "wholly absorbed by" the item recognized, and to make a required distinction between "the subjective route of his experiences and the objective world through which it is a route" (1966a, 104). This provides the "double aspect" of a series of experiences expressible in the contrast between "seeming" and "being": "In this duplicity of aspects lies the fundamental ground of the possibility . . . of self ascription of experiences . . . including such as have no contribution to make to the picture of the objective world" (1966a, 106). This makes it evident that the basic reason for understanding Kant's term "object" as "weighty object" rests not on any consideration of Kant's text but on the allure of an argument which seems acceptable or interesting. That it is an argument whose conclusion Kant canvasses in his later Refutation of Idealism provides some reason for ascribing such ideas to Kant, but that ascription has to be qualified in two ways. The conclusion of Kant's Refutation is similar to Strawson's, but the two arguments are quite different, and there is no good reason to read the Refutation of Idealism into the argument of the Transcendental Deduction. Strawson's conduct of the argument throughout his account of the Deduction reflects his view of "what Kant must regard as a way out of the difficulty," of "what Kant must reply," or of how the "Kantian position might respond," but it does not reflect a careful consideration of what Kant actually says. I add two related comments. If the real distinction is that between seeming and being, between the way things seem and the way they are, then it plainly does not draw a line between states of consciousness and outer objects. That contrast, between seeming and being, can be made just as well for at least some states of consciousness, and it is not clear that it will exclude any; but at least it will not draw a general distinction between states of consciousness and outer physical objects.17 For the same reason the argument will not establish the need for outer experience or the claim that self consciousness depends on outer experience. What it may show, at most, is that if we are to have a distinction between seeming and being, our experience cannot be confined to a

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restricted subclass of states of consciousness, namely those, if there are any, for which their "esse" is "percipi." So understood the argument is compatible with the conclusion that one's identity, and a description of one's experiences as a route through a world of consciousness, do not depend on any recognition of an outer world. Strawson indicates another criterion: "Judgements about objects if valid, are objectively valid, valid independendy of the occurrence of the particular state of awareness, of the particular experience, which issues in the judgement" (1966a, 73). Although this has some of the same ambiguity as before, it is natural to take it to distinguish between a judgment's truth or falsity and a subjective ground, such as a belief, for making the judgment, but this criterion is not identical with the others considered earlier. Beliefs which issue in judgments about our own states of consciousness allow the latter to be just as objective, just as objectively evaluable as true or false, as judgments about outer objects. The new criterion turns on our ability to evaluate judgments as true or false whether those judgments are about inner or outer objects, and it is that judgmental criterion which Kant indicates in B §19. That criterion does not draw a distinction between inner states of consciousness and outer, weighty, objects. It contrasts instead the content of a judgment, whether about inner or outer experience, and a subjective ground we have for asserting it. What is essential to Kant's position, and his conception of "objectivity," in the Deduction is that appeal to a true /false evaluation of judgments, and not a distinction between their inner or outer topics. The immediate ground for treating "object" in the Deduction as "weighty object" was not any evidence from the text, but the attraction of Strawson's argument for the priority of outer experience over inner. That conclusion, supported by a different argument, is reached by Kant in the Refutation of Idealism but not in the Transcendental Deduction, and underlying that dubious motive is the deeper assumption that the Deduction is an antiskeptical attempt to justify our knowledge of outer objects. That assumption is part of a wider belief that Kant's primary interest in the Deduction, and throughout the Critique, is the traditional idealist problem of justifying belief in an outer world on the basis of inner experiences. The appeal to sense data, and to states of consciousness whose esse is percipi, is the proposed traditional idealist, Berkeleian background to Kant's argument. These background views evidendy match what was called earlier an "ambitious" account of the Deduction but all of them have been shown to be open to decisive objections. There is no good textual reason to find that argument in the Deduction, and there is no good reason to interpret it in the light of the later Refutation of Idealism. If Kant's project is a descriptive metaphysics and not a normative, idealist epistemology, then there is no good reason to

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interpret the Deduction in the light of that traditional background. The ambitious reading should be replaced with a more modest account of the Deduction which targets not an idealist skepticism about outer objects but an empiricist skepticism about the existence and role of a priori concepts. Kant's immediate goal is to answer that empiricist doubt and to show how a priori concepts can have a use in a posteriori experience. His view is, conformably with empiricism, that such concepts must have such a use if they are to have a legitimate function, and that this can be explained by outiining generally their role in experience and their connection with sensibility. In the course of that demonstration it is necessary to elucidate how such concepts can constitute a reality of objects of experience by elucidating a legitimate conception of "objectivity" or of "objective reality." That elucidation is to be achieved through the conception of transcendental apperception, its mutually dependent notions of conceptual and personal unity, and the possibility of evaluating judgments as true or false. The mutual dependence on which the Deduction focuses is that between concepts and the self, not that between an inner self and an outer world.

[15] The Transcendental Deduction (3): Conceptual Unity

T h e central concept of the Deduction, transcendental apperception, has been shown to contain references to both a conceptual and a personal unity, and Kant evidently holds that these two unities are mutually related as conditions of each other's possibility (A108, B135). That mutual relation holds not between self and outer world but between self and concepts or language. The latter relation involves the role of the fundamental concepts in the language, the a priori categories, and the former is explored not in the Deduction but in the Refutation of Idealism. Although it is artificial to separate the mutually dependent conditions, I consider conceptual unity in this chapter and personal unity in the next before bringing the two together. I divide the discussion into (1) The Textual Case, and (2) Reality and Objectivity in the Transcendental Deduction.

1. The Textual Case in the Deduction Kant's argument in the Deduction turns on an appeal to conditions of our experience in synthesis and combination, and on an account of "objectivity." The most obvious indicators of these factors occur in the A Deduction's discussion of the threefold synthesis and "object of representations," but they also appear in somewhat different terms in B. I consider them under three headings: 1.1 Synthesis and Combination, 1.2 The Object of Representations and Objectivity, and 1.3 The Formal Argument. In 1.3, I note the principal divergence in the arguments in A and B.

1.1. Synthesis and Combination Kant places more emphasis on "synthesis" in the A Deduction and more on the term "combination" in B, and this marks a presentational shift from a 331

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more psychological to a more judgmental appeal. If we think of synthesis as primarily a cognitive operation and combination as primarily a feature of its result, then they can be seen as two sides of the same coin which Kant himself distinguishes as "generation" and "outcome" at A103^1. This difference brings also some changes in the explicit form of Kant's argument, for example, in the short proof that combination is an a priori concept (B129-30), but I first draw some lessons from the account of the threefold synthesis. The three syntheses, apprehension, reproduction, and recognition, are outlined by Kant initially as a posteriori occurrences in experience, but it is made clear that they are to be considered "not in their empirical but in their transcendental constitution" (A97). Part of what this means is expressed in the claims: (1) These psychological, cognitive powers are not merely contingent occurrences in our experience but are in some way necessary for experience. (2) These powers operate in relation not only to a posteriori but also to a priori content. Claim (2) might be regarded as an added claim based on the reasonable assumption that there are both a posteriori and a priori contents, but it might also be seen simply as a consequence of (1). If the syntheses are necessary for experience in general it might be thought to follow that they are necessary for that part of experience, including mathematics, natural science, and philosophy, which deals with a priori content. Both (1) and (2) express Kant's belief that our experience is governed by an a priori structure of concepts and intuitions and by an associated set of fundamental psychological powers, which it is the task of his philosophical inventory to record. Claim (2) is not necessarily vulnerable to the charge of "psychologism" with respect to mathematics, since Kant is not here offering an analysis of that discipline but indicating its position, its "topic," in our general experience. Two other questions immediately arise about (1), namely, whether it is true, and whether it points to hidden occurrences in a transcendent psychology. The latter issue can be expressed by considering two versions of (1) and (2): (3) There must be material psychological operations of pure synthesis temporally prior to, and causally necessary for, a posteriori experience. (4) Actual operations of the threefold synthesis occur only in experience but have a transcendental significance as formal, necessary presuppositions of that experience.

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There are obvious reasons to deny the necessity in every occurrent experience of each of the three powers. I may have knowledge of some circumstance without apprehending or perceiving it, or without remembering it, or without formulating some conceptual expression for it. Some such cases can be resolved by allowing flexibility in the object of the operation. If I am in direct, sensory contact with some item it may be that I neither need, nor can be said, to remember it, but some memory is plainly needed if the item is of a familiar type and I think of it as belonging to that type. In that case what is remembered is not the object apprehended but the rules governing its characterization, but memory or imagination may be involved if sensory contact is absent, or occurs over a period, or is intermittent, as Kant points out. Again much of what a subject perceives is not explicitly characterized, but even if I do not consciously formulate a description for it I may have grasped it under some concept, or unconsciously registered its presence. Subjects successfully avoid obstacles or dangers without consciously registering their presence or their character. Kant's thesis has to be understood in such flexible forms, so that the requirement is only that it is really possible for a subject to meet these conditions even when they are not all met in one experience. The basic requirement should then be that a total deficit in any one ability makes a genuine experience impossible. A creature which lacks completely either any sensory response, or any power of recall, or any ability to recognize what is presented, should, if Kant is right, be incapable of a genuine experience such as ours. Such a claim does not imply that there are no other necessary powers. Kant implicitly recognizes other related but derivative powers such as judgment, imagination, and reasoning, and other experiences for creatures with different cognitive powers in other possible worlds (B43). It would be easy, and correct, to make the qualification that Kant's requirements are primarily for our human experience, but to leave the point at that level is to miss an important corollary of his position. For the account of these psychological requirements for experience deploys a strategy which is tacitly contained but not made explicit in the argument. It is a conception of aspects of experience in terms of a "core" application surrounded by more or less "deviant" cases. In the most general terms the core experience with which Kant is concerned is our human cognitive experience with its primary functional differentiation between passive sense instantiation and active, discursive understanding. Kant admits such "deviant experiences" as intellectual intuition (B135, B139), a noncategorial intuition (B123), inapplicable mathematics (B147), or speculative science (B269-70). He is not prepared to license all such deviations as genuine knowledge, but he is prepared to accept that such cases may arise and have some degree of intelligibility. Some deviations may not impugn knowledge, where, for example, there is no present intuitive

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instantiation for a claim but the possibility of providing one is unproblematic. They may be characterized as fanciful or inventive (B269-70), or as verging on unintelligibility (B139), or as wholly unintelligible or inconsistent (B348). Kant provides a catalogue of such intermediate1 cases at B346-49 which testifies to their range and to his taste for detailed differentiation among items in the general inventory. Independendy of Kant we would be forced to offer such a picture of core requirements for experience with forms of deviation from it, but Kant himself evidendy subscribes to the same view. The necessity of the three syntheses can be understood in these ways; it is qualified in terms both of its conditionality and of their susceptibility to deviations from the core cases. It is conditional on the central case of a full human experience, and on the recognition that an intelligible experience may be more or less full, and may deviate more or less from the central examples. Only at the limit, where a deviation from the human case goes too far, is it possible to say that the case is unintelligible to us and this is probably why Kant expresses his views about intellectual intuition in the hesitant terms of B135 and B139. These qualifications are opposed by a popular view of Kant in which his necessities are absolute or unconditional, and his distinctions express implausibly rigid and exhaustive alternatives. That popular view is not supported, in this case as in others, by the qualifications Kant himself makes. Kant refers to the threefold synthesis as part of his standard abstraction procedure of exhibiting features of our ordinary experience in order to identify their "transcendental grounds," and that move to an abstract schematic account of presuppositions of experience encourages the popular view of them as rigid dichotomies. Kant's conclusions may be understood either in the material way of (3) or the formal way of (4), but Kant's recognition of the "formal/material" distinction shows that only (4) is correct. The distinction is outiined at B88-89 and extensively deployed in the Dialectic (B353-54, B518-19, B647-48). 2 Kant identifies a philosophical failing which misconstrues a pure, formal philosophical claim as if it referred to some material but hidden, transcendent object. The error is evidendy related to what was earlier called the "basic rationalist fallacy," that is, inferring the material existence of transcendent objects from what is true a priori of our immanent experience. In the light of that recognition it cannot seriously be suggested that Kant committed the same error in appealing to what is a priori true of our fundamental cognitive powers. The suggestion that the claims (1) and (2) together point materially, as in (3), to some unconscious, or preconscious, act of a priori synthesis which occurs before we have any a posteriori experience at all, must be wrong. The ascription to Kant of such a claim as (3) yields two consequential errors. On one side the transcendental is confused with the transcendent

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and Kant veers implausibly towards rationalism; on the other it is misidentified with the merely empirical and makes Kant too close to the empiricists. The former error, in the complaint about the "imaginary subject of transcendent psychology," was discussed earlier in chapter 7.3 and is explicitly castigated by Kant at A395 in those very terms.3 The latter is particularly unfortunate since an essential goal of Kant's transcendental move is to reject empiricism. Kant's transcendental antiempiricist approach cannot properly be elaborated in terms either of "empirically applicable" criteria4 or of hidden, transcendent occurrences. His commitment to (4) is to the transcendental significance of those fundamental psychological powers as presuppositions of our experience, and not to supposed transcendent, and privileged, acts and events. Actual psychological acts of these kinds occur only in experience, but their transcendental significance lies not merely in those occurrences, or in generalizations from them, but in their necessary role in making our experience possible. No particular act of recall is necessary but recall itself is. To think that the doctrine must identify additional transcendent occurrences would be like inferring that because the possibility of winning is a necessary presupposition of the game of chess there must be mysterious winning chess positions over and above those familiar in checkmates and resignations in actual or possible play.

1.2. The "Object of Representations" and Object»

ccTranscendental

Kant's transcendental interest in the threefold synthesis is not an interest in transcendent objects but it draws attention to controversies about the terms "transcendental object/subject." The central question in the Deduction asks what can be meant by "object of representations" and in his answer Kant refers mysteriously to a "transcendental object = X." Commentators disagree about the meaning of this reference and about the relation between a "transcendental object" on one side and the concepts of "noumenon," "thing in itself," and "intelligible object" on the other. Some commentators, such as Rae Langton in Kantian Humility (31), regard these terms as synonyms, and I was taken to task by Scott-Taggart (1969, 7) for failing in Kant's Theory of Knowledge to acknowledge passages where Kant makes this clear. I do not think that my account was substantially different from that given in Henry Allison's Kant's Transcendental Idealism (242-46), but my view was that the terms "transcendental object" and "noumenon" are not synonyms and play different but related roles in Kant's discussion. If there were no difference, then it would be puzzling that Kant deploys this new form in the Deduction and associates it with the expression ". . . = X," which is not used with the

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terms "noumenon" or "thing in itself." The suggestion I made was that the term "transcendental object" is introduced to stand problematically for an unknown, namely, whatever we take the term "object of representations" to signify. It poses a problem put less graphically in the question, what is meant by "object" or "objectivity"? and it points to two opposed solutions. One solution, which Kant rejects, identifies "object" with "noumenon" or "thing in itself' and identifies objectivity with that transcendent realm. Another, which Kant accepts, is to identify it with some aspect of immanent experience unrelated to purported transcendent things in themselves. That immanent Kantian solution is elaborated in terms of concepts, rules, and the unity in experience which they determine, but the issue here has less to do with the adequacy of that solution than with its account of the relations between the terms "transcendental object" and "noumenon." It says that "noumenon" stands for one possible solution to the equation, but not for the correct one. In such an account the two terms are not synonyms and their introduction marks distinct roles in Kant's theory, but they are intimately related, for "noumenon" is to be identified with "transcendental object" in that one solution which Kant represents as erroneous. The same is true of the conception of a "transcendental subject" which may equally, and equally wrongly, be identified as a noumenal self. An extensional5 overlap between "noumenon" and "transcendental object" in that one erroneous context is not just a curious casual association, but reflects for Kant a powerful temptation to commit the philosophical errors examined throughout the Dialectic. The temptation to solve the equation by construing "objectivity" as the transcendent independence of noumena is a central part of Kant's diagnosis of dialectical illusion. To regard the expressions "transcendental object" and "noumenon" as synonyms is to lose sight of that diagnosis. Does Kant's text in the Critique nevertheless count against this view? The passages in which Kant speaks of a "transcendental object" are the following: A46, A104, A109, A191, A247, A251, A253, A277, A279, A288, A358, A361, A366, A372-23, A379-80, A390-91, A393-94, A478, A479n, A494, A538, A545, A557, A565, A613-14, A679, A697-98. In addition he speaks of a "transcendental subject" at A346, A355, B427, A414, A470n, A479n, A492, A545. Scott-Taggart also listed A180-81 but this has no reference to transcendental objects or subjects. I classify the passages with representative quotations under four headings: (1) passages where Kant uses the original expression ". . . = X , " and, as in the introductory passage at A104, also speaks of an "object in general":

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These appearances are not things in themselves; they are only representations, which in turn have their object—which cannot be intuited by us . . . and may be named the non-empirical, transcendental object = X. (A109)

A247; A251; A279; A366; A698-99; A346; A355; B427; A414. (2) passages where the transcendental object though not identical with a noumenon, nevertheless can be so conceived or understood: that something which underlies outer appearances . . . may yet when viewed as noumenon (or better as transcendental object). . . . (A358) All we have done is merely to presuppose a something, a merely transcendental object, of which as it is in itself, we have no concept whatsoever. (A698-99) The object to which I relate appearance in general is the transcendental object. . . . this cannot be entitled the noumenon; for I know nothing of what it is in itself." (A251)

A545, A679. (3) passages where the transcendental object is referred to as a Grund, or "cause," or "basis," or "correlate" of appearances, or where appearances are considered as "representations" of such an object. Kant always adds the proviso in these cases that such correlates are unknown to us: and the transcendental object, which may be the ground of this appearance that we call matter, is a mere something of which we should not understand what it is even if someone were in a position to tell us. (A277) it does indeed think for itself an object in itself, but only as transcendental object, which is the cause of appearance, . . and not itself appearance and which can be thought neither as quantity nor as reality. . . . (A288)

A366; A390; A538; A564; A613-14; A492; A494. (4) passages where Kant expresses a parity between outer and inner sense in respect of the reference to a transcendental object: The transcendental object is equally unknown in respect to inner and to outer intuition. (A372-73)

A379-80. The question is whether these references to transcendental objects are essentially or primarily to noumena. There are two decisive reasons for rejecting that claim. The first is that even the strongest cases for adopting the proposal, namely, those passages listed under (3), are quite compatible

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with the alternative account. In that alternative it was conceded that one incorrect solution to the equation in which the "transcendental object" was originally introduced identifies transcendental objects with noumena, and it is that solution for " X " which the passages in (3) express. But the passages in (1) and (2) confirm the claim that the two expressions are not generally identical, and at least one, A251, explicidy denies their identity. The second is that of the two alternatives only one explains satisfactorily all the different references. If we treat (3) as the primary reference to transcendental objects and accept that they are simply identical with noumena, then the passages in (1) and (2) become incomprehensible. It would make no sense to say, as the passages in (2) say, that we may conceive, or view, the transcendental object ^anoumenon if these expressions are synonyms and their referents identical. It follows that of the two options only the account I gave originally satisfactorily explains all four types of reference. It does so by making (1) and (2) primary, and then regarding (3) as a special, and illusory, case in which transcendental objects are mistakenly conceived as noumena.

1.3. The aObject of Representations" and the Argument Structure In A the threefold synthesis leads direcdy to the discussion of recognition, concepts, and the idea of an "object." Since the section is designed to explore the possibility and role of a priori concepts it is not surprising that this sequence points towards the central notion of a conceptual unity and its claimed role in providing objectivity in experience. In B Kant begins with the notion of combination in judgment rather than with that of recognition in concepts, but both appeals are connected necessarily to judgments, judgment forms, and the Metaphysical Deduction. Kant would have had two motives for preferring combination in B to the threefold synthesis. First, it made the link with judgment more explicit and gave the opportunity to argue for the a priori character of combination at B129-30, and, second, it avoided the recognized dangers of misunderstanding the psychology of the subjective Deduction. It is misleading to represent the whole of Kant's argument as a monolithic deductive exercise from some basic premise such as Descartes's "cogito," but that part of it which leads to the requirement for conceptual unity can be represented in the following schematic way. 1. Knowledge of objects of our representations cannot be wholly "independent" of those representations, but must be somehow

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"distinct from" them. The problem is to understand and reconcile these two apparently conflicting requirements. 2A. Concepts, with their recognitional role, express rules governing both a posteriori and a priori contexts. 2B. Concepts presuppose combination (Verbindung) in judgment which cannot be given a posteriori and is therefore a priori. 3A. There must, therefore, be a priori concepts governing, and responsible for, the empirical discriminations made through concepts in experience. 3B. There must, therefore, be a priori concepts, necessary for experience, corresponding to the general notion of "combination," exemplified in basic judgment forms. 4. Those a priori concepts are ultimately responsible for the objectivity of experience, which can now be spelled out in more explicit terms as, e.g. "unity," "stability," "determinacy," a "nonaccidental," "nonarbitrary," order, and agreement in judgment. 5. Concepts must be instantiable, and so related to intuition, if they are to function at all. 6. The a priori categories ultimately responsible for that immanent objectivity manifest that role specifically in constituting objects of experience in conjunction with the requirements of 5. With the a priori intuitions they determine, or constitute, a schematic, abstract, a priori framework within which the whole of our experience operates. The structure of this part of the argument is clear. Item 1 puts the central question about the meaning of "independence" and "objectivity," and 2 - 3 make clear, in their appeal to judgments, that this is not the idealist problem about outer objects but a more general issue about thought and experience. 2A/2B and 3A/3B represent significant differences in the A and B arguments even though they both point in the same direction. 4 rejects a transcendent answer to the central issue in 1 and provides Kant's alternative immanent answer. 5 represents Kant's residual empiricism and 6 adds his antiempiricist conclusion in which a priori categories are shown to have an intelligible, constitutive use in a posteriori experience. I comment on the differences between A and B at 2/3, and on the concluding steps 4, 5, and 6.

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1 . 3 . 1 . DIFFERENCES BETWEEN A AND B AT 2 / 3

2A and 3A represent a weakness in the A argument which Kant notes and seeks to remedy with 2B and 3B. In A the emphasis is on concepts as rules, and this is supplemented in B with the argument at B129-30 that "combination" is not given through objects and either is, or contains, an a priori element.6 Although the two editions diverge in this way they both accept the earlier priority of judgments and the clue in judgment forms to the categories, and both place an emphasis on "combination" either in judgment or in synthesis. In 2A Kant characteristically assumes that to speak of concepts as rules, and to think of language as rule-governed, is to regard its rules as forming a hierarchy with the most general, most fundamental, a priori rules at the apex (A126). Such an argument by itself is inadequate since it gives no reason to suppose that the fundamental rules are a priori. In A Kant relies implicitly on arguments from the Metaphysical Deduction but they are not decisive in establishing that judgment forms or categories are a priori. 2B offers to fill that gap with an explicit argument that "combination" is, or contains, the fundamental a priori contribution of the understanding. It provides a more direct and more explicit connection between 2B and 3B than was evident in the move from 2A to 3A. Judgment, in linguistic terms, and synthesis, in psychological terms, express a relational tie, a combination of concepts, which, according to Kant, cannot be given through objects. Earlier Kant argued that concepts presuppose judgments and focused attention on judgment forms as necessary ways of representing our experience. At B129-30 Kant expresses a more pointed form o f the claim by insisting on the a priori status of such distinctively judgmental relations. Two natural objections to Kant's position are first a Fregean conception of judgmental relations and second an empiricist account o f language, but both can be answered. It may be said that at least since Frege we can no longer accept a traditional view of judgments in which they are composed of separate concepts linked by a copula or relational expression. The traditional subject-predicate form "5 is P" can be replaced with the neater, and less mysterious, "P*;" in which any relational tie is absorbed into the predicate. Frege's account is undoubtedly an improvement on the tradition in terms o f its formal logic, its general semantics, and its underlying philosophy. The traditional formulation encouraged a regress argument, famously outlined in Bradley's Appearance and Reality,7 in which if we say that S and P are related in the judgment "5 is P " by the relational term "is," we may be led to ask what additional relations hold separately between S and that relational term, and between that relational term and P. Bradley derived his monistic metaphysics partly from this argument but Frege's proposal

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makes clear that even the first step in that regress is unnecessary, since there is no additional "is" relation in the judgment beyond that linking 5 and P. The proposal nicely illustrates Wittgenstein's therapy in which "a cloud of metaphysics (is) condensed into a drop of grammar"8 (1953, 222). Kant accepts the traditional formulation for judgments, "5 is P " with a separate copula, and this has some importance in his accounts of the self (chapter 16) and the fourth Antinomy (chapter 28), but this does not show that 2B is mistaken. There is no sign that Kant is tempted by, or vulnerable to, a Bradleian regress argument, and acceptance of a Fregean formal semantics would not necessarily resolve his problem, which is to ask about the provenance of Fregean predicates along with judgments and combination. This is not a question which concerned Frege in his formal proposal,9 but it marks for Kant a difference between a general, formal logic and his own transcendental logic. That question may still be unclear or even bogus, but it cannot be dismissed by appealing to Frege's formal semantics. The problem arises from the most general form of judgment as expressing "what is the case," and involves the notions of objectivity and truth addressed by Kant in the argument at 4 and 5. It involves also the more general notion of intentionality implicit in that distinctive relational feature of judgment. It might be thought that an empiricist account of language would resolve Kant's problem, or show it to be unreal, by claiming that properties, concepts, and distinctive forms of judgment just are given a posteriori to our senses. This is a standard assumption in traditional empiricism reflected in a theory of language learning through abstraction from what is given to the senses. It evidentiy conflicts with Kant's position, is surely inadequate, and contains at best an unresolved problem. It reflects a radical unclarity in identifying what is given a posteriori to the senses, and reveals another potential empiricist "myth of the given." If what is given includes properties, with their judgmental ties, then the abstraction process is redundant, but if properties are not given it is unclear how they can be generated from concrete particulars. To talk of particulars being given without their properties is problematic and probably senseless without a Kantian abstract and theoretical account of a "blind" sensibility. The empiricist theory is strictiy an account of the way in which complex properties can be derived from simple properties, but to postulate primitive, simple sensory properties as given is useless since Kant's problem arises for any properties. Nor is it adequate to generate properties from extensional sets of things which have the properties, since that too presupposes the notion of a property for which the problem arises, and arguably leaves out a required reference to an intensional conception of properties. Kant's 2B takes an opposite view to the empiricists' in treating combination and judgment forms as not given a posteriori, as not strictly

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belonging to the senses, and prior to constituent concepts. It rejects that empiricist myth of the given and exemplifies the characteristic antiempiricist move of "going transcendental." It points to a fundamental feature of our language and cognition which is either overlooked or inadequately accounted for in empiricism. If Kant's question about the provenance of a relational tie, of "combination," in judgment, arises at all then he improves on that empiricist theory. 1.3.2.

CATEGORIES AND OBJECTIVITY

Nothing has yet been done in the argument to show that there is a unique set of a priori concepts which govern our experience, but this is not a serious handicap in the Deduction, whose central purpose is to explain an experiential role for a priori concepts whichever they may turn out to be "if they exist"(A95). More importandy, support is needed for the further claim that concepts, even some fundamental subset of them, do not merely record experience but actually constitute it. Conceptual rules of any sort might be said to exhibit or express objectivity, but Kant evidendy goes further than this in claiming that some concepts not only express objectivity but are ultimately responsible for it. The move from the former to the latter is another example of a Kantian transcendental step from a posteriori experience to its a priori presuppositions, but it is not valid as it stands. It may be that some set of a priori concepts displays objectivity, but that ultimate responsibility for that feature should be assigned elsewhere. Kant's argument faces two separate problems here. One is to support the claim that concepts may be responsible for and constitute, rather than merely record, experience; the other is to elucidate what it is in experience that they are responsible for, namely, "objectivity." Littie is said in the Deduction about the former, and it might be expected that the "constituting" relation in which categories make possible certain objects in experience is clarified in the Analytic of Principles. In the Deduction's account of an "object of representations" at A104-6 and of objective judgment at B §19 Kant consciously addresses the second problem. In those passages Kant offers to clarify the notion of "objectivity" as that feature of our experience for which categories have a collective responsibility. That clarification covers both a rejection of wholly independent objects as transcendent things in themselves, an "absolute conception" of reality,10 and Kant's preferred immanent resolution of the problem in terms of conceptual rules and a priori categories. In that positive, immanent solution the main difficulty is not a gap in Kant's discussion but an excessive number of ways in which objectivity is described. Kant speaks of conceptual unity variously as a means of avoiding haphazardness, arbitrariness, or merely accidental connections, of

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obtaining agreement and achieving necessity, determinacy, stability, and order in our experience. It is not obvious that these features are identical, how they are related, or which of them carries the burden of proof. Indeed it is clear that the descriptions are not only different but also positively misleading in some respects. Blankly to oppose what is "haphazard," "arbitrary," and "accidental," to what is "necessary" is a false dichotomy. A child's haphazard and arbitrary chess playing may later be replaced by competence without achieving any necessity; engineers may know enough about the construction of suspension bridges to avoid haphazard or arbitrary design, and yet might not speak of their particular design as necessary. These activities may be guided by necessities in the underlying rules of chess playing or bridge construction, and later steps will be governed by necessities conditional on what was done earlier. But the notions of necessity involved in such cases need further explanation which is not provided in a general reference to conceptual rules. What is left out in the opposition between the haphazard and the necessary is a stable regularity, but two provisos point to a clearer account of the necessity involved in conceptual unity. On one side Kant opposes the haphazard, arbitrary, and accidental to the regularity of conceptual rules and to the possibility of agreement in applying them, just as he opposed the arbitrary, accidental, outcome of a preestablished harmony to his own solution in the 1772 letter to Herz. In these claims the emphasis is on what is not haphazard or merely arbitrary and inexplicable. On the other side he insists that any necessity involved in conceptual unity attaches not to the content of objective principles or judgments but to their relation to transcendental apperception (B §19). That latter proviso is not immediately clear, but it rules out certain kinds of necessity and underlines the transcendental role of concepts and language in our experience. The necessity to which the haphazard is opposed is neither the necessity of analytic truth, nor the bare truth of empirical claims, but that of a conceptual unity with its stability, determinacy, and agreement in using concepts. The requirements are for a stability, determinacy, or agreement among different subjects and in the judgments which an individual subject makes on different occasions. Two general characteristics, uncontroversially relevant to Kant's position, are a stability in conceptualizing what is presented in experience, and a definite reference to the items so conceived. If language is to function in relation to experience it must contain stable meanings and be able to identify particulars even where there is conflict or disagreement in their descriptions.11 Understood in these terms conceptual unity covers a consistent and stable vocabulary coupled with the ability to identify presented items as the same under different descriptions and in different circumstances. Though Kant's use of Sinn and Bedeutung has nothing of the depth of

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Frege's, these requirements can be naturally understood in terms of "sense" and "reference." Kant underlines the need for the former stability of sense at B140 and the need for the latter agreement in reference at A245: To one man . . . a certain word suggests one thing, to another some other thing; the unity of consciousness in that which is empirical is not, as regards what is given, necessarily and universally valid. (B140) But the categories have this peculiar feature, that only in virtue of the general condition of sensibility can they possess a determinate meaning [Bedeutung] and reference to any object. Now when this condition is omitted from the pure category it can contain nothing but the logical function for bringing the manifold under a concept. By means of this function or form of the concept... we cannot in any way know and distinguish what object comes under it, since we have abstracted from the sensible condition through which alone objects can come under it. (A245) In the first passage the ambiguity in "suggesting the same, or a different, thing" covers what we would call sameness, or difference, of sense and sameness, or difference, of reference. In the second Kant insists on the Russellian requirement that we should be able to identify referents and distinguish them from other objects. The rules to which Kant appeals in elaborating the conceptual side of transcendental apperception are the repositories of these virtues required for the possibility of true/false evaluation and an underlying agreement in judgment. They are conditions making possible the intentionality of linguistic representations which apply to identifiable referents in experience under different, and conflicting, descriptions. Without these features objective experience, according to Kant, would be impossible. This requirement is not for a strict necessary truth in our judgments but only for the necessity of the general agreement in language and belief which is found in our experience. What is required is not even actual agreement but only the ability to reconcile disagreements in some intelligible way. Such an elaboration fills out part of Kant's conception of meaning, but it still leaves the notion of "objectivity" unclear. In the end it is "determinacy" which plays the central role. Kant had defined the term "appearance," in its strictly sensory context, as the indeterminate object of empirical intuition and in the Deduction he now insists that the contribution of the understanding is to determine, or make determinate, that object (B32, A249). Kant's appeal to the determination of an object of sense is not restricted to the characterization of outer objects but includes any determinate judgment capable of true/false evaluation whether it relates to inner or outer experience. Kant is interested in the more general

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relation of thought to experience rather than in that of inner empirical representation to outer object. What is required for objectivity of experience are the determinate senses and references in our thought provided by the links between concepts and their intuitive instantiation. To be determinate is to relate a concept to an intuition, and what Kant refers to as a mere "play of representations" without the required determinacy is not only the situation of intuitions without concepts (A112), but also that of concepts without intuitions (B194-95, B298-99). 1 2 In requiring both concepts and intuitions for determinacy Kant echoes the claims at B75-76, but he is not merely repeating them. Now the claim is more precisely that it is the character of determinacy for which that connection between sense and understanding is required. The suggestion is that such objectivity is required for any genuine experience of ours and it resolves the central problem of the Deduction, namely, how a priori concepts can nevertheless play a role in experience. They play their role precisely in making possible, and determinate, an objective experience from which they cannot be a posteriori derived. The notion of determinacy is evidentiy central to Kant's argument in the Deduction, but it might be asked what it has to do with objectivity. The immanent objectivity which Kant targets implies the notions of a true/false evaluation of judgments and of our understanding of the objective situations which make those judgments true or false. The argument rests on the idea that our conception of immanent reality is no more than that of the beliefs we take to be true (or false) of our experience. The "fruitful bathos of experience," which represents Kant's primary metaphysical interest, is no more than that set of (true or false) beliefs, and presupposes the requirements among conceptual rules which make those beliefs possible and allow room for the notion of a determinate intentionality. Two temptations in understanding Kant's argument should be resisted. First is the idea that it targets a traditional idealist skepticism about outer objects, and second that it offers a guarantee of truth or necessity for our beliefs against a more general skepticism. The former has been set aside with the claim that Kant is interested in the general relation between thought and experience and not with that between inner representation and outer objects. The latter has been set aside with the claim that Kant's primary concern is to combat a Humean skepticism about a priori concepts. The argument offers an explanation for the possibility that a priori categories have a role in a posteriori experience, but it is not designed to provide a general guarantee for that experience, or still less for the truth of our beliefs about outer objects. Even that modest account has consequences for skepticism outlined in 3.1.3.

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Part III: The Analytic of Concepts KANT'S RESIDUAL EMPIRICISM

Premise 5 expresses Kant's residual commitment to empiricism that all knowledge, even a priori knowledge, has its roots in, but is not all stricdy reducible to, sense experience. It asserts a modest residual empiricism sufficient to combat rationalist dogmatism. What is rejected in empiricism is the faulty conclusion from that claim, fostered by Kemp Smith's mistranslation of A101, that everything in experience reduces to sense experience. Just as the basic rationalist fallacy at B9 prohibits the inference from a priori truth to transcendent objects, so the basic empiricist fallacy at B l - 2 prohibits the inference from the a posteriori beginnings of our experience to its uniformly a posteriori character. The argument oudined above in 1.3.2 shows against that empiricist dogma that it is feasible to have a priori concepts which satisfy the empiricist requirement of a realization and role in experience. Kant cannot support his residual empiricism with a semantic verificationism, that is, a doctrine which counts as meaningless any claim not in principle verifiable by us. He does not believe that judgments which are beyond our power to verify, judgments about transcendent objects, are meaningless. It is evident later in the Analytic of Principles and the Dialectic, but also made clear earlier in the preface B, that it is a requirement of our conception of experience that transcendent objects are conceivable and reference to them is meaningful. Kant rejects any such appeal to transcendent objects in elucidating the notion of "objectivity," but his immanent project insists on a requirement for determinate meaning that we have expressions with a stable sense and univocal reference. This is not so much a theory of meaning as an attempt to locate language and meaning in the general map of experience for the purposes of his inventory. The same points are repeated in the section on "Phenomena and Noumena" considered in chapter 22. Kant's requirement of sensory instantiation for concepts makes an appeal to verification but it is a residual acceptance not of empiricist semantics but of empiricist epistemology. He does not accept a semantic verificationism but does believe that our concepts have a genuine use only in a posteriori experience. His transcendental project is not an exploration of the empirically applicable criteria of the relevant concepts, but it does require that concepts can be used with such criteria. Without the possibility of such a use Kant would agree with empiricists that our language would have no genuine function. The requirement that any viable use of concepts should be ultimately anchored in, or "run out into" (A101), sense experience is the limited concession Kant is prepared to make to empiricism. It is not a pointer to an empiricist reduction of our concepts to basic sense experiences, and should not encourage related doctrines such as an empiricist phenomenalism.

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The limited nature of Kant's residual empiricism, noted in chapter 11, quoted the summary of Kant's position from the second Critique (Ak. 5.50-56). In that passage Kant makes clear that his objection is to what he calls "universal" empiricism, that is to the doctrine that all concepts and beliefs owe their sense and origin entirely to what is given a posteriori to the senses. This is to put in another form the point just noted that for Kant although all knowledge begins with a posteriori experience it does not all derive from it. If Kant succeeds in establishing both that there are a priori categories and that they have a constitutive, determining, role in a posteriori experience, then universal empiricism is false. Although that falsity does not positively establish a general justification for our experience against all comers it eliminates what is for Kant the serious basis in empiricism for a skepticism that is not completely idle. If that ground for skepticism is eliminated then Kant has a good, if not decisive, reason to reject skepticism, but such an argument is modest in targeting only one version of skepticism.

1 . 3 . 4 . CONCLUDING THE ARGUMENT

The discussion points throughout to a modest rather than ambitious account of the Deduction. The suggestion is that it does not aim at an antiidealist proof of an external world, or at a blanket justification for our ordinary or scientific knowledge, and it leaves room for further detailed specification of the ways in which particular categories "constitute" objects of experience in the Analytic of Principles. It targets an empiricist skepticism about the existence of a priori concepts, and rejects a general skepticism about our experience based on a universal skepticism. Kant evidently does not think that the sciences need to be justified against traditional philosophical skepticism, and regards a nonspecific skepticism about experience as idle. Kant sides with Austin against Stroud in taking philosophical skepticism seriously only where it offers a specific doubt about which there can be some determinate decision. Kant rejects a transcendent conception of an "independent" reality, and consequently rejects as idle a skepticism which derives from our inability to access it. His alternative conception of an immanent reality in our experience is of a set of a priori categories which provide a determinacy and objectivity in that experience in conjunction with the pure intuitions of sensibility. That determinacy and objectivity is achieved through the necessary connections between categories and forms of judgment on one side and a priori forms of intuition on the other. The point is made at B 1 4 3 :

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All the manifold, therefore, so far as it is given in a single empirical intuition, is determined in respect of one of the logical functions of judgement and is thereby brought into one consciousness. Now the categories are just those functions of judgement in so far as they are employed in determination of the manifold of a given intuition. Such a combination does not provide a detailed realization of the pure categories in a posteriori experience. It points, through the later procedure of Schematism (B176-87), to an abstract framework governing our experience which can then be applied to a posteriori experience. It indicates an "affinity" within which the whole of our experience operates and which depends on our distinctive intuitions and concepts. It makes an ineliminable and necessary reference to our ways of organizing experience and leaves the crude picture of the "mind making nature" far behind. Such a modest account will seem unsatisfying to commentators who think of Kant as facing and resolving the traditional problems of what he called "school metaphysics." That response may depend either on the belief that the historical Kant could not have escaped his traditional background, or on the belief that those traditional issues remain even now the central problems of philosophy. It may be thought that contemporary problems may not have exactly the traditional form but are the current inheritors of the tradition, finally able to resolve its problems. I have argued that Kant was a revolutionary philosopher of a radical kind and that his text demonstrates both a wish to reject the tradition and his method of doing so. But it may still be claimed that the revolutionary account is "anodyne" and leaves out deeper issues about reality which Kant and contemporary successors addressed.

2. Reality and Objectivity in the Transcendental Deduction Philosophers engaged in contemporary debates about an independent reality and our access to it may find the modest account of the Deduction unsatisfying, but there are two general ways of meeting such a charge. One, partially met already, would be to say that, excessively modest or not, that ^the message of Kant's text. The discussions of "weighty" and "virtual" objects show that the Transcendental Deduction does not primarily address issues of traditional idealism, and is not an exercise in a constructive phenomenalism. To find that denial unsatisfying is only to say something about a contemporary philosopher's interests rather than Kant's. It might be said that although the Deduction itself does not point in these directions other aspects of Kant's position, such as his Refutation of

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Idealism, demonstrably do. That response was also partially met in the claim that it is an interpretative error to read into the text of the Deduction issues that figure later in the argument, but the Refutation of Idealism is not in any case a phenomenalist argument. Another way of defusing the charge of excessive modesty would be to show either that the important issues thought to be overlooked were really not important or profound but confused or senseless, or that Kant did not address them or thought them unimportant or confused. It was emphasized in chapter 11 that Kant believed some forms of philosophical skepticism to be futile and idle; the Deduction cannot be regarded as a response to those forms of skepticism. Contemporary philosophers have suggested other issues about "reality" and "objectivity" involved in the Deduction and I focus on two of these. The first concerns a discussion initiated by Bernard Williams in The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978), and continued by Barry Stroud in The Quest for Reality (2000), and can be put in terms of what Williams called the "absolute conception of reality." The second concerns a continuing debate between realism and antirealism about our conception of truth and the ways we ascribe it. Since "antirealism" has sometimes been thought a version of idealism it may seem natural to think of Kant's transcendental idealism as antirealist, but I shall deny this. I consider the issue by examining Crispin Wright's recent, relatively uncommitted contribution to that debate in Truth and Objectivity (1992).

2.1. An Absolute Conception of Reality The Quest for Reality continues Stroud's interest in philosophical skepticism, discussed in chapter 11. It identifies, in chapter 2, an "absolute conception of reality" from a passage in Williams's Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. if knowledge is what it claims to be then knowledge is of a reality which exists independently of that knowledge and indeed (except for the special case where the reality known happens itself to be some psychological item) independendy of any thought or experience. Knowledge is of what is there anyway. (64)

That characterization does not make clear whether the relevant "independent reality" is confined to the outer world or includes psychological phenomena. If it concerns only an independent outer world, then the problem is that of a traditional idealism which tries to justify our belief in an outer world of objects on the basis of subjective sense experiences. If it includes psychological events then it involves different questions about the objective truth or falsity of claims about both outer and inner phenomena.

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Stroud is conscious of these ambiguities but concludes that his attempts to attach a clear sense to this philosophical conception of reality end in failure. He consequently abandons the general problem and turns instead to a more specific issue about the reality of colors. At that stage, as he says, the general issue provides: at most an unfocussed worry about the adequacy of our conception of the world, not a coherent test of'absoluteness' or 'nonanthropocentricity'. . . . The question of the 'absoluteness' of our conception concerns the way in which we think of the world, not simply the truth or falsity of what we believe. But we still have not identified that nonepistemic question . . . [and] have found no general test for exposing the presence of such 'relativity' in a conception of the world that shows no evident signs of it. (2000, 40-41)

The issue plainly has some relevance to Kant's anthropocentric account of our experience and I focus attention on that rather than on the detail of Stroud's discussion. According to Stroud two factors outiine the requirements of an "absolute conception of reality." It may offer to correct a "naive and unreflecting conception of reality" by saying what the world is "fundamentally" like (2000, 29), and it is to be "independent of the peculiarities of any observers"13 (31). The philosophical issue does not concern specific empirical corrections of faults, mistakes, or conflicts in belief, but a more general account of what is fundamentally real. The absolute conception is of a reality pruned of the peculiarities of any observer, and identifies what is independently "there anyway." The difficulty Stroud finds is that there is no "coherent test" for the "absolute conception" of reality and that an alternative anthropocentric relativism has no echo in ordinary experience. His subsequent policy is not to abandon the problem but to pursue it at a more specific level by considering whether color properties are primary or secondary. Stroud acknowledges the relevance of Kant's views to the quest for reality. He claims that Kant's "deductions" are intended as contributions to the issue by drawing inferences from the way we think or experience to conclusions about the way the world is. He thought the 'deductions' he offered. . . . would have to take us by necessary steps from facts about how we think and experience the world to conclusions which appear to say how things are independently of all human thought and experience. (2000, 196)

He notes that in the end for Kant the world turns out not to be "fully independent" of our thoughts and experiences, but he thinks that such a qualification is not easy to "accept or even to understand."

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Accepting [Kant's theory] presumably means believing that the sun and planets and mountains on earth, and everything else that has been here so much longer than we have, are nonetheless in some way or other dependent on the possibility of our human thought and experience. (2000, 196)

Kant's "relativist" anthropocentric position is taken to have the aim of providing an antiskeptical guarantee that our general conception of reality cannot be wrong, but the guarantee falls short of what the skeptic required. (1999, 161-62). A philosophical theory was needed to make intelligible to ourselves how we could proceed a priori, by necessary steps, from our thinking of the world in certain ways to the truth of the basic general principles of the world. Only then would we understand how the way we think things are and the way things are could not possibly come apart, in general. (2000, 197) The conclusions of Kant's 'deductions' would thereby be shown to have a very special status in our conception of the world. They would have to be true if we have any beliefs or experiences of a world at all. (2000, 195)

These conclusions refer to Stroud's form of pragmatic invulnerability, which claims only that one who succeeds in uttering a belief satisfies the conditions presupposed in that utterance, but does not thereby establish its truth. It explains the paradox of uttering "P, but I don't believe it," but says nothing that would satisfy a skeptic about the truth of P. Stroud believes that this is the best way of giving sense to Kant's supposed goal through his "transcendental arguments," but that it is a strategy with a limited force which fails to refute skepticism. In chapter 11.3.2 it was pointed out that there is no suggestion of such pragmatic invulnerability in either the Transcendental Deduction or in the Critique. It is a strategy that applies more obviously to Descartes's "cogito" which refers to actual utterances of "I think," than to Kant's account which is about possibilities and not particular utterances. That misreading of Kant is evident at other points in Stroud's account. The specific failure of the "pragmatic" argument is reinforced with Stroud's general view that the skeptic's required guarantee cannot be provided in any way. Nor is there anything in our ways of trying to find out things in general that guarantees that we will succeed. That is a fact of life we just have to accept; and it applies as much to philosophy as to anything else. . . . This is something that I think Kant's own richly transcendental, non-austerely-understood, project denies at least with respect to philosophy (2003, 120)

That account of Kant's antiskeptical goal has also been queried in emphasizing Kant's projected metaphysical inventory of a priori elements in

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experience and his general attitude towards idle skepticism. The inventory is primarily descriptive rather than normative, and idle skepticism includes global doubts about ever attaining genuine knowledge. More particularly in the Deduction and in the Critique Kant accepts that our requirements for a viable experience may not be satisfied universally in other possible worlds. His synthetic a priori principles do not necessarily hold in all possible worlds and he admits other worlds which do not meet, or have to meet, our conditions. In other passages Kant actually agrees with Stroud that no philosophical argument can provide the requisite guarantee, and accepts the contingency of our experience at A110, B123, B145-46, and B764-65. This peculiarity of our understanding that it can produce a priori unity of apperception solely by means of the categories, and only by such and so many, is as litde capable of further explanation as why we have just these and no other functions of judgment, or why space and time are the only forms of our possible intuition. (B 145^6) Through concepts of understanding pure reason does, indeed, establish secure principles, not however direcdy from concepts alone but always only indirecdy through relation of these to something altogether contingent, namely, possible experience. (B764-65)

We are bound to ask if the text makes Stroud's antiskeptical strategy plain or whether it is just presumed that as a traditional philosopher Kant must be addressing these traditional skeptical problems. At other points Stroud's account of Kant's position in the debate is hard to understand. Kant is said to aim at conclusions about the character of the world "independently" of all human thought and experience, and yet to claim that our conception of the world is not "fully independent" of such thought and experience (2000, 195). In one passage (2000, 36) Kant's conception of the "independent" world is described in Kant's terms as that of "the world as it is in itself" but evidently Kant could not have intended to guarantee truths about that world. Since he thinks the world of things in themselves is totally outside our cognitive range he is a skeptic about those transcendent claims. Kant's arguments in the Antinomies and elsewhere turn on his belief that such claims are meaningful but "problematic"; we can understand them sufficiently to be deceived by them but they cannot be established by us as either true or false. Stroud does not distinguish clearly between skepticism about the transcendent world of things in themselves and skepticism about the immanent world of our ordinary experience. His conceptions of an "independent" or "absolute" world might cover either, but they must be separated since Kant accepts the former skepticism but rejects the latter. These problems raise the question

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whether the incoherence Stroud ascribes to Kant is not after ail only a reflection of unclarities in his own understanding. The above quotation from The Quest for Reality, p. 196, indicates one source of Stroud's anxiety about Kant's anthropocentric relativism, namely, its implication that the sun, planets, and mountains on earth might be "in some way" dependent on the possibility of human thought and experience. Stroud rightly admits that Kant does not claim that such objects are causally or nomologically dependent on that possibility, but he fails to note the qualification that the dependence is claimed to be not material but purely formal (2000, 195). What depends on our thought and experience is not the presence of planets or mountains but the recognition of them as things of a certain kind embedded in a formal spatiotemporalcausal system. Their material existence is patently neither formal nor a priori, but their conception as "substances" in that spatiotemporal-causal system is for Kant dependent on formal a priori aspects of our thought and intuition. The distinction between natura materialiter and natura formaliter at B163-65 is designed to make this clear. Stroud recognizes that Kant's position is anthropocentric in its insistence that our experience has distinctive guiding a priori principles. He recognizes a relativistic motive for such a view and for its contrast to the "absolute" conception, but thinks it inadequate. One thing that can lead us to the idea that we need such an 'absolute' conception is the undeniable thought that any conception of the world we can form is after all our conception of the world . . . and might be thought to show that it is only our conception. . . . The aim of the absolute conception then is to form a description of the way the world is not just independent of its being believed to be that way but independendy of all the ways in which it happens to present itself to us human beings from our particular standpoint within it. (2000, 30) I suspect that what encourages the worry that a conception which bears no obvious 'peculiarity' or 'relativity' on its face might nonetheless remain a conception of the world as it appears and not as it is 'absolutely', is the thought that our conception of the world is our conception . . . and that there might be different and possibly conflicting conceptions. (2000, 40)

Two grounds are given for that inadequacy but both rest on inaccurate accounts of Kant. First is the absence of what is called a "coherent, general, test" for "relativity," and second is the belief that Kant regards other conceptions of reality as meaningless. The former is inaccurate if it ignores Kant's conception of the synthetic a priori and the proofs of a priority, or if it requires, as Stroud suggests, a separation within our experience of those items which are "relative" to our cognitive powers and others which

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are not. Kant's transcendental project is to characterize the whole of our experience as "relative" or "mind-dependent," and not to separate different aspects within it in those terms. What is distinctively mind-dependent within experience, and contrasted with what is outer or physical, constitutes an empirical, not a transcendental, criterion for mind-dependence. Neither that empirical contrast between the mental and the physical, nor one between primary and secondary qualities is involved in Kant's transcendental aim. That is made clear in his rejection of that distinction in Prolegomena §13 discussed in chapter 10. The second ground rightiy identifies Kant's transcendental contrast between our experience and that of creatures in other possible worlds, but wrongly takes Kant to hold that those other experiences are meaningless. Some of them may be meaningless, but Kant insists that concepts of, and claims about, transcendent things in themselves are not necessarily meaningless. They are inevitably, for us, cognitively empty, but they may make sense. The issue goes back to the point that Kant's distinctions generally rest on the apparatus of "core" and "deviant" cases (chapter 15.1.1). The "fruitful bathos" of our experience is the central core of Kant's interest, but he recognizes a range of more or less intelligible deviations from that core. Just as references to transcendent objects are cognitively "empty" but not necessarily meaningless, so he is not committed to regarding other forms of experience than ours as stricdy unintelligible. Enough has been said in this discussion and in chapter 11 to draw two conclusions from Stroud's discussion. His account of Kant is at best doubtful and in some respects demonstrably wrong, and there is a strong suspicion, which Stroud partly accepts, that a general "quest for reality" is so far spurious because ill-defined. Stroud himself abandons the quest for an adequate criterion for the "absolute conception" and its relativist counterpart, but in its absence there can be no assurance that the issues raised by those conceptions make any clear sense at all. Such a suspicion is reinforced by the prevarications noted in chapter 11.3.2 in Stroud's attitude to those issues. That attitude is to take seriously the failure of the only available arguments for doubting the reality of colors, to refuse to say that they are real but to insist on the profundity and importance of the issue and the need to pursue it. Both the general question of an adequate criterion for "reality" and the more specific issue about the reality of colors are admitted by Stroud to result in a wholly inconclusive outcome. It is consequently difficult to be sure whether we should accept that Stroud's issues are profound, serious, and important to pursue, or the more plausible alternative that they have not yet been given enough sense either to understand them or to think them worth pursuing. The outcome of his discussion seems to be that we do not yet know what the quest for reality is, and this was the conclusion

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that Austin reached in his account of our use of such words as "reality" and "real." 14 If Stroud's problems about reality are those which Kant should have addressed in the Transcendental Deduction, then there is littie reason to complain of the omission. Two related objections may still be made in claiming that a vital ingredient in Kant's account has been left out. One is that Kant's claim, that our recognition may depend on our concepts, holds trivially for any concept with which we characterize our reality. The other is that Kant's position must include some reference to our "imposing" some structure on experience or "legislating" for it. However modest or anodyne his claims may be, they require that essential aspects of our experience are contributed by us and are not "there" independently of our cognitive powers. It will be said that this is a committed metaphysical view about the nature of reality, and the account so far has failed to accommodate it. But both objections can be, and indeed have been, answered. The immediate answer to the first objection is that Kant regards a posteriori claims about reality as dependent on contingent facts in a way in which a priori claims are not. It is trivial to say that our recognition of this object as a red book depends on our concepts of "redness" and "books," but something is added when we talk of "a priori" concepts. It is not trivial to claim that "cause" is an a priori, not a posteriori, concept and such claims are given a sense in Kant's arguments for that a priori status which Stroud does not consider. Stroud's interest is in the formal outcome of Kant's view in a pragmatic "invulnerability" which might follow from those arguments but is not their basis, and this point was made in chapter 11. The arguments for a priority disclose the formal "peculiarities" of our human thought and experience in terms of which we grasp the world's structure and its dependence on us. One contemporary way of putting the point is to contrast the a posteriori cases which merely "track" a given reality and the a priori cases which in some way "constitute" it. Kant's anthropocentric "relativity" and transcendental, not empirical, "mind-dependence" cannot be understood apart from those arguments. The arguments involve two background steps. First is the claim that a priori elements in experience can be identified "from within" experience through the "abstraction" or "isolation" procedure. Those abstracted elements include intuitions in the Aesthetic as well as concepts in the Analytic but even in the former case Kant has to use concepts for the a priori intuitions. At this point it follows directly from a correct identification of some element as a priori, whether sensory or intellectual, that it cannot be given a posteriori in experience. Those elements are not already "there" to be detected or tracked in experience and must be understood in some other way. Kant suggests not that we can literally subtract the a priori elements from ordinary experience and say that reality is the a posteriori residue, but

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that our immanent reality is the integral mix of those a posteriori and a priori given elements. Nor is there any way of notionally separating the a posteriori and a priori factors except through the metaphysical "abstraction" procedure applied to that integral experience from within. A reformed metaphysics for Kant is immanent, not transcendent. The second step provides an additional account of the a priori elements on the assumption that at the transcendental level there are only two options. They are due either to an independent given experience or else they are due to us as something that we contribute. The former option is ruled out by their a priori status, so everything turns on the proofs of a priority. If the proofs establish that a priori status, then those elements are not there independently to be tracked or detected, but must be due to us. If Kant is right to classify those elements as belonging to our a priori cognitive powers of intuition and concepts the proofs demonstrate the kind of mind-dependence outlined in earlier discussions. They show that our immanent experience cannot be understood without some ineliminable reference to the cognitive powers of sensibility and understanding embodied in the a priori concepts and principles. The outcomes, the contents, of our judgments which express the resulting claims include reference to both empirically outer, spatial, and inner, temporal aspects of that immanent experience. The immanent existence of the inner or outer referents in those contents is empirically established in the determinate truth or falsity of their judgments and represents Kant's "empirical reality." None of this supposes that Kant's proofs of a priority are correct. Whether correct or not they provide the strategy used to draw the distinction Stroud finds so hard to understand; namely, between what in experience is a priori and what is a posteriori, between what is due to our cognitive powers and what is not, between tracking and constituting, and between transcendental "mind-dependence" and "mind-independence." The Transcendental Deduction carries the elucidation of our responsibility for the objective character of our experience as far as the requirements of determinacy and agreement in judgments. That is one modest outcome of "conceptual unity" as it has been represented in this chapter, but it is also modest in another way for the Deduction itself provides no proofs of a priority. These are reserved for the Analytic of Principles. There Kant offers to show for each category in the Metaphysical Deduction how it makes possible, or constitutes, the essential "objects" of experience. Stroud's objections have not concerned those specific proofs but only the intelligibility of the framework in the Deduction which prepares for them, but the modest account of the Deduction provides all that is needed to answer those objections. In this context either the issues which Kant might be thought to neglect are not worth exploring or else his final account of them is given elsewhere in the Analytic of Principles.

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2.2. Realism and Antirealism In the contemporary debate between realism and antirealism the latter is sometimes identified as a form of traditional idealism and may consequendy seem to throw light on Kant's transcendental idealism in the Transcendental Deduction. Kant's general philosophy is certainly a response to traditional forms of "realism" and "idealism," but his understanding of that opposition is complex and influenced by its historical background. Kant separates different forms of realism and idealism and tries to identify his own combination of realism and idealism against that background. He effectively distinguishes between a realism and idealism associated with the contrast between inner and outer sense in the Aesthetic and one associated with the objective truth or falsity of judgments in the Analytic. There are further complexities in the contemporary debate between realist and antirealist, since those labels are understood differendy by the adherents of each position.15 I shall not survey that variety but focus instead on a recent contribution to that debate in Wright's Truth and Objectivity (1992), which presents a clear view of the issues and indicates both agreements and disagreements with Kant's position. Wright's ostensible goal is not directly to canvass a realist or antirealist position but to identify considerations which might enable the debate to make progress towards some rational conclusion.16 The approach is flexible in its conscious search for appropriate criteria with which to separate realist and antirealist commitments, and in its suggestion that different discourses may meet the criteria in different ways. Some areas, such as those of natural science, may seem to be paradigm examples of a truth-claiming assertoric discourse, but others, such as morality, literary appreciation, or what Wright calls "comic discourse," may deviate to different degrees in the strength of their claims to truth and to realist commitments. Both kinds of flexibility are valuable. The former meets the requirement outlined in chapter 11 to evade an idle skepticism by stepping back from an inconclusive philosophical debate in order to ask a prior question about the criteria for deciding it. The latter begins to recognize something of the complexity and range of different discourses in providing an understanding of Wittgenstein's "intermediate cases"17 between a strict realist and a strict antirealist commitment. Nevertheless that interest in the details of the different commitments in a variety of discourses is subordinate to Wright's principal aim. His ultimate aim is to resolve traditional metaphysical issues about reality through his examination of the differences between realist and antirealist commitments in diverse discourses. A central strand in the debate is a divergence between a realist's idealized conception of truth and an antirealist endorsement of a less demanding but achievable standard of warranted

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assertibility. That divergence may rest on formal differences between a classical bivalent logic with the law of excluded middle and a nonclassical, perhaps intuitionist, logic which rejects that law. A central intuitionist ground for rejecting the law involves the requirement of effective decidability for the disjuncts in the formula " P or ->P." There are formal and informal occasions when we cannot effectively decide which of the exclusive alternatives is true, and may consequentiy not be thought to be warranted in asserting either disjunct or the disjunction itself. Wright's discussion begins with a distinction between these conceptions of idealized truth and warranted assertibility, and their consequences for the semantics of different discourses, but the primary target is the underlying metaphysics of realism and antirealism. Wright's apparatus in pursuing those goals includes the minimal "disquotational schema" for truth, " P is true iff P," and its commitment to a realist position. Within the scope of such a "minimal" conception of truth he proposes criteria to measure the divergence between discourses with more or less strong commitments to a realist or antirealist perspective. Antirealists typically talk of an "evidentially constrained" notion of truth linked with real possibilities of recognizing circumstances in which assertions are properly warranted. Wright's view is that the minimal truth of the disquotational schema requires to be supplemented with other criteria in order to determine those realist or antirealist tendencies. Among the criteria used to compare realist and antirealist commitments are his notions of "superassertibility," "convergence," "cognitive command," and "cosmological width." "Convergence" and "cognitive command" reflect our general ability to reach agreement in judgments coupled with a further condition that residual disagreements may be explained by cognitive deficits. Kant has almost none of the technical background within which contemporary debates about realism and antirealism occur. Issues about effective decidability in formal contexts and bivalence in multivalued or other nonclassical logics evidently have no echo in Kant's position. It may be thought that Kant's appeal to determinacy distinguishes between a classically bivalent realist conception of truth and an antirealist liberation from that constraint, but the Deduction draws no such distinction. It has been claimed that Kant rejects the classical law of excluded middle in the Antinomy, but I argue in chapter 26 that this is unnecessary and anachronistic.18 In the Deduction Kant takes the conception of truth and falsity for granted, dismisses enquiries into a general criterion for truth, and treats determinacy and objectivity as a reflection of an unreconstructed ascription of truth and falsity (B82-83). Since he draws no distinction between truth and warranted assertibility his position is difficult to locate unequivocally in that realist/antirealist debate.

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On one side Kant may be regarded as a realist in taking truth and falsity for granted, and in determining immanent reality by reference to accepted truths. On the other side his acceptance of a form of idealism and rejection of transcendental realism may be thought to make him more of an antirealist. A contemporary antirealist will represent our assessment of judgments as falling short of an ideal truth or falsity, and Kant's rejection of transcendental realism may seem to make the same restriction. Kant rejects the "Olympian standpoint" of an "absolute conception" of real things in themselves which might be linked with a realist idealized truth. But neither empirical and transcendental realism on one side nor empirical and transcendental idealism on the other are distinguished in terms of a contrast between truth and warranted assertibility. Kant's acceptance of empirical realism and transcendental idealism may consequently be regarded as a confused attempt to combine both realism and antirealism, but a better explanation is that Kant is not engaged in the contemporary debate. Nevertheless there are some respects in which Kant's and Wright's projects can be compared. Despite Kant's ignorance of the disquotational schema and of the formal differences between classical and nonclassical logic there are two points of contact between the Deduction and Wright's discussion. There is in the Deduction an essential reference to agreement in the evaluation of judgments, and this makes a gesture towards Wright's "superassertibility" and "convergence." Kant notes that requirement without pursuing it (A104-5). The realist/antirealist debate involves an underlying disagreement between the claims that our beliefs merely track or record an "independent" reality and that they in some way "constitute" that reality, between a realistic belief and idealistic disbelief in a reality whose "independence" is given in terms of an objective truth and falsity. The contemporary debate can be seen as an attempt to disambiguate the relevant notions of "independence" in such claims, and earlier discussion has made clear that this is also true of Kant's less formal and more epistemological replacement of traditional idealism with his own transcendental version.19 The comparison can be made clearer by considering one consequential similarity and one divergence between Wright's approach and Kant's. Both Kant and Wright are interested in the character of diverse discourses in our experience, but Kant pursues that interest more over the whole Critical philosophy than in the first Critique. Throughout the Critical philosophy, and notably in the second and third Critiques, Kant attempts to clarify the differences between discourses involving natural and formal sciences, morality, politics, teleology, aesthetics, and even metaphysics itself. The three Critiques and additional works of applied philosophy, such as the Metaphysics of Morals and Metaphysical Foundations of the

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Natural Sciences, target that diverse range of discourses and attempt to explain their different characters. Just as Kant's metaphysical inventory in the first Critique attempts to identify the diverse strands in our speculative, theoretical experience, so the whole range of Critiques attempts to measure the character of those other practical, political, legal, aesthetic, and metaphysical discourses against that theoretical experience. That general interest in the diversity of different discourses is not apparent in the Transcendental Deduction which provides the basic conditions for theoretical experience, and an unreconstructed notion of truth, against which other discourses are to be measured. The wider interest in distinguishing the character of other nonspeculative discourses is evident in the first Critique but primarily in the Dialectic's accounts of morality, politics, teleology, and metaphysics itself. Kant wrestles in that section and in later Critiques with the task of separating the legitimate and illegitimate uses of Ideas of reason in these diverse contexts but he is handicapped throughout by a poor apparatus. He has to make do with a basic, and inadequate, distinction between the subjective and objective, and then seeks to develop this with contrasts between the ostensive and heuristic, the constitutive and regulative, which improve on the former but are still insufficiently discriminating. In that project shared with Wright Kant also shows a disagreement. Wright is primarily interested in the underlying metaphysical issues which point towards a realist or antirealist resolution of the issues, whether generally or in relation to particular forms of discourse. Kant by contrast is interested primarily in mapping the details of those diverse discourses with less attention to subsequent metaphysical issues about reality. For him the theoretical discourse mapped in the first Critique provides the basis for the immanent reality of experience, and other discourses are to be understood as deviating more or less, legitimately or illegitimately, from that core case. Where a discourse has a legitimate function, such as that of morality in the practical sphere, it provides us with another aspect of the basic immanent reality.20 The idea of a moral world has . . . objective reality, not as referring to an object of intelligible intuition (we are quite unable to think any such object), but as referring to the sensible world, viewed as being an object of pure reason in its practical employment . . . as a corpus mysticum of the rational beings in it, so far as the free will of each is, under moral laws, in complete systematic unity with itself and the freedom of every other. (B836)

The point throws an important light on the better known claim that "we must deny knowledge in order to make room for faith" (Bxxx). Kant's primary interest, even in morality, is in the "fruitful bathos" of immanent

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experience and not in the "windy metaphysics" of a supposed absolute, transcendent reality. It is an interest of the same kind as Wittgenstein's attention to "intermediate cases," Carnap's focus on "internal" questions, and Austin's painstaking catalogue of excuses. It is an indicator of that difference of interest that Wright regards his apparatus as able to resolve traditional issues about the nature of reality, and recommends that metaphysical goal against what he calls "quietism."21 Kant's more revolutionary view is that the traditional issues in windy metaphysics cannot be salvaged and should be abandoned in favor of his new reformed direction for philosophy. That revolutionary new direction treats the detailed examination of the various discourses, the theoretical, practical, and others, as all that can be sensibly aimed at and as the primary focus for a reformed philosophy. In that attitude of investigating an immanent possible experience and turning away from transcendent metaphysics Kant advocates a form of "quietism" (cf. chapter 24.3). This raises the question whether a modest, "quietist," account of the Deduction is open to Wright's criticisms. The suggestion is that the modest account of the Deduction leaves out the important metaphysical issues of realism and antirealism. Wright's view of the relevance of his project to traditional issues about realism and to quietism is expressed in the following: We ought therefore to be receptive to the possibility that a truth predicate may have certain more-than-minimal features . . . which . . . define and substantiate realist intuitions about the discourse in which it operates without entailing a lack of evidential constraint and enforcing a distinction from superassertibility for that reason. The crucial matter for debate is, I suggest: whether any of the properties of a local truth predicate additional to the essential minimal set may somehow justifiably inspire a realist perspective on the discourse. (1992, 78) I hope this much is already plausible: that we do not in going minimalist about assertoric content and truth, set ourselves on a fast track to quietism about traditional philosophical controversy concerning realism and objectivity. (1992, 86) Many commentators who would disagree about the details would nevertheless agree that properly to have assimilated the ideas about rule following in Philosophical Investigations and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics is to see that no distinctions of the kind I have been trying to outline can be drawn, and that a quietist stance concerning the traditional debates about realism is effectively imposed. (1992, 204-5)

Wright recognizes that the works of Wittgenstein's later period can be Utterpreted as advocating a quietist attitude, but he disagrees with that interpretation. The passages testify to Wright's belief that his project is not

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merely the inheritor of traditional issues about reality but is designed to resolve them. Although, like Stroud, he does not claim to have provided a final resolution, he recommends that we should address those issues rather than retreat to "quietism." Unlike Stroud his criteria for realist or antirealist aspects of discourse provide a basis for some potentially illuminating differences between discourses, but it can be questioned whether the traditional issue is resolvable and whether quietism is open to his objections. The two issues are plainly related: If the traditional issues are unresolvable then the only rational response presumably is quietism. The traditional problems are then abandoned and replaced with a set of new ones in a radical revolution. In the concluding chapter of Truth and Objectivity Wright offers three criticisms of quietism. These are that it leaves no room for significant metaphysical debate, that it wrongly takes the realist/antirealist disagreement to require an "Olympian standpoint" and a "muddled desire to step out of one's skin," and that it leaves different discourses as purely "self-regulating" with "no common metric" for their comparison. I argue that a quietism associated with Kant, Wittgenstein, and Carnap is not vulnerable to these criticisms. I believe that Wright is correct in saying that we do not have to choose between what he calls the Scylla of a transcendent realism and the Charybdis of an idle skepticism, but that his response conflicts with the claim that he can resolve the traditional issues. The first objection to quietism is plainly inconclusive. There is no reason to suppose that a quietist can find no room for metaphysical debate, any more than there is good reason to think that Kant's radical reform of metaphysics abandons the subject altogether. Kant's evident intention was not to give up metaphysics but to reform it and to set it on a more fruitful path, and the same is true of Wittgenstein and Carnap. It would be tendentious to say against Wright that all three philosophers advocated the dismissal of "spurious" or "transcendent" metaphysics and yet it was their avowed aim to reject traditional issues they thought spurious. They represented themselves as "revolutionary" philosophers breaking away from the tradition rather than simply following it or attempting to reconstitute it. A quietist attitude may require the abandonment of traditional metaphysics, but that is compatible with the pursuit of a better, reformed version. Kant's dismissal of a transcendent "windy metaphysics" in favor of the "fruitful bathos" of immanent experience expresses such a position. It would be surprising if Wright did not see his own project in that light but his own account produces a conflict. On one side his enquiry examines the intermediate cases of different discourses, but on the other he conceives it as contributing to the traditional metaphysical issues about reality. On one side he represents it as resolving the traditional metaphysical problems of reality and objectivity which offered that exhaustive choice

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between realism and skepticism, but on the other he rejects that exhaustive choice, investigates "internal" features of the discourses, and points away from the traditional debate. One way of putting the evident difficulty is that the traditional issues assumed an exhaustive choice between the Scylla of transcendent realism and the Charybdis of skepticism. Traditional skepticism was a response to the failure to justify belief in a transcendent realism; transcendent realism was the position required to refute traditional skepticism. In rejecting that exhaustive dichotomy Wright is strictly abandoning the traditional issue and not resolving it. In a similar way Wright's project is an examination, by Carnap's standards, of the "internal" features of the investigated languages. It does not resolve the traditional "external" questions by moving away from those internal characteristics to answer a different question of the forms: "Does the language "really" reflect reality?," "Do its referential concepts really designate actual objects?," or "Are there "really" such things as numbers, abstract objects, moral obligations and the like?" Wright's discussion undoubtedly refines the internal criteria which Carnap considered, but they remain internal for all that. One sign that the claim to settle the traditional issues is overambitious is that there is no strong reason to think that the enquiry will produce general agreement about the procedures or the outcome. When Stroud plausibly said that the skeptic will always "win going away" he suggested that there will always be room for disagreement in the traditional issues. Wright concedes that his own project has not in any case finally settled the issues, but the same point can be made about the procedures he advocates for settling them. It is equally wrong to think that a quietist interest in the characteristics of diverse discourses can find "no common metric" for their comparison, and must regard each discourse as self-regulating and subject to its own internal standards. A quietist can consistently say that a detailed investigation of discourses is bound to allow some points of comparison between them but also that to infer their "reality" or "objectivity" in the traditional way is a further step and is either spurious or questionable. The suggestion is, with one proviso, that once the detailed exploration of the different discourses has been carried out there is no further serious, or clear, question about their "reality" or that of their constituents. The central issue of understanding the nature of these diverse discourses is exhausted by that detailed investigation of their features in comparison with other such discourses. The proviso is that Wright's proposed procedure depends not only on the investigation of the diverse discourses but also on the underlying conceptions of truth and falsity, or of warranted and unwarranted assertibility, which manifest our conceptions of reality and objectivity. The traditional issue about reality and objectivity is resolved, in the only way possible, by

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formulating those standards and comparing discourses against them. His objection was perhaps not merely that quietists cannot compare discourses and leave them to be only self-regulated, but the stronger point that the comparison requires a top-down, general exploration of truth in its minimal or expanded forms and the associated semantics. This is evidently a reasonable enquiry but it is not an adequate answer for two reasons. The first is that Wright himself does not pursue that enquiry; he is more interested in its metaphysical consequences than in the detailed semantics for the various discourses. Second, the inference from such a developed semantics to those metaphysical realist, or antirealist, conclusions remains obscure. It is not clear how to take that step or why we should bother to take it. Wright's own discussion shows that the examination of diverse discourses is unlikely to produce clear contrasts between "realist" and "antirealist" cases, and it will then be equally unclear where to draw the lines between more or less "realistic" discourses. The complex detail of the discourses will show the substantial differences between them and provide the substance of an understanding of their variety. Once that complex detail is available it is not obvious how to go on to settle the metaphysical question about reality, or even whether there is any benefit in doing so.22 Doubts about that metaphysical issue about reality mean that Kant's Transcendental Deduction can reasonably be "modest" in a quietist way. It repudiates both a transcendent realism and an opposed skeptical alternative, and recognizes a revolutionary new direction for an enquiry into the immanent objectivity of our language and our experience. It rejects an "absolute conception" of reality but does not regard the immanent alternative as a surrender to skepticism. It abandons the traditional issues and does not attempt to reconstitute or resolve them. It seeks instead to provide an accurate and illuminating description of the conditions in which notions such as "objective," "real," "concepts," and "determinacy" actually work in our experience. This corresponds to Wright's project of examining different discourses but without the further metaphysical issue. Kant lacks the apparatus to provide an adequate semantics for the diverse discourses, but his project points in that direction and he pursues it as far as his limited equipment allows.

[16] The Transcendental Deduction (4): Personal Unity

T h e discussion of the conceptual unity in chapter 15 omitted direct reference to the personal unity in transcendental apperception. In this chapter I consider Kant's appeal to that personal unity separately and in its relation of mutual dependence to conceptual unity. I shall take it that the lessons from that earlier discussion apply again in the new context. The mutually dependent elements in transcendental apperception are not inner and outer objects but the self and concepts. Kant's procedure is to take our experience as given in order to identify and record its a priori elements for his inventory. These are characteristic aspects of his metaphysics, of the abstraction procedure for isolating a priori elements, and of his antiempiricism. The method of "going transcendental," of identifying a transcendental "ground" for that given experience, is an attempt to identify elements required for experience which cannot be adequately explained on empiricist lines. The project typically locates formal conditions of experience rather than material, transcendent occurrences which temporally precede and causally produce that experience. Kant follows the modest pattern of a metaphysics of experience rather than an ambitious attempt to guarantee knowledge against traditional skepticism.1 These items reinforce the dangers of considering Kant's claims as if they could be exhaustively descriptions either of empirical states of affairs, or else of transcendent things in themselves beyond our experience. The transcendental project, outlined in chapter 5, is designed to avoid both of those alternatives.2 To adopt the former is to disregard the essential transcendental move in identifying what is not merely empirical in our experience and responds to "empirically applicable criteria"; it yields a picture of Kant too close to the empiricism he rejects. To adopt the latter is to commit the opposite error of supposing that because the abstracted a priori elements are not, by themselves, separately identifiable in experience they signify items which are transcendent and go beyond experience into a realm of things in themselves. This is to provide a picture of Kant too close 365

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to the rejected rationalists, and conflicts flagrantly with the basic rationalist fallacy which it is a task of the critique of reason to unmask. In the context of the self and of personal unity the relevant dangers are those, first, of merely recording a posteriori aspects of our personal experience, such as token utterances of "I think," or the surrounding embodiment of speakers and auditors in such utterances3; and, second, of locating personal identity, and an ultimate self, in the realm of things in themselves as a supposed safeguard against skepticism. Kant has been understood and criticized on both scores. He has been reproached for not including references to empirical circumstances and criteria, and also for committing himself to the existence of the self as a transcendent object. I argue that Kant's account of the self in transcendental apperception should be understood in neither of these ways. It outlines a schematic structure governing the whole of our experience in which our conception of the self is accepted as fundamental. Just as the basic ingredients of Euclidean geometry outline the fundamental structure of our spatial experience in a schematic and abstract form, so Kant's metaphysics of the self in the Deduction outlines its abstract but fundamental role in our experience. The structure is not wholly independent of experience, as things in themselves are, but it does more than record merely a posteriori aspects of that experience. Two factors limit the discussion of Kant's conception of the self and self-consciousness in the Deduction. The later Paralogisms and Third Antinomy4 elaborate that conception and are needed for a final understanding of Kant's position. Discussion of personal unity in the Deduction introduces a range of ambiguous terms, such as "conscious," "self-conscious," "unity" and "identity" of the self, as well as such technical terms as "empirical" and "transcendental apperception." A discussion in which no clear sense is given to these terms will confuse rather than clarify Kant's own position. Further difficulties arise through Kant's conscious echo of Descartes's cogito in the B Deduction (B132). Commentators, who recognize that Kant rejects a Cartesian framework for the self and self-consciousness in the later Paralogisms, may nevertheless assimilate Kant's position to that of Descartes in the Deduction. I shall suggest that the differences between Kant and Descartes are just as evident in both passages. I deal with these issues under three headings: 1. Comparison with the Cartesian cogito; 2. Consciousness, self-consciousness, unity and identity; 3. Implications for the self in B §§24-25.

1. Comparison with the Cartesian Cogito Descartes's appeal to the cogito in the Meditations has these features: It is the terminal point of an initial enquiry into what we can know which iden-

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tifies a privileged fragment of personal experience, the cogito, to act as an indubitable foundation from which all other knowledge may be deduced.5 The project is that of a traditional epistemology facing the global challenge of justifying a standard of knowledge against skepticism, and has the hallmark of a traditional idealism in its location of a claimed irrefutable foundation in knowledge of the self as an essentially conscious, thinking being. Such a starting point defines an idealist contrast between inner mental representation and outer physical world which generates a skeptical query about the step from the former to the latter. Descartes pursues the project with great ingenuity but dubious success to the point of reinstating as genuine knowledge our beliefs about the external world. If Kant's appeal to the cogito at B132 had the same characteristics it would be impossible to avoid characterizing him as a traditional epistemological idealist. But, even apart from his explicit repudiation of Cartesianism and his revolutionary rejection of the tradition, his appeal to the cogito in the Deduction has a quite different form. The complex modal form of Kant's claim, that the cogito must be able to accompany all my representations, indicates at once a difference from Descartes's appeal. It must be possible for the 'I think' to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me. (B132)

Kant does not say that the cogito does, or must, accompany all my representations,6 and consequently the claim neither merely records nor generalizes over occurrent experiences. There are occurrent, a posteriori experiences in which a subject consciously thinks or says, "I think that P," but Kant's claim about the cogito prefix does not refer to them. The claim points in the opposite direction, away from such occurrences, towards the underlying general conditions of a personal and conceptual unity marked respectively in the two parts of "I think." It expresses the necessary possibility of using such a prefix and is like the claim that it must be possible to win a game of chess. Such a claim points to an underlying condition for the game but not to any particular occurrences in which games are won. The general claim may be true, and held to be an essential feature of a zero-sum game, without indicating anything of the particular circumstances which constitute a win, and without referring to any winning occasion and its characteristic accompaniments. Kant's claim is similarly separate from particular utterances of "I think" and correspondingly modest. It says only that representations would be nothing to me if the "I think" were really impossible, that is, if it were impossible for a unified subject to think its representations.

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Kant's "I think" differs from Descartes's cogito in that formal way but it fails also to express the Cartesian privilege attached to occurrences of "I think." There is no overt suggestion in the passage that occurrences of "I think" have a special indubitability in a subject's phenomenological experience.7 Since Kant is talking not of actual occurrences but only of the requirement that they should be possible it is hard to see how any such privileged epistemic status attached to those occurrences could follow. Categories such as "cause" have the same a priori status but there is no suggestion that particular claims about causes are indubitably true. Kant's claim about the cogito cannot refer to any occasion in which our knowledge is indubitable, and cannot serve as a Cartesian foundation, a "sovereign premise,"8 from which the rest of our knowledge might be deduced. Kant recognizes that we can know the relevant principle a priori, and that there are formulations of it which are analytically true, but neither concession represents the principle as an indubitable certainty of Descartes's kind. Reference to the cogito in the B132 claim, and to a "Deduction," may encourage the assimilation of Kant's project to that of Descartes in these two respects, but the formal structure of Kant's argument shows how inaccurate such an assimilation would be. Kant's project in his metaphysical inventory discloses fundamental, a priori aspects of experience and not Cartesian, indubitable, antiskeptical foundations for it. Kant is concerned with what is metaphysically fundamental in our experience and not with what is for Descartes its epistemic, indubitable foundation. Despite these evident disparities between Kant and Descartes traditionalist objections to Kant may assume that he is embarked on a traditional search for the unassailable subjective foundation from which all knowledge can be derived. John McDowell9 complains that Kant's transcendental conception of the self provides only a dimensionless Euclidean point from which it would be impossible to reconstruct an adequate conception of either empirical persons or their broader experience. This is to imply that Kant's project is an attempt to reconstruct, and guarantee, that broader, empirical, experience on the basis of a Cartesian personal certainty. McDowell is right to employ the Euclidean analogy, but seriously wrong to think that Kant attempts to reconstruct experience in a Cartesian, or even empiricist, way on that dimensionless point. Kant's references to the personal and conceptual unity in transcendental apperception are, like Euclid's references to dimensionless points, abstract appeals to an underlying structure for experience. The former are no more adequate descriptions, as they stand, of our a posteriori experience of persons, or of the external world, than are Euclid's references to points, lines, and planes, adequate descriptions of the locations, paths, and surfaces of ordinary spatial experience. Both identify abstract conditions for experience which form part of its a priori structure, but are not merely a poste-

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riori aspects of that experience. Just as the empirical realizations of Euclidean points may be diverse, so the empirical realizations of the required abstract personal unity may also be diverse. Kant claims that if experience is to be possible subjects must be able to think their representations, and to retain their unity or identity in those cognitive operations, but nothing more is, or needs to be, said about the specific realizations of those unities.10 McDowell's primary error is to regard Kant's project as a traditional idealist, antiskeptical search for an indubitable and transmissible certainty, and to overlook the possibility of treating it as a metaphysics of experience.

2. Consciousness, Self-consciousness, Unity, Identity Kant's cogito differs radically from that of Descartes, but the latter has the merit of a certain direct simplicity. Everyone responds to the idea that in occurrendy thinking "I think . . ." I am direcdy aware of my activity and of myself, and recent philosophers have used the notion of an "immunity to error through misidentification" (IEM) 11 as a parallel to that claim. Kant's more complex appeal to the necessary possibility of "I think," and its relation to a unity of consciousness, may be more subde and more profound, but it is undoubtedly less easy to grasp. In Kant's account there are unelucidated references to consciousness, self-consciousness, and to the unity or identity of the self, which make his position open to a variety of interpretations and to criticisms of ambiguity. It is, therefore, necessary to outline and resolve ambiguities in these terms before considering if they can be related in the way that Kant envisages. I divide the discussion into a summary classification of these key terms and a consequent account of personal and conceptual unity as mutually related.

2.1. Kant's Complex Vocabulary Two dimensions of ambiguity in Kant's vocabulary are the different uses of such terms as "aware" or "conscious," and the different criteria, introspective and behavioral, which may be deployed to ascribe them. Under the former heading we may be conscious of something or conscious that something is the case, but we may also speak of a creature as conscious or unconscious without a need for any particular content of consciousness. We may associate being conscious of something with an introspective, phenomenological "feel" or alternatively with patterns of behavior or behavioral responses. We may, even within these complexities, distinguish both a bare consciousness of something, and consciousness that something is

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the case, from self-consciousness. We might think of being self-conscious as no more than being conscious of oneself, or of one's features, as just one item among a whole range which we may attend to or be aware of. Alternatively we may think of self-consciousness as a more complex, higher form of experience whose grammatical form misleads us into thinking of it as an inner observation of a specific object. 12 It would then be natural to associate that difference of level with different types, or degrees, of sophistication in behavioral responses or in the capacity for thought. Ordinary use of "self-conscious" has the same ambiguity; it is to be unduly aware of oneself, or one's position, and is associated with typical behavioral responses. It seems clear that Kant is not concerned primarily with the bare distinction between consciousness and unconsciousness, and that he assumes a context in which the relevant subjects, human cognitive agents, are conscious and sentient rather than unconscious. Within that context the contrast between "being conscious o f . . ." and "being conscious that . . ."is relevant to Kant, for we can use it to draw a distinction between two levels of sophistication. A dumb animal may be conscious of a pain but not conscious that it is in pain. We might not hesitate to claim that it is in pain and responds to this, but deny that it fulfils a necessary condition of being conscious that it is in pain, namely, that it recognizes what it feels as pain. We might add "being conscious of X as T " to the repertoire as a reminder of Kant's explicit connections between concepts, consciousness, and recognition, but I shall not distinguish that expression from "being conscious that . . ." (A103). We might further distinguish between a subject's being conscious that it is in pain and its being sufficientiy self-conscious to express the thought "I am thinking that I am in pain." The latter claim expresses a reflexive capacity not necessarily present in either "being conscious o f ' or "being conscious that. . . . " We do not have to respect these linguistic intuitions, but they offer alternative and relatively clear ways of initially understanding the relevant terms. The notions of unity or identity are also variable in these contexts. It is natural to think of the identity of a person as identity over time and even over a whole life, but we also speak of a person's identity in terms of their identification as that person at a specific time. We might connect these by thinking of that difference as no more than a difference between longer and shorter periods over which identity is ascribed, or we might note the different contexts in which the two kinds of identity arise. We may think of persons' identities as essentially an issue for them, a matter of what William James called their "sense of identity,"13 but we may also think of it as determinable independendy of their sense of identity by factors such as bodily or psychological continuity, which can in principle be monitored by

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others. Those two approaches are sometimes characterized as, or associated with, a "first-person" and a "third-person" account of persons, because the "objective" criteria are naturally used by others rather than by the subjects themselves, but that terminology may also mislead. Subjects themselves can appeal to "third-person" criteria, and the diverse criteria can be employed in cases where there is no distinction between first- or third-person pronouns.14 There are no clear prior guidelines to determine how we might differentiate "unity" and "identity" of consciousness, for these are already terms of philosophical art. The identity of persons is spoken of in nonphilosophical contexts, but commonly presupposes a conception of persons with their typical associations in ordinary life, their embodiment, their prolonged careers, and so on. In the more technical context of philosophy both unity and identity of consciousness are ambiguous in their possible reference to forms of sentient awareness or to forms of thinking, and within each of these there is a further ambiguity. We may distinguish between the unity, or identity, of the subjects of experience or thought, and the unity, or identity, of the content of what is experienced or thought. Unity or identity of consciousness might signify the manifold or content present or available to one consciousness at a time or over a connected period, or might refer to the unity of the subject of consciousness, the person. We might choose to say that "same consciousness" requires identity of person, but we could legislate that the same type-consciousness of content occurs between different people. Because "personal identity" is used ordinarily to mark that full conception of a person in our experience noted above I shall use Kant's technical notion of a "personal unity," but no determinate sense has yet been given to that notion. These points provide an initial and complex survey of extensive variations among these terms, but it is necessary to make some decisions about their use before aligning Kant's position to those uses. Not all of the variations have direct relevance to Kant's position, and I make summarily the following distinctions in the light of the discussion: (1) To be consciousj is to register and respond not merely mechanically to a sensory stimulus.15 It is naturally expressed as "being conscious of. . . . " (2) To be conscious2 marks a response in which some item is recognized as of some type. It is naturally expressed as "being conscious of X 2ls T," or "being conscious that . . . ." (3) To be self-consciousl is to function in ways which presuppose a unified consciousness.16 It can be called "personal unity1."

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Part III: The Analytic of Concepts (4) To be self-conscious2 is to think reflexively, which is naturally, though not necessarily, associated with such expressions as "I am thinking that. . . . " It can be called "personal unity2."

I have expressed the variants in terms of occurrences because it is simpler to discuss their relations in such terms, but Kant is primarily interested in the associated capacities or dispositions. The move from (1) to (4) is intended as one from relatively unsophisticated to relatively sophisticated forms of awareness. Typically a subject which satisfies a later criterion will also satisfy earlier criteria, though this may not always be the case. A subject who satisfies (4) will necessarily also satisfy (3), and to satisfy (3) is also naturally, though not necessarily, to satisfy (2). If Kant's essential connection between understanding and sense is accepted, then, on condition of a subject's having a standard experience not deviating too far from our own, to satisfy (2) is to satisfy (1). What has been called in recent discussions, following Kant, a "unity of consciousness" might cover either (3) or (4) but more commonly refers to (4). 1 7 More specific criteria that might be used to distinguish the cases have not been considered, and it is characteristic of the domain that there will be marginal and disputed cases at each boundary. They do not exhaust, or distinguish, all the variants previously noted, and they seem the ones most relevant to Kant's claims, but they leave unclarities which Kant's discussion throughout the B Deduction does little to resolve. That has been a constant ground for criticism, but I shall argue that a proper grasp of the formal schematic account of transcendental apperception makes many of those criticisms irrelevant.

2.2. Kant's Interest in the Repertoire Despite the contrast with Descartes the cogito in B, and the subsequent accounts of a personal unity after B132, display a residual Cartesian view of first person accounts.18 The complex modalities of Kant's cogito are made from an outside, transcendental viewpoint on experience but it is a view of subjects' capacities that they record. For that reason, although the account can accommodate appeals to behavioral criteria, no such appeal is made in Kant's text in the Deduction. Although the distinction between (1) and (2) is a central part of Kant's contrast between sensibility and understanding, his claims about transcendental apperception as a distinctive contribution from understanding focus more particularly on (2)-(4). If we associate "being conscious of. . ." with a sensory response in (1), and contrast it with the more articulate "being conscious that . . ." in (2), then interest in the role of understanding in the Deduction focuses on the lat-

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ter and not the former. It is for this reason that Kant distinguishes explicidy between an inner-sense satisfying (1) and apperception satisfying (2) at B152-54. Even empirical apperception, that is, the ability to attend to some discriminable item, involves (2) in some way, but the connection is even more evident when Kant talks transcendentally of apperception.19 Transcendental apperception, and its cogito expression, indicate the real possibility of articulate thought implied in the expression "being conscious that. . .," but problems remain about the distinction between (3) and (4), and relations between (2) and (3) or (4). If we ask whether (2), "being conscious that . . .," implies some form of self-consciousness of the (3) or (4) type, the answer is not immediately clear and underlines the grey areas between the variants. A subject may be conscious that the sun is shining without making any overt appeal to itself in its thought. The subject is essentially involved, but it is not clear how to account for the implicit reference to the subject in such thinking. The subject does the thinking and is required for it, but may not have an explicit capacity to distinguish itself in that thinking. A subject S with an articulate, reflexive language who can express not only that the sun is shining but also that S is thinking that the sun is shining plainly has a more sophisticated capacity to distinguish itself explicidy in thinking. That capacity brings with it an ability to distinguish between the self and what is not the self, but it would be wrong to think of that capacity as necessarily involving the distinction between what is subjective or mental and what is objective or physical.20 The empirical self has both physical and mental characteristics, and distinctions between the self and what is not the self may be drawn by contrasting oneself and others, or oneself and one's properties. To identify the self/not-self distinction with the mental/physical distinction is to make too much of a concession to Cartesianism. It is also tempting but wrong to suppose that Kant's appeal to the cogito requires the use of the reflexive language in (4). That language explicitly satisfies the requirements for Kant's cogito but we have no reason to suppose that it is the only way of satisfying them. We have indeed some reason to deny this on Kant's behalf, since his conception of concepts and their unity is not necessarily tied to the expressions of a natural language. His account is an account of our thought, however it may be expressed or realized.21 The overtly linguistic case realizes Kant's appeal to a personal unity2 but we should make room for other possibilities of realizing self-consciousness, and that lesson is important because of the noted complex modal expression of his claims. Those claims do not directly make assertions about actual cases in which the dispositional abilities may be realized, and I later indicate some of the dangers of failing to respect that proviso. So long, therefore, as a subject has a capacity to distinguish and identify itself among items in reality, however that capacity may be

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realized, the subject shares something of the repertoire of that more sophisticated situation. We do not have to specify other viable ways of identifying that repertoire without overt language, but recent work on animal intelligence shows decisively that there are such ways.22 Primate behavior in a group whose members exhibit deception, implying some sense of benefits and of improprieties to be concealed, exhibits a sophisticated awareness of the self as distinguished from other members of the group. That appeal to self-consciousness has to be understood, for Kant's purposes, not merely as a logical but as a real possibility. It would not be relevant to claim of some species that it has a capacity for self-consciousness merely because several million years of evolution might enable it to develop that more sophisticated repertoire. In such a case we would more naturally say that the species might develop the capacity, and not that it already had it. These considerations explain why there is uncertainty about the answer to the original question, whether "consciousness that . . ." entails "selfconsciousness." Both terms, but especially "self-conscious," cover a range of cases, and the entailment may hold in some constructions of "self-conscious" but not in others. Self-consciousness may be understood to express a requirement for thought in (2) and (3) which insists on the unity of the subject throughout the thinking. Any thought requires that the thinker should be a unity in relation to that thought, otherwise the situation would arise, outlined in the Second Paralogism and later canvassed by William James, in which distinct consciousnesses each think part of a judgment in the appropriate order, but where the lack of a unified subject excludes the occurrence of that judgment (A 351-53) 2 3 A subject may, however, meet that requirement and may be conscious^ of meeting it without achieving the status of self-consciousness2. It may be consciousj of such a unity without being conscious2 of itself as a subject, that is, it may have unified thoughts without the capacity to think of itself reflexively as the subject of those thoughts. Even occurrences of "consciousness t h a t . . . " require a subject's identity or unity, since if there were no unified subject to think that content it could not be ascribed at all. What reflexive thought in (4) adds to the required identity, or unity, of the subject is the subject's recognition of that identity or unity. Without the reflexive thought in (4) it would be impossible, not for the subject to be a unity, but for the subject to ascribe the thought to itself and recognize itself as a unity. Although it is natural to illustrate Kant's appeals to personal unity and apperception in these specific ways his transcendental claims about personal unity are dispositional and unspecific about the form in which it is realized in our experience. The required personal unity may be illustrated by reference to particular thoughts, or sequences of thoughts, or even extended

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sequences throughout a life, but the requirement is only that for each variation there is an appropriate underlying unity. For the thought "the sun is shining" all that is necessary is an underlying unity which grasps the sequence of ideas in that judgment. For an extended conversation the requirement is for sufficient grasp of the sequence of assertions and responses which make up the conversation, and so on. Kant would no doubt be willing to say that without the ability to grasp such small-scale sequences there would be no question of a person's large-scale identity throughout a life, but the underlying requirement of a transcendental unity points in the opposite, nonempiricist direction towards a general condition necessary even for those small-scale features. That necessary condition is no more than an ability to grasp some such conception of personal identity realizable in these and coundess other empirical ways. Kant offers no specific procedure through resemblance, causal connection, or bodily continuity with which to construct a durable personal identity from fragments of experience. But this is because, contrary to McDowell's suggestion, his project is not a Humean project of that constructive kind. "Going transcendental" in this and other contexts is not a reconstructive analysis of some a posteriori aspect of experience but an indication of a nonempirical ground or presupposition of that aspect.

2.3. Self and Categories as Mutually Dependent These points have implications for the claimed mutual dependence between personal and conceptual unity in the idea of transcendental apperception. That mutual dependence can be expressed initially in the following claims: (5) It would be impossible to have a conceptual unity without a personal unity. (6) It would be impossible to have a personal unity without a conceptual unity. With some provisos, what (5) expresses is already established, even for nonreflexive thought, in the unspecific claim that any thinking requires an underlying unity, a unified thinker. Since Kant's conceptual unity is inseparable from thinking of judgments, the required personal unity must be able to extend over a judgment. The same point holds if we think only of some creature remembering past events and adjusting its present behavior accordingly, even though Kant makes litde specific reference to the role of memory in apperception. Another proviso, already noted, is that the unified

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thinker is no further characterized, and has only a remote and indeterminate link with traditional philosophical or ordinary problems of personal identity. (5) could not seriously be taken to identify some underlying self, discovery of which guarantees personal identity against skepticism.24 "Transcendental apperception" and "transcendental self" do not refer to privileged objects which a skeptic such as Hume sought but was unable to find. They do not represent Kant's post-Humean discovery of such elusive transcendent objects but only Kant's higher-order, transcendental survey of our experience and its most general, fundamental features. (5) and (6) represent contour lines in a map of experience joining two fundamental concepts in that experience. The direction of dependence in (5), of conceptual on personal unity, is relatively uncontroversial, but the dependence in the opposite direction in (6) is more difficult to motivate and is open to two related objections. First it is not obvious that personal unity1 requires or presupposes a conceptual unity, and the most natural argument in its favor seems to require an even more specific form of personal unity, namely, reflexive thinking, or personal unity2. As a consequence (5) seems to concern "personal unity1," while (6) concerns "personal unity2," as if this might constitute a fallacy of equivocation. If this first query is an objection, then it has been conceded already since personal unity1 has been allowed to arise without the possibility of reflexive thought, and even without any linguistic ability. An animal may lack a language but still preserve its unity or identity over a sequence of sensory feelings or responses.25 The resulting equivocation could be represented by reformulating (5) and (6) as: (5)' It would be impossible to have a conceptual unity without a personal unity1. (6)' It would be impossible to have a personal unity2 without a conceptual unity. It may be thought that even if (5)' and (6)' are undeniably true, the price to pay for that truth is an ambiguity which makes the resulting position fallacious. Or it may be objected that "personal unity" is no longer a
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The ambiguity in "personal unity" might still be thought objectionable on the ground that conceptual unity is mapped against two items rather than just one, but this too can be answered. What the ambiguity shows is that the original notion of a personal unity is complex, but there is no good reason why the map should not mark the relations of a conceptual unity to both aspects in that complex notion. Viewed in that way, (5)' and (6)' are no more objectionable than a map which marks the triple peaks of the same mountain along one contour line. So long as the map correcdy represents those relations, and this has been conceded, its complexity is not objectionable but inevitable. Nevertheless the discussion reveals an ambiguity in the suggested relationships. Kant's appeal to the prefix "I think . . ." at B132 suggests strongly the requirement of reflexive thought for experience and for conceptual unity, and later references to the explicit ascription of representations to oneself indicate the same conclusion. But at B136-37 the requirement is the less demanding personal unity v In so far as the [manifold representations of intuition] must allow of being combined in one consciousness they are subject to the [original synthetic unity of apperception]. For without such combination nothing can be thought or known, since the given representations would not have in common the act of the apperception 'I think' and so could not be apprehended together in one self- consciousness.

Although in this passage Kant still refers to "I think . . . " and to "self-con sciousness," the requirement is naturally read as that of combining representations in one consciousness which involves only personal unityj. The prefix "I think . . . " remains ambiguous between expressing the requirement for a reflexive self-consciousness or only for a unified consciousness in combining representations in judgment. It might express only the requirement of a unified thinker for thought, or the stronger requirement of the thinker's recognition of itself in that thought. 26 There is no obvious way of establishing that a reflexive self-consciousness is required either for personal u n i t y o r for a conceptual unity. The consequence is that Kant's mutual dependence has to be expressed either as in (5)' and (6)', or else (5) and (6) have to be restricted to personal unity r These alternatives represent an unclarity in Kant's position, but since the two kinds of personal unity are not totally disconnected the argument still has some force. Even if personal unityl might exist without the reflexive personal unity2 the latter is a natural development from the former and is typically realized in ordinary human consciousness. Kant's argument strictiy requires only that the reflexive unity of self-consciousness2 is really possible, and personal unityl may be taken as a condition which ensures that possibility.

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Kant could be taken as uncertainly pointing in these two directions because of those connections, and then either (5) and (6), supplemented with a recognition of reflexive thought, or (5') and (6'), which already include that recognition, represent his view His account is undoubtedly ambiguous in this way, and open to criticism, but the resulting positions are nevertheless defensible. Both personal unityl and personal unity2 remain relatively indeterminate. They refer to no specific occurrence, or even type, of consciousness and mark no more than a real capacity for thought. They signify no privileged moment of self-knowledge, and do not claim to identify a transcendent self hidden behind the appearances, whose discovery might guarantee personal identity against skepticism. The point is firmly made at B157-59 and is discussed below.

3. The Epistemology and Metaphysics o f the Self: §§24-25 In §§24-25 Kant embarks on a psychological excursion into inner sense, apperception, and imagination which partly reflects in B the A subjective deduction. It is regarded by Henry Allison as step two in the two steps of the Transcendental Deduction, and it emphasizes what Kant now calls the "productive imagination" of a "figurative synthesis." Those sections also address the epistemology and metaphysics of our conception of persons in the light of the Deduction itself. Kant raises the questions whether it is coherent to think of persons as passive in sensing and spontaneous or active in judging, and whether the Deduction exempts selves from the general restriction of knowledge to appearances. That Kant resolutely rejects such an exemption, even in the case of self-knowledge, confirms the claims in the previous paragraph. It is not surprising that these references to transcendental apperception, and to an underlying identity or unity for persons, seem sometimes to go beyond mere appearances and to identify in this one case a genuine knowledge of things in themselves,27 and traditionalist commentators naturally take such a view. The issue is whether §§24-25 support traditionalism in this respect or not, and I argue for the latter view. The difficulties in Kant's account, which he now attempts to identify and resolve, arise from the connection between understanding and inner sense. He initially addresses a so-called paradox about ascribing both passive and active cognitive powers to a unified self, but I identify three related problems underlying the discussion.

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3.1. The "Paradox" of Ascribing Active and Passive Powers to a Unified Self According to the Deduction, the understanding is active in causally affecting a passively receptive inner sense just as empirical objects causally affect outer sense. Kant continues to insist on a parity between the senses in this respect, and on the claims in both cases that the senses are subject to such causal relations, and that we are immediately aware of the objects of those senses. If then, as regards the latter [appearances of outer sense] we admit that we know objects only in so far as we are externally affected, we must also recognise, as regards inner sense, that by means of it we intuit ourselves only as we are inwardly affected by ourselves; in other words that so far as inner intuition is concerned we know our own subject only as appearance, not as it is in itself.

(B156)

The immediate paradox which Kant explicitly notes is a seeming conflict between active and passive aspects of our cognition. The resolution of the paradox is essentially to say that there is no real problem, any more than there is a real problem in understanding how humans can in general be both active, in setting goals for example, and passive in accepting obstacles to their achievement. In the cognitive case there is no general reason why we should not be passive in respect of our sensory operations and active in our characterization of what is presented to the senses, or passive in terms of our reception of a presented field of view or sound, and active in attending to this part of it rather than that. This is an adequate response to the immediate paradox, but it is a superficial aspect of deeper problems under 3.2 and 3.3. A second issue, which Kant does not address, arises from the implications of his account for current theories of mind. We might wish to ask for more information about the nature of those psychological powers, which might be provided by a materialist identity theory or a nonspecific functionalist account of the mind. The former would resolve problems about the items which affect, and are affected, in consciousness by identifying these with features of the brain, perhaps brain events, and accepting that causality is a purely physical relation.28 The latter is compatible with such a view but does not entail it. It may insist on a functional, causal, relationship between these powers and leave it open how these are to be realized either as brain events or in some other way Kant does not, contrary to the views of Kitcher and Brook outlined in chapter 14.2, explicitly canvass in this passage either an identity or a functionalist theory of these kinds, though his position is compatible with both. By current standards there is

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a gap in his account of which he was unaware, and which it would be anachronistic to close. The gap is not a serious objection because Kant's account could be developed in the direction of either of these contemporary theories. It is a fault of omission and could be remedied by a consistent elaboration of the account. Such elaboration belongs to the further development of Kant's views in which we may be interested but which would not be a report of his views.

3.2. Restriction of Knowledge of the Self to Appearances A more serious problem for Kant appears from another direction. Even in the discussion of the initial paradox Kant insists on the claim that our knowledge of ourselves is always of ourselves as appearances, and not as things in themselves. Persons, selves, or consciousnesses are represented as no more exempt from this general restriction than any other items in experience, but some parts of the passage have been taken to conflict with this consistent disclaimer. At B157, after repeating the view that for knowledge of ourselves we need both thought and intuition, Kant continues: [Since self-knowledge, apart from the action of thinking in bringing the manifold of intuition to the unity of apperception, requires a determinate mode of intuition],29 it therefore follows that although my existence is not indeed appearance (still less mere illusion), the determination of my existence can take place only in conformity with the form of inner sense. . . . Accordingly I have no knowledge of myself as I am but merely as I appear to myself.

It is natural to take the conclusion to repeat Kant's consistent claim that even with regard to the self we have knowledge of ourselves only as appearance and not as a thing in itself. But the first sentence, in which Kant denies that my existence is appearance on the basis of the unity of apperception in thinking, may seem at odds with this, and similar conflicts appear in other passages: in the transcendental synthesis of the manifold of representations in general, and therefore in the original synthetic unity of apperception, I am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am. (B157) The "I think" expresses the act of determining my existence. Existence is thereby already given but the mode in which I am to determine this existence. . . . is not thereby given. . . . I cannot determine my existence as that of a selfactive being; all I can do is to represent to myself the spontaneity of my thought. . . . But it is owing to this spontaneity that I entitle myself an intelligence. (B158n)

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I exist as an intelligence which is conscious solely of its power of combination. (B158-59)

Although these passages continue to insist that knowledge, that is the "determination of my existence," always requires intuition and is of an appearance, they have been taken to suggest that Kant has an underlying commitment to the existence of persons, selves, or intelligences as things in themselves. This is one of the most important points which traditionalists cite as irrefutable evidence of Kant's final commitment to the existence of actual things in themselves. Even if it were shown that Kant had no commitment to external objects as things in themselves, the commitment to persons, or selves, in themselves would still, according to that view, be irresistible. Closer attention to the passages shows that such a conclusion cannot be inferred. Kant explicitiy denies that the transcendental unity of apperception provides either knowledge, or even consciousness, of myself as a thing in itself. His triple classification of appearance, thing in itself, and bare existence distances bare existence not only from appearances but also from things in themselves. It trades on a logical contrast, cited in Kant's argument against the ontological argument for God's existence in the Ideal, between bare existence and the determination of properties30 (B 620-31). Both that underlying logic and the triple classification count decisively against a traditionalist view of Kant's commitment to any knowledge or presumption of the actual existence of selves in themselves. A later argument in the Third Antinomy over the conflict between free will and universal causality is also sometimes taken to make such a commitment, but that will also be shown to be unwarranted in chapter 27. If Kant held in this context, as he plainly does in others, that we can meaningfully conceive of things, including persons, as they are in themselves this would not be a serious handicap, but the cited passages may suggest that Kant accepts more than this. He may be thought to accept that a person's existence is not merely appearance, that we are spontaneous intelligences, and are conscious of ourselves in this form even without appeal to inner sense and its manifold of intuitions. In view of Kant's overwhelming denial, even in this passage, that we have any knowledge of persons as they are in themselves and independendy of inner sense we have to consider other ways of construing the passage. A faulty interpretative practice which disregards that requirement would leave Kant's position in yet another transparent inconsistency, but he points to other ways of understanding that position. In other passages it is made clear that these references to pure understanding and its synthesis, to spontaneous intelligence, and its general effect upon inner sense, are to be understood as abstractions from actual experience.

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Now the understanding in men is not itself a faculty of intuitions and cannot. . . take them up into itself so as to combine them as the manifold of its own intuition. Its synthesis, therefore, if the synthesis be viewed by itself alone, is nothing but the unity of the act, of which, as an act, it is conscious to itself, even without [the aid of] sensibility, but through which it is yet able to determine sensibility. (B153) [My emphasis] Motion as an act of the subject . . . and therefore the synthesis of the manifold in space,firstproduces the concept of succession—if we abstract from this manifold and attend solely to the act through which we determine inner sense according to its form. (B154) [My emphasis] The consciousness of the self is very far from being knowledge of the self. (B158)

The importance of this abstraction procedure was already noted in the discussion of the "blindness" issue and of the threefold synthesis. These references to a distinctive understanding abstract from the manifold of sense when the former's synthesis is viewed by itself alone (B153-54). The point is quite unmysterious and can be explained in the following way: In any relevant occurrent experience I may know that I am synthesizing, combining, representations because that action of the understanding on inner sense is represented in inner sense. Inner sense is the sensory mode of access to such events just as outer sense is the mode of sensory access to outer objects. If I want to isolate the distinctive contribution of understanding, and so to abstract from the ways we know about it through inner sense, then I may represent understanding as a pure faculty distinct from sensory intuition. We may theoretically and abstractly identify a pure understanding in this way, but we cannot know it, or its activities, separately from its representation in inner sense. The model from geometry illustrates this style of representation in which the abstract features of the system, Euclidean points and lines, formally represent spatial relations but cannot be exemplified directly in experience. This inability to exemplify such pure abstract items in experience may tempt us to commit the rationalist basic fallacy and to infer their existence as things in themselves beyond experience. We may take Euclidean points and lines to be objects which do not exist as such in a posteriori experience, and infer that they must exist in some purer a priori realm of things in themselves. The parallel temptation and error in talking of an abstract understanding would be to take it to refer to a thing in itself beyond any inner sensory experience. Kant's recognition of this error is an essential part of his diagnosis of philosophical illusion in the Dialectic. Kant's claim that philosophers are tempted to commit such errors in talking abstractly of objects in general, or of a pure understanding, counts decisively against the ascription of the

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same transparent error to himself. The issue becomes important later in the discussion of the Paralogisms in chapter 25, for the fallacy in those arguments turns on the distinction between our empirical conception of persons and a pure, abstracted, conception corresponding to transcendental apperception. The fallacy is that of inferring from such an abstraction to the existence of a nonsensory, intelligible object or self as it is in itself. That this solution is in line with Kant's position can be seen from a parallel passage in the Paralogisms at B428-29. There Kant faces the same problem and responds by saying: Thought taken by itself is merely the logical function . . . and does not exhibit the subject of consciousness as appearance; and this for the sufficient reason that thought takes no account whatsoever of the mode of intuition, whether it be sensible or intellectual. I thereby represent myself to myself neither as I am nor as I appear to myself. I think myself only as I do any object in general from whose mode of intuition I abstract.

The apparent paradox is resolved by noting the possibility of abstracting from inner sense a conception of our understanding which has the same formal character of an "object in general." That notion itself is regarded by Kant as a staging post on the way to the fallacy of inferring to transcendent things in themselves independent of the senses (B88-89, B187-88, B334-35, B344-46). It forms the basis for his use in the A Deduction of the expression "transcendental object = X " considered in chapter 15.1.2. It may be conceded that Kant has a theoretical apparatus to explain these apparent conflicts and yet still objected that this does not explain why Kant says that through this abstract contribution I am conscious that I am, and that my existence is not appearance, even though any determination of it in genuine knowledge is of an appearance. Some background points need to be repeated: Kant does not assert, but denies, that we know ourselves as things in themselves. He admits that in apperception I am conscious that I am, but that cannot be to say that I am conscious1 that I am since that necessarily involves inner sense. It can be taken only to reflect the point made in the footnote to B157, namely that our existence conceived purely as spontaneous intelligences in abstraction from inner sense is not an appearance. For Kant that existence is not an appearance for several related reasons: First, because appearances belong uniquely to the senses and this contribution is distinctively and purely that of an understanding abstracted from inner sense; second, because my existence as an object of experience with determinable properties must refer to a possible sensory intuition; and third, because what is abstracted reflects an active capacity for thought distinguished from a passive capacity for sense perception. In actual experience that capacity for spontaneous, active thought

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is exemplified only in its appearances in inner sense, but an abstract, theoretical reference to it can be made notionally separate from inner sense. One of the underlying motives for the traditionalist view lies in an oversimple understanding of Kant's term "appearance." If that term is understood in its transcendental use to signify a substitute for "real existence," then it will be natural to regard the real existence of selves as a commitment to their status as things in themselves. It will lead to the following complaint: But what sort of truth is it that we appear to ourselves in a temporal guise? Do we really so appear to ourselves, or only appear to ourselves so to appear to ourselves? . . . I really do appear to myself temporally, but I do not really temporally appear to myself. (Strawson 1966a, 39)

These are unreal anxieties if it is accepted that in the Aesthetic and elsewhere Kant forestalls an illegitimate confusion of the transcendental and empirical notions of appearance. For Kant the transcendental use of "appearance" expresses our legitimate, immanent conception of reality, and is not opposed to it. Kant himself delivers a clear rebuke to such accounts in the Anthropologic: I know myself only as appearance, not as a thing in itself...I know myself in inner experience only as I appear to myself: This claim is often mischievously turned round to mean: It only appears to me that I have inner ideas and sensations, or that I exist. (Ak. 7.142)

It is difficult to imagine a clearer statement of the differences between the transcendental use of "appearance" and its empirical, colloquial counterpart.

3.3. Causal Relations between Understanding and Inner Sense There is another aspect of the problem in Kant's account of the relation between understanding and sense. It is the paradox of claiming both that understanding and its operations are presented to us through inner sense, and that understanding in its operations causally affects inner sense. The problem might be expressed by asking how what causes a presentation to inner sense could coherently also be given in that presentation. The difficulty is insuperable if it is assumed that to affect inner sense is to be totally disconnected from that sense. If the understanding, in its purely theoretical abstract guise, is taken to be some object disconnected from the senses,

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glimpsed confusedly through some intermediary sense representation but with a causal power to affect inner sense, then it is inevitably represented as a thing in itself beyond our experience. That picture leads not only to the familiar incoherence of supposing that we might have knowledge of transcendent causes known only through their effects in experience, but also to the alleged distinctively Kantian incoherence of both positing and denying any knowledge of such transcendent causes. It is a picture of a traditional idealism, with its "veil of perception" and resulting problem of external objects, which Kant demonstrably rejects. For him sense presentations are not intermediaries, whether confused or not, between us and the external world. Kant endorses a parity between inner and outer sense in which empirically external objects are given to us immediately in outer sense just as empirical states of consciousness are given immediately in inner sense. The apparent difficulty for objects of inner sense matches the earlier problem of supposing that external objects both affect outer sense and yet are also presented in outer sense. That the cause in this new case belongs not to an outer world but to our inner consciousness makes no significant difference to the statement of the problem, to its intractability under certain idealist assumptions, or to its Kantian resolution.31 In both cases such an account may seem to be committed to things in themselves, whether they are "outer" or "inner," but in both cases Kant denies this. The parallel problem arising from our experience of external objects was considered earlier and shown to be compatible with Kant's denial of a commitment to knowledge of external objects as things in themselves. The resolution depended on taking Kant's project as accepting ordinary causal relations between objects of experience and our senses in order to disentangle the elements involved for the purpose of his transcendental topic or inventory. In that topic the forms of sense presentation and the objects presented were held to be transcendentally "mind-dependent" but not themselves empirically mental inner experiences. Our knowledge of external objects, and of their causal influence on the senses, was understood within a framework in which all access to, and knowledge of, empirically outer objects depends on outer sense. The outcome was neither committed to things in themselves, nor totally independent of the senses, nor incoherent. Plainly the same resolution is available in the case of inner objects such as the understanding and its operations, and it is offered summarily by Kant himself at B156. That resolution says effectively that there is no more difficulty in speaking of inner causes of inner sense effects than there is in talking of outer causes of outer sense effects, and assumes that there is no real problem about those outer causal relations. Just as external objects can be empirically causes of our sensory responses, so inner objects can be empirically causes of responses in inner sense. Just as we may be misled by

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the causal relation into conceiving outer causes as things in themselves, so we may be misled into thinking of inner causes as things in themselves. In both cases it is possible, even inevitable, that we should be able to conceive things in themselves in these ways, but in both cases such conceptions provide no knowledge, and distort the knowledge we legitimately have of external and internal objects and their causal operations. That legitimate knowledge occurs within the scope of empirical experience in which the senses cannot be dispensed with. An abstract, quasi-Euclidean representation of a pure understanding may encourage us to think that we can have knowledge of things in themselves which causally affect us in this one case without sensory access, but for Kant this is an illusion. It is an illusion which in both outer and inner contexts may explain the belief that we know things in themselves but cannot justify it. To a traditionalist this Kantian response can be no more than a perverse refusal to confront the traditional idealist problem, for the response assumes that the outer case is unproblematic when in the tradition that is precisely what raises the problem and makes it intractable. The traditional problem arises so long as the causes are located outside experience and our experience is confined within our subjective sense impressions. These are the philosophical assumptions of a traditional dualist idealism which Kant may seem perversely to disregard, but which in fact he has explicitly rejected in his own transcendental idealism and empirical realism. The alternative to a traditionalist interpretation is to suppose that in denying that there is any real problem about empirical outer causes of outer sense Kant is not accepting that traditional idealist position and does not regard it as genuine. That alternative is decisively supported in Kant's rejection of traditional idealist dualism in the Aesthetic and elsewhere. It is supported in this passage both by the explicit denial that our knowledge of outer or inner objects is a knowledge of things in themselves, and by the footnote at B156-57 which expresses Kant's bewilderment that the idea of causally affecting ourselves in selective attention should seem problematic. In that illustration Kant makes it plain that he is talking empirically of such causes, in specific acts of attention, and implies that the supposed difficulties arise from a philosophical distortion of that unproblematic relation. Bewilderment on the part of traditionalist commentators that Kant should so casually dismiss their idealist framework is matched by an equal bewilderment on Kant's part that that framework and its supposed problems should be accepted as either obligatory or legitimate.

P A R T

I V

The Analytic of Principles

Introduction to the Analytic of Principles

T h e Analytic of Concepts has identified candidate categories and offered a general account of their role. The Transcendental Deduction provides an explanation, vital for Kant's antiempiricism, of the way in which a priori categories, if there are any (A95), can in principle nevertheless have a role in experience. That role cannot be simply to reflect, or track, what is independendy "there," for then the categories, however important in experience, would be a posteriori. Their realization in experience must be complex since they concern not merely representations but a pure synthesis of representations which makes possible or constitutes related areas of that experience. The cash value of Kant's transcendental idealism for concepts of the understanding is given in those two claims, that categories are a priori and that they do not merely reflect but constitute objects of experience. There is no appeal to the literal account of the "mind making nature," and the necessary references to our contribution are made in establishing the a priori status and constitutive role of those concepts. The major part of the Analytic of Principles is consequendy devoted to proofs of the principles associated with each of the category headings identified in the Metaphysical Deduction. Kant offers to prove two principles, Axiom and Anticipation, for the principles of quantity and quality respectively, which relate to the possibility of mathematics (chapter 18). He provides in the Analogies separate proofs for each of the relational categories, substance/accident, cause/effect, and agent/patient (chapters 19-20), and he writes a short essay on the epistemology of the modal categories, possibility, necessity, and actuality (chapter 21). These proofs finally offer to establish the a priori status and constitutive role of the various categories. If they succeed then Kant's claims about those features of the specific categories will be established, and his transcendental idealism will be vindicated as far as the understanding is concerned. The proofs have raised two familiar controversial issues about skepticism and the inner/outer and subjective/objective distinctions. They are 389

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sometimes represented as a justification against skepticism of the relevant aspects of our experience, and sometimes as an anti-idealist justification for our belief in outer, spatial objects and their fundamental quantitative, measurable, and causal properties. In earlier discussions I have expressed strong reservations about the assumption that Kant's primary goal in the Critique is to provide arguments against skepticism, and I claim that the same reservations hold for the proofs of the principles. Qualifications need also to be made to the belief that Kant's subjective/objective distinction in the proofs is the same as the distinction between inner/mental and outer/spatial. The proofs concern our objective experience, but objectivity in the Transcendental Deduction was not restricted merely to outer experience, and concerns judgments and their truth-values. There is a clear indication, especially in the Third Analogy, that after the first edition Kant came to think that more emphasis should be placed on the application of categories specifically to outer experience. That change is almost certainly due to the formulation in B of the new Refutation of Idealism, but I argue that this does not significantly affect the character of the proofs themselves. The proofs are abstract and address neither the specific empirical application of categories nor their application only to spatial phenomena. They show how the categories can be realized in experience through their connection with a priori intuitions of space and time, and the objects they constitute are primarily features of an objective time such as duration, succession, and simultaneity. They provide a formal a priori network of intuitions and concepts which make possible their application in a posteriori experience, but they do not fully specify that a posteriori application. The major exercise in providing the proofs of the specific principles is surrounded by one important preliminary and some even more important consequences of the proofs. The preliminary section, the Schematism (chapter 17), offers a general explanation of the way in which categories can be related to, and realized in, sense experience. Its outline of the procedure would not be out of place in the second step of the Transcendental Deduction, since it relates each category to a temporal discrimination in experience and so to sensory intuition. More pointedly than the references to intuition in the Deduction, it claims that that realization can be effected only by an operational procedure in which each category is used to provide those temporal discriminations. The categories are realized not by identifying their specific realizations in a posteriori experience but through the relevant procedures of synthesis which point towards those realizations. References to such a synthesis may seem to make the argument vulnerable to psychologism but I argue that this is not a serious objection. Three additional sections summarize Kant's position after the proofs of the principles. The new Refutation of Idealism, located in the discussion of

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the modal principles at B274-77, finally offers Kant's definitive argument against traditional, empirical idealism. It offers a clearer and formally more satisfactory argument against that idealism than the denials of that doctrine in the Aesthetic and the Fourth Paralogism A. In the Aesthetic Kant sought to locate what was true in traditional idealism, and had effectively shown how that residual truth was compatible with empirical realism. In the Fourth Paralogism he rejects a version of traditional idealism which assumes, and questions the validity of, a causal inference to the existence and properties of outer objects from our inner, empirical representations. In the B Refutation of Idealism Kant offers a new formal argument for the conclusion that inner experience depends on outer. That claim reverses the traditional idealist assumption that outer experience depends on inner, and corresponds closely to Wittgenstein's claim in Philosophical Investigations §580 that an inner process stands in need of outward criteria. Kant's conclusion is effectively the same as Wittgenstein's, but the argument for it is quite different (chapter 21). As with Kant's other reversed priorities the conclusion supplements the traditional idealist priority and does not replace it. For Kant inner sense and outer experience are mutually dependent. The two concluding sections, On Phenomena and Noumena and the Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection, summarize Kant's views at this stage about the limits imposed on our experience. They look forward to the consequences of those limits for the discussion in the Dialectic of transcendent illusions in philosophy (chapter 22). The distinction between phenomena and noumena contrasts what we can know and what is beyond our cognitive range, and looks back to the contrast between appearances and things in themselves in the B preface. Kant addresses the issues of explaining that division and an associated diagnosis of the philosophical temptation to overstep those limits. The diagnosis was already oudined at B88-89 and B186-87 and is extensively used throughout the Dialectic to resolve philosophical problems about the self in the Paralogisms, the world in the Antinomies, and God in the Ideal. It is applied initially in the Amphiboly to Leibniz's monadology which Kant characterizes as a "peculiar way of thinking, which rests on nothing but a misunderstanding" (B326). The Amphiboly restates Kant's diagnosis of the temptations of dialectical, transcendent illusions, and outlines his own project of a cartographic "transcendental topic" firmly within the limits of our immanent experience. The primary aim in the Critique is to map correctly the fundamental elements in experience, and to use the corrected map to diagnose traditional philosophical error. The fundamental elements are validated finally in the Analytic of Principles, and the resulting corrected map is used throughout the Dialectic to identify and diagnose those philosophical errors.

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Chapter 23 concludes the discussion of the Analytic of Principles by examining the ascription to Kant of a strong commitment to the actual existence of transcendent noumena or things in themselves. Recent traditionalist commentators have characteristically endorsed that ascription, but few of them have based it on so thorough an examination of Kant's text as Erich Adickes carried out in the 1920s. His two books, Kant und das Ding an sich and Kant's Lehre von der doppelten Affektion unseres Ichs, offer a meticulous survey of the texts from which he drew the conclusion that Kant accepted a strong commitment to the actual existence of things in themselves as a fundamental, but unargued, premise of the Critical philosophy. I examine his textual evidence and argue that Adickes's conclusions are unwarranted. It might be said that the Analytic of Principles brings to an end Kant's positive survey of the structure of our experience, and its fundamental, governing, a priori elements. The next section of the Transcendental Logic, the Dialectic, may then be represented as a wholly negative critique and rejection of innumerable false trails and dead ends in traditional philosophy. That account is not totally wrong, but it distorts the role of the Dialectic. It would be more accurate to say that along with the negative critique of traditional error Kant offers a corrected account of the central concepts, Ideas (Ideen) belonging to reason, which generate that error. Just as the Aesthetic and Analytic of Concepts and Principles map the correct locations of a priori intuitions, concepts, and principles in our experience, so the Dialectic offers a corrected map of the legitimate roles played in our experience by those Ideas of reason. Ideas of reason are not, like a priori concepts of the understanding, constitutive of our experience, but they have a legitimate role, as well as illegitimate pretensions, in that experience.

[17] The Analytic of Principles

I n this chapter I outline the central sections of the Analytic of Principles and begin to pose some of the questions which it raises. Although the Transcendental Deduction may be regarded as the centre of gravity of the Critique, the Analytic of Principles is vital in completing the account of categories. If the Deduction provides a general, formal explanation of how categories can be both a priori and yet apply only to experience, it leaves unanswered the question how the specific concepts listed in the Metaphysical Deduction achieve this. Kant provides some prior guidance in answering that further question1 in claiming that categories play a special role in the "constitution" of experience as "conditions of the possibility of experience, or of objects of experience." Any such condition of possible experience must refer not only to categories but also to the a priori intuitions of space and time in which their use is realized. The categories and a priori intuitions form in combination an abstract network, an "affinity," of principles without which our experience would be impossible, and the resulting principles are to demonstrate how specific concepts, the candidate categories, satisfy those requirements. Two general aspects of the proofs deserve to be noted initially. First is the point made at B188 that a proof of such fundamental principles must take a special form: Principles a priori are so named not merely because they contain in themselves the grounds of other judgments, but also because they are not themselves grounded in higher and more universal modes of knowledge. This characteristic does not remove them beyond the sphere of proof. But this proof cannot, indeed, be carried out in any objective fashion, even though it must make the nature of such a proof problematic.

The passage acknowledges the problematic nature of such a proof, and underlines two aspects of Kant's metaphysics: first, the appeal to priority or 393

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dependence relations between principles and other judgments which they ground, and second, an appeal to those principles as themselves a priori, that is, as not themselves dependent on other grounds. That hierarchical structure of priority relations with these principles at their apex leads to the need for a special kind of proof (A126; B198). If the principles are conditions for the possibility of experience, no appeal to experience can provide a proof of them. If they provide the regulatory framework within which alone experience and its standards of proof arise, such as its contrast between veridical and illusory perception, then they cannot themselves be subject to those standards. If, as Kant insists, the principles are themselves synthetic rather than analytic truths, then they cannot be proved by logic from the principle of contradiction. The point could be put in terms of a distinction between proofs within an established framework and proofs of the principles of such a framework themselves. It then echoes Carnap's distinction between internal and external questions, and similar claims made by Mill in Utilitarianism and Wittgenstein in On Certainty? Nominally we might say that the principles can be proved neither empirically nor logically but only transcendentally, but this provides only a label for an answer and not an answer itself. Second is a proviso about Kant's references to "objects of experience" and their conditions. It is natural, but wrong, to assume that this refers exclusively to physical, material, or external objects. It is true that such objects form an important part of our common, public experience and Kant explicitly recognizes this in the Refutation of Idealism, but his "objects of experience" in the Principles range far more widely.3 What the categories and their principles make possible are magnitudes, extensive or intensive (Axioms, Anticipations), substances, events and interactions (Analogies), and a range of modalities (Postulates). More generally the targeted "objects" are objective temporal discriminations such as duration, succession, and simultaneity, in their ordinary and scientific uses. In this way Kant reinforces the earlier recommendation, in the discussion of the Deduction, to think of his account of "objects" as an account of "objectivity" and the determinate ascription of truth and falsity in judgments. The principles make possible an objective experience with those temporal features, and the proofs typically attempt to show how categories fulfill their role by making possible those determinate discriminations in judgment. I divide the central sections of the Analytic of Principles in the following way, and add a concluding note on parities and disparities in Kant's treatment of space and time. 1. Preliminaries: 1.1. The Doctrine of Judgment 1.2. The Schematism

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2. The Principles and Their Proofs: 2.1. Mathematical Principles: Axioms and Anticipations 2.2. Dynamical Principles: Analogies and Postulates 3. Implications: 3.1. The Refutation of Idealism 3.2. Phenomena and Noumena 3.3. The Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection 3.4. The General Note on the System of the Principles 4. Parities and Disparities between Inner and Outer Sense and their Objects

1. Preliminaries 1.1. The Doctrine of Judgment In this preliminary section Kant outlines more of his vocabulary and begins to distinguish reason, understanding, and judgment. The Analytic of Principles deals with principles of the understanding, but since their application requires a combination of a priori concepts and intuitions it involves judgment as well. The cash value of this guideline is that the candidate categories have to be combined in judgments with realizing intuitions in the formulation of the principles themselves. The distinction between understanding and reason is further elaborated in the Dialectic, which deals officially with concepts and principles of reason. Commentators are suspicious of these Kantian divisions in faculty psychology for two reasons. The distinctions, especially in the Dialectic, have been regarded as confused, and the reference to psychology has been thought improper and objectionable. The former point is considered in the discussion of the Dialectic in chapter 24 and the latter needs only a reminder of points made earlier. There is no general objection to psychological references in epistemology or metaphysics, and the complaint that Kant's psychology is transcendent was rejected in chapters 5 and 7.3. Kant's psychology is transcendental, not transcendent. Schematically, while reason is distinct from understanding, judgment is treated as a subfaculty of the latter. For Kant understanding has to do with the rules which govern experience, whereas reason is at least tempted, erroneously, to construe its rules as going beyond that experience. "Reason on the other hand in its endeavours to determine something a priori in regard to objects, and so to extend knowledge beyond the limits of possible experience, is altogether dialectical (B170-71). The claim

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restates what has been referred to as the basic rationalist fallacy, that is, to infer claims about a transcendent realm from a priori truths, and begins Kant's diagnostic therapy for philosophy which is completed in the Dialectic. It reinforces Kant's threefold contrast between the empirical, the transcendental, and the transcendent (chapter 5), and is connected later to a distinction between understanding's "constitutive'5 and reason's merely "regulative" rules. The understanding deals with rules which are constitutive with respect to our experience while reason is tempted wrongly to regard its rules as constitutive with respect to transcendent objects beyond experience, that is, to things in themselves. Since for Kant we can have no knowledge of such things, those rules can be only regulative for experience and not constitutive of it. If they have any legitimate role in experience it is to offer only heuristic, regulative guides for its enquiries. Kant uses the same terms, "constitutive" and "regulative," to distinguish respectively the mathematical and dynamical principles of the understanding in the Analytic of Principles (A180), but that contrast is drawn within the principles of understanding and not between principles of understanding and those of reason. Kant now claims that understanding and its rules need to be supplemented with judgment on the ground that there is a further skill in applying known rules. The point is plausible; someone may have learned the legal, strategic, and tactical rules which manuals formulate for chess playing and yet be a poor player over the board. Such a defect might be explained in various ways, but it would be wrong to assume that it results only from an inability to grasp the rules. Perhaps the player does not think quickly enough in the time limits, or perhaps the rules are not precise and leave a flexibility in their application which goes beyond sheer calculation, or perhaps a player is typically faced over the board with a variety of competing rules and has to make a judgment of their relative importance which is not itself incorporated in the rules. We speak in such a context of a man with judgment as one who not only knows the rules but can apply them flexibly and successfully. Kant's point is not to distinguish between applying the constitutive rules of the understanding in actual experience well or badly, but to describe how their application in experience can be understood at all. His diagnostic therapy is designed to distinguish their legitimate application in experience from their illegitimate use beyond experience to things in themselves, but that philosophical goal has no counterpart in the chess example. The chess example provides only an empirical illustration of Kant's transcendental distinction (A91, B126, B582, B686). Kant's distinction between understanding and judgment has been linked with Wittgenstein's idea that justification by appeal to rules has to come to an end. We cannot, without committing a regress, look for fur-

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ther rules which guide us in applying an initial set, and this has sometimes been understood as an antiskeptical strategy.4 Kant makes use of that potential regress to find an essential function for judgment, but the descriptive task for the Principles oudined above is not primarily targeted at philosophical skepticism. The project is primarily to describe and understand the use of constitutive rules, and any additional consequences for skepticism will follow from that. The project is guided by two considerations: first, that the rules themselves are independent of experience, and second, that their application requires an appeal to sensibility in which the rules can be realized or instantiated (B174-75). Sensible intuitions were introduced in the Aesthetic as particular realizations of general concepts, but their a priori forms, space and time, are themselves independent of a posteriori circumstances. The a priori forms of sense in conjunction with categories consequently do not provide specific a posteriori applications such as particular causal rules. They provide a formal template or an abstract network, an "affinity," of concepts and intuitions which enables the categories to meet the requirement of being anchored in experience. The combination of a priori forms of understanding and sense provides a formal a priori structure which only a material a posteriori content fleshes out and realizes in full. I suggested earlier that such a formal template is modeled by Kant on his understanding of mathematics, particularly Euclid, in which the formal a priori structure of our spatial experience abstracts from its a posteriori realization. Just as Euclid provides a formal, abstract representation of the structure of our spatial experience, so the system of principles aims to provide a formal representation of the structure of the whole of our experience. Insofar as the structure is itself a priori, combining a priori categories and a priori intuitions, it provides an abstract representation of experience, but still falls short of a full a posteriori illustration. The combination of a priori elements from sense and understanding, space, time, and the categories, provides us with a basic vocabulary with which to formulate the framework which governs experience, and within which our human empirical experience operates.5 Kant's map or inventory might be constructed through the different methods he distinguishes as "starting from below with the empirical" (All9), through the synthetic method of the Critique or the analytic method of the Prolegomena (Ak. 4.274-75). The synthetic method, described as "difficult and needing a determined reader," is supposed to identify a priori principles through pure reason, while the analytic takes established sciences as containing unquestionably a priori judgments in order to identify their a priori presuppositions. But all these methods can be understood as no more than differences of presentation and not of substance, aim, or outcome. In both cases the outcome is the same, namely to

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show the role of the a priori elements as necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. The differences correspond merely to different directions of interest in which that common goal may be achieved or presented.6

1.2. The Schematism Kant's account of schematism, like the Metaphysical Deduction, is commonly thought to be open to serious objection. One of the principal reasons for this arises from the mechanical imagery used to introduce the topic, but I shall suggest that if one can see past the imagery there are important ideas in the section. The problem that motivates Kant to introduce schematism arises from the need to connect the categories to their realized use in experience through the instantiating role of sensibility. The imagery that Kant deploys suggests that we have two pieces of machinery of different shapes which need to be joined if the system is to function properly in providing knowledge. At that figurative level the suggestion is that we can join them so long as we can find some item which fits one shape at one end and the other shape at the other. Schematism is thus represented as a kind of universal joint whose characteristics enable it to fit onto a priori concepts at one end and a posteriori sense experience at the other. The problem and its Kantian solution are expressed at B177-78: there must be some third thing which is homogeneous on the one hand with the category and on the other with appearance, and which thus makes the application of the former to the latter possible. . . . Now a transcendental determination of time is so far homogeneous with the category . . . in that it is universal and rests upon an a priori rule. But, on the other hand, it is so far homogeneous with appearance, in that time is contained in every empirical representation of the manifold.

These claims provide some reason to expect that pure categories must be connected to time determinations if categories are to be related to experience. Kant's account of experience in the Aesthetic represents time as the one feature which satisfies these requirements: It is a priori, sensory, and universal. If the account seems suspicious it is less because of the mechanical imagery than because the solution seems altogether too neat. It raises the questions: is this a decisive reason to link categories and the time of inner sense?; are there any other features of experience which meet Kant's requirements?; and is the outcome, in the suggested connections between categories and time, acceptable? The ultimate justification for Kant's procedure will depend on the success of its outcome in the later proofs of the

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principles, but this may seem further to reduce the significance o f the Schematism passage itself.

Whatever the answer to these questions, the immediate outcome is a summary list of the claimed links between specific categories and time determinations. These guide Kant in his later construction of the proofs and at this stage they are merely listed. So, for example, he writes: The schema of substance is permanence of the real in time . . . the schema of cause . . . is the real upon which, when posited, something else always follows. . . . The schema of necessity is existence of an object at all times. . . . The schemata are thus nothing but a priori determinations of time in accordance with rules. (B183-84)

For the most part these brief accounts match their counterparts in the principles. Questions arise about some of the specific connections7 and about the proposed association of each category with a "time determination," but I leave these for the detailed discussion of the principles. Kant's discussion of these links between a priori concepts and intuitions rests on wider issues about meaning which are only sketched in this section and elaborated further in the section on Phenomena and Noumena (chapter 22). Immediately they concern the debate about abstract general ideas conducted by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume,8 and more remotely they concern general problems of universals and meaning. Kant is more interested in the cognitive than the semantic issues, but I note two related points in this connection. A "schema" is to be sharply distinguished from an "image." Although Kant does not refer explicitly to the Locke-Berkeley debate, it is hard not to see this as a comment on a central issue in that debate, for both Locke and Berkeley are committed to the thesis that a general term acquires its meaning in relation to an empirical idea or image. In Locke's famous case of the different types of triangle the image is ostensibly the incoherent representation of all the incompatible properties belonging to the different types falling under the relevant class (1924, 4.7.9.); In Berkeley's case it is a singular image of some representative standing proxy for other members of the class (1901, introduction). These solutions have been rejected for their psychologism, and more generally for their circularity and lack of explanatory force, but Kant's emphasis on schemata as rules and not images avoids those problems. The point is nicely illustrated in his account of "number," whose schema provides an operational procedure for identifying numbers but no images of them (B179-80). The upshot is to replace a simple naming model with a more complex and more realistic operational or functional account of meaning.

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But if on the other hand I think only a number in general . . . this thought is rather the representation of a method whereby a multiplicity may be represented in an image . . . than the image itself. This representation of a universal procedure of imagination in providing an image for a concept I entitie the schema. . . . It is schemata not images . . . which underlie our pure sensible concepts. . . . On the other hand the schema of a pure concept of understanding can never be brought into any image whatsoever. . . . (B179-81)

The point holds across all the proofs of the principles and not just for number. In the Metaphysical Deduction Kant had distinguished categories from a posteriori concepts by insisting that the former generate not just representations but a synthesis of representations (chapter 12). The consequence of that claim in the Schematism is the reference to an operational or functional account of the meaning of categories. Part of what that means points to procedures through which categories are able to have a use in experience where such use is an essential contributor to the full determinate meaning of the concepts. Although later it will be necessary to distinguish "meaning" and "use," in Kant's account the two are connected. The necessary use for such a priori concepts in experience through their combinational, judgmental connection with a priori intuitions is an essential part of their fully determinate meaning. How exactiy this works out in the ways in which each category makes possible specific "objects" of experience is apparent only in the proofs themselves. It is an indicator that Kant's goal is not a constructive analysis of parts of experience, but rather an account of the way in which categories, like a general grid, can be used to focus and make determinate certain general and necessary aspects of that experience. At the end of the section Kant addresses the issue of meaning in general, for which he here mainly uses the term Bedeutung. His initial claim is to restrict the use of categories to possible experience "if they are to have reference to objects and significance [Bedeutung]." The general principle is that "in the end the categories have no other possible employment than the empirical," even though their a priori nature tempts us to transcend that employment and so to succumb to dialectical illusion. The diagnosis of that temptation is that in such a case we believe that to lift the restriction on the use of such concepts is to give them a wider significance, to free them from an unnecessary constraint (B171). Kant's remarks echo the passage noted earlier in the introduction in which Plato is described as succumbing to this temptation by freeing flight from the obstruction of air resistance (B8-9, A96; chapter 3). The result in that case is to destroy the possibility of flight, and Kant holds the same view of the attempt to free concepts from the constraints of possible experience (B186-87).

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If we omit a restricting condition we would seem to extend the scope of the concept that was previously restricted. Arguing from this . . . we conclude that the categories in their pure significance, apart from all conditions of sensibility, ought to apply to things in general as they are, and not, like schemata . . . only

as they appear. . . .

Now there certainly does remain in the pure concepts. . . , even after elimination of every sensible condition, a meaning [Bedeutung]; but it is purely logical, signifying only the bare unity of the representations. . . . This objective meaning they acquire from sensibility . . . which realises the understanding in the very process of restricting it.

Kant's account can be expressed in two principles: (1) Categories have a significant use only in relation to the experience which they make possible. (2) The pure categories are strictly independent of that experience and have a formal, purely logical meaning. If "use" in (1) is identified with "meaning," then (1) and (2) conflict, but it is clear that Kant could not accept that use and meaning are the same. He deals with this difficulty by drawing a distinction between the pure form of categorial concepts in the Metaphysical Deduction and their actual use in experience. The former are commonly called "unschematized" and the latter "schematized" concepts. Although Kant is perfectly entitled to distinguish "meaning" and "use" we should ask for a theory of "meaning" to explain the terminology and reconcile (1) and (2). The distinction between pure and applied categories offers no more than a sketch of such a theory, which would have to satisfy two requirements. First, a priori concepts could have their full, determinate meaning only in relation to possible experience, and second, they must nevertheless retain some independent, "purely logical" meaning. Informally we might say that the cognitive use of categories is restricted to possible experience but their semantic scope is not. That wider semantic scope is, for Kant, the major source of dialectical illusion. It tempts us, as it tempted Plato, to aspire to knowledge of things in themselves beyond our experience. For Kant the "full" meaning of categories is represented as a synthesis of a "pure" logical form and an a priori intuition together with an illustration or exhibition of their a posteriori realization in experience. Their formal significance is limited to an "abstract" representation of that logical form, but this is liable to mislead us into thinking that it refers to some actual object. Since no empirically experienced object can have that abstract character, the temptation will be to locate its referent in a supersensible world of things in themselves. This model serves to explain Kant's

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more detailed diagnosis of these temptations and resulting errors in which we move from a conception of them as "things in general" to their conception as "things in themselves." The same tempting but erroneous steps were outlined in the different senses attached to the "transcendental object = X " in the Deduction. That diagnosis of philosophical error in the misuse of reason and the associated basic rationalist fallacy have been associated with a "verificationist" account of meaning, but what has been said so far rules out any such interpretation. Kant's restriction on the use of categories in (1) is compatible with a semantic verificationism, if "use" is equated with "meaning," but (2) is not. The point is worth repeating both because it guides Kant in the whole of his therapeutic essay in the Dialectic, and because commentators have so often interpreted Kant as endorsing a verificationist semantics.9 Kant goes part of the way with a Humean, or positivist, empiricism, and finds it useful in demolishing the pretensions of dogmatism, but he is not content to stop at that point because it leads to an unacceptable "universal empiricism" and to skepticism (chapter 11). This is the great utility of the sceptical mode of dealing with the questions which pure reason puts to itself. By its means we can deliver ourselves at but a small cost from a great body of sterile dogmatism. . . . (B513-34) Scepticism is thus a resting-place for human reason . . . but it is no dwellingplace for permanent settlement. (B789)

For Kant the meaning of categories has to contain something more than is manifest in their experiential use,10 just as our experience has to contain something more than a posteriori sense experience.

2. The Principles and their Proofs It was noted at the start of this chapter that, according to Kant, the principles require a special form of proof which appeals neither to empirical nor to logical methods. Kant's resolution of the difficulty is to appeal to a mediating link between subject and predicate in the principles which he regards as neither an a posteriori correlation nor an analytic connection. The mediating link is that conception of a "possible experience" which captures Kant's idea of a transcendental condition, and involves the idea of "objectivity" in experience: The possibility of experience is then what gives objective reality to all our a priori modes of knowledge. . . . Apart from such synthesis it would not be knowledge but a rhapsody of perceptions that would not fit into any context

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according to rules of a completely interconnected possible consciousness, and so would not conform to the transcendental and necessary unity of apperception. (B195)

Kant makes one further important point in this preliminary section. It is that his principles are not just principles of mathematics or physics, but are higher-order requirements which lie behind those scientific principles. Although Kant divides his principles into the "mathematical," which deal with spatiotemporal intuition, and the "dynamical," which deal with existence, he insists that we should not regard them as, respectively, mathematical principles or principles of dynamics. Instead they are principles which make possible the development of such scientific theories, and should therefore be described as transcendental.11 Kant remains faithful to his idea of a higher-order transcendental enquiry which explains the possibility of a priori knowledge and does not simply record or develop it (B80-81). But it should be noted that we are as littie concerned in one case with the principles of mathematics, as in the other with the principles of general physical dynamics. We treat only of the principles of pure understanding in their relation to inner sense (all differences among the representations being ignored). It is through these principles of pure understanding that the special principles of mathematics and dynamics become possible. (B201-2; B197-98)

2.1. Mathematical Principles: Axioms and Anticipations The two mathematical principles, the Axiom and Anticipation, are designed to explain the applicability of the category of quantity in experience. The former deals with "extensive" and the latter with "intensive" magnitude. In B the former is expressed as: All intuitions are extensive magnitudes, and the latter as: In all appearances the real that is an object of sensation has intensive magnitude, that is, a degree. It would be natural to associate the latter principle with the calculus rather than natural number arithmetic and Kant refers briefly to "flowing quantities" at B211-12. 1 2 The claim is that these transcendental principles serve to explain the necessary applicability of mathematics to our a posteriori experience. This transcendental principle of the mathematics of appearances greatiy enlarges our a priori knowledge. For it alone can make pure mathematics . . . applicable to objects of experience. . . . Appearances are not things in themselves. . . . What geometry asserts of pure intuition is therefore undeniably valid of empirical intuition. (B206)

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Kant's attempt to prove these principles is both brief and unclear, but the quotation may suggest two controversial approaches. In one Kant assumes an underlying idealism and faces the task of justifying our quantitative beliefs in mathematics and in a posteriori experience on the basis of truths about our subjective psychology. The suggestion is that Kant can establish a priori truths about the extensive and intensive character of our mental states but then is required to explain how we can infer beliefs in objective quantitative truths from that character. Such a view is encouraged by Kant's distinction between the mathematical and the dynamical principles in which the former are said to concern intuitions and the latter the existence of appearances. It conflicts with Kant's noted dismissal of skepticism about mathematics (chapter 11), and also with one aspect of the proofs, namely that each principle applies to both inner and outer sense. For Kant both inner and outer sense contents, both inner and outer appearances, have extensive and intensive magnitude and are equally the subject of the proofs in each principle. The arguments do not focus idealistically on features of inner sense in order to infer claims about the outer world but explain the application of quantitative categories to what is presented to the senses,13 whether inner or outer. Parity between the senses is preserved in these proofs. A variant on that suggestion is that the proofs offer to construct a priori quantitative claims in mathematics and parallel a posteriori claims in experience from basic spatiotemporal intuitions. This would be to represent the passage as a sketch of a program for analyzing or reconstructing mathematics from more basic subjective intuitions, or for reducing its complex claims into simpler components. Such a program would not need to assume an idealist framework and could accept Kant's parity in the discussion between inner and outer experience, but it conflicts with two aspects of Kant's account. Such reconstructive programs naturally belong with an empiricism which Kant rejects. A Kantian nonempiricist reconstructive program could be imagined in which synthetic a priori principles play an indispensable role, but this would not be reductive and so would lose one of the principal motives for canvassing it. In any case Kant consistently denies any such reconstructive goal in the discussion. These considerations underline the unclarity about Kant's proofs, but in the later discussion I reject both idealist and analytic reductive accounts.

2.2. Dynamical Principles: Analogies and Postulates Commentators rightly regard the three Analogies as the most central and important of all the proofs. I make two initial points about all of them and then briefly summarize the line of argument in each.

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Kant's guiding principle is that the specific categories with their associated principles make possible certain "objects" of experience. Those "objects" cover many more discriminations than merely physical objects and at their most general involve a range of objective temporal features. In the Analogies the central "objects" are those of temporal duration, temporal succession, and simultaneity, and the categories involved are the pairs "substance/accident," "cause/effect," and "agent/patient." Kant's aim is to demonstrate that the categories in this case, say "substance," "cause," and "reciprocity," make possible associated objective time discriminations embodied, respectively, in the concepts of an enduring thing, a sequential event, and a coexistent simultaneity. Kant's method in such proofs gives rise to the earlier ambiguity between analytic and synthetic methods. Should we expect a demonstration of the analytic construction of an event from, or on the basis of, the category of cause/effect? Or should we expect him only to demonstrate that it would be impossible to introduce that concept without that category? The former might provide us with conditions sufficient for the construction of events in our experience, while the latter offers only necessary conditions for that construction. Even the former would not represent the category as sufficient by itself to realize events in a posteriori experience. That is made clear by the difference noted above between an a priori framework for our experience and its full realization in a posteriori experience. Kant's primary interest is in the necessary, enabling, a priori conditions of experience rather than a sufficient guarantee or construction of that experience (Cf. B259-60): "Permanence is thus a necessary condition under which alone appearances are determinable as things or objects in a possible experience" (B232). Kant could be understood to provide a sketch of such a construction but as before it would be a nonempiricist, conservative, but not reductive representation of experience which depended on synthetic a priori principles. Two connected points arise in the general strategy of the proofs. Each of the proofs involves the premise that time is not itself perceived, which may seem both independendy false and in conflict with the Aesthetic account of time as a form of inner sense. The latter problem could be resolved by distinguishing a "subjective" time in inner sense and an "objective" time, but that division itself requires explanation, and it may still be objected that even objective time is simply perceived.14 The former premise that time is not perceived may still be questioned, but it is a view held in common with Hume,15 and it points to a guiding strategy in all the proofs. Kant's central thought is that if time cannot be perceived and yet is an essential ingredient in an objective experience, it is necessary to explain how it is introduced into experience. The solution in the proofs is to find some representative16 in experience which stands for objective time, and to claim

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in each case that this can be determined only through the categories and their principles. So, for example, the category of "substance/accident" enables us to represent duration in experience, and "cause/effect" provides such a representative for objective succession. The proofs in the Analogies all claim to locate such representatives through the same kind of operational procedure indicated in the mathematical principles. 2 . 2 . 1 . T H E FIRST ANALOGY

As in other cases, Kant offers different versions of the principle in A and B: A: All appearances contain the permanent (substance) as the object itself and the transitory as its mere determination, that is, as a way in which the object exists. B: In all change of appearances substance is permanent; its quantum in nature is neither increased nor diminished.

The upshot in both versions, however, is that the category of "substance" provides for us the representative item in experience which stands for the durational aspect of objective time. The B version expresses a "conservation" principle which is not included in A and might with provisos be associated with the conservation of matter. But the principle concerns "substance," and it is left open whether this ranges more widely than material substance. At B232 Kant makes the proviso that the "empirical criterion" of substantiality is to be considered only later (B249, B291-92), and reinforces the distinction noted above between the transcendental principles, which are scientifically neutral, and their realization in such a science as physics (Cf. B254). He reinforces also the distinctions drawn earlier between unschematized and schematized categories and their empirical realizations. As far as the strict proof goes, it does not matter how the category is actually realized in our experience or whether it might be realized differently in other possible worlds. The pure formal structure of category and a priori intuition does not fully determine its realization in a posteriori experience. That proviso is reinforced by the further informal way in which Kant elaborates the role of the category of substance. For just as the category is properly identified with the correlated pair "substance/accident," so Kant now distinguishes two kinds of "change" appropriate to each of these items. Accidents, or properties, change (wechseln) only in a context in which something remains unchanged; they go in or out of existence against the background of the persistent substance to which they belong or cease to belong. Substances do not change in that way but only alter (andern) in respect of changes in their properties. Kant's conception of the role of the category

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includes that whole conceptual framework of "change" and "alteration" along with "substance" and "accident," which provides the required representative of objective duration in our experience. 2 . 2 . 2 . T H E SECOND ANALOGY

The second Analogy has the same structure as the first but is more complex. Kant outlines a formal proof, which contains points from the First Analogy, and then spends a longer time discussing it. Commentators often claim that the ensuing discussion contains further distinct proofs,17 but it contains the same requirement to determine a representative for an objective temporal feature. In this case that feature is objective succession and a representative is required because all experience is subjectively successive. Kant illustrates his case with the famous distinction between a house, which does not itself contain any succession although our perception is successive, and a ship's movement, where both our perception and the different locations of the ship are successive. The central point of the proof is the claim that the category of cause/effect is necessary for that contrast. That a priori conceptual, but not analytic, relation between category and objective succession is parallel to the a priori, but not analytic, relation of substance and accident to objective duration. Kant expresses the principle of the Second Analogy differently in the two editions as follows: A: Everything that happens, that is, begins to be, presupposes something upon which it follows according to a rule. B: All alterations take place in conformity with the law of connection of cause and effect.

Both formulations and the following discussion make clear that the major target in the passage is Hume's empiricist account of cause, but the nature of that disagreement is controversial. Some commentators take Kant and Hume to disagree about the claim that specific causal laws are necessarily true. Others take the major disagreement to be about the necessary a priori status not of particular causal laws but of the general causal principle (GCP) expressed in the above principles.18 There is controversy also about the character of the proofs, and additional comments, in the passage, and in the later discussion these issues will be addressed. 2 . 2 . 3 . T H E THIRD ANALOGY

The principle in this Analogy is importantly different in A and B. A says that all coexisting substances stand in mutual interaction, but B refers

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specifically to interaction between substances coexisting in space. The text does not make comparable amendments and often refers unspecifically to substances in general. The point has some importance since this is the only time that a principle's formulation is changed in B to accommodate the new form of argument in the Refutation of Idealism which attaches a priority to outer experience over inner. That priority is expressed in the Refutation and the General Note, but the proofs generally disregard it. A question arises whether Kant tacitly assumed that the proofs involved specifically outer objects or whether the proofs are insensitive to the distinction, and retain Kant's usual parity between inner and outer sense. Apart from that distinctive feature the third Analogy repeats the same structure of argument as the other Analogies with the requirement to locate a representative to stand for some objective aspect of time given that time itself cannot be direcdy perceived. The identified temporal relation is objective "coexistence" or "simultaneity," which is to be explained through a category of "reciprocity." As in the other Analogies the category is properly a pair of terms, in this case agent and patient, but Kant understands these in this context only as causal rather than personal notions. Once again the premise that time, in this case simultaneity, cannot be perceived might be questioned, but given that premise the nominated representative is mutual causal interaction (MCI). Just as objective duration is governed by substance, and objective succession is governed by causal relations and the GCP, so objective coexistence and simultaneity are governed by the causal relations in MCI. The point makes clear, as recent commentators have righdy noted, that the three Analogies are all interconnected.

2.3. The Postulates The Postulates, as Kant himself acknowledges, have a different structure from the other principles. This is not only because they concern modal features, possibility, actuality, and necessity, which operate at a higher level than other properties of objects, but also because the notion of a postulate in this context is not the same as that used in mathematics. The section is more of an essay on modal properties related to Kant's own operations in the Analytic rather than a direct proof of certain principles. Indeed it becomes apparent that for these reasons the only principles which determine the existence of items in experience are the Analogies. We might say that the Postulates define, and limit, the extent to which other first-order principles such as the Analogies determine for us what is barely possible, what is actual or existent, and what is necessary. Kant distinguishes informally between different kinds of modality such as "logical" and "real" possibility. Notions such as those of telepathy or

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clairvoyance (B270) may be logically possible, but, according to Kant, they are not really possible because they conflict with accepted laws of experience. Kant's own transcendental enquiry concerns real rather than logical modalities; the necessity of the categorial principles is not logical but synthetic. The later Amphiboly makes clear that these comments on modalities and their relation to Kant's own inventorial project are more important than has been generally realized. They reflect not only the pursuit of that project but also a self-conscious account of limitations in the project and in our cognitive experience. At the heart of Kant's enquiry is a wish to establish the limitations to our experience and to metaphysics itself. Here more than anywhere else is a potential answer to the Hegelian criticism that transcendental philosophy cannot be at once witness, counsel, and judge in the tribunal of reason. For what Kant insists on is the ability of that philosophy to allocate not only other disciplines, such as the sciences, to their proper position in the inventory of experience but also the discipline of philosophy itself. What he calls in the Amphiboly a "transcendental topic," that is, the allocation of concepts to their correct position in the map of experience, includes that self-conscious examination of philosophy itself.

3. Implications In these final sections of the Analytic of Principles, Kant summarizes the position he has reached, and points towards the more negative, therapeutic role of the next major section, the Dialectic. The summary includes a head-on attack on traditional idealism in 3.1, The Refutation of Idealism, a review of the technical vocabulary for classifying objects that we can or cannot know in 3.2, Phenomena and Noumena,19 and illustrations, especially from Leibniz, of basic philosophical errors about those objects in 3.3, The Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection. The concluding sections on Phenomena and Noumena and the Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection in particular summarize the argument so far and prepare the ground for Kant's therapeutic treatment of traditional philosophy in the Dialectic.

3.1. The Refutation of Idealism This passage has an importance out of all proportion to its size. It is this addition in B to which Kant refers in the famous passage in the B preface (xl, n.) where he talks of the "scandal" to philosophy that it has not been able to prove the existence of things outside us. It should come as a gen-

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uine shock to those who accept a traditionalist account of Kant, for in one form or another that account rests on the attribution to Kant of a basic traditional idealism. The outer objects whose existence philosophy has scandalously failed to prove are not things in themselves but outer spatial objects, that is, Kantian appearances.20 When in Prolegomena §13 and the appendix Kant represents his position as the "opposite of idealism" it is this proof of outer objects' existence which marks that opposition (chapter 10). Kant's opposition is not located in a belief that things in themselves exist, for that is a doctrine which Kant ascribes to the idealism he rejects. The formal argument in the Principles identifies two forms of traditional idealism, the Cartesian, in which the existence of outer objects is doubted, and the Berkeleian, in which it is denied, but the focus is on the former. Kant represents traditional idealism as at least doubting an assumed inference from our empirical representations, subjective inner states, to the outer objects which they sometimes represent. The skeptical challenge is to justify an inference which seeks to go beyond that immediate inner experience to establish the public world of outer objects. Kant's chosen method of attacking the idealist assumption of that radical division between inner and outer experience is to "turn the game played by idealism against itself' (B276). This means accepting, for the sake of the argument, the idealist assumption of an epistemic priority attached to inner experiences initially in order to demonstrate that it leads to an incoherence in thinking that a viable experience of a purely subjective kind can be sustained without outer objects. If Kant's argument is correct the idealist assumptions are shown to be untenable. They attach an erroneous priority to our inner experience over outer and adopt an incoherent picture of that subjective experience. Kant rejects the idealist priority not as he had done in the Aesthetic (B55) by insisting on a parity between inner and outer sense, but by reversing that priority so that inner experience is shown to be impossible without outer experience. The argument marks the first formal proviso made to the general parity between inner and outer sense canvassed so far in the Critique, although the amended principle in B of the Third Analogy seems to owe its change to a recognition of the formal refutation argument. Kant marks yet another Copernican revolution or reversal in traditional philosophy, by correcting the idealist priority for inner over outer experience, and provides formal support for his "empirical realism." In that reversal of the traditional priority Kant shares Wittgenstein's view that inner processes stand in need of outer criteria (1953, §580) and that of Sellars in chapter 10. The arguments Kant uses to arrive at the same conclusions are nevertheless different from those deployed by either Wittgenstein or Sellars.

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3.2. Phenomena and Noumena This passage, with the Amphiboly, look back to the central themes of Kant's position up to this point and forward to the more critical, negative account to be given of the Dialectical errors. It repeats the diagnosis of those errors which have been noted even in the Analytic, namely, that the benefits of the conceptual resources which alone make experience possible entail also a major disadvantage. That disadvantage is the perennial temptation to think that those conceptual resources alone give us access to a realm beyond what is presented to our senses. It provides an illustration of what Wittgenstein meant by talking of "the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language" (1953, §109). For Kant the structure of such illusory thinking is that we abstract from the sense experience in which our conceptual resources are used, form corresponding notions of "things in general," and then imagine that such a phrase designates real but nonsensory objects to which pure understanding or reason gives access independently of the senses. Consequendy what we do is to think something in general; and while on the one hand we determine it in sensible fashion, on the other hand we distinguish from this mode of intuiting it the universal object represented in abstracto. What we are then left with is a mode of determining the object by thought alone—a merely logical form without content, but which yet seems to us to be a mode in which the object exists in itself (noumenon) without regard to intuition, which is limited to our senses. (B345-46; cf. B186-87)

The term "transcendental object = X " is used in this passage again (Cf. A104-5) as a cipher to mark this illusory process. Kant underlines and explains again his rejection of what I have called this "basic rationalist fallacy." One natural temptation to commit such fallacies arises from mathematics and formal natural science. Kant's "abstract" conception of such a system as Euclid's geometry is designed to diagnose and evade that error, and in the Dialectic he outlines other examples of the illusion. Kant dismisses mathematical pretensions early in the passage (B299-300; cf. B8-9, B 146-^8) but later makes the same point about Newtonian physics. The question . . . is whether in addition to the empirical employment of the understanding—to its employment even in the Newtonian account of the structure of the Universe—there is likewise possible a transcendental employment which has to do with noumenon as an object. This question we have answered in the negative. When therefore we say that the senses represent objects as they appear and the understanding objects as they are the latter statement is to be taken, not in the transcendental but in the merely empirical

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meaning of the terms, namely as meaning that the objects must be represented as objects of experience, that is, as appearances in thoroughgoing interconnection with one another, and not as they may be apart from their relation to possible experience (and consequentiy to any senses) as objects of pure understanding. (B313-14)

The passage identifies a division between a world of the senses (appearances) and a world of understanding (noumena) which Kant had suggested in the Dissertation but now repudiates.21 The section begins with a reminder of the map-making, inventorial images which Kant uses to outiine his project. He speaks of leaving the known territory of the Aesthetic and Analytic to embark on a voyage full of hazards and uncertainty into the realms of the dialectical inferences. The map, or inventory, already provided in the earlier sections may guide us through the known territory of our experience, but is intended also to warn us about the hazards of attempting to stray into realms beyond experience. Kant raises the question whether it is stricdy necessary to provide such a map, in doing philosophy, instead of just exploring the terrain in an accredited science, and answers that without a higher order map we will be liable to lose our way (cf. Prolegomena Ak. 4.261-62 2 2 ). Philosophy is thus represented as a higher-order discipline which articulates and records in proper fashion the knowledge which ground floor explorers in the sciences and elsewhere have gained. A metaphysics of experience should not only map the whole terrain and locate every item in its proper place, but also mark the limits beyond which our knowledge cannot reach: "We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding and carefully surveyed every part of it but have also measured its extent and assigned to everything in it its rightful place" (B294).

3.3. The Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection An Amphiboly, for Kant, is a confusion, ambiguity, or misunderstanding about the status of different concepts, about their proper location in the map of experience including our cognitive faculties. Later in the Dialectic Kant uses another unfamiliar term, "subreption," to mark the philosophical errors of that kind of ambiguity and confusion. Kant contrasts a logical reflection, or comparison of concepts according to their content, with what he calls "transcendental reflection." The former, unlike the latter, does not classify them according to their provenance as belonging to sense or understanding. Kant's claim is that if we restrict ourselves to logical content and disregard the status of concepts as belonging to sense or to understanding, then we may, like Leibniz, ascribe to those contents only what belongs necessarily to their concepts. This would be, as he says, to abstract from their

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character as sense presentations and to be tempted to leave out of account any relations they may have to such specifically sensory features as space and time. We are thus led into the basic rationalist fallacy with an illusory conception of a "thing in itself' accessible through reason alone and totally independent of any sensory presentation. Kant claims that the whole of the monadology, the principle of the identity of indiscernibles, and a faulty dogmatic conception of the principle of sufficient reason exemplify these erroneous temptations.

3.4. The General Note on the System of the Principles (B288-94) In B Kant added a new short summary of the Analytic of Principles. Its content and its novel appearance in B after the relocation of the Refutation of Idealism indicate the influence of that latter argument, but it also rehearses many of the familiar themes from A. Under that latter heading come the renewed claims that a priori concepts need reference to intuition if they are to be more than mere "forms of thought" and to have "objective reality"; that the principles cannot be proved dogmatically from concepts alone, as Leibniz thought; that these points may be concealed by confusions about analytic interpretations of the general causal principle, or about the modal terms, "actuality," "possibility," and "necessity." The novelty of the account is reinforced by the claim, with its further implications, that in all cases the needed intuitions are primarily spatial. That claim finally expresses, as the Refutation of Idealism does, a priority for space over time which rescinds the general parity between inner and outer sense in the argument up to that point. One important implication, also evident in the Refutation of Idealism, lies in its application to inner experience. Just as we need a spatial model for such concepts as substance or alteration, so the model of the movement of a point in space is prior to our conception of inner movement, inner acts, or inner experience. Kant adds, surely rightiy, that this is important for our understanding of selfknowledge and for his own related conception of transcendental apperception. These implications are extensively discussed throughout the Dialectic and in its first section, the Paralogisms.

4. Parities and Disparities between Inner and Outer Sense and Their Objects Prom the earliest sections of Kant's text the issue of a claimed parity between inner and outer sense has proved important. Because traditional

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idealists attach a strong priority to inner sense and its objects, "empirical ideas," Kant's claimed parity between the senses, is a central element in his revolutionary aim of rejecting traditional idealism. Finally, at the end of the Analytic of Principles, in the B Refutation of Idealism and the General Note, Kant rescinds that parity by arguing for a priority of outer experience over inner. But the situation is complicated and I therefore list some of the principal parities and disparities which are attached to the two senses at different points in Kant's argument. 1. In the Aesthetic, inner and outer sense have a parity in sharing such characteristics as having a priori forms or modes, being subject to causal influences, and presenting their objects immediately. At this stage the claim is no more than a phenomenological report which is given a formal proof only later in the Refutation of Idealism (see 5). A similar claim is made in the A Fourth Paralogism, but there it is opposed to the idealist view that all knowledge of empirical outer objects requires a causal inference.23 2. Compatibly with 1, inner and outer sense also differ. They have different forms or modes; space for outer and time for inner sense. Inner sense is universal since everything is given to inner sense and its temporal mode, but not everything is given to outer sense since not every content has a spatial dimension. Nevertheless Kant holds that outer sense provides all the material for inner sense and that all sensory intuiting makes a reference to spatial features through the senses' bodily connection. The apparently paradoxical nature of these claims was discussed in the account of the Aesthetic. 3. Many of Kant's arguments are conducted at a level of abstraction in which differences between inner and outer sense are irrelevant. In the Aesthetic Kant's principal aim is to identify a priori forms, or modes, of sense and these features belong equally to inner and outer sense. In the Analytic, where Kant considers the general relation of thought to experience, the claims hold whether that experience is inner or outer. If "objectivity" is understood to be the susceptibility of judgments to true/false evaluation, then judgments about the objects of inner sense are just as objective as those of outer sense. 4. In the Analytic of Principles two opposite orders of priority are noted for space and time. In the Schematism, successive experience has a priority as that universal form or mode of sense (see 2) which primarily connects categories with sense experience. In the Refutation of Idealism, space has a priority as the primary form of sense to which categories such as substance apply in their empirical

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realization in experience. There is no good reason to think that these different orders of priority are in conflict or that they clash with earlier parities between the senses. 5. Kant expresses his opposition to traditional idealism in two ways. In the first, in the Aesthetic (B54-55), the parity between inner and outer sense in 1 rejects the idealist priority attached to inner sense and their objects as immediate and privileged knowledge. In the Refutation of Idealism, Kant is not content merely to replace that idealist priority with the noted parity between the two senses, but actually reverses the priority by assigning it to outer over inner experience. The two senses have parity, as in 1, but there is a disparity between the two forms of experience or knowledge, inner and outer. 6. It would be an interpretative error to assume that Kant's reversal of the idealist priority late in the Analytic of Principles modifies or rejects the earlier claims where a parity between inner and outer sense is in place. Commentators have sometimes read this new priority back into their interpretations of the earlier Deduction and the Analytic of Principles, and have consequently failed to recognize the parity between inner and outer sense in those arguments (chapter 15). 7. In the Analytic of Principles there is an interplay between inner and outer sense in which every representational content is subject to temporal succession in inner sense, even though the model for that succession is the linear representation of space. But even that linear representation is temporally successive in the process of "drawing a line" (B154-55). This interplay, reflected in Kant's earlier claims that all representations are subject to time and yet that the material for representation is supplied by outer sense, is not reductive and deserves to be counted also as a certain kind of parity between the two modes of sense (chapter 9).

[18] The Mathematical Principles

two mathematical principles, Axioms and Anticipations, are concerned with "mere intuition," unlike the dynamical principles which concern the "existence of appearances" (B199-200). While the former are said to be "absolutely necessary conditions" of any possible experience and "apodeictic," the latter are "only accidental" even though both are necessary a priori and have "undoubted certainty." Kant evidendy envisages different kinds or standards of certainty appropriate for different discourses,1 but in both of these cases he distinguishes transcendental and related mathematical or scientific principles: But it should be noted that we are as litde concerned in the one case with the principles of mathematics as we are in the other with the principles of general physical dynamics. We treat only of the principles of pure understanding in their relation to inner sense. . . . It is through these principles of pure understanding that the special principles of mathematics and dynamics become possible. (B201) While, therefore, I leave aside the principles of mathematics I . . . include those [more fundamental2] principles upon which the possibility and a priori objective validity of mathematics are grounded. These latter must be regarded as the foundation of all mathematical principles. (B199)

Kant repeats his picture of a hierarchy of principles, the most fundamental of which are a priori and transcendental. These make other a priori systems of knowledge in mathematics and the sciences possible (A126). Questions arise not only about the nature and validity of the proofs, but also about their relation to scientific theory and nonscientific perception. In both cases I outline the principles and their proofs, note some of their difficulties, and assess their validity and outcome.

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1, Axioms of Intuition Kant's formulation of the principle expresses the claim that all intuitions (B), or appearances in their intuition (A), are extensive magnitudes. It may be thought that this difference is significant since the A version is about appearances, the objects of intuition, while B is about intuitions which represent such objects. The difference is significant if Kant's argument is interpreted under idealist assumptions as an attempt to justify, or construct, our beliefs from subjective empirical ideas, but I argue, in line with his earlier rejections of idealism, that such an interpretation is mistaken. Kant's account provides neither an antiskeptical justification for mathematics nor an idealist construction of it. The basic proof can be summarized thus: 1. All appearances contain an a priori spatiotemporal intuition.3 2. There can be no apprehension of appearances without generating a synthesis in space/time. 3. Consciousness of such a synthesis is the concept of magnitude. 4. A magnitude is extensive when representation of the parts makes possible (and precedes) representation of a whole. 5. Only through a successive synthesis of part to part in the apprehension of pure (spatiotemporal) intuition can appearances be known. 6. There can be no apprehension of appearances in space/time unless they are extensive magnitudes. I i 1

That formal proof is expanded in subsequent comments: a. The proof holds not only for (pure) intuition, in mathematics, but also for (empirical) perception and its objects, appearances. (B203) b. Geometry, which involves quanta (B204), and arithmetic, which involves quantitas, are "based" (griindet) on this principle. The former has axioms, the latter only numerical formulae. c. "[The transcendental principle alone] makes pure mathematics, in its complete precision, applicable to objects of experience." (B206) d. The principle also "makes possible the apprehension of appearance . . . every outer experience, and all knowledge of the objects of such experience." (B206) e. Any account of mathematics which denies, for instance, the infinite divisibility of lines or angles in objects of the senses mistakenly treats those objects as things in themselves. (B207)

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The picture that emerges is of the concept of extensive magnitude, so defined, as making possible certain essential features of our intuitive experience. Premise 1 can be taken as an assumption already grounded in the Aesthetic, and 2 as an assumption expressing quite generally the requirement in the Deduction that any knowledge requires a conceptual synthesis. Premises 3 and 4 formulate explicit definitions of magnitude and extensive magnitude, while 5 makes a claim about the kind of synthesis involved in spatiotemporal apprehension. The definition of extensive magnitude is provided with its schematized realization in the synthesis required for its apprehension, and it is concluded, in 6, that intuitive appearances can be apprehended only as extensive magnitudes. The argument turns on the claim that a required mereological form of synthesis for apprehending appearances, from part to part in a whole, is that of extensive magnitude. Such a spatiotemporal synthesis provides the required schematized link between pure concept and pure intuition4 and an operational procedure for applying the category in intuitive experience. Since even empirical perception presents appearances under the intuitive forms of space and time, those objects of experience are claimed to be extensive magnitudes. At the level of pure a priori elements the synthesis makes possible the mathematics of space, in geometry, and of number, in arithmetic, which consequently have an assured application to empirical experience. The two branches of mathematics provide an abstract, formal, explicit representation of the underlying structure of even ordinary empirical, perceptual experience. Two preliminary interpretative questions throw important light on the argument: 1.1. Does the argument conflict with Kant's account of space and time in the Aesthetic? 1.2. Is the argument psychological or not; is it a priori or not?

1.1. Conflict with the Aesthetic There are two ways of bringing out an apparent conflict between Kant's position in the Principles and in the Aesthetic. One asks whether the extensive magnitude, as well as the unity and even infinite divisibility, of space and time were not already established, or accepted, in the Aesthetic. Kant seems in the Aesthetic to speak of these attributes of space and time as "given," whereas in the Principles they need to be "generated" as in (5) (B39-40). The other notes that while here Kant insists on the priority of parts over wholes in apprehending spatiotemporally, in the Aesthetic he

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claimed that the parts of space and time "cannot precede" the whole (B39). A resolution of these apparent conflicts rests first on the recognition, noted in chapter 7, that Kant distinguishes, artificially and for theoretical purposes, the presentation of space and time to sense from their conceptual articulation in experience. He distinguishes between a bare sensory presentation of items in space and time and our knowledge of such presentation in perception. This issue has been confronted before in the "blindness" problem, and it was argued that, although artificial and theoretical, Kant's procedure is justified and even unavoidable. It requires us to admit for theoretical purposes a sense-presentation in space and time without the articulated conceptual features with which it is characterized in a developed experience or in mathematics. There are constraints on our talking in that way of a pure sensory experience without conceptual resources, just as there are constraints on our exemplifying in experience the abstract points and lines of Euclidean geometry, but it was also accepted that we need to make room theoretically for a notionally distinctive sensory contribution to experience. Kant's appeal to what is distinctively sensory is a higher-order, theoretical device which takes our ordinary experience and artificially abstracts from it the conceptual articulation of the understanding. An inarticulate successive and extended domain, a manifold, is presented to the senses, but knowledge or perception of it requires synthesis and articulate concepts. The conflict is resolved so long as that more general account of the distinction between sense and understanding is itself accepted. That it is Kant's view is made clear in the footnote to B160. Space represented as object (as we are required to do in geometry) contains more than mere form of intuition; it contains also combination of the manifold, given according to the form of sensibility, in an intuitive representation, so that the form of intuition gives only a manifold, the formal intuition gives unity of representation. In the Aesthetic I treated this unity as belonging merely to sensibility simply in order to emphasise that it precedes any concept although . . . it presupposes a synthesis which does not belong to the senses. . . .5

The second apparent conflict can be similarly resolved by noting the differences of aim in the Aesthetic and the Principles. In the former Kant addresses a question about the metaphysical status of space and time as belonging to sense or understanding, and as a posteriori or a priori. In the latter he asks the epistemological question, how do we come to know, or apprehend, specific features of space and time and their inhabitants? Kant's answer to the first question excludes an empiricist derivation of space and time from experience of their parts; the answer to the second insists that for specific knowledge of extensive magnitudes we need to proceed from

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parts to wholes. The two issues are different and the two apparendy conflicting answers are compatible. Their compatibility reinforces the earlier claim that the Aesthetic does not describe occurrent psychological operations of experiencing space and time, but offers a metaphysical classification of their status. In the Aesthetic, space and time are given a metaphysical priority over their parts; in the Principles, the operational procedures we use in apprehending spatiotemporal features give a priority to the parts over the whole. Two important general conclusions can be drawn from these accounts. The first is that Kant consistendy represents spatiotemporal knowledge, like any other, as requiring concepts, despite the Aesthetic's theoretical and metaphysical interest in a pure sensory dimension of a "manifold." The lessons of the Transcendental Deduction, in which, despite the isolation of pure sense in the Aesthetic, concepts are required for determinate knowledge even of space and time are now applied in the Principles. The second is that Kant's conception of the step from intuition or sensibility to perception or knowledge is not the standard relation queried in traditional idealism. In the latter the step is represented as moving from discriminated, simple, sensory states such as colors, shapes, or sounds to a recognition of external, physical objects. But Kant's theoretical conception of sense is stricdy of a "blind" faculty which makes no such discriminations. Only when concepts of colors and shapes are introduced through the understanding can we properly speak of experience or identify the contents of perception. The point is reinforced in the parity which Kant maintains in these principles (B202, B203, B207, B211). "In other words appearances are all . . . extensive magnitudes. As intuitions in space or time [my italics] they must be represented through the same synthesis whereby space and time are determined" (B203). Kant's distinction between sensibility and understanding notionally separates both inner, temporal and outer, spatial sense on one side from understanding on the other. It is not a traditional idealist distinction between a subjective inner experience and an objective experience of an outer physical world.

1.2. Psychology or Epistemology; A Posteriori or A Priori At the heart of the outlined proof is a reference to those operational procedures in schematism which "generate" an apprehension of space and time (premise 2). For Kant's purposes the crucial point in such a reference is that the procedure should explain the way in which "extensive magnitude" is realized in experience. It is essential for the proof that the apprehension of space and time proceeds mereologically "from part to part" in the generation of a "determinate time- (or space-) magnitude" (B203-4)

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(premise 5). A general question consequently arises in such a reference about the psychological character of the procedure, underlined by the differences in 1.1 between the Aesthetic and the Analytic of Principles. A more specific question arises also about the a posteriori or a priori character of that reference in the proof. The first question invites a distinction between three different ways of expressing Kant's claim: (1) Appearances in space or time are necessarily wholes consisting of spatiotemporal parts. (2) We can apprehend appearances in space or time only if we can apprehend them wholes consisting of spatiotemporal parts. Such apprehension covers spatial surveys and counting, related respectively to geometry and arithmetic. (3) We can apprehend appearances in space or time only if we apprehend them as wholes by apprehending their spatiotemporal parts. (1) asserts a claim which Kant undoubtedly accepts, but it makes no reference to any procedures in which we apprehend spatiotemporal appearances, and is closer to Kant's conclusion than to any of the premises in the proof. (3) remedies this by explicitly outlining a procedure in which we apprehend spatiotemporal appearances, but it is too strong and dubious a claim for Kant's purposes. (3) is vulnerable to the objection that it is simply not true that we can apprehend a spatial extent (quantum), or a number of items (quantitas), only by apprehending their parts. Although we may apprehend things in that way, it is also possible for humans and some animals to apprehend a spatial extent immediately as bigger or smaller than another, or to apprehend the number of items presented to sense without adding up their parts. Humans and some other creatures can discriminate small numbers of things immediately without adding them up, or separately surveying their parts, but Kant's general point is not vulnerable to that objection. His purposes would be served adequately by allowing not that we carry out such an aggregative procedure on every occasion, but only that such a procedure is ultimately necessary as the basis for any check on the metrical properties at issue, even where they are immediately apparent. Adding, or surveying, the parts of some aggregate is for us the basic default case and immediate apprehension the exception. Even in the Principles Kant is not merely describing or generalizing over occurrent psychological processes, but is interested both in the criteria used for such determinate apprehension and in the operation of such criteria. The relevant operations involve our psychology, but they are not, any more than

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the transcendental appeal to a threefold synthesis was, mere reports of actual psychological events. This shows that of the three claims (2) is closest to Kant's position. (2) makes reference to our procedures of apprehension but it incorporates also the point about the criteria for determining quantitative claims about spatiotemporal appearances. (2) could consequendy replace the ambiguous premise 5 in the proof, and that is confirmed by Kant's own formulation of his conclusion at B204: "All appearances are consequendy intuited as aggregates, as complexes of previously given parts" (my emphasis). That account leads to the second query. Kant's proofs are supposed to be a priori, but a premise about our psychological modes of apprehension in (2), and even its underlying distinction between sense and understanding, may seem to threaten that a priori character. (2) shows, once again, how naturally and inevitably Kant incorporates psychological material into his epistemology, and how his account of experience makes an ineliminable reference to our psychological powers. Even if that psychological reference is not a description of every occurrent apprehension of extensive magnitude, it might still be thought to be a posteriori. Kant's claim that the principles are not a posteriori but synthetic a priori provides a first test for his antiempiricism in the context of understanding and its constitutive role in experience. I offer three related reasons for thinking that in this case the principle satisfies the test with some modification. If the only choice were between taking (2) to be either a posteriori and synthetic or analytic, then Kant's problem would be insuperable, for it is not analytically true. It is not even strictiy true, as we have seen, for the immediate apprehension of size and number in some cases. But to assume an exhaustive empiricist classification which admits only either analytic or synthetic propositions is to beg the question against Kant. Earlier it was argued that there is no good reason to accept the empiricist identification of "synthetic" with "a posteriori," or of "analytic" with " a priori," but it was left open whether the criteria for synthetic a priori truth could be met for any Kantian propositions such as (2). That issue cannot now be resolved simply by assuming an empiricist framework. It was also accepted that for Kant, but not for Kripke, necessity is associated with the "a priori," and analytic truth with truth in all possible worlds. Since synthetic truths hold in some, but not all, possible worlds, Kant can consistendy accept that these principles are synthetic truths which we can know a priori and which hold, in Kripke's phrase, for subjects with minds like ours. The question is whether, independendy of that empiricist framework, the premises in Kant's proofs can be held to be synthetic a priori, and to have that kind of necessity. There are two appeals to necessity in this context. First Kant's transcendental claims are intended to represent conditions without which our

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experience would be impossible, and underlying (2) is the belief that we could not apprehend appearances in space and time unless we could attach quantitative properties to them. In this case the necessity is that of meeting a condition whose absence would make a genuine experience impossible or even, with some qualifications, unintelligible. The outcome of the earlier discussion of the threefold synthesis in chapters 13.2.1 and 15.1.1 was not a stark division between intelligibility and unintelligibility but an approach to the limits of intelligibility in progressively greater deviations from our experience. Just as the conception of an "intuitive intelligence" lies on the borders of intelligibility,6 so Kant claims that to deny (2) is to approach that border. The central claim of the Transcendental Deduction reinforced that view by characterizing the primary requirement in our experience for which categories are responsible as determinate objectivity. To exclude extensive magnitude from our experience would undoubtedly be a serious deficit. It would exclude our recognition in both inner and outer experience of spatial or temporal extent and of counts involving numerical identity. A deviant experience with such a deficit is not totally unintelligible but it would lack a major determinate aspect of our experience. There is a second, and more relevant, appeal to the necessity of meeting this condition through the synthesis of part to part in a whole. That is the feature of (2) which may still be taken as no more than an a posteriori report about our cognitive psychology, and one which for small sizes and numbers is known to be false. It is consequently necessary to provide some further clarification and modification of (2). We have to ask what it is exactly that presents us with that approach to unintelligibility. It cannot be the possibility that we might always have an immediate or instantaneous apprehension of magnitude for that is bizarre but would represent an enhancement rather than a diminution of our current experience of size. The point is that although we can instantaneously apprehend quantities for relatively small sizes there is a requirement of a test even for those cases. Even if we were always able to judge quantities immediately it would still be possible, and might be necessary, to check such judgment by a process of counting or surveying. Our immediate recognition of size or number even for small quantities is not always correct. A more plausible requirement for our determinate experience in Kant's account would consequently be the presence of such a possibility. How could our experience have the required determinate objectivity if there were really no possibility of our making such a check? (2) could consequently be reformulated as: (2') It must be possible for us to apprehend appearances in space or time by apprehending them as wholes consisting of parts.

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(2'), like its predecessor, involves a reference not only to such psychological surveys of parts in a whole, but also to the criteria for quantitative claims and their necessity for our experience. The claim is not that we never can immediately apprehend size without a survey or counting, but that if it were impossible to carry out checks in those ways, then we could not genuinely apprehend appearances in experience. This invites another objection to Kant's position, for this claim might be said to have become merely an analytic truth about the criteria for quantitative properties, but there are two strong, related reasons to set that objection aside. First there is no good general reason to think that such constraints about what is required for our determinate experience are imposed only by semantic considerations rather than by our cognitive powers. There is no good reason why fundamental features of our cognition should not impose limitations on what we can understand, and the kind of understanding which requires the possibility of a check is not obviously just semantic. It would be natural to say with Kant that an analytic expression of the necessary criteria records in semantic terms an underlying synthetic aspect of our experience. Not only do we have to be able to formulate the relevant criteria in such semantic terms, but we also have to be able to carry out the operations in which the criteria are applied. We might say that the strict semantic expression of the relevant claims depends crucially on the underlying psychological factors, and echo Kant's general claim that analysis presupposes synthesis.7 That indicates the more important and specific point that (2') is not merely a statement of the relevant semantic criteria. It includes a reference to our fundamental psychology, that our intuition is governed by temporally successive and spatially extended modes, and it expresses the requirement that the criteria for extensive magnitude have to operate within that framework. These involve our psychology but Kant has already argued that they are a priori aspects of it. The necessity, and a priority, of (2') is established by the deficit in lacking the relevant possibility, and this is neither simply an analytic necessity nor an a posteriori report about our psychological powers. It allows that in other possible worlds the requirement might not need to be satisfied, or might be satisfied in other ways, but insists that in our actual world with our forms of intuition it is a necessary part of our experience. Its complex reference to the "necessary possibility" of some aspect of experience is typical of Kant's transcendental appeals to conditions of possible experience. It echoes the form of Kant's appeal to the "I think" in the Transcendental Deduction at B132. 8 That discussion enables a controversial point in the proof to be represented in the following way:

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Part IV: The Analytic of Principles (4) We could not apprehend appearances without (the possibility of) a synthesis of what is presented to sense noninstantaneously, that is, successively in time and extensively in space in counting and surveying operations. (5) Such a mereological synthesis of part to part in apprehension of a whole is that of extensive magnitude. (6) Both (4) and (5) entail the necessity in our experience of apprehending inner and outer appearances as extensive magnitudes.

1.3. Idealist and Constructionist Interpretations That account of the proof will raise a question about an idealist inference from our inner syntheses, however necessary, to properties of represented objects. It will be said that the account leaves out what is an essential background to Kant's proof, namely, a justification for that step in idealism from subjective inner experiences to objective outer world. The criticism is that however necessary or indispensable those synthetic processes may be, nothing has been done to establish that they reflect an objective reality, and it remains possible that the objects themselves may not correspond to them. The objection presupposes an idealist dualism of subjective representations and their objects, in which the goal is to justify our beliefs about external objects on the basis of an internal synthesis of sense impressions. The suggestion is that Kant attempts to justify our ascription of objective magnitude to spatial objects by inferring, or perhaps constructing, it from our inner experiences. What has been said so far of Kant's position in the Critique and the proof of the Axioms shows that traditional idealism is not the background with which Kant approaches the issue. Throughout the Critique Kant is hostile to, and rejects, traditional idealism, and in ( 2 ' ) and in (4)-(6) the reference to our sensory capacities is not made within the restricted framework of empirical idealist inner states. The psychological capacities at issue, like Kant's classification of space and time as "modes," presuppose an experience which includes both empirically inner and outer items, and the argument is directed just as much at the apprehension of magnitudes in inner sense as that of outer sense. Kant is not offering to justify an inference from inner sense experiences or syntheses to outer objects against that traditional idealist challenge. The argument is designed to explain the applicability of the basic concepts of mathematics to experience, inner and outer, but Kant has no interest in arguing against a wholesale skepticism about mathematics itself. The proof is designed to show how a category makes certain quantitative features of both inner and outer experience

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possible in a descriptive metaphysics, and does not attempt to guarantee such an experience. The point is confirmed by Kant's earlier illustration in the Transcendental Deduction at B162-63 of these later arguments from the Principles and from B211-12. In the former passage he offers brief illustrations of the role of the categories of "quantity" and "cause," and in the latter deals with intensive magnitude. Thus my apprehension of such an event, and therefore the event itself, considered as a possible perception, is subject to the concept of the relation of effects and causes. . . . (B163) Every sensation . . . and likewise every reality in appearance . . . has a degree. . . . All appearances are continuous magnitudes, alike in their intuition as extensive and in their mere perception (sensation and with it reality) as intensive.

(B211-12; my emphasis)

If Kant's central aim was to bridge the idealist gap between subjective sensations or syntheses and objective truths about space or number, it would be incomprehensible that he should deal with it so casually in such passages. These are not arguments but statements of the scope of mathematics given the explanation of the connection between categories and modes of sense. That explanation exhibits a connection between the given a priori features of inner and outer sense and a required synthesis expressed in the categories of extensive and intensive magnitude. The former provide inarticulate successive and extensive modes of intuiting and the latter provide a synthesis which makes that inarticulate manifold of sense determinate and objective through the outiined operations. It enables us to apprehend and perceive objects of outer and inner sense, such as houses or pains, as having determinate sizes (B162-63). It may still be said that Kant attempts, and fails, to show how magnitudes, inner and outer, can be constructed out of more basic, primitive, spatiotemporal elements. Even if the argument does not justify an idealist inference from aspects of our inner experiences to outer objects, it may be said to involve a construction of inner and outer magnitudes such as spatial and temporal extension out of spatial points and temporal instants. Since Kant associates spatial points and extension with geometry, and temporal instants and extension with number and arithmetic, this may seem to point towards a constructive program in the philosophy of mathematics, but such an account conflicts with Kant's own claims. Just as he repudiates a standard idealist construction of outer objects from inner sense data, so he also rejects that more formal constructive project in mathematics. A passage at B211-12 clearly denies the possibility of constructing space and time from points and instants.

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Space therefore consists solely of spaces and time solely of times. Points and instants are only limits, that is, mere positions which limit space and time. But positions always presuppose the intuitions which they limit or are intended to limit; and out of mere positions, viewed as constituents capable of being given prior to space and time, neither space nor time can be constructed. (Cf. A25)

Kant evidently takes his view of space and time as quanta continua with no smallest parts and his metaphysical priority of space and time over their parts to be incompatible with a construction of the former out of the latter. The fact that he treats the notion of "construction" here as figurative rather than literal further indicates that he is not aiming at that more formal constructive project.9 The account of the Axioms is evidently not intended as an attempt to construct the mathematics of space or number out of more primitive entities, and this is to be expected in line with his antiempiricism. His aim is to demonstrate how mathematics, and its application in experience, rest on fundamental a priori concepts and principles; it is not to demonstrate, as Berkeley suggested, how mathematics can be reduced to a posteriori sense experiences. Kant's primary complaint against Berkeley is that such an account turns mathematics, mistakenly, into an a posteriori discipline (Prolegomena appendix; chapter 1). He might also have added, with Frege, that it mistakenly represents mathematics as a posteriori psychology. Once the idealist construction from simpler elements is abandoned, the project points instead to an explanation of how we can move from an indeterminate sense experience, whether inner or outer, to a determinate apprehension of that experience. The former indeterminate sense experience is not a collection of determinate, simple fragments but a manifold which needs to be conceptualized in order to identify its determinate simple and complex features. The claim is that we achieve this only through the requirement that our intuitions are synthesized, apprehended, in a mereological, part/whole, conceptual scheme which is that of extensive magnitude. The reciprocal account is of a priori concepts realized or schematized through the operational processes of our cognitive psychology, but both versions rely on that interplay between sensibility and understanding. The claim covers our apprehension of external, spatial objects, but is not confined to that case. It covers equally other cases, such as pains and remembered tunes, in which the extensive magnitude is that of a temporally successive inner experience. The suggestion is that only through such a mereological synthesis can we make our sense experiences quantitatively determinate, whether the objects associated with those experiences are inner or outer. Construed in this way the argument in the Axioms is neither idealist, nor formally constructive, nor certainly empiricist. Instead its central aim is

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to exhibit how extensive magnitude enables us to make determinate what is given indeterminately in a spatiotemporal manifold. It rests on two basic ideas. First, that the required determinacy for mathematics is achieved through the interplay between a category and the operational criteria in sense experience which provide its schematization. That claim could be understood without Kant's notional separation of sensibility and understanding but in his hands that separation is required. Second that what holds of that a priori connection between understanding and sensibility holds also for a posteriori sense perception in ordinary experience. Pure a priori intuition is not a literally separable ingredient in our experience distinct from ordinary perception, but an integral part of that perception.10 The argument is designed to identify complex conditions of the applicability of mathematics in a posteriori experience. So long as our senses provide that indeterminate manifold, and so long as we grasp the significance of the a priori category and its connection with sensibility, we have the basic apparatus with which to characterize experience, inner or outer, in terms of extensive magnitude. We have also the basic apparatus with which to develop a more sophisticated conceptual scheme in a formal mathematics, but none of these outcomes is guaranteed, for the required conditions may not themselves be satisfied. They are enabling, not guaranteeing, conditions.

2. Anticipations of Perception Though there is one significant difference between the two formulations of the principle in A and B the central point in both versions is the ascription to sensation and its object of an "intensive magnitude" or "degree." The difference is the reference in A, deleted in B, to a "correspondence" between sensation and the "real" (B209-10, B217). The formal proof of the principle depends, as in the Axioms, on Kant's distinction between empirical perception and pure, formal intuition. The former provides what Kant calls "the real of sensation," "the matter for some object in general" (B207), or what we would call a posteriori content, while the latter provides pure intuitions of space and time. When Kant says of such pure formal intuitions that "they cannot, in and by themselves, be perceived" (B207) he acknowledges their function as abstract, theoretical representations which are not to be found separately in actual perception. In that way he reinforces the claims made earlier about the abstract model of such a system as Euclidean geometry in which such pure representations occur. Empirical experience provides us with perception in which formal spatial, or temporal, features coexist with material, sensational properties, and Kant's task is to disentangle notionally in such perception what belongs to

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sense and what to understanding, what is a posteriori and what is a priori. The whole passage plainly involves mathematics and particularly the calculus and Newton's "method of fluxions" (B211-12), but Kant's primary interest in the proof is directed from the first line at empirical perception and its material sensations. It concerns the applicability of an a priori concept by means of some schematized operational procedure. The argument is that because we have that distinction between sensational matter and pure intuition, a synthesis is possible in which the former is diminished until it leaves only the latter. "Now from empirical consciousness to pure consciousness a graduated transition is possible, the real in the former completely vanishing and a merely formal a priori consciousness of the manifold in space and time remaining" (B208). Kant treats space and time equally in the passage, and there is no suggestion that the argument concerns only spatial sensations or spatial objects. Kant's conclusion is that the "real that is an object of sensation has intensive magnitude, or a degree," and that this can be known a priori even for empirical sensations. The examples, of color, heat, gravity, radiation, brightness (B211, 216-18), confirm the point made in the Aesthetic that for Kant even these empirical features have an a priori structure. We cannot anticipate the material content of sensations (B208-9) or the a posteriori bases of natural science (B213), but we can know a priori that such a posteriori material must have a degree structure. This argument is similar to but also different from the earlier account of the Axioms. In both our modes of intuition and categories are said to constitute certain objects of perception, but in the Anticipations the fundamental experience is instantaneous rather than extended or successive. Despite the fact that at B213 Kant refuses to appeal to causality because it involves empirical principles lying outside the limits of transcendental philosophy, the former point is put at B208: "Corresponding to this intensity of sensation, an intensive magnitude, that is, a degree of influence on the sense . . . must be ascribed to all objects of perception in so far as the perception contains sensation." The appeal to instantaneous experience is put at B209-10: Apprehension by means merely of sensation occupies only an instant, if, that is, I do not take into account the succession of different sensations. (B209) But since its apprehension by means of mere sensation takes place in an instant, and not through successive synthesis of different sensations, and therefore does not proceed from parts to the whole, the magnitude is . . . not extensive magnitude. (B210)

In the discussion Kant formulates a principle of continuity, or denseness, and uses the notion of a limit, or approximation, to define intensive

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magnitude. Michael Friedman makes clear in his Kant and the Exact Sciences that Kant's account concerns what mathematicians now call "denseness" rather than "continuity," and I shall use the former term for Kant's claims.11 For Kant both extensive and intensive magnitudes are dense (B212); Euclidean lines and angles, which are extensive magnitudes, have also the property of denseness formulated at B210: Between reality in the [field of] appearance and negation there is therefore a continuity of many possible intermediate sensations, the difference between any two of which is always smaller than the difference between the given sensation and zero or complete negation. . . . A magnitude which is apprehended only as unity in which multiplicity can be represented only through approximation to negation = 0,1 entitle an intensive magnitude.

This presents a difficulty which runs through the passage. In the principle, and often in the formal proof, Kant speaks only of an intensive "degree," but the appeal to denseness adds something to that claim. We might accept that sensations have degrees of intensity without supposing that the degrees are dense. Variations in degree of sensation, as greater or less, are compatible with the nonsmooth, stochastic character of what psychologists call "just noticeable differences."12 It does not follow from the fact that we speak of one shade as redder than another that shades of color are dense, or that it is always possible to find a sensation different in degree from any two others, or that we can indefinitely diminish their degree in approximating to their disappearance. It remains unclear whether this additional requirement is supposed to follow from the original proof, or is a further specific example of it, or whether intensive magnitude is defined in terms of denseness or only of variations in degree. Kant seems to resolve this problem at B211 in characterizing degrees themselves as "intensive magnitudes which can always be diminished," but I later offer a further explanation of the point. The Anticipations are for these reasons more obscure than the Axioms. In the Axioms the argument rested on the necessary possibility of a mereological way of apprehending spatiotemporal wholes, but in the Anticipations that process is replaced by a more abstruse contrast between actual perception and its possible diminution towards zero in pure formal intuition. The former process, in surveying or counting, can be easily illustrated in experience, but the latter may seem to be more of a notional thought experiment than a feature of ordinary experience. There is after all no real possibility of arriving at a pure formal intuition without any material content in our ordinary experience even though Euclidean geometry provides such a formal representation. Kant notes empirical cases in which we are aware of similar sensations with varying degrees but the mere exis-

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tence and recognition of degrees of intensity of sensations are not adequate for Kant's purposes. To appeal to such a posteriori circumstances would not require an a priori argument and would not sustain an a priori conclusion. The argument seems to rest instead not on a posteriori variations in degree but on an operation of constituting a pure formal intuition in which all material content has vanished. The suggestion seems to be not merely that we recognize a posteriori variations in the degree of some sensation, but that their operational diminution, and perhaps their smooth diminution, to zero can be known a priori. I use the outlined structure of the argument in the Axioms as a guide to the resolution of three major problems: 2.1, the a priori status of the claims; 2.2, inference to "the real"; and 2.3, the role of the category.

2.1. A Priori Status In the Axioms Kant appeals to the fundamental modes in which we perceive spatiotemporally as the basis for the use and role of the category of extensive magnitude and for a consequent limitation in our experience. It would be natural to take the parallel appeal in the Anticipations to be the recognized degree variation in sensations, but this may be said to be known only a posteriori, and an experience which lacked such variation would not deviate significantly from our own. In Guyer's Kant and the Claims of Knowledge the point is put as a decisive rebuttal of Kant's position. the claim that "between reality and negation there is a continuum of possible realities and of possible smaller perceptions" (B211) seems to be asserted as a simple matter of fact; it may be true but there is nothing inconceivable in the alternative assumption that any given sort of sensation can come in only one strength. (204)

This objection to Kant is not obviously correct, and Wittgenstein in the Tractatus suggests a different picture. Though he does not explicitly appeal to the a priori character of degrees of sensations it is natural to read the following passage in those terms13: "A speck in a visual field need not be red but it must have a colour; it has, so to speak, a colour space round it. A tone must have a pitch, the object of the sense of touch a hardness etc." (2.0131). Guyer's claim is that in this case, unlike that in the Axioms, an experience is possible in which every sense property has just one degree. Every experience of red is of just one shade of red, every experience of sound is of one determinate volume, and so on. The difficulty here is that even in such a world we have not ruled out the possibility of degree variations even though they are never experienced. Is it feasible not merely that

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the world has this fixed character, but that it is impossible for there to be any degree variation? Guyer's claim is ambiguous14 but it can be understood as allowing it to be conceivable not merely that every sense modality comes in just one strength, but that it is impossible for them to have degrees. That would be to allow an understanding of color or sound where no such degree variations were even possible, and such a situation differs from our experience just as seriously as the corresponding situation in the Axioms. It would be at best a serious deficit in an experience not to be able to ascribe extensive magnitudes, or to ascribe them without our associated operational surveying and counting procedures. The same is true of a situation in which no sensory content can have a degree. Kant's argument plainly cannot rest merely on the a posteriori occurrence of degree variations, but the alternative appeals in both Axiom and Anticipation to the necessary possibility of surveys and degrees are not vulnerable to that objection.

2.2. Inference to the Real That outcome has implications for the supposed inference to "the real" in the argument. The same grounds given in the Axioms (1.3) for rejecting an idealist framework for the argument hold in the Anticipations as well. Kant is interested in both contexts not in inferring what is outer from what is inner but in showing how a category makes determinate certain "objects" of both inner and outer sense namely extensive and intensive magnitudes. The same conclusion arises more generally from his rejection of any need for an inference to outer objects. All outer perception therefore yields immediate proof of something real in space, or rather is the real itself. In this sense empirical realism is beyond question, that is, there corresponds to our intuitions something real in space. (A375) Between reality in [the field of] appearance and negation there is therefore a continuity of many possible intermediate sensations . . . [so] the real in the [field of appearance] has always a magnitude. (B210)

The denial at A375 of any need for inference from inner to outer experience might be taken as a commitment to an idealist subjectivism, but this conflicts with his acceptance of an empirical realism which includes both empirically inner and outer objects. The passage from the Anticipations at B210 does not separate reality and negation in terms of sensations and what they correspond to but applies both to sensations and their associated properties.

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Kant's claim is that the material contents of sensation, whether inner pains or outer colors, are susceptible of degrees. It should be remembered that for Kant the field of appearances includes both the former inner sensations and the latter outer features. As in other cases if his project were to justify outer beliefs within an idealist and skeptical framework then these aspects of the discussion would be incomprehensible. If his project is understood instead as a metaphysics of experience designed to outline the role of a priori intuitions and concepts in that experience, then these traditionalist objections become irrelevant. The outcome is that a serious deficit would arise in experience if our sensational contents, inner or outer, could not have degrees. No idealist significance should be attached to the notion of "correspondence," and Kant deleted the reference in the B formulation of the principle. He retained the term in the Schematism at B182, but provides a gloss on the expression which divests it of idealist significance. His interest is in the notional possibility of diminishing sensations to vanishing point, in the transition from reality to negation rather than in any inference from sensation to reality. The point is confirmed in the earlier quotation from B211-T2: There therefore exists a relation and connection between reality and negation, or rather a transition from one to the other, which makes every reality representable as a quantum. (B182-83) Every sensation . . . and likewise every reality in appearance . . . has a degree. . . . All appearances are continuous magnitudes, alike in their intuition as extensive and in their mere perception (sensation and with it reality) as intensive. (B211-12; my emphasis)

What Kant refers to at B182 as "every reality" covers the reality of sensational content whether inner or outer; it covers our more or less vivid sensations of pain and colour as well as the ascription of degrees of force or brightness in their causes. The natural idealist objection to this is that our sensations do not necessarily match, or correspond to, reality, but Kant is characteristically uninterested in the two natural ways of understanding this. In one it trades on the distinction between veridical and illusory perception to cast a more general doubt on our beliefs about reality, but Kant characteristically sets that consideration aside (B278-79). That does not mean that variations in a subject's sensations are never illusory, but only that the veridical/illusory contrast arises within our experience and the a priori scheme which makes it possible. Kant's metaphysical inventory accepts the bathos of that experience and seeks to identify those a priori conditions.

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The alternative skepticism trades instead on the "absolute conception of reality," considered in the discussion of Stroud and Williams in chapter 15.2.1. The outcome of that discussion was to show that the absolute conception of reality may be included in Kant's dismissal of "idle" skepticism. That absolute conception relied on its being "independent" not only of us but of the peculiarities of any cognizers. Kant evidentiy thinks that such a conception of transcendent things as they are in themselves is so far out of our cognitive range as to be irrelevant to his problems about the bathos of immanent experience. He believes that no reality can be totally independent of cognisers and that we have to be content to investigate the only reality available to us. That is the point Kant makes at B182-83 in denying that the Anticipations are designed to establish any correspondence between our inner experiences and a transcendent reality: "Since time is merely the form of intuition, and so of objects as appearances, that in the objects which corresponds to sensation is [not] the transcendental matter of all objects as things in themselves (thinghood, reality)" (B182). Kemp Smith interpolated the "not" reasonably to capture the evident sense of the passage. Kant identifies a sense of "correspond" in which our experience may correspond to transcendent things in themselves, but this is set aside in favor of the immanent investigation of our actual experience of sensations and their inner or outer contents.

2.3. The Role of the Category In the Axioms the role for the category was that of determining or articulating the mereological character of our spatiotemporal intuition and perception. The category related to a posteriori experience through the schematization of our surveying and counting. The claim is that without such a conceptual articulation the formal development of spatiotemporal magnitude in geometry and arithmetic would be impossible. Concepts and language are required for the processing involved in such systems as the Transcendental Deduction had argued. A similar response can be made in the Anticipations to resolve the earlier ambiguity between "having degrees" and "being dense." Our ordinary acknowledgement of degrees in sensation and the real, or their necessary possibility, forms the basis for an articulated conception of denseness in mathematics. The claimed a priori necessity of a possible degree structure adds something to the evident a posteriori recognition of variations in degree; and the a priori articulation of denseness in geometry and calculus adds something to the general role for the category of intensive magnitude. It rejects a Berkeleian empiricist account of infinitesimal quantities as discrete "just noticeable differences" among sensations and sensory properties.15 Kant's

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discussion explains why mathematicians have no need to appeal to such a posteriori features in elucidating denseness and developing the calculus. The required basis for such a development is available a priori from the categories and operational procedures in intuition. If this is Kant's idea, then he offers no detail about the way in which such a development might proceed. He offers a programmatic suggestion about it, but his primary interest, in what is after all only a "propaedeutic" to philosophical enquiry into specific sciences in the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences, is to provide outline necessary, not sufficient, conditions for experience in mathematics and more generally.

3. The Mathematical Principles and Mathematics Kant's account of the two mathematical principles indicates a basic a priori network of concepts and intuitions which make possible the more complex formal concepts and principles of mathematics. The categories and associated operational intuitive procedures in surveys and counts do not provide a complete specification of the outcome, but Kant's primary interest is in the identification of the a priori network as a necessary condition of the development of mathematics and its application in experience. Kant makes clear in the Analytic of Principles and also in the Doctrine of Method that this is the role of the transcendental principles. In the Analytic I have indeed introduced some axioms of intuition into the table of the principles of the pure understanding; but the principle there applied is not itself an axiom but serves only to specify the principle of the possibility of axioms in general, and is itself no more than a principle derived from concepts. For the possibility of mathematics must itself be demonstrated in transcendental philosophy (B761; also B197-98, B202-3)

To demonstrate the possibility of mathematics is not to defend mathematics against skepticism but to outline descriptively how it functions in relation to its transcendental a priori background and its a posteriori use. This is to represent Kant as arguing from transcendental principles to the possibility of both mathematics and experience rather than from mathematics to the possibility of our objective experience. A view of that latter kind has been illuminatingly canvassed by Michael Friedman in Kant and the Exact Sciences and may seem to provide a different view. It rests partly on Kant's account of mathematics in the Doctrine of Method and gives an opportunity to conclude the general topic of Kant's account of mathematics. In chapter 8.2.1, a conflict was noted between commentators such as Beck and Brittan who take Kant's belief in the synthetic character of math-

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ematics to reflect the synthetic truth of some mathematical axioms, and those, like Russell and Friedman, who take it to reflect the synthetic character of at least some mathematical inferences. Although Michael Friedman himself expresses some doubts about his resolution of the conflict in favor of the Russellian position (1992, 66 1 6 ) in the end he prefers it to the Beck/Brittan alternative. His central claims can be summarized in the following: (1) Modern logic with polyadic quantifiers has such forms as "Vx . . . 3y . . ." which may have only infinite models, and are naturally used in the formulation of a continuity principle in Euclidean geometry as "Vx V y 3z ((x < y) (x < z < y))" (B210). By the same token monadic, and syllogistic, logic is not required to have infinite models, and is therefore formally unable to "generate" the required infinity of points or instants (1992, 59 17 ). (2) Since Kant lacked any conception of such polyadic forms he could not have expressed these Euclidean requirements in that logical form, and needed to appeal to a nonformal resource for this purpose. the natural alternative is to represent infinite divisibility by an intuitive constructive procedure for 'cutting out' a smaller line segment from any given one: for example, Euclid's construction for bisecting a line segment of Proposition 1.10. (1992, 71) denseness is represented by a definite fact about my intuitive capacities; namely whenever I can represent (construct) two distinct points, a and b, on a line, I can represent (construct) a third point c between them. (1992, 64)

(3) Equally Kant had no conception of a distinction between pure and applied mathematics which contrasts an uninterpreted, purely formal system with an interpretation. This explains the sense in which geometry is a priori for Kant: The only way to represent the theory of linear order . . . is to provide in effect an interpretation that makes it true . . . that space is infinitely divisible is a priori because its truth—the existence of an appropriate 'model'—is a condition for its very possibility. (1992, 66) If we can even think the infinite divisibility of a line segment, it follows, via Euclid's Proposition 1.10, that the segment is in fact infinitely divisible. (1992, 127)

(4) With some provisos Kant's transcendental philosophy can be conceived in a "naturalist" way,18 in which the exact sciences provide princi-

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pies which first make possible empirical, objective knowledge.

For, as Kant intimated . . . the mathematically exact sciences—delimiting the form and principles of the spatiotemporal phenomenal world—constitute the conditions of the possibility of empirical knowledge. (1992, 37)

These claims concern particularly infinite divisibility and the Anticipations, but the package throws genuine light on Kant's position and is a considerable improvement on a naive "quasi-perceptual" model sometimes ascribed to Kant and outlined in the following: We construct geometrical figures like triangles and somehow 'see' that they are Euclidean. . . . "Kant's picture presents the naive eye of the mind scanning these creations and detecting their properties" (Kitcher, Philosophical Review 84, [1975]). It is then easy to show that pure intuition, conceived on this quasi-perceptual model, could not possibly perform such a role. Our capacity for visualising figures has neither the generality nor the precision to make the required distinctions^ 1992, 89-90)

Nevertheless I want to add some qualifications to the claims. Claim (1) identifies a resource in polyadic quantification which we have but Kant did not, and it follows that any inferences from polyadic expressions could not have been understood by Kant as purely formal. But to infer from this that such inferences could not have been treated as analytic requires a further assumption that only what is licensed by formal logic is analytic. If Kant held the view, expressed in one account of analytic truth in chapter 4.2, that analytic truths may be licensed in other ways than merely through formal logic, then he could have taken the relevant inferences as analytic even though he knew of no formal logic to license them. Friedman is right to say that if Kant had recognized the formal character of those polyadic inferences then he would not have needed pure intuition to support them. But equally if he had recognized the analytic, though not formal, character of those inferences, he would not have needed to appeal to that support. The synthetic character of the inferences evidently does not follow merely from a failure to recognize their formal validity. Friedman's view is influenced by his reading of the Doctrine of Method in which Kant outlines his account of the mathematical a priori "construction" of concepts in intuition (B741-45). This was briefly considered in chapter 8 but set aside on the grounds that the Aesthetic dealt primarily with the institution of mathematics rather than its development in proofs, and that reference to "construction" was deleted from the Aesthetic in B. Construction evidently has more significance in Kant's later accounts of the development of mathematics in the Principles and the Doctrine of Method. Kant's "construction" is not about the analytic reduction of complex mathematical concepts to simpler ones, but a description of the way

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in which mathematics operates with its concepts both generally and in such procedures as proofs. A less misleading account of it is that "to construct a concept means to exhibit a priori the intuition which corresponds to the concept" (B741). Kant believes that as an a priori discipline mathematics has the ability to exhibit its concepts in a priori intuition and that the possibility of constructing its concepts a priori in intuition explains the use in proofs of particular examples with a universal scope. This was a problem Berkeley faced and resolved in his account of general concepts, and it is unsurprising therefore that Kant's resolution appeals in the same problem area to schematism. Kant speaks of a particular figure "constructed" in a proof as a "schema," which is "thought of as universally determined" and associated with the procedures in the Axiom and Anticipation for developing and applying the quantitative categories (B742). For the construction of a concept we need a non-empirical intuition. The latter must be a single object and yet, as the construction of a concept (universal representation), it must express . . . universal validity for all possible intuitions which fall under the same concept. . . . For in this empirical intuition we consider only the act whereby we construct the concept and abstract from the many determinations (magnitude of the sides and angles) which are quite indifferent. (B741-42) Once it has adopted a notation for the general concept of magnitudes . . . it exhibits in intuition in accordance with certain universal rules all the various operations through which the magnitudes are produced and modified. (B745)

Those are the operational procedures, such as surveys, counts, or degree diminution, outlined in the mathematical principles which Kant regards as necessary for the development and application of the pure concept of quantity. Friedman appeals to such underlying intuitive procedures in (2), which represents Euclidean denseness by a fact about my intuitive capacity to divide line segments, but this is potentially misleading. It could be objected to such an account that it is hard to understand how for Kant a fact about my intuitive capacities might bear on the content of an priori Euclidean geometry, and it may be questioned even whether it is a fact about our intuitive capacities.19 Clearly there are physical factors in the indefinite bisection of a given line which restrict the scope of one's psychological capacities. This would be to interpret (2) in a way which conflicts with Kant's assumption of a priori intuitions in an a priori mathematics, but is also independently hard to accept. Such an account makes it look as though Kant's objection to a Berkeleian empiricist account of infinitesimals as minima visibilia is not that it fails to do jus-

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tice to mathematics, which is both correct and endorsed in the Critique, but that it is psychologically false, which is doubtful. Friedman's claim should be construed in some other way. Kant's appeal to the underlying intuitive procedures is not intended to represent just a psychological fact but the universal availability in intuition of surveying and counting procedures which are independent of particular contents. Because they are universal and necessary aspects of intuition they provide the a priori connection to the a priori category of quantity, and because they are independent of any particular a posteriori content they provide a universal scope for the particular representation, figure, or construction in a proof. Although their primary role is to provide an a priori basis for pure quantitative mathematics they apply at more specific levels in proof procedures and actual constructions. To insist on the bare fact of a questionable ability to divide a line segment indefinitely is to turn attention away from Kant's primary aim towards what is in danger of leading to an empiricist, Berkeleian account of infinitesimals. Friedman's own discussion does not move in that direction but such an account is open to a number of objections both independently of, and in relation to, Kant. It makes mathematics too psychological, too empirical, and too close to the "quasiperceptual" model which Friedman rightly rejects on Kant's behalf. A similar qualification arises from the claim that Kant had no modern distinction between pure and applied mathematics. It was noted in chapter 8.2.1, that Kant drew some distinction between pure and applied disciplines such as mathematics (B15, B77-78, B146-47), even though it was not our contrast between a formal, uninterpreted system and its interpretation. Although Kant lacked both polyadic quantifiers and our conception of a purely formal system and of mathematics as such a system, he still distinguished a pure and an applied mathematics. The earlier suggestion, now confirmed in the Analytic of Principles and Doctrine of Method, is that Kant regarded the claims of pure mathematics as an abstract representation of the a priori aspects of our experience, but as neither merely analytic truths nor a mere factual record of that experience. Euclidean geometry is taken to be neither an a posteriori report of spatial relations nor a series of analytic truths but a description of the a priori spatial structure of our experience. The account of underlying operative procedures in intuition, applying at all levels, supports that earlier picture. It shows at the transcendental level how a priori concepts and universally available intuitive procedures combine to yield the basic mathematical notions of extensive and intensive size. It shows how in developing mathematics, in its axioms, definitions, and proofs those universal procedures invest particular representations with the requisite generality. And it shows how those same procedures are embedded just as much in a posteriori perception as in a priori intuition. It

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was pointed out in discussing the Aesthetic that a priori intuition is not a separate form of intuition from ordinary perceptual experience, but is integrated in the latter. Kant's view is not that we have separate a priori intuitions which we then "impose" on a posteriori perception, but that the latter already includes the former. The identity of the fundamental operational procedures in these different contexts is evidendy taken by Kant to ensure that mathematical claims have an application in pure mathematics and its proof procedures as well as in a posteriori experience. Since those mathematical claims themselves rest on the more basic transcendental principles which appeal to those procedures to explain how mathematics is possible, the transcendental principles have just the same governing, constituting role in a posteriori perception. The a priori conceptual and intuitive framework provides our experience with its recognition of size in inner and outer perception just as it provides for the development of a sophisticated "pure" mathematics. Such an account is compatible with the claim that Kant's conception of pure mathematics is not our logic-based conception. Those reservations about some aspects of Friedman's claims ( l ) - ( 3 ) are reflected in similar qualifications to the naturalism in (4), in which mathematics and the exact sciences themselves make possible empirical knowledge and an objective experience. The view is supported in Kant and the Exact Sciences by Kantian claims in which a figurative synthesis in imagination of sense and understanding "first" establishes such knowledge and experience20 (B152), and is clearly expressed in "Kantian Themes in Contemporary Philosophy": Necessary or a priori truths, in mathematics for example, have no special domain of objects at all; their characteristic status derives rather from their constitutive function with respect to ordinary empirical objects (viz. 'appearances'); their function namely of making empirical knowledge of such objects first possible. (117)

Friedman is right to understand Kant as denying a Platonist view of a special domain of mathematical objects, and he gives an illuminating account of the way in which Kant restructures Newtonian physics in the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences to ground a distinction between "true" and "apparent" motion.21 But the passage at B152 does not refer explicidy to geometry, mathematics, or physics and can naturally be read as a requirement for a "synthesis speciosa" in productive imagination even for ordinary perception.22 Friedman endorses some form of naturalism because of the weight he places on the sciences in the constitution of experience, but this conflicts with Kant's distinction between "transcendental" and merely "a priori" principles. For Kant mathematical and

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scientific principles, as opposed to principles of mathematics or of science, may be synthetic a priori but they are not transcendental since they do not satisfy the higher order requirement of B80-81 that they explain the possibility of other a priori truths. I take it that to "explain the possibility of a priori truths" it is not enough merely to deduce them from some axiom set. Kant draws a clear distinction between the different, but overlapping, interests of mathematicians and philosophers at B752-54. The firm distinction drawn at the start of the Principles between the philosophical, transcendental principles and the scientific principles whose a priority they explain underlines that claim and is repeated again in the Doctrine of Method (B197-98, B201-2, B761). The priority ascribed to science in (4) is open to the objection that an objective, ordinary experience, including a distinction between true and merely apparent motion and a recognition of extensive and intensive size, is available even without science.23 If the transcendental principles make that objective experience possible, as Kant claims, there is no need to appeal to science to do the same job. What science valuably achieves is to elaborate, systematize, and sometimes correct that objective experience, and that achievement is the target of Kant's applied philosophy in the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences. In the Critique, by contrast, with one important proviso, Kant outlines the more fundamental transcendental principles on which even the a priori sciences depend. Such an account fits Kant's own understanding of "transcendental" and of the role of the transcendental but nonscientific principles in the Critique. It matches also the account given above of the two mathematical principles and of Kant's explanation of the applicability of mathematics. The proviso is that the mathematical principles focus also on the issue of the applicability of mathematics in experience as well as its pure a priori status. That is the reason for Kant's insistence on the schematized, operational procedures which provide a formal realization for the a priori category of magnitude in both pure and applied mathematics. That is the background to the alternative orders of Kant's inference. In one account the a priori status of a Euclidean postulate depends on certain supposed facts about our a posteriori intuition, even though the facts themselves and their potential support for a pure a priori axiom are questionable. In the alternative the combination of pure concepts and intuitions makes possible the development of a sophisticated pure mathematics, and that pure mathematics can be applied in experience as a consequence of the schematization of the intuitive operational procedures. Those intuitive procedures reflect the a priori character of space and time in the Aesthetic, but they function just as readily in the a posteriori context of perception as in the pure context of formal mathematics. Kant's discussion in the Axiom and Anticipation consequently presents

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a step from the higher-order transcendental principles to pure mathematics and its application in experience. It does not go from a posteriori truths about intuition to the truths of mathematics, or from a priori mathematics to the possibility of experience. The character of the transcendental principles is transmitted both to mathematics and to ordinary perceptual experience, but mathematics does not make the latter possible. What it makes possible is a mathematized treatment of quantitative aspects of that experience which is necessary for natural sciences and available in a primitive form in ordinary experience. But the central point of the mathematical principles is not to develop sophisticated applications of mathematics in experience but to explain how pure mathematics and its application are possible at all. Kant is a naturalist in attaching importance to the elaboration of objective experience in the sciences, but not in treating scientific principles as transcendental, or in treating only the standards of certainty or objectivity in science as legitimate.24 Kant's final view of mathematics in the Critique denies several alternative theories. He rejects a rampant Platonism which requires a separate realm for abstract mathematical objects such as numbers or geometrical figures.25 He does not reject a recognition of what these represent as abstract schemata, but their role in that case depends on the background in a priori categories and intuitions which contain the a priori, universal, operative procedures, and these admit the empirical reality of conventional inner and outer objects. He rejects Mill's and Berkeley's extreme empiricist account of mathematics without argument, since it fails to acknowledge the a priori status of mathematical truths. And he rejects the more familiar, current logico-empiricist accounts of mathematics based on interpretations of a formal system of analytic truths.26 He avoids psychologism, naturalism, analytic constructivism, and the naive traditional idealist account of the mind making nature. The rejection of most of these positions may be welcomed but contemporary philosophers will doubt whether Kant has a viable alternative to the prevailing logico-empiricist doctrines. Kant's own positive view is that mathematics is an abstract a priori representation of our experience, neither wholly divorced from it as in a rampant Platonism nor a mere a posteriori reflection of it as in Mill. It might be labeled a "structuralist" position, although its central point will be concealed without spelling out the kind of structure Kant envisages. That structure requires a reference to our a priori forms of intuition and their connection with a priori concepts in formal operative procedures such as surveying and counting. It has Kant's characteristic ineliminable reference to our psychological powers and is modestly idealist in that way. It is not a traditional idealism and does not pursue the consequences for a detailed formalization of mathematics.

[19] The Three Analogies of Experience

nt has already anticipated some general lines of argument in these three principles. In the Schematism he lists the connections between substance and permanence, cause and succession, and reciprocity and coexistence (B183-84). In the introduction to the Principles he distinguishes the mathematical and dynamical principles as concerned respectively with intuition and existence, and as having respectively "absolute" or "conditional" necessity but being equally certain. In an introduction to the three Analogies, Kant repeats some of these points and underlines others (B218-24). The Analogies deal with "necessary connections" in perception, and are guided by the claim that "time itself cannot be perceived." The role of the three categories is confined to their use in experience and does not license any "transcendental" use in relation to supposed things in themselves beyond experience (B223). Their role is to make possible certain objective time relations in immanent experience. I comment on each principle in turn and assess the outcome in the next chapter.

1. The First Analogy In the history of philosophy before Kant issues about substance ranged over a diverse and unclear area. A brief survey would include: (1) What are the basic ontological existents in nature or reality? The term "substance" may be offered as a nominal answer to such a question but it raises the prior issue of what counts as a substance. There is a difficulty in attaching an immediate sense to the original question, and Kant echoes a general doubt about such issues at B303 in rejecting a "proud ontology" in favor of an "analytic of concepts."

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Kant's interest in the category of substance has some links with these unclear traditional problems, but he generally sets them aside. It is sometimes claimed that he merely confuses them and their different conceptions of substance, but I shall suggest that his own interests differ from these traditional issues.2 Only in B is the principle called that of the permanence of substance, and I consider the B formulation: "In all change [ Wechsef] of appearances

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substance is permanent; its quantum in nature is neither increased nor diminished." That formulation indicates at once Kant's interest in linking such concepts as "substance," "permanence," "duration," "alteration" (Veranderung) for substances, and "change" (Wechsel) for properties. Kant's account of such "conceptual" connections does not imply that these are simply analytic truths, despite the fact that he identifies certain "tautologies" which derive from the relevant concepts (B227). Kant calls such connections, and philosophical interest in them, "conceptual" even when he regards the principles themselves as synthetic and not analytic truths (Bxiv; B750). 3 The conceptual structure which Kant discloses is directed at the general aim of showing how specific categories "make possible" certain time discriminations and so have an "objective reality" in experience even though the concepts are themselves a priori. Such a project evidently matches the account given above of the Transcendental Deduction. But Kant's discussion has an interest also in distancing his position from that of earlier philosophers such as Locke and Hume on the empiricist, and Leibniz and Wolff on the rationalist side (B264-65; B293). The proof is: [1] All appearances are in time (coexistent or successive). [2] Time itself remains and cannot change. For time is that in which coexistence and succession are determined and cannot therefore be itself susceptible of coexistence or succession. [3] Time itself is not perceived. [4] Hence something must be found in the "objects of perception," appearances, to stand for time; and all change must be identified in relation to this. [5] The substratum of the real is substance. [6] All that exists can be thought only as a determination of substance, and on it depends all time relations among appearances. [7] Substance therefore must remain the same; its quantity can neither increase nor decrease. The premises and the proof call for the following summary comments: [1] is open to two typically different interpretations. On a traditionalist account it expresses the assumption that our subjective representations, appearances, are given successively, so that the proof will then attempt to justify an inference from that assumption to the claim that independent, that is, spatial or physical, objects have objective temporal duration. Such an account is open to innumerable queries. Unlike

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the mathematical principles, which are said to concern primarily our subjectively successive intuitions, Kant here speaks of the existence of appearances, the "objects" of intuition (as in [4] and B218). We cannot assume that [1] expresses a purely inner appeal to succession or coexistence. The more plausible alternative is to take [1] as an expression of our normal experience of common time relations, so that the proof can then demonstrate what is necessary in order to constitute that experience. The proof will then be an exercise in a descriptive metaphysics of experience which delineates the required connections between concepts in that given experience. Kant undoubtedly trades on a distinction between our temporal mode of representing and the time relations of the content represented, but it is premature and misleading to conclude that Kant attempts to justify an idealist and dubious inference from private mental states to an objective, physical world.4 Just as the mathematical principles make possible determinate magnitudes in both inner and outer experience, so the Analogies make possible their "objects," things and events in both inner and outer experience.5 The distinction between what is "subjective" and what is "objective" ^involved in Kant's account, but is notoriously unclear and I shall suggest that it cannot be interpreted in the Analogies along traditional idealist lines. Item [2] is a premise, with a subsidiary argument, that few will dispute in relation to our ordinary conception of common time. It might be disputed by a traditionalist view of [1], for it might be thought that "subjective" time could change so that my time might be going faster than yours, or my time now might be racing while yesterday it was plodding. It is not obvious that such claims, in which temporal predicates are attached to time itself, make literal sense, and they would normally be understood to mean only that in some circumstances time, or events in it, seems to pass more or less readily. Premise [2] seems designed partly to underline that point about the literal absurdity of ascribing temporal predicates to time itself, and so to provide a reason to reject the traditionalist account. It is sometimes objected that Kant does characterize time in temporal terms as "permanent" or "enduring," but his expressions bleibt and wechselt nicht can be understood to characterize time as "unchanging" or "uniform."6 Premise [3] may seem puzzling, since in the Aesthetic Kant associates time with inner sense and so with inner perception, but the puzzle is easily resolved. For while Kant in the Aesthetic undoubtedly classifies the presentation of time as belonging to sensibility, premise [3] can be taken to claim that objective time is not itself so presented or directly given to perception. What we perceive, inner or outer, does not come with a date or duration already stamped on it.7 The aim of the proof is then to explain what else is needed beyond the mode of successive sense presentation to enable us to characterize dates and durations.

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It may be objected that nothing more is needed, and that we sometimes simply perceive actual temporal relations between objects, but this is to misunderstand Kant's project.8 He does not need to deny that we sometimes perceive such temporal relations between objects in order to ask what requirements enable us to do this, and to answer that among those requirements are the a priori concepts "substance/accident." Kant may be quite wrong in his answer about the conditions which enable us to say that we saw some event, but he is not shown to be wrong merely by pointing to the perceptual occasions which prompt the question. Nor is Kant concerned with a traditional problem about distinguishing veridical and illusory perception of objects and events. As I suggest later, his primary interest is in delineating the formal framework of concepts and intuitions which enable us to talk empirically of both veridical and illusory perception, and not to provide a criterion to distinguish them. The answer Kant gives to his question about the enabling conditions for objective time is in part definitional. Premise [5] claims that the notion of a "substance" irthat of the required unchanging substratum, and hence can stand for, or represent, time itself. There is in the claim some ambiguity between being a "representation o f ' and being "representative o f permanence or time itself. Kant's primary thought is that since time is not perceived something perceivable in experience has to be a "representative o f ' that missing feature. This does not necessarily mean that the representative is no more than an empirical "representation," that is a private mental state belonging to inner sense. Although Kant is not here attempting to formulate an empirical criterion for "substance" by appealing to physical or outer objects, these nonmental items may, as far as the proof goes, be wholly acceptable candidates for that "representative." They may be "representative of' time without being private representations in the empirical sense. The remaining steps are either [6] a consequence of this final position, or else [7] a further aspect of the concept of "substance," which provides the articulation necessary for a concept of a unified temporal duration and acts as a conservation principle of an indeterminate kind. Kant's added comments throw further light on the proof. The answer to the central question implicit in [4] indicates a network of concepts which include "substance," "accident," "change," alteration," "duration," and "permanence." Even at this level Kant improves on Locke, part of whose embarrassment over "substance" arose from his failure to recognize that the concept of "substance" is essentially connected to that of an "accident" or "property." Locke held that substances were totally distinct from properties and that our experience rested solely on the detection of sensory properties. But an empiricism which licenses concepts only if they can be related to sensory properties may then be forced to conclude either that "substance" is a bogus concept because it cannot be so licensed, or else that the underlying empiricist principle is false.9 Kant avoids the dilemma

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by insisting that the category is that of "substance/accident," so that if the senses present us with accidents or properties this already implies that they belong to some substance. If the notion of a substance is a priori, then the correlative notion of a property or accident is a priori too. The category is properly not just the concept of substance but the package of "substance /accident." At the end of his comments Kant makes the disclaimer that he is not concerned here with the "empirical criterion" of necessary permanence in, or the substantiality of, appearances (B232). The proof does not rely on the way in which the category is empirically realized in experience. This may seem at odds with his intention to identify the "realizing conditions" of categories in the Principles, but this is not so (B174-75). It was noted in chapter 17 that Kant is committed to a threefold distinction between pure unschematized categories, schematized categories, and their full empirical realization in experience. The B174—75 requirement is satisfied in the proof by relating the pure category to its schema, but even the schema and the proof of its a priori role in experience do not tell us exacdy how it is realized empirically. The a priori roles of "substance" and "cause" do not indicate which items in experience are substances, or cause specific effects. Though Kant is concerned with the way categories function in our immanent experience, his proofs do not appeal to empirically applicable criteria.10 Two important consequences follow. One is that the "parity" between inner and outer experience remains firmly in place.11 As far as the proof is concerned "substance/accident" may be realized empirically in either outer or inner sense, or both; the account does not at this stage express a traditional preference for either material or spiritual substance. The second point is that it would evidendy be a mistake to reinterpret Kant's argument as if it relied upon an empirical appeal to physical objects, clocks, chronometers, quartz crystals and the like, to measure the passage of time. Quite apart from the proviso that Kant is not yet giving a priority to outer over inner experience, it is also clear that he is not concerned direcdy with the measurement of time. Some commentators have recognized this point, but others have complained of the "excessively abstract" nature of Kant's argument (Strawson 1966a, 1 2 5 , 1 2 8 - 2 9 , 1 3 1 ) , and sought to remedy this by appealing to the operational measurement of duration with physical devices.12 The motive is misconceived; Kant's argument ^abstract, and to replace it with these empirical considerations is to subvert it.

1.1. Two Criticisms With those provisos it may well seem that the strongest objection to Kant's proof is its apparent triviality rather than its clear failure. The argument

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may seem to rest on no more than a definitional introduction of the category "substance/accident" in [5], but both the charge and denial of triviality may also result from misunderstandings. Strawson's discussion of the First Analogy in The Bounds of Sense and his related account of "reidentification" in Individuals offer ways of avoiding the charge of triviality, but I claim that they misrepresent Kant.13 Strawson's position is that there could be no experience without the reidentification of some particulars not under continuous observation. Without such reidentifiability every point in experience would have no link with what has happened before or may happen afterwards; each point would represent a totally novel experience disconnected from all others, and would make our connected experience impossible. Kant himself envisages just such a position in the Third Analogy (B260-61) in connection with the category of "community" or "reciprocity," but it is not represented in the First Analogy's account of "substance" (the point at B229 and B231 is different14). Strawson's argument emphasizes particulars, things, objects, or individuals, rather than substances, and is interested in reidentification with empirically applicable criteria, but Kant explicitly renounces an interest in empirical criteria. Strawson focuses on external, spatial individuals, and emphasizes the role of space in providing the required unchanging stability which Kant associates with the undifferentiated category "substance/accident" (1966a, 128-29, 130); but there is no explicit reference to space, and no restriction to spatial individuals, in the First Analogy. Strawson's notion of reidentification is, at least in part, that of reidentifying outer objects not under continuous observation; Kant's notion of substance is undoubtedly linked to that of identity, but the connection is with identity over change rather than identity over discontinuous perception. In conformity with that contrast between continuous and discontinuous perception Strawson's Kant operates within the traditional idealist framework of an attempt to justify our beliefs about the external world against an idealist skepticism. But it has been shown generally that this background cannot be assumed in Kant, and that the First Analogy's parity between inner and outer sense conflicts with it. Strawson's argument may avoid triviality but it is not Kant's. Another motive for the suspicion that Kant's argument is definitional or trivial comes from the passages where Kant spells out the conceptual, and analytic, network of "alteration," "persistence," and "change" which supplements the bare distinction between substance and accident (B226-27, B230-31): "All that alters persists, and only its state changes." Paul Guyer claims that these passages represent a separate second proof, which Kant is tempted by even though it rests, contrary to his official position, on analytic or tautological truths (1987, 215-16; 221-22). Kant recognizes that tautologies can be constructed from the conceptual net-

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work surrounding categories, and this is a standard consequence of his belief that metaphysics deals inevitably with concepts (B227, Bxiv). Characteristically his position is that expressing relations between concepts is bound sometimes to yield analytic truths, just as there are some analytic truths among other synthetic a priori propositions in mathematics (Cf. B135). Even where there is an analytic, or definitional, relation between concepts, as in [5], Kant claims in the slogan "Analysis rests on synthesis" that it rests on other synthetic truths. Still more important is the belief that his central relations between concepts are not analytic but synthetic a priori. This explains the claims in the First Analogy where "Substance is permanent" is said to be tautological, but the principle "In all change of appearances substance is permanent" is an "obviously synthetic proposition" (B227). The tautology expresses a conceptual and analytic relation between its terms given their use in experience, but the principle adds to this the nonanalytic claim that they have such a use in relation to appearances. The consequence that this makes possible an objective experience of duration is similarly a record of a synthetic, not analytic, a priori dependence between those concepts.15 There is no need to treat those passages as a separate second argument for the principle, but other aspects of Guyer's account of the argument also indicate some misunderstanding. What he calls the first argument corresponds to the formal steps [ l ] - [ 6 ] , and rests on Kant's beliefs that permanence is not directly perceived but must be represented by something perceivable in appearances. Guyer regards this argument as "deeply questionable" because it violates a Kantian principle expressed at Bxli that "the representation of something permanent in existence is not the same as permanent representation" (1987, 219-20). But Guyer himself formulates the argument in a way which does not obviously violate that principle as: "There must be permanence in what is actually perceived—empirical objects—because the permanence of time itself is imperceivable." Formulated in this way, Kant's argument requires only a permanence in what is perceived, in "empirical objects," and not a permanent representation. The objection rests on two noted ambiguities, for which Kant has responsibility, namely between a "representation" and a "representative," and more generally between the empirical and transcendental uses of the term "representation" or "idea." Kant requires a representative item in experience to stand for time, but it does not have to be an inner mental state. That representative may be assumed to be a mental state because it is classified transcendentally as an "idea," but this is to confuse the empirical and transcendental uses of the term. Empirically outer objects are "ideas" in Kant's transcendental sense but they are not "empirical ideas," that is private mental states.

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In this first argument Guyer claims that the notion of substance is then inferred as an ultimate bearer of properties from the notion of a permanent substance, but this is not demonstrable from the text. The proof at B225 first identifies substance as the "substratum of the real" which carries with it the notion of its accidents: "But the substratum of all that is real, that is of all that belongs to the existence of things, is substance; and all that belongs to existence can be thought only as a determination of substance." It then identifies substance with permanence and infers that it is unchanging. The inference might just as well be understood the other way round as in the step from [6] to [7] in the proof, but the issue is academic, since there is no serious doubt that Kant wishes to associate both notions, substance as property-bearer and as nominated representative of unchanging time. What Guyer regards as a tempting but erroneous second argument then spells out the conceptual, analytic network attaching to the concepts of substance and accidents in our "common understanding" (B227). That was already shown to be not a separate proof, but only an analytic step towards the synthetic a priori conclusion. A third argument to which Guyer attaches special value, associated particularly with the passage from B230-31, is based on "empirical verifiability" and claims that "only by treating any putative case of 'change' (in accidents) as an 'alteration' in the states of a continuing substance can we have evidence for the occurrence of any form of change" (1987, 224). Guyer elaborates this by referring, as have other commentators,16 to a necessary spatial dimension in the claim, despite the fact that the text makes no such reference. Similarly references to empirical verifiability and to the empirical determination of objective change in the argument are in danger of misrepresenting Kant for two reasons. First is the point already made that Kant's argument stops short of the empirical realizability of "substance" in our experience. It provides a link between pure categories and pure intuitions necessary for those empirical criteria, but it does not demonstrate which items in a posteriori experience are substances. In particular the proof occurs at an abstract level at which the category may be realized empirically in either inner or outer sense, or in both. Second, it is liable to misrepresent Kant's position in the priorities it associates with "substance" and "accident." On one side, it identifies potential changes as "states of affairs" identified only by a posteriori property terms, such as "red" or "black," but on the other, its central point is to give a priority to the alteration of substances in the identification of objective change. These priorities emerge in Guyer's description of the initial states of affairs and in the final claim that only by identifying "alteranon" in substance can we have evidence for objective change. Both priorities conflict with Kant's position. The first conflicts with Kant's evident conviction that we cannot logically identify accidents or

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properties without some reference to their bearers; and the second conflicts with his conception of the category as a package which includes equally both "substance" and "accident." Kant could not have wanted to say that alteration of substances is prior to change of properties, even though this reverses an empiricist priority for property change over the notion of substance. Kant's position is not that that empiricist priority should be reversed, but that it should be rejected. Alteration in substances is indivisible from change in their accidents; neither has priority over the other. Guyer regards the First Analogy as offering a justification for our identification of objective change in the face of the successive character of representations in inner sense, but that view conflicts with the suggestion that Kant is not trading on the empirical distinction between the inner and outer and is more naturally connected to the Second Analogy. In the First Analogy the category of substance makes possible not objective events, which have not yet come into the picture, but objective duration and an objective passage of time. In the Second Analogy the argument requires that an event is, analytically, a change of properties in one and the same object, but neither the First nor the Second Analogy make this their principal point. In both cases that principal point connects the categories of substance/accident and cause/effect with temporal relations, respectively, objective temporal duration and succession. These considerations show that there is no good reason to think that there are three separate arguments in the text. Guyer's first argument contains virtually the whole of the formal proof and should be regarded as Kant's integrated position. The alleged third argument is open to the difficulties noted above that it concerns the Second Analogy rather than the First, and attaches priorities to the separate categorial concepts of substance and accident which Kant disallows. There is no doubt that Kant is concerned with our use of the category in experience, and that this brings a reference to epistemic conditions of the possibility of objective duration. This is part of Kant's policy of explaining in the Principles the ways in which a priori categories nevertheless have a role in that experience. But Kant is not concerned here with actual empirical realizations of the category in inner or outer sense, or with measuring devices for time, or with the use and realization of "substance/accident" in science. The integrated proof oudines the links between substance/accident, permanence, and time, the network of concepts which elaborates those connections, and the way in which they relate to experience as conditions of the possibility of objective temporal duration. The concept of objective duration is, if Kant is right, synthetically dependent on the category of substance/accident. To construe the argument in that integrated way has two important consequences for Kant's later arguments. Since it is neutral between identifying "substance" empirically as either inner or outer, its conclusion can

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be used in the later Refutation of Idealism without begging the question. The evaluation of the Analogies in chapter 20 and of the Refutation of Idealism in chapter 21 consider that point again.17 The integrated argument also allows Kant to specify subsequently how the concepts "substance" and "accident" and any associated conservation principle are realized empirically in a science such as physics. Kant makes plain at several points that the central term "alteration" requires additional empirical resources to specify how it is actually used in a posteriori experience and in science (B213, B290, B291-92). I have insisted that the proofs are not designed to provide a fall empirical realization of categories in a posteriori experience, but only a schematized a priori network of concepts and intuitions required for that empirical realization. The additional resources needed for that purpose are evidently thought to be out of place in the a priori proofs of the Principles, but they are deployed in the later philosophy of science in The Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences. The First Analogy provides no more than a conceptual, but not merely analytic, template which the further projects in the Second Analogy, the Refutation of Idealism, and philosophy of science pursue in more detail and in other directions.18 Kant provides a fundamental basis for such projects but does not pursue them in the First Analogy itself.

2. The Second Analogy The two versions of the principle which I shall call the "general causal principle" (GCP) are19: A. Everything that happens, that is, begins to be, presupposes (voraussetzt) something upon which it follows according to a rule. B. All alterations (Veranderungen) take place in conformity with the law of the connection of cause and effect. Kant may have preferred B because it, unlike A, specifically mentions "cause" and "effect." Popular accounts represent the principle as "Every event has a cause," which is misleading in two important ways. First, in A Kant speaks of "presupposing," as he typically does elsewhere at B247, B264, B289, rather than "having" a cause, and in B what is required is only "conformity with," or "subjection to," the causal law. Since "the" causal law (GCP) is a general principle, and not a specific causal connection, even the B version requires only containment within a general causal network rather than any specific causal relations. Containment amounts to

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no more than an expectation for every event that it has a cause rather than a knowledge of what its cause is. Second, it is essential for Kant that "alterations" and "events" are changes in the states of phenomenal, not noumenal, substance, and it is those states, rather than the whole events in which they figure, which have the primary causal connections. The popular version places Kant in line with empiricists who speak of causal relations between events, whereas for Kant it is relations within events, between states of an object, which provide the fundamental locus for causal relations. Commentators have argued extensively over the number of proofs of the principle provided in the text, but I shall not pursue those issues.20 Kant provides a basic formal proof at B233-34, as he does in other cases, followed by extensive comments which sometimes duplicate the given proof, sometimes enlarge it, and sometimes comment on its implications. The proof is unusual in being prefaced by a recapitulation of the First Analogy, whose material is evidently assumed in its successor. It is true that the text sometimes suggests that a proof, or a new version of a proof, is forthcoming, for example at B236 ("Let us now proceed to our problem . . .") or B246 ("The proof. . . rests on the following considerations . . ."), but these seem merely to recapitulate in variant forms points that were already made in the basic proof itself. I outline the formal proof (B233-34), and then offer a summary catalogue of the subsequent discussion. [1] We perceive successively opposite states of some object and connect the perceptions in time. [2] Connection (Verknupfung) is not the work of sense, but of understanding or imagination determining inner sense. [3] Time itself cannot be perceived, and imagination may order successively perceived states in different ways. The order cannot therefore be determined merely by perception. [4] Order in the objects must be determined as necessary, that is as irreversible. [5] It must consequently depend upon a pure concept, namely, that of cause and effect. [6] Experience, with such a determinate time order, is possible only if all alteration is subject to causal law. The proof has a similar pattern to that in other principles. Like its counterpart in the First Analogy, [ 1 ] can be taken as a premise about our actual experience in the project of a descriptive metaphysics. [2] is drawn from

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Kant's general distinction between passive sense and a more active understanding or imagination in the Aesthetic and Analytic, especially B75-76. [3] has been discussed before and can here be interpreted either as the claim that the order of perception is not necessarily the objective order, or as the claim that what we perceive does not come labeled with a date stamp indicating its relative order or its unique location in a unified temporal frame. [4] consequently claims that something, some representative, is needed to fix that objective order, that is, to determine the order as irreversible. [5] evidently derives from [2] and [4], but introduces the relevant category, like [5] in the First Analogy; and [6] is the conclusion from the preceding premises. Kant may take it for granted that without an objective time order experience is impossible, and then the proof rests essentially on the conclusion that only the category of cause and effect provides such a time order in our experience. As in other cases Kant claims that the category is an enabling, not a guaranteeing, condition; and his inventorial stance invites initially a verdict about the truth of [6], rather than about the proof's success in refuting a traditional skepticism. It may be construed as an answer to an idealist skepticism about the external world, or to an empiricist skepticism about induction, but I argue that the connection to such skepticism is not straightforward and needs initially to be kept open. The subsequent discussion includes the following: (a) Reminder of the First Analogy and its formal proof (B233-34). (b) Reminder and reinforcement of the earlier account of "object" at A104ff. which indicates two ways of elucidating that concept: immanent and transcendent (B234-35, B242, B252). The rejected transcendent way identifies objects as things in themselves, while the accepted immanent way points to the conceptual rules which discriminate types among appearances. The objects in this case are not transcendent things in themselves but appearances governed by distinguishing rules. (c) Examination of the house and ship cases to illustrate the relations between things and events, irreversibility, and the distinguishing rules of (b) (B235-38). (d) Subjective succession is dependent on objective and this reinforces the appeals to irreversibility and necessity (B238-39). (e) An "indirect" argument; to suppose the absence of any determinate rule means no objective experience. Experience of an event is possible for us only under the given assumptions (B239^£0, B246-47).

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Part IV: The Analytic of Principles (f) Comparison with an empiricist account, such as Hume's ( B 2 4 0 41, and B793-94). (g) Reference to a consequent indispensable law of empirical representation of the time series that past determines future; understanding makes representations possible, not as in a Leibnizian account merely "distinct." The Principle of Sufficient Reason is the ground of possible experience (B244^16), but it cannot be proved "dogmatically" from concepts alone (B252-53). Kant's claims here evidendy refer to the Leibnizian view that reason provides a "distinct" access to a reality only confusedly presented to the senses. It underlines Kant's own general conviction that such principles cannot be proved by reason alone without any reference to the senses. (h) An objection defused by distinguishing time order from time lapse (B248-49). 2 1 (i) Relations between cause, force, and action; action as an empirical criterion for substance (B249-52). (j) The argument is not concerned with empirical knowledge, or with things in themselves, or with dogmatic proof (B252-55).

It is evident that Kant's discussion ranges more widely than that of other principles, and is righdy regarded as the centerpiece of the Principles. It binds together all three Analogies by presupposing the First and being centrally involved in the Third,22 refers to the central account of an "object" or "objectivity" from the Deduction, and indicates some scientific implications in its account of "action," "substance," and "continuity." It provides a focus for Kant's general hostility both to empiricist-Humean and rationalist-dogmatic, accounts of the principle of sufficient reason. I pick out for further discussion: the proof and the house and ship example (2.1); Kant's renewed account of "object," (2.2); and a comparison with Hume's empiricist account (2.3).

2.1. The Proof; The House and Ship Example The opening steps in Kant's proof are either uncontentious or have been considered before. It is uncontentious that we do perceive opposing properties in one and the same object, and even that this by itself is insufficient to identify a genuine event with its determinate temporal order. The claim that we do not perceive a determinate time order has been considered before and is not open to a standard objection which patently misses the point, namely that we do sometimes directly perceive a determinate time

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order. Commentators with strong empiricist tendencies, like Pritchard or Quinton,23 point to the undeniable fact that sometimes when we perceive an object moving from A to B we really are perceiving that event, as if this were an objection to Kant. Kant's interest is not in the issue of distinguishing illusory and veridical perception but with the identification of a background framework which makes such a distinction feasible. More importantly, he is not denying that in ordinary experience we may sometimes perceive the order of events but endorsing it as the basis for his further question. Given that we may sometimes perceive the order he asks: How is it possible for us to identify the order and to understand the notion of an event which we can perceive? It may be that the empiricist answer to these questions is correct, and that Kant's own answer is mistaken, but the empiricist claim cannot be demonstrated merely by noting an assumption which Kant himself endorses. This is not so much a criticism of Kant as a rehearsal of the assumptions in the proof. At this stage we should distinguish between two conclusions Kant wishes to reach. First, he wishes to claim that the package concept "cause/effect" is a condition for the possibility of events in our experience, and this might, somewhat unusually, be accepted even by empiricists. Second, he wishes to claim that that package concept is a priori and its fundamental principle, the GCP, is a synthetic a priori truth, but this claim could not be accepted by standard empiricists. These claims, and the underlying conflict with a standard empiricism, depend upon Kant's analysis of an event and his conclusions about the conditions of its possibility. Although Kant does not believe that his principle can be proved solely by an analysis of the concept of an event, nevertheless his proof contains such an analysis which points finally to the conclusion that the category of cause/effect is a necessary condition of our experience.24 Agreeably, and unusually for Kant, these aspects of his proof are explored in the particular example of the house and ship ([c] above). Although this is an illustrative example and not the formal, abstract proof itself it contains what seem to be the essential points. Despite the seemingly endless controversy which the example has generated, its basic features are simple. When we perceive a house, looking first at its ground floor and then at its roof, our perception has that successive character which Kant presupposes from the Aesthetic. Our intuitive mode of representing the circumstances, our perceiving, is temporal and successive. The same is true of our perception of a ship moving downstream, and yet only in the second case do we recognize an event in the content or object of the perception. The relation between the ground floor and the roof of the house does not constitute an event in that perceptual content, but the relation between the ship's position upstream and then downstream does. With one proviso these points are uncontroversial. What

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is controversial is the answer to the further question: What enables us to make such a discrimination? Kant's answer is that without the concept of cause/effect such a discrimination would be impossible for us; we could not then contrast an event with a nonevent such as a house. The proviso is a point sometimes raised about the claim that only in the ship case do we recognize an event. It is sometimes said that there is an event even in the house case, namely the event constituted by the alteration in our perception.25 It was for that reason that I expressed Kant's point by saying that in the house case there is no event "in the object." There may be an event "in the subject," that is, in the subject's perceiving, but Kant's point is to distinguish between that successive mode of perceiving and the "objective" content of what is perceived. This is not to contrast what is mental or inner with what is physical and outer since even within the former we can distinguish between inner items, "objects," and the way they are successively represented. Even in inner sense I can distinguish an event such as the headache's getting steadily worse from a successive representation of different aches. The discussion of the Aesthetic in chapter 9 made clear that the mode of perceiving can be made into a content. This relative account of an "object" is both controversial and important, and I consider it again under 2.2. The real difficulty in Kant's argument arises at this stage. The difference, for Kant, is that the event case is "irreversible" while the house case is not, which leads to the concluding claim that irreversibility itself depends on the concept of cause/effect. If those two claims were accepted, then Kant would have succeeded in showing that the concept of cause/effect is necessary for the discrimination of events. If it were also true that discrimination of events is necessary for an objective time order, and that without an objective time order no experience would be possible, then Kant's conclusion would be established. These steps in the particular example match, explicitly or implicitly, the stages in the formal proof, but a central problem arises from the appeal to irreversibility. An initial dilemma about irreversibility can be summarized in the following way. Suppose that irreversibility is either a causal or a logical relation. If it is causal the argument will be circular, and the claim that the ship sequence is irreversible is in any case false; if it is logical, then this too is either false, or else inadequate in Kant's own terms. The causal circularity arises if Kant assumes in a premise that causal irreversibility is involved in the case of the ship but not of the house, since it is the notion of "cause" which is at issue. The falsity results because for any event it seems always possible to conceive another with the order of its constituent states reversed, even if such reversed events never occur in our experience. It is possible for ships to move forwards downstream, but also to move backwards upstream. I cannot jump into the air and fly unaided but that con-

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tent describes an event just as much as my jumping into the air and landing back on the ground. The falsity of the claim that it is logically impossible to reverse a ship has already been indicated above in an appeal which recalls Hume's argument that causal relations are not logically necessary. To appeal to a logical impossibility in reversibility is apparently inadequate for Kant if it conflicts with his claim that the GCP is a synthetic, not analytic, truth. These dilemmas rest on an exhaustive opposition between synthetic, causal relations of irreversibility and analytic, logical ones, and may appear insuperable, but at least the final objection can be set aside. At this stage in the illustrative case Kant is merely explicating the notion of an event as a determinate, irreversible order between opposed states in one object. This is an analytic part of his argument, but even if the claim is analytically true it is compatible with the GCP's synthetic truth. For the GCP adds to that analysis the claim that what makes that notion of an event possible is the notion of a cause, and that added claim may itself be synthetic. It may relate two concepts in a typically Kantian dependence relation which is not merely analytic. In fact that is how Kant sees his central argument, so that this objection fails, but it still leaves the apparently decisive problems of circularity for causal irreversibility and falsity for logical irreversibility. The dilemma can be avoided if there is some other way of construing "irreversibility," but it would be question-begging to point out that the Humean alternatives of a causal or logical relation omit any reference to the Kantian synthetic a priori. The required form of irreversibility must be located independentiy of Kant's preferred classification, and I suggest such a form. The event is irreversible in virtue of its individuation as consisting of these states in that order. It is not logically irreversible in the sense that there can be no consistent conception of a reverse event; nor is it logically, or necessarily, irreversible in the sense that that event had to occur at that time and place.26 It is irreversible only because that event is individuated in that way; to identify its components in any other order would not be to identify that event. Such a resolution may initially seem unpromising because it appeals to an even stricter, perhaps trivial, logical impossibility. To say that this succession of states, so ordered, could not have been another event, differently ordered, or a nonevent like the house, seems to reduce Kant's position to tautology, even though he persistently expresses his argument in terms of this event or this perception (B237, B238, B243-44). But this impossibility is different from the earlier case and is not vulnerable to Hume's argument that logic can never restrict or determine the type of events that occur in experience. Not even Hume could deny that the event is essentially individuated in these terms, or that any deviation from them would yield a different event or a different content.

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The advantage of evading Hume's point may seem outweighed by the disadvantage of triviality. It may seem obvious that nothing of significance could be based on such a trivial truth, and particularly since Kant himself requires that the farther conclusion should be a synthetic rather than analytic truth. But the apparent conflict between this trivial analytic truth and Kant's required synthetic principle was resolved above. The objection would stand up only if this were the conclusion of Kant's argument, but it patendy is not; it is the first analytic step in the argument characterizing events in order to ask under what conditions we can identify them. Once the account of event individuation is given, Kant has substantively to argue that what enables us to conceive and individuate events in this way is the introduction of the concept of cause/effect in the GCP. There is no good reason yet to suppose that that additional argument yields analytic rather than synthetic truth, and certainly the current objection provides no such reason.

2.2. The Renewed Account of "Object" It was noted above that Kant refers throughout his discussion to ambiguities in the notion of an object. These ambiguities were resolved earlier in the Transcendental Deduction (A104ff.), and Kant repeats the same points in the Second Analogy (see [b] above, and B233-34, B235-36, B242-43). The basic ambiguity arises from treating objects either as things in themselves (noumena) or as appearances, and Kant's consistent message is that events, the objects involved in the argument, are only the latter and definitely not the former. Kant's project in the Deduction and more generally is concerned with the bathos of our immanent experience and not with a Leibnizian or rationalist realm of things in themselves. The two faces of the cipher expression "transcendental object = X " express exacdy that preference. That ambiguity is easily resolved in favor of the Transcendental Deduction's conception of an object as an object of immanent experience governed and identified by conceptual, but not necessarily analytic, rules, but there is another more extensive ambiguity, which may be less easy to resolve. Traditionalists, who regard the whole of Kant's project as occurring within the framework of a traditional idealism, may insist that the notion of an object is that of an external, physical object, and that the proof attempts to explain how knowledge of such objects can be constructed from subjective sense impressions. That Kant's target is the notion of an event rather than that of a physical object need not be an obstacle to such a view because Kant evidently thinks of events as composed out of objects and their properties. The traditionalist view may also seem supported by

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the house and ship examples, since both of these involve physical objects, but that consideration is double-edged. The house and ship cases are illustrative examples only and do not necessarily exhaust the range of events and nonevents. It was pointed out earlier that Kant trades on a "relative" distinction between "objects" and the way they are presented to us, between the content of perception and the mode of perceiving, which is not a distinction between what is empirically outer and what is inner, or between what is physical and what is mental. Kant's distinction can be applied just as well to objects and events in inner experience as to outer. We can distinguish between inner objects and our mode of representing them, and Kant is quite ready to admit causal relations between inner mental states (B152-54, A385-86). 2 7 Kant's central contrast is between the perceptual contents of an event and a nonevent, and not between a subjective sense impression of an event and the event itself, or between veridical and illusory perceptions of an event. Even the distinction between " . . . seems . . . " and ". . . is . . ." does not adequately capture Kant's contrast without some indication of the content in such expressions. "Seems to be an event" already meets whatever conditions are necessary for the introduction of the notion of an event. There is no doubt that some account of the ambiguous distinction between a subjective mode of representing and an objective content of representation ^involved in the Second Analogy as it was in the Aesthetic, but it is not committed to a traditionalist idealism in either passage. Kant, like many other philosophers, was unwise to use the radically ambiguous terms "subjective" and "objective," but commentators have an interpretative obligation to clarify their meaning as I have done. It would be quite wrong to assume that Kant uses it in a traditional idealist way when so many indicators point in another direction. The traditionalist account assumes an exhaustive dualism between subjective mental states and physical objects, and commentators often symbolize this division formally by using "A/B" for successive states in an external object and "a/b" for the associated mental representations.28 With this background Kant's central question has been expressed as: How can we infer from a succession in our private mental states ("a/b") a "real" succession in a corresponding external object ("A/B")? Or: How can I be assured that a succession in my perception is not illusory and corresponds to a genuine succession in the corresponding outer objects? A more sophisticated response, which notes Kant's claim (d), might put the question the other way round: How can we infer a subjective sequence "a/b" from an objective succession "A/B"? but all these questions presuppose the same exhaustive dualism. I argue that that dualist assumption is unwarranted, and that Kant's question can properly be put in neither of these ways. Just as Kant provides a more complex classification scheme than a

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traditional dualism in the Aesthetic, so he follows that more complex account in the Second Analogy. When Kant himself uses such variable letters he does not use them unequivocally in that dualist way. In the passage from B253-54 he makes use of "A/B" to mark a succession, but it is a succession in the states of the objects governed by causal law, and not a succession in a subject's mental states. At B237 he asks, what distinguishes apprehension of an event from that of anything else? and answers: in an appearance which contains an event (call the preceding state of the perception A and the succeeding B) B can be apprehended only as following upon A; the perception A cannot follow upon B but only precede it. For instance I see a ship move downstream. My perception of its lower position follows upon the perception of its position higher up . . . , and it is impossible that in the apprehension of this appearance the ship should be first perceived lower down and afterwards higher up.

The schematic letters "A" and " B " might be interpreted as referring to successive mental states primarily because Kant refers to them as "states of a perception" and talks of "the perception A/B," but this would be to overlook the significance of the contents of the perceptions represented by the schematic letters. If it is barely possible to read a dualist account into the text, it is also necessary to note its ambiguity and the natural alternative to such a reading. When Kant talks of the apprehension of this appearance, should we take the appearance to be the sequence of states in the object or content of the perception, or the sequence of states in the perception? Kant's starting point is "an appearance which contains an event," that is, a perceived sequence of states in an object, and he identifies the successive states perceived in terms of the position of the ship at different times, that is, in terms of the contents of such perception. Kant endorses that conception of an object elsewhere (B236): "The object is that in the appearance which contains the condition of this necessary rule of apprehension." The reference to our perception or apprehension is made because Kant is talking of our necessary ability to access and discriminate events through the senses. But we should distinguish in the passage, as was done earlier in the Aesthetic, the content of the perceptions from the mode of perceiving, and both of these from the actual event. Kant is interested in the conditions which enable us to discriminate event-contents within the scope of our perception, but that framework is not traditionally idealist and does not raise the familiar issues about illusion. That more complex threefold classification conflicts with the assumption of a traditional dualism, and it becomes an open question whether Kant's primary interest lies in the relation of the mode of perception to its

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content or in the relation between both of these and the actual event itself. If the earlier conclusion of 3.1 is accepted, then in the final clause of the quotation from B237 the impossibility referred to is that of apprehending this event in a different order, and this is a claim about the event whether it is perceived or not. This indicates that Kant is primarily interested in the relation between a successive mode of perception, which cannot discriminate any objects since it holds for all (B243; B246), and the content of perception in which events are individuated and distinguished from other objects such as houses. If this is so, then his interest is not primarily in the idealist relation between a subjective representation and an actual object, or in the related cases of illusion. Kant's interest is primarily in the way in which on the basis of a universally successive mode of representation we are able to discriminate within our apprehension and perception such distinctive contents as events. The more complex classification can now be seen to conflict with an idealist dualism in two ways; it is at least a threefold, not a dual, contrast, and it focuses on the relation between modes of representing and contents represented and not on the relation between these as inner "subjective," states of consciousness and "objective" items in an outer, physical world. A genuine event which meets the required conditions may occur within inner experience just as well as outer. These factors steer what may initially seem an indecisive text to a decisive but not traditionalist conclusion. That was the central point of Kant's account of the categories and objectivity in the Transcendental Deduction. It reinforces the idea that the distinction between "subjective" and "objective" time is not between inner mental states and outer objects, but between an inarticulate presentation of temporal succession to the senses, whether inner or outer, and their articulate, truth-valued determination through the categories. I suggest two pointers to such a conclusion: First, that from the point of view of a descriptive metaphysics it makes no difference whether we map our representations of experience or the items in experience so represented. Once such a descriptive metaphysics sets the issue of illusion aside the traditional problem of an idealist dualism becomes irrelevant to Kant's aim. Second, such a message, anticipating the Analogies, is implicit in a passage at B163: Now this synthetic unity, as a condition a priori, under which I combine the manifold of an intuition in general, is—if I abstract from the constant form of my inner intuition, namely time—the category of cause. . . . Thus my apprehension of such an event and therefore the event itself, considered as a possible perception, is subject to the concept of the relation of effects and causes. . . .

Kant infers directly from my apprehension of an event to the event itself as though the traditional idealist problems had no relevance to his project.

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Understood as part of a descriptive metaphysics of experience such an attitude makes good sense; understood as a contribution to traditional idealist problems it is incomprehensible. The same ambiguities and resolutions can be seen throughout the Second Analogy. Consider the following passage at B243-44. Kant begins by repeating the universally successive mode of representation which fails to discriminate any object, and goes on: immediately I assume or perceive that in this succession there is a relation to a preceding state, from which the representation follows in conformity to a rule, I represent something as an event . . . an object to which I must ascribe a certain determinate position in time . . . which . . . cannot be otherwise assigned. . . . The situation, then, is this: there is an order in our representations in which the present . . . refers us to some preceding state as a correlate of the event which is given; and though this correlate is indeed indeterminate it . . . stands in a determining relation to the event as its consequence. . . .

Throughout the passage Kant identifies the states in a postulated event within the framework of our perception or apprehension. That framework, with its universally successive mode, refers to the states in some object as constituents of an event, and reflects our sensory access to them, but the necessary connections are between those present contents, the states themselves, and not between my subjective mental states. When Kant appeals to irreversibility as "a determinate position in time which cannot be otherwise assigned" he is talking of an irreversibility not between my mental states, but between the state-contents of the event perceived. Kant needs to speak of these relations within the frame of our apprehension since these mark an ineliminable notion of "mind-dependence" within which such discriminations between events and nonevents occur. "Mind-dependence" in this transcendental context is not the empirical distinction we make within experience between inner, mental objects and outer, physical objects. Reference to our perception of events is made first because our modes of intuition are needed to realize concepts in our experience, and second because the successive mode of intuition within which all experience occurs is not sufficient to ground the apprehension of succession in objective events. Nor can it be objected that since for Kant everything rests on the privileged private experiences of individuals, he has no right to speak of "our" experience,29 for that begs the question by assuming that Kant endorses such idealist premises. Kant's readiness to talk of "our" experience in a metaphysics of experience shows on the contrary how far he is from accepting them. When Kant speaks generally of the term "object" in the Second Analogy at B235-36 and B242 he identifies two rejected positions. On

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one side he explicitly rejects the idea that an object is a transcendent thing in itself totally independent of our senses at B235-36. On the other side he also rejects any attempt to analyze "object" as no more than an aggregate of subjective representations or mental states. At B242 he outlines that possibility and rejects it: How, then, does it come about that we posit an object for these representations, and so, in addition to their subjective reality, as modifications, ascribe to them some mysterious [ich weiss nicht was . . .] kind of objective reality. Objective meaning cannot consist in the relation to another representation (of that which we desire to entitie object) for in that case the question again arises, how [it] goes beyond itself, acquiring objective meaning in addition to its subjective meaning as determination of the mental state.

Plainly, for Kant, some way out of the network of mental states is recognized if we are to understand the term "object" properly. It cannot signify merely relations to other representations, other mental states, as in phenomenalism, but equally it cannot signify some thing in itself wholly divorced from perception and its successive mode of accessing any objects. To reject both of these alternatives is to reject a dualist assumption which appeals only to subjective mental states or transcendent things in themselves, and to confirm Kant's revolutionary rejection of traditional dualism. It is to reject the doctrine he later explicitly repudiates as "transcendental dualism" at A378-79 and to underline his triple contrast between the transcendent, the empirical, and the transcendental. The lesson is that to speak transcendentally, neither empirically nor transcendently, of representations requires that we make room for a notion of determinate content, and that in such a notion there is an adequate account of objects and "objective meaning." It distinguishes the mode of representing from the content of representation in the way anticipated in the Aesthetic, and it records in a metaphysical inventory these salient features of our experience. It complements Kant's account in the Deduction of categories as responsible for the determination or articulation of what is presented indeterminately to the senses, and it underlines the ineliminable reference to our cognitive powers in Kant's nontraditional account of mind-dependence. More positively it meets Kant's requirement of showing how it is possible to use a priori categories, through schematism, in a posteriori experience.

2.3. Kant and Hume Kant's discussion of the relation between events and causes involves also criticisms of his predecessors, particularly Hume and Leibniz, that throw

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light on his final position. In this context Hume's empiricism is the more substantial target, but Kant underlines a familiar fundamental difference from Leibniz in his claim that the principle of sufficient reason cannot be "proved dogmatically from concepts alone." Kant holds, against Hume, that the GCP has an a priori necessity, and against Leibniz that that necessity is not due to reason alone. I outline in 2.3.1 the principal difference between Kant and Hume, and in 2.3.2 examine an issue about the necessity of specific causal laws. 2 . 3 . 1 . T H E CENTRAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN KANT AND H U M E OVER CAUSES

Two passages in the Critique, B 2 4 0 ^ 1 and B 7 9 3 - 9 4 , explain in detail Kant's attitude to an empiricist account of cause such as Hume's. In other briefer passages, at B124, B127, and B168, Kant indicates that the major difference between himself and Hume lies in the necessity and a priority which he attaches to the notion of a cause but which Hume rejects. These latter claims indicate that a nonempirical "dignity" attaches to the concept, and that an empiricist account leaves us with only a comparative, inductive basis for causal laws, or only a fictitious and arbitrary subjective habit. At B 2 4 0 - 4 1 Kant expresses the point in the following way: The accepted view is that only through the perception and comparison of events repeatedly following in a uniform manner . . . are we enabled to discover a rule . . . and in this way we are first led to construct for ourselves the concept of cause. Now the concept, if 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.

This passage links together the earlier complaints, and makes plain that the central issue concerns the "introduction" of a concept of "cause" and the claimed a priori necessity for the GCP. Kant believes that an empiricist account fails to acknowledge this "dignity," and consequently regards the GCP as purely inductive with no genuine universal validity. Such an account provides an instance of the more general disagreement with empiricism over a priori elements in experience. One way of elaborating this disagreement is to compare the orders of priority which Hume and Kant attach to the notion of a cause, to the experiential basis for specific causal laws, to the determination of objective succession in events, and to the GCP. Hume's account, as Kant describes it, attaches a priority to our noticing recurrent patterns of events in experience, coming to expect their persistence, and then devising the relation of

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cause and effect in order to formulate first the associated specific empirical laws and then some version of the GCP itself. What is noticeable in such an order is that it takes for granted the initial recognition of events, together with their implicit temporal sequences, in order to account for the subsequent recognition of persistent patterns and the development of a causal vocabulary to express them in specific causal laws. For Hume the GCP appears within such an order only as a final induction from the development, and presumed success, of specific causal laws. The GCP in such an empiricist account is no more than an inductive hypothesis and is as vulnerable to skepticism as any other inductive generalization.30 If skepticism about causes can be avoided only by establishing some noninductive necessity and generality in the GCP then this Humean account represents skepticism as unavoidable. This account portrays a recognizable Hume, and its general accuracy can be seen from Hume's treatment of specific causal laws and the GCP in the Treatise (1.3, §iii; §xiv-xv). Typically Hume devotes far more attention to the character of specific causal laws as based a posteriori on observed patterns of events. When, in the Treatise, he comes to consider the status of the GCP he considers a few plainly inadequate reasons for regarding it as a necessary truth, rightly dismisses them all quite briefly,31 and returns at once to the more congenial discussion of specific causal laws. It is also fair to regard Hume as treating temporal features, such as objective succession in events, as part of what is given a posteriori in experience even though they are "modes" rather than objects. Certain a posteriori experiences present us with a simple, relative, temporal order from which we come to derive a unified and uniform time, and the inductive scientific theories in kinematics and physics which describe it. If there are any necessary truths about time and cause, in science or ordinary experience, they will be relations of ideas, or analytic truths, rather than matters of fact. Kant's position, by contrast, offers an almost reversed order of priority among these items. For him the notions of an event, and of recurrent patterns of events, are not prior to that of cause, and specific causal laws are not prior to the GCP. On the contrary, Kant believes that the GCP is required in order to introduce the notion of an event, and is prior to the formulation of specific causal laws. The hierarchical account of experience at A126, with the most fundamental laws at its apex, represents the GCP as the prior law under which specific causal laws are subsumed, but from which they are not derived. The GCP is consequently represented not as an inductive generalization from specific causal laws but as an a priori condition of their possibility and of possible experience. The position is more complex with respect to time. Kant holds that time, as a presented succession, is given as an a priori form of sense, but that the GCP, as a prior condition for the apprehension of

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events, is a required condition for the possibility of the objective, determinate time sequences in those events. A Humean empiricist might accept some version of Kant's division between the senses and the understanding, but could not accept Kant's notion of what is "given a priori," or his belief that the GCP is a prior condition for the possibility of objective temporal sequences, or that the GCP is a synthetic a priori truth. Both Kant's and Hume's positions are vulnerable to objections. Hume's position may be thought vulnerable to the objection that it does not provide an adequate account of causality, or of causal laws. It is certainly true that Hume never considers, and so does not rebut, Kant's different order of priority and the synthetic a priori necessity attached to the GCP. Although Kant has provided a new account of the dignity and necessity attached to the GCP he still has to establish not only his order of priority among these elements, but also the belief that the fundamental principles, including the GCP, are a priori. The account begins to clarify the differences between Hume and Kant over causality but does not yet indicate which position is correct. That account is confirmed by the second passage from B792-94. There Kant attempts to distinguish what is correct and what is incorrect in Hume. Kant believes that Hume was correct in questioning, and rejecting, the possibility of establishing a priori truths about the world from reason alone, but because Hume failed to distinguish truths of reason from those of understanding he was led, mistakenly, to reject also a priori truths of the latter kind. Hume does better than Leibniz in rejecting a dogmatic establishment of a priori truths of reason, but he fails to see that there are a priori truths of understanding which have a legitimate, constitutive role in experience. we suppose ourselves to be able to pass a priori beyond our concept and to extend our knowledge . . . either through the pure understanding in respect of that which is at least capable of being an object of experience, or through pure reason, in respect of such properties of things, or indeed even of the existence of such things, as can never be met with in experience. . . . He therefore regarded all supposed a priori principles as fictitious and concluded that they are nothing but a custom-bred habit arising from experience and its laws, and are consequendy merely empirical . . . and in themselves contingent, to which we ascribe a supposititious necessity and universality.

In relation to causality this general error led Hume to infer the contingency of the law itself from the contingency of our determination in accordance with the law. Kant makes plain that while principles, such as the GCP, can be known a priori, the specific laws subsumed under them can be known only a posteriori through experience.

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If, therefore, wax, which was formerly hard melts I can know a priori that something must have preceded upon which the melting followed according to a fixed law, although a priori independent of experience I could not determine in any specific manner the cause from the effect or vice versa. Hume was therefore in error in inferring from the contingency of our determination in accordance with the law the contingency of the law itself. (B794)

What Hume failed to see, according to this diagnosis, was the a priori status of the GCP as a condition for the possibility of events, objective temporal sequence, and specific causal laws subsumed under the general principle. 2 . 3 . 2 . NECESSITY IN SPECIFIC CAUSAL LAWS

This is exactly the account already outlined from the Second Analogy, and it runs counter to a popular view of the disagreement between Kant and Hume, which represents Kant as asserting, and Hume as denying, that specific causal laws are necessary What separates Kant from Hume is not belief or disbelief that specific causal laws are a priori and necessary, for both reject that claim. What separates them is that Kant attaches a prior, and essential, status to the GCP in our experience which Hume, rightly or wrongly, failed to notice. To put the point in Kant's own terms, Hume did not recognize that there are a priori principles of the understanding which make possible our knowledge of objects of experience, and he confused the a posteriori character of specific laws with the a priori character of the GCP under which the former are subsumed. Two objections might be raised against this account, but neither requires any change. First, it may be pointed out that Kant often speaks as if specific causal laws are themselves "necessary" (B124, B168); second, it may be argued that when Kant talks of the "contingency of the law itself' at B794, the law referred to is the specific relation between the sun's heat and the melting wax. Both objections can be answered. In those earlier passages Kant ascribes a necessity at least to schematic versions of particular causal laws; the concept "cause" is said at B124, to make a strict demand that "something, A, should be such that something else, B, follows from it necessarily and in accordance with an absolutely universal rule." But it is quite natural to read this as expressing what the category of cause and the GCP add to their contingent use in experience. Specific causal laws require a posteriori experience but because they depend on the GCP they share in, and reflect, the "dignity" and "necessity" of that a priori principle. Both Hume and Kant offer explanations for our attaching some "necessity" to causality and even to specific causal laws, but Kant's appeal to a genuine necessity in the GCP is not to a mere fiction. Kant's

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hierarchical structure ensures that a posteriori laws subsumed under fundamental a priori principles reflect something of that special status. The point is made later in the Postulates, where an empirical criterion of necessity is the hypothetical necessity of an effect given its cause (B279-80). That first objection can be accommodated, but the second point scarcely needs to be accommodated at all. In the passage from B794 Kant's reference to "the law itself' might conceivably refer to the specific causal link between the sun and the wax. Kant does not specify, in that sentence, which law he has in mind, but the whole passage is designed to draw a distinction between a priori principles of the understanding, such as the GCP, and transcendent principles of reason. Kant thinks Hume right to reject the latter but wrong to reject the former, and explains Hume's error as a failure to see the difference between them. In the subsequent discussion it is the former principles which are characterized as noncontingent, a priori, and necessary truths, and it is their instances in specific causal laws which are characterized as contingent and a posteriori. In the light of this background it is inconceivable that Kant could have supposed the specific a posteriori instances of the GCP to be themselves unqualified a priori or necessary truths. The objection can be set aside and the original account retained.

3. The Third Analogy As in the other Analogies, Kant changes the formulation of the principle between the two editions, but this time the change is more significant. A: All substances, so far as they coexist, stand in thoroughgoing community, that is, in mutual interaction. B: All substances, so far as they can be perceived to coexist in space, are in thoroughgoing reciprocity. In A Kant speaks only of "all substances" being in mutual interaction, but in B that general claim is qualified by reference to "substances so far as they can be perceived in space" I have insisted throughout the earlier arguments, in the Deduction and the previous Principles, that Kant maintains the noted parity between space and time. In the Principles the parity is not merely that our forms of inner and outer intuition share common features and attach the same status to their objects, but that the principles and their proofs operate at a level which does not explicitly distinguish their application to outer or inner objects. Even where, as in the Second Analogy, the central point turns on differences between two kinds of external object, a

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house and ship, Kant does not explicitiy restrict the application of the relevant categories to spatial items. So long as there is a distinction to be drawn between the event and the successive mode of its representation, even within inner experience, the argument will apply. Even in A that neutrality remains for the Third Analogy, but it is now apparently rescinded in the formulation in B. One reason for the change might be that for the first time Kant realizes that he should be quite explicit about the priority which he has all along attached implicidy to the spatial cases. Another possibility is that changes in B, namely, the new Refutation of Idealism and General Note on the System of the Principles, encouraged him to concentrate on the spatial cases. Both of these sections, especially the Refutation, argue for and emphasize a priority of space over time in our objective experience. They clarify and underline a point which was made in the Fourth Paralogism A but only in an unclear and misleading way. It was noted earlier that the rejection of idealism in the Aesthetic in A did not turn on a priority of outer over inner experience, but on the denial of the idealist priority assigned to the inner over outer sense. In the Refutation of Idealism Kant goes further and reverses the idealist priority of inner over outer experience. Should we, therefore, understand all the previous arguments in the Principles as depending on that reversed priority? My belief is that this would be a mistake. Neither in the Transcendental Deduction nor in the mathematical principles is there any reason to rescind the parity between space and time in those arguments, and the same is formally true of both the First and Second Analogy. Since the Refutation argument actually turns on the claim that spatial, outer objects or substances are prior to inner, Kant might also have changed the First Analogy in B to underline that point. Commentators have noted that later (after B) Kant indicated a priority for the spatial case even in the First Analogy, but its text was not changed in that respect.32 Even in the Third Analogy, although there is a new emphasis on the spatial case in the formulation of the principle, the argument does not explicitiy insist on the priority of space over time. Almost all the argument in the text of A is retained in B and makes claims which are not restricted to spatial substance. At B260, for example, Kant expresses a conclusion in exacdy the same form as the principle in A which makes no distinction between types of substance.33 We have to take it that Kant's argument, as opposed perhaps to his ultimate belief does not depend on the priority of space over time. The argument of the Third Analogy follows a similar pattern to the other Analogies. It turns, as before, on the claim that time is not itself perceived so that if we are to use such notions as "coexistence" or "simultaneity" in experience, then something must be found to stand for, to be a representative of, those relations. The same responses must be made here

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to the empiricist objection that we just do sometimes perceive coexistents, if both are visible, audible, or perceived together Kant's view is that this is a special case which cannot adequately explain the conception of coexistence or simultaneity we deploy where there is no coperception. The key to Kant's argument, as he now puts it in B with specific reference to outer things, is: in the case of things which coexist externally . . . a pure concept of the reciprocal sequence of their determinations is required. . . . But the relation of substances in which the one contains determinations the ground of which is contained in the other is the relation of influence. . . . Thus the coexistence of substances in space cannot be known in experience save on the assumption of their mutual interaction. (B257)

As in the other Analogies where a category, substance, or cause was required if we are to satisfy the requirements for a certain temporal discrimination in experience, so in the Third Analogy the category of mutual interaction is required to enable us to establish coexistence and simultaneity. Just as the GCP is prior to, and required for, our discrimination of objective succession in events, so the principle of reciprocity (PR) is prior to, and required for, our discrimination of coexistents and simultaneous occurrences. In the discussion, Kant comments on the role of PR in our conception of a continuous, nonisolated experience, on the location of perceivers, and on implications for the notion of an "empty space" (B258, B260-61). 3 4 The Third Analogy may seem less important than the others, perhaps partly because it presupposes them, but the brief text contains features which outline its distinctive role. I consider in 3.1 how Kant understands coexistence; in 3.2 the argument from "isolation" and a comparison with Strawson's appeal (in Individuals) to "reidentification"; in 3.3 mutual causal interaction (MCI) with and without the perceiver, and in 3.4 local and global issues and the reference to "empty space."

3.1. Coexistence and Cause Kant's position in the Analogies was shown in 2.1 not to be vulnerable to the blunt empiricist charge that we do sometimes just perceive duration in objects, or succession in events, or coexisting things, and the point is underlined by Kant's account of coexistence. An empiricist might claim that we sometimes perceive directly that " X and T exist at r," but Kant argues that existence of two objects at the same time can be understood only through their mutual causal interaction (MCI) (B257). " X and T both exist at f " cannot, according to Kant, be elucidated merely as "Xand Twere perceived together at but requires a more complex causal inter-

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action between X and T which indicates a need for the category and its associated principle. If there is MCI between Xand T, then they certainly coexist, and Kant invokes this claim as the explanation for our reciprocal perception of both X and X, that is, first the perception of X without T (X and -«T) followed by a perception of T without X ( T and ->X). Indifference in the order of our perceptions of X and T, which is not by itself sufficient to establish their coexistence, is explained by their MCI. The argument turns on Kant's belief that " X and Tare both perceived at tn is inadequate for coexistence because time is not itself perceived, and because coperception of X and T is a special case. Just as in the Axioms Kant treats surveying or counting as the basic case and immediate recognition of magnitude as special, so in the Third Analogy he treats coperception as a special case and the appeal to MCI as basic. In both cases there are clear grounds for that position, since coperception may by itself be insufficient and severely restricts the scope for ascription of coexistence and simultaneity to the local context of current perception.

3.2. The Argument and Role for Reidentification The central argument for that conclusion is that if all substances were completely isolated, then their coexistence would not be a possible perception, and "the chain of empirical representations, that is, experience, would have to begin anew with each new object" (B259-61). Kant invokes the principle that "everything without which experience of these objects would be impossible is necessary" to infer that all coexisting substances in appearance necessarily stand in MCI (B259-60). Kant evidently anticipates Strawson's argument (1959, 33-36) for the necessary reidentification of objects not continuously observed, but associates it not with the category of substance but with that of reciprocity. His position can be justified in the following way: Strawson's requirement of reidentification may be necessary, but is not sufficient, for the condition of nonisolated continuity which both philosophers regard as essential for experience. If we could not identify items as the same in a subsequent noncontinuous perception then that continuity would be impossible, but even with that condition the items reidentified might not exist continuously between the perceptions. We might have the situation which Kant describes throughout the Third Analogy, when coperception of X and Tis impossible, as perception of X and ->T followed by Tand where neither the continuous existence nor the coexistence of A and B is yet established. Even if subsequently X and T are perceived as the same again this does not exclude the possibility that they did not continuously exist between the times of perception, or the possibility that the two objects did not coexist during that interval. The same

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point is made by Kant in the more complex case of the order-indifference of the perception, successively, of A, C, and D (B258). Since those possibilities are excluded by the requirement of MCI, Kant's argument identifies that further condition of the required continuity in experience. Strawson's own position explicitly excludes the assumptions of traditional idealism (1959, 34), but that is not true of the position he ascribes to Kant. Strawson's position rests on a contrast between the gappy, noncontinuous perception we have of the same object over a period and the object's continuous existence, but such perception does not refer to some purely private sense impression from which claims about objects are to be inferred or constructed. The structure of the argument is that we are given in such perception a content of object X a t one time and of such an object at another time but without continuous observation of X over that period, and are asked to consider what would be the consequence of never allowing those contents to be of the same object. Kant's argument has the same structure. It allows that we are given a content in perception of objects A, B, C, D and then asks how we can ascribe coexistence to these objects when they are not continuously perceived, separately or together. Both arguments turn on the character of the contents perceived, and not on an idealist inference from private sense impressions to outer objects. If it is said that Strawson, unlike Kant, repudiates traditional idealist assumptions the response is that Kant also repudiates those assumptions earlier in the Aesthetic and later in the Refutation of Idealism. These are quite explicit repudiations, but to them can be added Kant's exasperated response to those, like Garve, who misunderstood his project in just that way.

3.3. MCI With and Without Perceivers Kant adds to that point about the requirements for continuity in experience a recognition that the continuity is of two kinds. The first concerns the impersonal continuity and identity of objects over time when they are noncontinuously perceived, and the second concerns the continuity of the perceiver with those perceived objects. The former represents the subject as relating objects apart from itself, and the latter as relating itself to other objects. The former has been considered in 3.2, but Kant indicates the latter, rather obscurely, in a passage at B260: We may easily recognise from our experiences that only the continuous influences in all parts of space can lead our senses from one object to another. The light, which plays between our eye and the celestial bodies, produces a mediate community between us and them, and thereby shows us that they coexist. We

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cannot empirically change our position, and perceive the change, unless matter in all parts of space makes perception of our position possible to us.

Our location as perceivers in space is subject to the same PR as any other spatial objects. Just as the PR is required to enable us to discriminate coexisting objects in space apart from ourselves, so it is also required to represent ourselves as objects coexisting in space with other outer objects when we perceive them. There is MCI between us and distant stars when we perceive them, exemplified on our side by our ability to change our position with respect to them and our perception of them. That particular case, like the others, still rests on two Kantian claims, namely, that time is not itself perceived, and that the specific principles are necessary to establish the relevant temporal relations.

3.4. Local and Global Community and Empty Space In all the Analogies there is a distinction to be drawn between what might be called a local and a global conclusion from Kant's arguments, although that terminology is explicitiy used only in the Third Analogy in the contrast between dynamische and locale Gemeinschaft (B260). The point is stressed in the summary of the Analogies (B264-65 and note). The unity of the world-whole, in which all appearances have to be connected, is evidendy a mere consequence of the tacidy assumed principle of the community of all substances which are co-existent. For if they were isolated, they would not as parts constitute a whole. . . . We have . . . shown that community is really the ground of the possibility of an empirical knowledge of coexistence, and that the inference, righdy regarded, is simply from this empirical knowledge to community as its condition. (B265n)

The "global" unity of the "world-whole" is represented as a further inference from the principle of the Third Analogy, and the latter's argument is represented as a descriptive metaphysics in which our empirical knowledge of local coexistents is assumed in order to identify its underlying transcendental condition. Both claims throw an important light on Kant's position. In the First and Second Analogies there is a difference between such claims as that in any change something remains or in any event a cause is presupposed, and that nature, or reality or experience, consists of unchanging substances and their properties, or that nature or reality is a system of thoroughgoing causal influences. In the Third Analogy the same contrast can be seen in the claims, first, that to be able to ascribe coexistence some reference to the PR is required, and second, that nature consists of substances in thoroughgoing dynamic interaction. The first claims focus on

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conditions which make possible a recognition of things, events, coexistents and local time relations, while the second outiine a global picture of nature itself with one unique temporal and causal system. The former principles are required to introduce into our experience the recognition of substances, events, and coexistents, and with them objective duration, succession, and simultaneity, but they do not establish that all events occur in a unique, closed, and determinate order, or that everything in nature is assigned a unique place in one determinate time, or that everything is in dynamic interaction with everything else. Kant's arguments clearly point to both claims but the immediate target of the proofs is the former claim rather than the latter. The suggestion is that once such introductions have been properly recognized a further inference can be drawn to the global unity of the world-whole. Kant recognizes in this way a difference between the immediate conclusions of the proofs of the principles and that wider inference, but it remains uncertain how that inference is to be understood, and I consider it in the evaluation of the arguments in the next chapter. Kant also makes a brief comment on the implications of the PR for the notion of an "empty space."35 If it is necessary for experience that nature should consist of substances in dynamic causal interaction it may seem as though the notion of an empty space, that is, a space without any such interacting inhabitants is impossible. Yet Kant's central argument for the a priority of space in the Aesthetic rested on the claim that empty space is possible. Kant notices this difficulty and responds by distinguishing different types of possibility, consistent with his general position and his analytic apparatus. The claim is that the Third Analogy cannot establish the unqualified impossibility of empty space, but only the impossibility of such a space within our experience. Kant claims that there may actually be empty spaces in contexts outside our experience, but that we could never perceive or know them. So empty space is logically possible, as a theoretical, notional possibility, but it is not materially possible in our cognitive experience. That response reinforces two elements emphasized earlier in Kant's position, namely the relativity of Kant's claims with respect to our human experience, and the limitations of the necessity he attaches to the principles. They are not necessary by virtue of holding in all possible worlds, but by virtue of holding necessarily of our world. Kant's response also reinforces the earlier claim that the possibility of empty space depended on Kant's conception of Euclidean geometry. It was suggested that Euclid provides a model of such an empty space, and so provides a ground for regarding space as a priori, even though that model cannot be direcdy exemplified in our experience. Euclid provides a schematic, abstract representation of our spatial experience, but because it dispenses with actual objects and actual locations it cannot fully represent the experience in which these exist. Its abstract representation can be fully realized only when its pure form is filled out with a posteriori material.

[19] What Do the Analogies Achieve?

T h e Analogies provide the centerpiece of Kant's account of the constitutive principles, and it is correspondingly important to assess their success as a measure of Kant's positive project before the therapeutic unmasking of philosophical illusion in the Dialectic. The detailed arguments in the Analogies were outlined in chapter 19 but they contain some ambiguities which need to be resolved on the way to a final assessment. Accordingly I recapitulate the general form of the three arguments as they were presented, resolve some of the ambiguities in section 1, and finally consider their success in section 2. The overall argument has the following form: [1] Experience contains objective temporal duration, succession, and coexistence or simultaneity; in it we discriminate things and their properties/relations, things and the events and changes in which they figure, and things with their changes in mutual interaction. [2] Objective time itself is not directly perceived. [3] The temporal features in [1], and the uniform time which they presuppose, have as a consequence of [2] to be represented by something perceivable in experience to function as a representative of these time relations. [4] The search for that representative is not to be conducted at an empirical level and does not concern specific empirically applicable criteria. The argument requires that a priori categories should be combined with the a priori intuitive forms of space and time, but that a priori combination is not yet a full realization of categories in a posteriori experience. (B748 1 )

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[6] The categories, and their subsidiary concepts, provide a network for establishing the determinacy of the relevant objects (things/properties; things/events; coexistence) and the relevant temporal features (duration; succession; simultaneity), without which objective experience would be impossible. [7] The relevant principles, separately and together, provide a global structure for experience with the features from [6]. 2 [8] Those principles are synthetic and a priori.

I comment briefly on these steps to underline points made in chapter 19.1 have chosen to express [1] in terms of the attempt to disentangle the a posteriori and a priori elements in our experience, but it would be possible to express it by starting from a purely formal sensory manifold, undifferentiated in its contents, in order to show how categories combine with it. The preferred expression of [1] reflects part of Kant's appeal to an analytic rather than synthetic method, but both methods approach the same issues and arrive at the same conclusions from different directions. I have chosen the former because it corresponds more obviously to the project of Kant's transcendental topic, and because the alternative contains a potential misunderstanding. It is natural for contemporary philosophers to understand the alternative, "constructive," project as a Carnapian construction of the outer world, or as a reductive phenomenalism in which external objects are transmuted into relations among sense data, but I have argued that this is not Kant's model. It is too close to traditional idealism and to an empiricist analysis to be ascribed to Kant. He is not attempting to show how categories or categorical experience can be analytically constructed out of private sense experiences, but how a priori concepts, independent of experience, nevertheless have a role in relation to it. They are a grid imposed on a sensory manifold and not an analytic derivative from it. The point is reinforced in [2], because it indicates a problem about "objective" time. If objective time relations were just presented a poste-

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riori to our senses there would be no need to appeal to a priori categories, but for Kant the "subjective" sensory succession which is presented to inner sense provides no direct access to features of objective time. The distinction between "subjective" and "objective" is perennially ambiguous and creates other misunderstandings and is considered further in section 1. For the present I note only that Kant's view of objective time in [2] is shared with Hume in his contrast between "substance" and "mode": As 'tis from the disposition of visible and tangible objects we receive the ideas of space, so from the succession of ideas and impressions we form the idea of time—nor is it possible for time alone ever to make its appearance, or be taken notice of, by the mind. . . . We may conclude that time cannot make its appearance to the mind either alone or attended with a steady unchangeable object, but is always discover'd by some perceivable succession of objects. . . . Five notes play'd on a flute give us the impression and idea of time, tho' time be not a sixth impression which presents itself to the hearing. (Treatise 1.1, §vi)

Both Hume and Kant deny that objective time is simply perceived as a "steady, unchangeable object," and both classify it as a "mode" or "modification" of sense rather than a substance. Differences between them arise from their divergent solutions to the resulting problem of explaining how our conception of objective time relates to successive perception. Kant's solution turns on his belief in [3] and [4] that some "representative" standing for objective time must be located in experience under the guidance of a priori concepts, but the apparatus of a priori categories and intuitions has no parallel in Hume. Hume's enquiry is conducted throughout at an empirical level which Kant explicitly excludes in his transcendental account.3 That transcendental account produces neither merely empirical criteria, nor analytic conceptual relations, nor transcendent references to things in themselves. It yields instead, if Kant is right, the principles claimed to be synthetic a priori in [8] which are necessary for our recognition of objective time.

1. Ambiguities in Kant's Conclusions and Arguments The detailed arguments in [5] for each of the relational categories were considered in chapter 19 but left behind a number of ambiguities. That discussion and the consequent outline, [ l ] - [ 8 ] , resolve some of these by representing the proof structure in three distinguishable phases with their conclusions at [5], [7], and [8]. Phase I outlines the core proofs for each principle up to [6]; phase II outlines an extension from the local core in [5] to the global picture at [7]; phase III adds the meta-classification of the

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relevant principles as synthetic a priori in [8]. The following discussion trades on the distinctions between the three phases.

1.1. Formulating Kant's Conclusions Kant evidentiy regards the separate proofs in the Analogies as pointing to a general framework due to understanding, an "affinity," for an experience containing substances, change in their properties, causal influences between them, and reciprocal interaction (B862). There is equally no doubt that in the Dialectic Kant has a conception of a closed, completed framework of these relations, due to reason, which he regards as problematic and responsible for the "conflicts of reason" in the Antinomies. The constitutive principle of causality in the Second Analogy and its nonconstitutive, purely regulative counterpart in the First Antinomy might both be expressed as "Every event has a cause," but Kant evidentiy draws a sharp distinction between them. If that distinction is to be respected the two principles need to be formulated in different ways.4 Kant formulates the principles of the Analogies in universal terms as "Every event has a cause," or "All appearances contain the permanent (substance) as the object itself," or "All coexisting substances stand in mutual interaction." They appear also in variant and weaker forms, such as "Every event presupposes a cause," or so that appearances are "subject to," or "conform to," categories and their associated rules. The latter formulations point to the weaker idea that "cause" and "substance" are applicable to our experiences of change rather than to stronger claims that we know a priori what the relevant substances or causes are in specific cases, or that we can identify particular things or events only by identifying a permanent substance or a causal connection. In the conclusion of phase II at [7] the suggestion is that all substances and causes occur within a unique global system, but this, too, is ambiguous. It might signify no more than the earlier claim that all appearances are "subject to" causal rules or to the discrimination between "substance" and "accident," but might additionally indicate the idea of a closed, determinate, global system in which the series of causes or the identification of substances is unified and complete. It is not easy to formulate these variants but the GCP in the Second Analogy might be expressed as either (1) or (2). (1) Every phenomenal event is the outcome of a necessary causal law. (2) Every phenomenal event presupposes some causal connection. (1) might be taken, implausibly, to indicate that there is just one causal law which governs and makes necessary every event, or might indicate that

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such events are governed by some causal law among a variety of them. The necessity canvassed in (1) is also ambiguous. It might signify a necessity attaching to the occurrence of every event within the global network of events, and would then claim that every event had to take place as it did in the series of world states at its particular time. But it might signify only a necessity attaching to the effect-state in an event given its antecedent state and a causal law which governs it.5 In the discussion of the proof of the GCP it was denied that the necessity for the category of cause was of that global, determinist kind. If (1) is understood as expressing a strong claim about the necessity of every event in the global context, it raises issues about a comprehensive determinism which are addressed by Kant primarily in the Antinomies rather than the Analytic of Principles. To understand it in that way would be to regard it as a "regulative" principle of reason rather than as a "constitutive" principle of the understanding. (2) avoids those handicaps and is consequently a better formulation for the GCP. It says only that events presuppose causality and not that every event is bound necessarily to some unique, determinate, necessary order and date in the series of world states. (2) remains ambiguous and would approximate to (1) if the presupposition of causal law entailed that determinate global order. But it would deviate from (1) if it were construed as a general reference to causal law required for the introduction of the concept of an event into our experience. It would then claim that in order to grasp the concept of an objective event we require the conception of a determinate temporal order of two opposed states in one object and of a factor, namely causal connection, which determines that order. Our use of "event" in experience might be understood in that way without claiming, or establishing, a unique, global, temporal order for all events. This was effectively the outcome of the earlier discussion. (2) is subject to an important proviso made earlier in that discussion, namely that we have to distinguish different kinds of conceptual relation in the claim. It was accepted that "event" just means "ordered relation between opposed states of the same object," and that this expressed an analytic conceptual relation, but the presupposition of a causal connection to determine that temporal order was held to be a nonanalytic conceptual relation. It expresses not a part of what "event" analytically means but a synthetic conceptual dependence of "event" on "cause." That conceptual dependence ensures that the concept of an event cannot be introduced adequately without some grasp of a causal relation even though "cause" is not included in the meaning of "event." The notion of a cause specifies synthetically how our experience meets the general analytic requirement of a determinate order of states in what we call an event. Such an account does not ensure that the series of world events can be completed in providing a cause for every event, or that every event has a

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necessary, unique, temporal location in the succession of world states. It provides no reason to think that we could ever know the causes of every event, and in the Antinomies Kant later provides reasons for thinking it problematic that we could ever have such knowledge. That consequence shows that the conceptual dependence in [2] does not guarantee even that we can establish the actual causes of any event. Establishment of a definitive, conclusive cause for any event may depend on a complete knowledge of its prior causal relations, and the Antinomies show that this is problematic. It might also be claimed that since our identification of specific causes, and of causal laws, is constantiy under review we cannot definitively exclude the possibility that no such identification is ever final. In this way (2) has a limited scope but provides the required contrast between the constitutive GCP of the Analytic and the associated purely regulative principle of the Dialectic. Similarly the synthetic conceptual dependence in [2] does not establish that we can identify events in experience only by connecting them with their causes. Once the notion of an "event" has been introduced through the presupposition of a causal relation we can simply perceive events without linking them to any causal law or even considering their causal connections. That possibility is the basis for the noted and misconceived empiricist objection to Kant that we can directiy perceive objective events without considering or knowing their causal connections. Kant's principle, understood as (2), does not deny that possibility. The most we can say is that if the dependence is accepted, then our perception of events carries a presumption that there must be some cause even if we do not know what the cause is and have no interest in locating it. These points indicate conclusions of the global kind that cannot properly be drawn from Kant's argument in the Second Analogy and other more modest versions of the GCP. If Kant wished to draw the former conclusions then he is mistaken and his argument fallacious, but if he wished to canvass only the more modest conclusions then the argument is at least exempt from those objections. This mirrors the position in the Transcendental Deduction where a minimal conclusion was held to be valid while the stronger traditionalist claims for it were not. In both cases the grounds for the modest conclusions are not simply that they stand a better chance of success, but that Kant himself points to the relevant ambiguities. In this case the central contrast is between the constitutive role for the GCP in making possible our conceptions of an event and an objective time order and a global causal determinism expressed in a nonconstitutive principle in the Antinomies. For these reasons, a better formulation for the minimal GCP, which Kant indicates in his own weaker formulations would be:

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(3) The concept of an event in general is synthetically dependent on that of a cause. Provided that (3) is understood within the Kantian notion of a nonanalytic conceptual dependence it provides a more refined and explicit expression of (2) and of the GCP.6 (3) is naturally linked to the presumption that in identifying any event there is some cause for it, or that it fits into a causal framework. That presumption might, naturally but crudely, be expressed as "Every event has a cause" so long as the appropriate provisos are made. These different versions of the GCP have parallels in the other Analogies, and point towards other ambiguities. The First Analogy similarly expresses a presupposition of the introduction of temporal duration in our experience and subjects the sensory manifold to its categorization of "substance/accident." It claims that such a category has to be realized somehow in experience if we are to have a conception of objective duration, but it does not claim that everything in that experience is either a substance or an accident. Our sensory experience is subject to the category, but Kant recognizes other identifiable nonderivative types in experience, such as "modes." Our conceptions of space and time are not conceptions of substances or of accidents but of what both Hume and Kant call "modes," or ways, of intuiting such things as substances and accidents.7 The same points can be made about the Third Analogy. Its claim is not that we have to recognize the unrestricted global range of reciprocal causal relations in order to recognize coexistence, but that we cannot introduce or recognize coexistence adequately without a grasp of mutual causal interaction (MCI). A related, but different, formal ambiguity in Kant's conclusions at [ 5 ] is marked by commentators with the distinction between (a) Vx 3y (Fx & Gy Rxy) and (b) 3x Vy (Fx & Gy —> Rxy), so that the first two Analogies might be represented as: (a) For all change there is a substance

or (b) There is a substance for all change

(a') For all events there is a cause

or (b') There is a cause for all events

These variations claim (a) that a substance remains in each change, and additionally (b) that it is the same throughout all changes; or (a ') that each event has its cause and additionally (b ') that the cause is the same throughout all changes. They have been used characteristically to raise the question whether Kant thinks there is a plurality of substances or only °ne, 8 and to claim that his arguments require the latter, stronger form.

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The earlier discussion shows that the strong claims in (b) and (b') for some unique, global substance or some original cause are more appropriate formulations for the principles in the Antinomies, and in that case the debates about Kant's commitment to a plurality of substances or causes in the Analogies are beside the point. Kant accepts that in experience we recognize a plurality of substances and causes in a normal interpretation of the principle of the Third Analogy, and more generally for the categories' realization in a posteriori, sensory experience. The arguments in the Analogies are concerned with that immanent reality even though they are abstract and do not pursue the realization of the categories fully to the empirical level. Nor is Kant's transcendental intention to map that structure in experience an endorsement of the transcendent reality of Leibnizian monadic substances.

1.2. Structural Ambiguities and Potential Criticisms The abstract, transcendental, but not transcendent character of the arguments and conclusions in the Analogies underlines Kant's explicit renunciation of any appeal to empirically applicable criteria. To object that Kant's arguments are unacceptably abstract and provide no reference to empirical criteria is to overlook the determinedly antiempiricist direction of his position. Kant may still be criticized for not developing the empirical realization of the a priori categorial structure but this is a misunderstanding rather than an objection. It points to a further enquiry into the full empirical realization of the a priori structure which is not in conflict with Kant's interest but a natural extension of it. It points towards that extension in what he would regard as applied philosophy in such works as the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences and the Metaphysics of Morals. Such an extension is clearly and well portrayed in Michael Friedman's account of Newtonian absolute motion in his Kant and the Exact Sciences? The account shows how Kant's a priori framework applies to physics in its identification of an appropriate representative of Newton's central concepts and of time itself. The only, but essential, proviso to be made is that such an account is by Kant's standards not pure but impure a priori. It says something about the empirical realization of the categories in a context which goes beyond ordinary empirical experience but is not purely a priori and transcendental.10 The objection to that abstract transcendental character may also be motivated by a belief that Kant's position is trivial and uninteresting precisely in so far as it bypasses, or reforms, the traditional issues in idealism and skepticism. This might fairly be answered by the polemical counter that those traditional issues are futile and trivial, and that one of Kant's

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great merits lies in his revolutionary effort to reform philosophy by rejecting them and pointing in a more fruitful direction. If there is a serious point in such an exchange it rests on the belief that Kant's arguments are not abstract in canvassing the suggested parity between inner and outer experience, but turn on an idealist distinction between the subjective and the objective. There is no doubt that the arguments turn on some distinction between the "subjective" and the "objective," but I have consistently rejected the view that this should be understood in the terms of a traditional idealism. In those terms Kant's arguments in the Analogies attempt to justify a step from an inner, private, mental succession of ideas to an outer, spatial objective reality. The First Analogy is supposed to justify a step towards outer, physical substance, the Second towards spatial events, and the Third towards physical, spatial interaction. The earlier discussion of the detailed arguments had rejected that idealist and skeptical framework, but I add two points in favor of that conclusion in the context of the Analogies. The first concerns the evidence adduced in favor of the traditionalist view by Bennett (1966, 202-3). There it is claimed that the later argument of the Refutation of Idealism, contrary to a common belief and Kant's text, 11 does not presuppose Kant's conclusions in the First Analogy. Bennett claims that it would be "impossible" to read the First Analogy as "neutral as to whether the 'something permanent' is inner or outer," and he later describes that "neutrality between the subjective/objective or inner/outer borderline" as "absurd" (203). His motive is to answer an objection to the Refutation of Idealism in which, if it presupposes the First Analogy where the existence of outer, spatial, substance is already proved, that later refutation will be redundant. In the light of the textual evidence that outer spatial substance is not explicitly mentioned in the Analogy Bennett supports his view by saying that the First Analogy "is clearly stated in both editions as a thesis about the division of 'appearances', that is of the objective realm into substance and properties" (1966, 202). Bennett's understanding of the term "appearance" has been noted before and shown to be an error. Kant's term "appearance" is neutral between presentations to inner and to outer sense and their objects, and Kant frequently speaks of "inner appearances," "inner experience," "inner objects," and "inner perceptions" in accordance with that use. The term "appearance," in its transcendental use, marks the distinction between what belongs to sense, inner or outer, and what belongs to understanding. It does not mark the traditional idealist distinction between what is inner and what is outer, or the current contrast between mind" and "world."12 Bennett's way of saving the Refutation of Idealism from redundancy is both erroneous and unnecessary. The Refutation does presuppose the First Analogy but the latter does not establish the existence of outer, spatial substances, or make the later refutation redundant.

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In the light of that demonstrable error it may seem unnecessary to support the alternative view any further, but a second consideration can be found in the Prolegomena §15, where Kant explicitiy endorses the parity for the Analogies: There is much in a general science of nature which is not completely pure but dependent on experience, such as the concepts of motion, impenetrability, and inertia etc., which prevent it from being a completely pure natural science; moreover it concerns only objects of outer sense, and so provides no example of a general natural science in a stricter sense. That would have to formulate general laws of nature dealing with objects [Gegenstande] of either outer or inner sense (physics and psychology as well). Among the principles which really have the required generality are: that substance remains and persists, that everything that happens is always determined by a cause through constant laws etc. (Ak. 4.295) In this passage the cited principles of the Analogies are designed to stand a priori over a "strict" general natural science which includes both physics and psychology, and to apply to the objects of both inner and outer sense.13 The passage decisively confirms the parity attached to inner and outer objects in the Analogies and resolves an ambiguity, noted in chapter 19.1, over the scope of Kant's conceptions of "nature" and "reality": Neither is restricted to outer spatial phenomena. It may be objected that Kant could not have intended to apply the categories to inner representations since this would conflict with his aim of securing reference to an objective time, and with his anti-idealist professions. Contemporary philosophers are naturally drawn to such an objection because they already attach a priority to objects of outer over those of inner sense. Their reaction against Cartesianism encourages a primary interest in materialist or functionalist theories of mind which trade on that priority for outer experience, and Kant endorses that priority in the Refutation of Idealism. But the objection rests on a misunderstanding. Kant is not endorsing a Cartesian, idealist use for categories but only, at this stage in the argument, allowing it to be neutral between an inner and an outer application. Kant's metaphysics of experience, as I have outlined it, assumes the empirical distinction between inner and outer objects as essential parts of our experience, but the parity between them at this stage in the Analogies leaves it open whether there is some priority to be attached to outer experience.14 In the Aesthetic that parity between inner and outer sense was enough to reject a Cartesian idealism; only later in the Refutation of Idealism is that rejection strengthened with a priority attached to outer sense. The objection says more about contemporary interests than Kant's argument. To read Kant's text in Bennett's traditionalist way is not wholly gratuitous. The "subjective/objective" distinction is notoriously ambiguous,

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and Kant's arguments admittedly turn on some distinction between intuition, or perception, on one side and understanding and concepts of "objects" on the other. If it is assumed that the argument can be understood only within a traditional idealism, then that framework will inevitably be read into these distinctions, but I have argued against that assumption in the case of the Second Analogy and more generally. The distinction Kant deploys is not barely between the inner and outer but is a "relative" distinction between the subject's view of the situation and the situation itself whether the latter is inner or outer. Just as a moving ship and a house are both presented in a successive outer experience, so a worsening headache and a stable migraine are both presented in a successive inner experience. Kant's task is to establish what enables us to mark that distinction between objects and events, whether they are presented in inner or outer sense. Kant's distinction is for that reason closer to the ordinary contrast between ". . . seems . . ." and " . . . is . . ." That contrast is, like Kant's, not one barely between inner and outer experiences, but between a subject's view of some purported object and that object itself whether the latter is inner or outer. The important proviso is that Kant is not concerned with the transition from " . . . seems to be an event" to " . . . is an event" which reflects a distinction between veridical and illusory perception of an event. Even " . . . seems to be an event" presupposes the notion of an event whose preconditions Kant is investigating, and this underlines the earlier claim that his argument is not concerned with an idealist distinction between the veridical and the illusory, or with its skeptical implications. Kant's question is not: How do we distinguish between real and illusory, merely apparent, events? but: How can we introduce the concept of an objective event in experience whether it is real or apparent? We are left with the question how the "subjective/objective" distinction is to be understood in this context, and this can be answered by reference to what has been said of it earlier in the Aesthetic and Analytic of Concepts and by its "relative" use. In the former Kant's transcendental use of "subjective/objective" marks a distinction between what holds distinctively of our human cognition and what holds quite generally in all possible worlds.15 Just as there is an empirical distinction between properties which hold generally for humankind, such as shapes, and others which vary from person to person, such as the taste of wine, so there is a transcendental distinction between what holds necessarily for our experience and what may be true of other subjects with other cognitive powers in other possible worlds. We cannot assume that what holds, even necessarily, of our cognition holds in all other possible worlds. Kant's conception of experience is of our experience with its cognitive apparatus and not an "absolute conception of reality" of the kind discussed in chapter 15. Any

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realization of that conception is, for Kant, beyond our cognitive range and concerns the supposed realm of transcendent things in themselves of which we have no knowledge. The Analytic provides an additional, more positive, characterization of what is "objective" by moving away from any reference to transcendent things in themselves towards a more fruitful investigation of our immanent experience. It contrasts the indeterminate character of an abstract sense experience, or manifold, with the determinate discrimination of items within it due to concepts and language. What is properly, not transcendendy but transcendentally, objective is that determinacy in truth valuation which brings with it the possibility of agreement in judgments and a conceptual framework for experience and immanent reality. The Analogies build on that conception by identifying the conceptual rules and presuppositions, among the relational categories, which provide the associated objective temporal discriminations and the required stability of immanent experience. The "objective" is what is determinately experienced in accordance with our concepts, and the "subjective" is the indeterminate sensory manifold which those concepts determine. The point is made quite explicitly at B235-36 for the notions of "cause" and "event." How things may be in themselves, apart from the representations through which they affect us, is entirely outside our sphere of knowledge. In spite, however, of the fact that appearances are not things in themselves . . . I have to show what sort of a connection in time belongs to the manifold in the appearances themselves. . . . The object is that in the appearance which contains the condition of this necessary rule of apprehension.

The central point in the passage is to move the enquiry away from the pseudo-realm of "absolute reality," of things in themselves, in order to address the serious issue in the "fruitful bathos" of our immanent experience.

2. The Positive Argument In the light of those points Kant's project in the Principles is, consistently with his descriptive metaphysics of experience, designed to show how a priori concepts independent of a posteriori experience nevertheless play a role in "constituting objects" in that immanent experience. Transcendental idealism rejects any cognitive value in the "absolute conception" of reality and recognizes that our immanent reality cannot be characterized without an appeal to our transcendentally "subjective" cognitive powers of sensibility

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and understanding. They are ineliminably involved in the demonstration of that categorial role, but they do not constitute a commitment to traditional idealism. Transcendental idealism does not confine us to a set of incommunicable private worlds and is consequently compatible with an empirical realism which includes objects of both inner and outer sense (B875-76; Prolegomena Ak. 4.295). The discussion throughout the Analytic of Principles occurs in a context which rejects traditional idealism along with both rationalist and empiricist accounts of the relevant concepts, but in the Analogies more attention is paid to the argument against empiricism. This follows from Kant's account of philosophical progress from dogmatic rationalism through skeptical empiricism to the Critical account (B788-89). The proofs in the Analogies are directed throughout at the objects of our immanent experience and not at those of a transcendent realm of things in themselves (B235-36). The background to those detailed arguments in the Metaphysical and the Transcendental Deductions has been noted before. The former offers a prima facie reason to regard the listed concepts as a priori categories, in virtue of their dependence on forms of judgment. The latter explains what conditions would have to be satisfied if some candidate is to be shown to be an a priori category. Such a concept would have not merely to be derived from, but to govern or determine experience, to be necessary for the possibility of some "object" without which our experience would be impossible. Neither of those earlier passages attempts to demonstrate that any particular concept meets those conditions. The Metaphysical Deduction offers a list of candidates for that role, and the Transcendental Deduction considers how such a concept, "if there are any," might satisfy those conditions. It is left to the Analytic of Principles to demonstrate that the listed concepts do fulfill that role and are a priori categories. The method of proof in the Analogies makes use of two devices used already in the mathematical principles, namely that of an operational procedure involving schematism and the consequent provision of a nominated representative in experience to stand for a time which is not directly perceived. The need for these devices is determined by the assumption that time itself cannot be perceived and therefore needs some representative to stand for it in experience. The identification of such a representative for all the temporal relations depends on the candidate categories and their connection with a procedure of schematism which involves intuition and its a priori forms. It was noted that Kant shares the assumption that time is not itself perceived with Hume, but their responses to it are different. Kant concludes that we need to locate, through the operational procedures of schematism, a way of representing objective time. He draws a distinction between time as a mode in which objects are presented, extensively and successively, in the senses and time as a determinate way in which objects

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themselves, phenomena, are related. Hume seems not to recognize such a distinction and addresses other issues arising from mathematics, such as infinite divisibility, and what he regards as "fictions" arising from that notion (Treatise 1.2, §iv16). His discussion treats succession in impressions and in objects indifferendy. The ideas of some objects it certainly must have, nor is it possible without these ideas ever to arrive at any conception of time; which since it appears not as any primary distinct impression can plainly be nothing but different ideas or impressions, or objects dispos'd in a certain manner, that is, succeeding one another. (Treatise 1.1, §iii)

In other contexts Hume takes for granted that objective time is available in formulating a posteriori causal laws from experience even though it offers no primary distinct impression. In the Analogies the proofs proceed on the assumption that we are not presented with the relevant features of time or with substances, causes, and coexistence a posteriori, but have to locate them in the more complex procedure of synthesis or schematism. The parallel is most clear in the Third Analogy, where Kant explicitiy contrasts the cases where we perceive two objects together and those where we cannot perceive them together, but perceive first one, then the other, and then the first again. In that second case, the argument goes, we need some additional factor to secure the required coexistence, and that added factor is the notion of mutual causal interaction (MCI). The suggestion is that without that conception we can ascribe coexistence at best only in the limited circumstances where we observe two objects together, and cannot on that basis ascribe it more generally over experience where coperception is not possible. That restriction would amount to a debilitating limitation on our ascription of coexistence and simultaneity, since it covers only a subject's immediate perception, and not either the remote cases where objects cannot be perceived together or where perception is interrupted. In that argument we find again the three factors from the Axiom: First, a complex operational synthesis, involving in this case MCI as a condition for the ascription of coexistence, and second an outcome in a nominated representative, a default paradigm, of coexistence, namely two objects not perceived together but under the condition of MCI. There is also, as in the Axiom, a third priority accorded to the more complex case in providing an adequate criterion with which to ascribe coexistence and simultaneity quite generally. The significance of the appeal to a "representative" to stand for an objective time relation is the priority attached to the default option over the immediately presented items. The First and Second Analogies follow a similar pattern. Substance is not immediately presented but requires an operational procedure of iden-

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tifying a representative object which remains the same throughout changes in its accidents. The process cannot be for Kant an analytic construction of substances from their accidents, or of outer substance from inner representations. The a priori category includes both "substance" and "accident," and Kant's project is based on neither an analytic construction nor a traditional idealism. The category of "substance/accident" marks the location of a representative for permanence and identity throughout change, and its associated procedure stands for, acts as a representative of, objective temporal duration. The category with its associated procedure in intuition enables us to mark temporal duration, but it neither provides a detailed account of what are the primary substances in our experience, nor requires that they are outer objects. The arguments are abstract and the link with intuition is understood at an a priori level without providing a full a posteriori realization of the category in empirical perception. The Second Analogy similarly does not take our conception of an event to be introduced simply as an immediately perceived item in experience. Events are experienced in ordinary life but to recognize them requires, if Kant is right, a prior introduction of the concept which depends on the notion of a cause. The introduction of the notion of an objective event depends on that more complex operational procedure in which opposed states of an object have their temporal order determined by a causal relation. It reflects in a one-dimensional order the Third Analogy's reciprocal order of mutual causal interaction. The default option is not the simple ostensive observation of a succession, but that of a causal connection between two states of the same object. Kant's evident view is that since the whole of our experience consists of observed successions in outer and inner sense these do not by themselves identify or introduce objective events. Since everything is presented in that sensory succession, it cannot by itself differentiate objective and subjective succession, and cannot, for example, separate perception of physical objects and events. Kant raises in this way an issue prior to Hume's apparent assumption that there is no need to distinguish between a time or succession attached to impressions and one attached to objects. Understood in this way Kant's argument in the Analogies opposes empiricism and points to the form of that opposition. It outlines an order of priorities radically different from Hume's account of causation, and from an empiricist account of substance or coexistence. Where Hume claims that our notions of an event, and of a time order, can be given directly in, or adequately derived from, paradigm observations of objective events in a posteriori experience, Kant denies this. Where Hume regards specific causal laws as inductive generalizations from the observation of repetitive patterns in experience, Kant thinks of them as in part dependent on, and subsumed under, the GCP. Where Hume thinks of the GCP as

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either a trivial analytic truth or else a pointless inductive generalization from established empirical laws, Kant regards it as a fundamental synthetic a priori truth without which our experience of events, of an objective time order, and of those specific causal laws would be impossible. Where Hume gives a priority to the ostensive, sensory, presentation of events and their time order over inductively based specific causal laws and the GCP, Kant reverses that priority to make our recognition of events, an objective time order, and our inductive policies, dependent on the prior GCP itself. The central difference between Kant and Hume in all three arguments is that the reversed priorities indicate different identifications of the core or default, "representative," cases. For a Humean empiricist the core cases for the introduction of "event," and of causal laws governing events, are a posteriori observations of events and their recurrent patterns; for Kant the representative core involves the conception of a determinate causal and temporal order among states of an object in accordance with the GCP which constitutes a genuine event. For simultaneity or coexistence the empiricist focuses on the immediate perception of two things together, but for Kant the focus is on the relations between coexistents which are not perceived together. For substance the empiricist points to an immediate observation of persistent things and their properties where Kant points to a complex network of concepts, including substance, accident, change, alteration, identity, and permanence, which articulate those otherwise dumb sense presentations in an indeterminate succession. In a similar way empiricists typically locate the default option for size or number in immediate ostensive presentation of those features and not in Kant's more complex procedures of surveying or counting parts in a whole. Where the empiricist locates the relevant realizations of concepts ostensively in perception, Kant relies instead on the more complex operational procedures which provide a default representative only through the mediation of the categories. Where the empiricist appeals only to a posteriori experience Kant insists on the prior need for those categories. Those differences mark central divergences between Kant and empiricism, but do not determine which view is preferable or correct. Both positions face evident and diverse challenges. Kant's position requires not only the priority of the categorial apparatus which provides the relevant criteria and the default "representative," but also its a priority, and that step may be questioned. The empiricist has no need to face that challenge but has a central difficulty which Kant avoids. If the default, core cases consist of an ostensive presentation of substances, or events, or time itself, there is a problem of explaining how we move from those simple core cases to the more extended, and more common, cases. If coexistence is understood direcdy only in terms of the perception together of two objects, how can we ascribe it in the more common and complex cases where the objects are

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not perceived together? How is it possible to distinguish substance and accident ostensively in a kaleidoscope of universal indeterminate flux? How can we identify events and their determinate time order in a universally successive experience? More generally there is the question how in that successive experience room can be made for our notion of an objective, common, uniform time. These are at best difficult questions for empiricists, and they encourage a skepticism linked naturally to empiricism. If we are justified in ascribing size, or coexistence, primarily where these are immediately and ostensively presented, then it is questionable that we can be justified in their ascription where those perceptual conditions do not hold. Since those problematic cases constitute the larger number of such ascriptions, to abandon them is to abandon a considerable part of our experience. An empiricist may reinstate them as imaginary "fictions" which allow our experience to function but without any justification. For such an empiricist our beliefs must seem arbitrary and accidental, even dependent upon a miraculous preestablished harmony. The empiricist order of priority not only encourages skepticism, but leaves open in the mathematical principles a central aspect of size ascription, namely, the use of metric criteria in surveying and counting procedures. Kant's alternative priorities do not face those problems. Surveys and counts function as a general procedure locating a prior representative default option in the way Kant envisaged in his procedural account of number (B179-80). It is not just that surveys and measurement are needed only in the more complex cases but that they provide schematic test procedures for ascribing size even in the simplest, immediately perceived examples. Even immediate presentation of size provides no guarantee that our judgment of size is correct. Kant's alternative priority attached to his core, default options with their use of categories and explicit criteria allows immediate recognition to fall out as a special case. The same orders of priority hold across each of the Analogies and have the same advantages over an empiricist account. An evident advantage in Kant's order of priorities over that of empiricism may not be thought an adequate argument in his favor, and it may be said that if Kant is to argue that empiricism is mistaken he has to show that it cannot provide an adequate account of time. The claim in the proofs for the a priority and necessity of the principles is designed to provide that antiempiricist argument, but it may be thought unclear and open to objection. It may be objected that Kant has not shown that the principles are a priori or necessary in holding in all possible worlds, but this is evidently a misunderstanding. Kant claims that it is impossible for us, with our cognitive powers, to represent those time relations in any other way, but not that the result is achieved in that way in all possible worlds. Relations between

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categories and time are classified by Kant as synthetic principles in [8], and this entails that the relations do not hold in all possible worlds. A subject with an intellectual intuition, or a more extensive sensory intuition than ours, might achieve the same result without the oudined synthesis of a priori categories and intuitions. According to the proofs objective duration, succession, and simultaneity depend on the categories of substance, cause, and reciprocity, but it does not follow, and Kant does not claim, that the dependence holds in all possible worlds. To note that misunderstanding is to defuse one objection, but there are others. It may be accepted that Kant's claim does not legislate for all possible worlds but insisted that he has not yet shown that empiricists cannot provide an adequate account of the same outcome in our world. One way of putting the point would be to say that Kant may have shown that a category, such as "cause," is prior to the recognition of "objects" in experience such as "events," but that this does not establish the categories' a priority. Priority is not the same as a priority, but Kant's point still runs counter to a natural empiricist order of priorities in which the identification of causes is dependent on the observation of events. Kant's stand against Hume's empiricism is made stronger since the latter accepts that time is not itself perceived, and leaves open how we might distinguish between successions in inner sense and objective events. A more plausible empiricist view would be to say that objective events and time relations can be derived directiy from presented sense experiences, but it is unclear how the derivation is to be achieved. Even if it is unclear how empiricism might achieve the derivation Kant may be said not yet to have excluded that possibility in claiming the necessity of the principles. Kant's view is not merely that we do achieve the result in his way but that there is a necessity about our achieving it in that way which excludes any empiricist account. These appeals to a necessary connection between categories and their objects may be thought unclear, and further compromised by the claim that the necessities are not analytic but synthetic. Kant's account of necessity is complex and even ambiguous, and empiricists typically reject synthetic necessities or any claimed nonanalytic conceptual dependence of objects of experience on categories. Kant's position faces two related, perennial problems. First what kind of necessity for our experience belongs to the principles, and second how can Kant support a belief in synthetic necessities? It was noted earlier that there are two appeals to a necessary connection between categories and their objects in Kant's argument. He claims first that without those objects and the associated time relations our experience would be not merely different but impossible, and second that there is a necessary but nonanalytic dependence of the relevant discriminations in experience on the categories. It was conceded earlier that objective time

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discriminations are necessary for our experience and that the conception of an experience without those features is limited to the point of impossibility. As far as the proofs of the Analogies are concerned, Kant rests this part of his case on the evidently serious deficit that would result from the absence of such objective temporal discriminations in our experience. Kant does not offer any elaboration of what such a deviant experience would be like, perhaps because he thinks it virtually unimaginable, but there is no doubt that it lacks an essential feature of our experience. The second kind of necessity in the proofs relates categories to their "objects" in experience in the "constituting" or "making possible" relation. It may be objected that Kant has not demonstrated that the relation is both synthetic and necessary, and empiricists will question that relation, but the objection can be answered in two ways, one of which has been already noted. Kant allows that there may be other worlds with an objective experience of time relations in which those relations do not hold. Kant is not claiming that the way in which we achieve this, with the limitations on our cognitive powers, holds for every possible experience, and that entails for him that the connections cannot be analytic. If it is further objected that this provides no adequate explanation of a "synthetic necessary" connection, or a nonanalytic conceptual dependence, it may also be said that Kant has answered this in his proofs. What the proofs demonstrate is that categories, such as "cause/effect," are required for, but not part of the meaning of, their objects, such as an "event." To reject this would be to show either that the categories are not required for such discriminations or that they are part of the meaning of their target objects. Kant does not provide a general characterization of nonanalytic conceptual dependence but his examples have considerable force and point in the direction of a more general account. It seems plausible to think that the meaning of "event" is captured by the notion of an ordered relation between opposed features of the same object, but does not include reference to a causal relation. Kant's argument that to fix that temporal order requires the concept of cause/effect is as plausible as the claims that "substance," and the identity of persistent objects, is required for, but not part of the meaning of, "duration," or that mutual interaction is required for but not part of the meaning of "coexistence" or "simultaneity." There is a prima facie case for Kant's position from the proofs themselves, but the examples point to a general feature of such cases. They provide examples of concepts, such as "event" or "coexistence," which have a use within a wider, necessary, framework of fundamental concepts and associated principles without which that use would be impossible.17 The suggestion is that a holistic conception of a language, or theory, will make use of relations between those fundamental concepts and their ground floor objects which are not purely semantic or analytic (cf. chapter 29.2).

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It might, finally, be conceded that Kant's proofs have the resources to provide a preferable alternative to an indeterminate empiricist analysis, but questioned how they are designed to resist an associated skepticism. The proofs, especially in the Second Analogy, are sometimes thought to aim at a justification of induction, and it may be suggested that the GCP justifies belief in a stable future in which causal laws are guaranteed to hold since they are a priori and necessary. I have claimed that if this is their aim then they are bound to fail, but I have indicated also that this cannot be Kant's goal. In (3) the principle of the Second Analogy has the form "Every event, some cause" and not "Same cause, same effect," but even the latter provides no more of a guarantee of future stability than any other generalization. The introduction in (3) of the concept of an event and the associated objective succession has no role in guaranteeing a stable inductive future. The concepts of substance and reciprocity cannot guarantee the continued existence of a global interaction in a uniform time, though they may have a role in providing representatives of duration and simultaneity to introduce an objective conception of time in our experience. A better suggestion is that Kant follows, here as elsewhere, the strategy outlined in chapter 11. There Kant's reaction against "universal empiricism" was not to accept its assumptions and show how the challenge could be met with the required guarantee, but to reject the assumptions on which the skeptical doubt was based. The suggestion is not that the a priori requirements for the introduction of things and properties, events, or coexistence provide a guarantee of the continued stability of the world, but only that in denying the assumption of universal empiricism that there are no a priori concepts or intuitions the argument for skepticism is bypassed. There are no guarantees, but for Kant there is no good reason to take seriously an empiricist skepticism which requires them. Kant's descriptive metaphysics of our experience provides directiy a more sophisticated, and a more accurate, map of the structure of that experience than universal empiricism. It provides a corrective to an empiricist doctrine from which those skeptical doubts arise. The discussion has outlined a number of conclusions which Kant's arguments neither establish nor are meant to establish. They do not establish a global, uniform, temporal or causal system, and do not guarantee a stable future for our beliefs against an empiricist skepticism. They provide no ground for thinking that our beliefs about reality, or our inductive policies, are stable and bound to persist or hold in the future, and their necessity is not of that crude kind. Instead they rely on the claim that objective time relations are necessary for our experience, and on a necessary way in which for us that feature of our experience is introduced. That latter necessity is captured in the way objective time relations depend on a priori categories, and on their use in relation to intuition. The categories are needed

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in combination with a priori forms of sensibility in providing operative procedures and a representative for otherwise unperceived temporal relations. They reverse the priorities of an empiricist account of these aspects of our experience and show how universal empiricism distorts our experience and its structure. Kant aims to correct an empiricist account of the structure of our experience so that the skeptical issue does not arise. Kant's proofs do not provide the answer which empiricism requires, but show that the requirement resulted from a misconception about the structure of experience. Essential to that corrected structure are Kant's two claims about elements in experience which are both a priori and constitutive of its objects. Those characteristics make an ineliminable reference to our cognitive powers and provide the ground for his transcendental idealism.

[19] The Postulates and Refutation of Idealism

final section on the categories and their principles is a consciously limited account of the modal properties of possibility, actuality, and necessity. Kant describes the discussion as restricted to "some merely critical remarks" and refers to further comments on modality in the Dialectic (B282, B285). The discussion is also limited in its attention to different types of modality in their "empirical employment," and in its negative warnings against errors arising from a failure to distinguish formal, logical, and material modalities. The main interest is in epistemological rather than metaphysical or logical modalities. Although Leibnizian rationalism is not explicitiy mentioned as an example of the noted errors it is difficult not to see this aspect as an anticipation of the more explicit attacks on Leibniz in the Amphiboly and on rationalism in the Dialectic. Between the postulates of possibility and actuality on one side and that of necessity on the other, Kant takes the opportunity formally to offer a refutation of idealism which attempts to show that the traditional idealist epistemic priority attached to inner experience over outer is a mistake. On this occasion Kant claims against that priority not merely that it should be replaced with a parity between inner and outer experience as at B54-5 5, but that it should be reversed.1 The required proof must therefore show that we have experience, and not merely imagination, of outer things; and this it would seem cannot be achieved save by proof that even our inner experience, which for Descartes is indubitable, is possible only on the assumption of outer experience. (B275)

Kant's claim has an often noticed, and striking, similarity to Wittgenstein's: "An 'inner process' stands in need of outward criteria" (1953, §580), but although their conclusions are the same the arguments are patently different.2 Both are expressions of a perennial wish to find philosophical grounds to reject Cartesianism, but the grounds are not the 501

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same. I consider in section 1 the Postulates themselves, and in section 2 the Refutation of Idealism.

1. The Postulates of Empirical Thought Kant's primary interest in the modal categories of possibility, actuality, and necessity is in their application to empirical experience. That is the major reason for his central distinction between formal and material modalities, and for his insistence on the errors of confusing them. I summarize the central claims and add brief comments on each: (1) Modal properties of objects do not enlarge the concept of the object, even if that concept is complete. In a similar way existence or actuality is not contained in any concept. Modal concepts for Kant are epistemic and relational rather than metaphysical; to ascribe possibility to some thing is not to add to the content of its concept but to relate it to our faculty of knowledge. Concepts are "possible" just insofar as they can be exemplified in experience in accordance with empirical laws. Their title suggests that they concern the "mode" in which contents are represented rather than the contents themselves, and underlines again Kant's general contrast between "modes" and "contents." 3 That these features hold even for "complete" concepts invokes the Leibnizian view that a complete concept of some individual contains analytically all its predicates, "past, present, and future."4 Kant does not endorse that view but the point is the basis for his later insistence in discussing the ontological proof of God's existence in the Fourth Antinomy that "existence (actuality) is not a predicate." It reflects also the doctrine in the Amphiboly that rationalists such as Leibniz wrongly thought that they could infer truths about an underlying supersensible reality solely from concepts. That inference for Kant is a standard example of the basic rationalist fallacy and is associated with his rejection of what he calls "absolute" modalities (B285). (2) We should distinguish logical modalities applied to the "form of thought" from "material" modalities applied to things. The latter has to do with their empirical use, requires some reference to perception, and defines our understanding of "reality" (B270). The distinction between logical and material modalities cuts across a related contrast that might be made between attaching modalities to things and attaching them to judgments, but neither makes a distinction between

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de re and de dicto modalities. There is no sign that Kant recognized that distinction, and its application to his view is complicated for two reasons. In one way all Kant's empirical modalities are de dicto since, in transcendental idealism, they require a reference to our experience and its concepts. But since he has a clear notional distinction between things as appearances or objects of experience, and things as things in themselves or as noumena, a de re modality would have to differentiate between those items. Kant allows references to things in themselves, and talks of them in modal terms, but since we have no knowledge of them to talk of such modalities as de re is at best problematic. Two distinctions are evident in the text; one between modalities of things and judgments and one between formal and material modalities. The former modalities might each be either formal or material, but Kant's primary interest is in the contrast between logical and material modality. Kant remains faithful to his central claim that formal a priori modal claims arising from the categories are neither material nor logical. It is important to recognize Kant's identification of reality with what is immanent in our experience, since commentators from Garve onwards have frequently supposed that his conception of reality is essentially transcendent and refers to an underlying realm of things in themselves.5 That traditionalist claim conflicts with what Kant here explicitly says, with the earlier reference to the basic rationalist fallacy, and with his earlier exclusive interest in the "fruitful bathos" of experience in the Prolegomena (chapter 1). Kant's general view is captured in the following claims which echo the central point made in this context at B270. The possibility of experience . . . is what gives objective reality to all our modes of knowledge a priori. (B195) As regards reality we obviously cannot think it in concreto without calling experience to our aid. For reality is bound up with sensation, the matter of experience, not with that form of relation in regard to which we can, if we choose, resort to a playful inventiveness [in Erdichtungen spielen]. (B270) Possible experience is that which alone can give reality to our concepts; in its absence a concept is a mere idea [Idee], without truth, that is, without relation to an object. (B517)

(3) If we do not recognize the distinction in (2), then we may be led to conjure up fictitious concepts, associated with a priori categories such as substance or cause, which have no objective reality. We may be led, erroneously, to attempt to transcend the sphere of possible experience in such fanciful, and groundless, notions as those of clairvoyance or telepathy.

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That such concepts of transcendent objects are consistent does not establish that they are for us materially possible. Kant reinforces his diagnosis of transcendent error in which our conceptual resources, especially a priori concepts, enable, and may encourage, us to make dogmatic assertions about a supersensible realm (A96, B186-87). Kant has throughout insisted on these typically philosophical errors which are extensively documented in the later Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection and the Dialectic. They belong strictiy to reason rather than understanding, and point to later discussions in the Dialectic of the ontological proof, and of "systematic unity" (B285, B279-82). They reflect Kant's conjunction of the necessity and the hazards, the advantages and the disadvantages in the "bewitchment of our intelligence" by our use of concepts, and his conception in the prefaces of the two faces, legitimate and illegitimate, of reason. (4) We can know something of existents a priori by inference from actual perceptions in accordance with laws, but "our knowledge reaches only as far as perception and its advance according to empirical laws." The material necessity in those latter cases is only "comparatively a priori" and hypothetical. This repeats Kant's distinction within the hierarchy of laws between the topmost a priori and the subsumed a posteriori cases, and resolves a problem about the necessity of specific causal laws (chapter 19.2.3.2). Kant evidentiy holds that there is a certain necessity in using specific causal laws to infer unobserved existents, but it is a qualified, hypothetical, comparative necessity, and derives from the unqualified a priori necessity attaching to the GCP under which specific a posteriori causal laws are subsumed. Any necessity in specific empirical causal laws is derivative from, and reflects the status of, the GCP. Material necessity, which involves both higher a priori principles and a posteriori perception, is contrasted both with a pure or unqualified necessity belonging to the categorial principles, and with a formal, logical necessity. Although these are the central points in Kant's text, there is undoubtedly more that might be said of modal concepts, and in particular an issue remains about the kind of necessity attaching to synthetic a priori judgments. It has been suggested at various points that Kant's claims for the a priority, and necessity, of some concepts and principles are well grounded, but a question remains about the kind of necessity involved. It concerns the characterization of what I have called "nonanalytic conceptual dependence" and is considered finally in chapter 29. That characterization requires a clearer picture of what it means to say that such judgments are necessary in, or for, our experience, what it means to say that a judgment is necessarily true for us but does not hold in all possible worlds, and to distinguish between his "comparative" and other "absolute" modalities.

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Kant's brief survey in this passage indicates the general point that the transcendental necessity of fundamental a priori principles and categories must be distinguished from purely logical and from a posteriori material modalities. The latter distinction concerns modal claims within experience, while the transcendental necessities are constitutive ^/experience. Although Kant does not make the point explicidy in this passage it parallels the implicit distinction between empirical and transcendental uses of "idea," or "representation," and the explicit distinction between empirical and transcendental uses of "thing in itself' and of "external object." Brief references are made in the passage to the required transcendental conception of necessity, but since Kant's interest is in the empirical use of modalities they are not pursued. The empirical use of categorial modalities is not the same as their transcendental use.

2. The Refutation of Idealism A formal refutation of idealism in Kant's text must be highly significant. Traditionalists tend to play down its importance because they insist that despite all the provisos Kant is, and regards himself as, an "honest to goodness, old fashioned idealist,"6 They tend to think that the qualifications to his idealism, as "formal," "critical," "transcendental," and not "empirical," still retain a traditional idealist core, that is, an epistemic privilege and priority attaching to individual's inner experiences. "Formal" idealism, for example, may be understood as the application of that inner core to the formal characteristics of space and time, but since all appearances are in space and time such an idealism will carry over to the material contents of experience, namely, appearances.7 The resulting theory is virtually indistinguishable from a traditional idealism. Discussion of the Aesthetic has shown that this account conflicts with Kant's text, as he himself points out at B274 in saying that the Aesthetic has "already undermined idealism." The epistemic priority accorded in traditional idealism to such private experiences is rejected by Kant in the Aesthetic's parity between inner and outer sense. The new formal refutation of traditional idealism extends that view by arguing not merely for parity between the senses but for the reversal of the idealist priority. I oudine the structure of Kant's argument and then identify some crucial issues in it for further discussion.

2.1. The Structure of the Argument In the introduction (B274-75) Kant distinguishes two types of material idealism, problematic Cartesian and dogmatic Berkeleian, in which the

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former queries, and the latter denies, the existence of objects in space. Merely doubting or denying outer objects is not sufficient for idealism, which requires that the doubt should be based on an epistemic priority accorded to a subject's inner experiences or "ideas." The claim is that we can know our inner experiences immediately and with certainty but can know of outer objects only through a doubtful, perhaps causal inference. Descartes is represented as accepting just one indubitable (unjjezweifelt) inner, idealist claim, namely, "I exist," while Berkeley is represented as reducing objects in space to "imaginary entities." Kant comments that the latter dogmatic idealism is unavoidable if space is regarded as a property of things in themselves, and that such a view has already been undermined in the Aesthetic. Descartes's cautious doubt is called "reasonable" until a contrary proof has been found, and Kant's argument is designed to provide such a proof by reversing the idealist priority of the inner over the outer. The proof begins with a statement of the anti-idealist position, namely that the "empirically determined consciousness of my own existence proves the existence of objects in space outside me." Kant had previously insisted that for Cartesian idealists inner experience is indubitable, so with Kant's thesis that inner experience is impossible without outer, the existence of objects in space can be inferred. We could not infer the indubitability of outer experience from the premises that inner experience is indubitable and inner experience is impossible without outer experience, but if outer experience incorporates the existence of outer objects, then their existence can be inferred. The discussion then consists of one paragraph of a formal proof, with a recommended change in the text from the preface Bxl note, and three notes by way of comment. I summarize the proof and each note separately. 2 . 1 . 1 . T H E PROOF AND THREE NOTES

The proof can be formulated as follows: 1. I am conscious of my existence as determined in time. (Assumption) 2. All determination of time presupposes something permanent in perception. (First Analogy) 3a. This permanent cannot be in me, since only through this permanent can my existence in time be determined. (Version at B275) 3b. This permanent cannot be an intuition in me, for as a representation that requires a permanent distinct from it, in which its change

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and my existence in the time of such change can be determined. (Version recommended in preface B) 4. So perception of this permanent is possible only through an outer thing, and not through mere representation of it. 5. So determination of my existence in time is possible only through the existence of actual things I perceive outside me. Kant adds a further elaboration of this conclusion in the following: 6. Consciousness of my existence in time is bound up with consciousness of the conditions of its possibility, and so with the existence of things outside me. 7. So consciousness of my existence is at the same time an immediate consciousness of the existence of outer things. Note 1. The proof plays idealism's game against itself. Idealism assumes that only inner experience is immediate, and that outer things can be only dubiously inferred from it, as in any inference from effect to cause.8 Such an inference allows the possibility that the real cause may be in me, and not in an outer object, but this is refuted in the proof that (i) outer experience is itself immediate and (ii) only by means of it is inner experience possible. The cogito representation, "I exist," expresses the existence of a subject, but for Kant contains no empirical knowledge and so no experience of the subject. For knowledge of a subject, in addition to the thought of a subject's existence, inner intuition is required to characterize the subject in time, and for that outer objects are indispensable. So, according to the proof, inner experience is possible only mediately and through outer experience. In a footnote Kant insists that the immediate consciousness of the existence of outer things is proved, not presupposed, in the proof. He raises the question whether we could have only an inner sense coupled with an outer imagination, and offers two responses: First that to imagine something outer requires an outer sense, and a distinction between its receptivity and the spontaneity involved in imagination; second that the hypothesis is incoherent in "annulling" the very outer sense which imagination is supposed to "determine."9 Note 2. The conclusion, that inner experience is possible only through outer, conforms to the actual use of our cognition in experience. We cannot perceive time determinations except through change in outer relations (motion) and relative to permanents in space (relative motion of sun and

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earth); and we have nothing permanent to base "substance" on except matter. Permanence itself is not simply obtained from outer experience, but is presupposed a priori as a necessary condition of the determination of time, and so of inner sense and our own existence. Consciousness of myself in the representation " I " is not an intuition but an intellectual representation of the spontaneity of a thinking subject, and contains no intuition which might serve as a permanent, as impenetrability serves in our empirical intuition of matter. Note 3. This conclusion does not claim that every intuitive representation of outer things is veridical; some may well be illusory (as in dreams and delusions). What is proved is only that inner experience in general is possible only through outer experience in general. Whether particular experiences are imaginary or not requires the use of specific empirical criteria for "real experience."

2.2. Comments on the Formal Proof I comment initially on each step up to 5. Step 1 is an assumption which Kant takes to be common both to the idealists and to himself, but it might be thought ambiguous. It might mean either that I am conscious of myself in the succession of my representations, or that I am conscious of myself as having a place in a common, uniform time. The former might seem a more plausible assumption to share with idealists, but the latter is what Kant goes on to consider in 2. Step 2 refers back to the argument of the First Analogy,10 but would be independently acceptable to idealists who think that the required permanent is clearly located in an immediate, indubitable awareness of the self.11 But the argument in the First Analogy is designed to establish a condition under which we can discriminate an objective, though not necessarily spatial, temporal duration; it is not committed to a priority for either physical or mental substance. Steps 1 and 2 together might be taken to identify a situation, which idealists would naturally accept, in which a substantial self provides immediate knowledge of something permanent with which to ground such objective time relations. The idealist expectation would be that an adequate account of temporal relations can be grounded on inner consciousness and its substantial self, but Kant's aim is to show that this expectation, however natural, is confused and mistaken. Step 3 then goes on to insist that the required permanent cannot be merely in my consciousness. Later notes offer more explicit detail in which Kant distinguishes between two potential candidates in consciousness for permanence, namely, the inner intuition of 3b and Kant's conception of

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the cogito's transcendental apperception, which is a mere "thought" disconnected from any intuition. Step 3a is vulnerable to the charge of question-begging. It may be taken to assert that my existence in time cannot be determined by what is in my consciousness, although this is exactiy what is at issue. It is true that Kant seems to offer an argument, rather like that in the First Analogy to show that time cannot change since it is the precondition of change, but it rests so far on no more than that question-begging assertion. Why should not something permanent be located in my consciousness as that on which my existence and duration depend? The First Analogy argument is successful, but this version is not. In the preface Bxl note Kant does not explain his dissatisfaction with 3a, but the note at B277 marks Kant's recognition of the danger of begging the question. Its insistence that the immediate consciousness of outer things is proved and not merely presupposed denies such question-begging. Step 3b adds to 3a a further argument to explain the inadequacy of what is in my consciousness, namely, intuitive representations,12 to provide the required permanent. The suggestion is that intuitions change and that something permanent is required for that change. Intuitions, representations, are then understood as accidents of the self and not themselves permanent as a substantial self would be. Thus 3b avoids the objection to 3a that it begs the question, but it invites another objection. For now it would be natural to ask why that permanent could not be identified as a substantial self to which those accidental, changing representations belong. Such a self would belong to my consciousness, has not yet been excluded in the argument, and if it were excluded by fiat would generate a further question-begging step. There is an answer to that further objection in note 1, for there Kant attempts to explain why appeal to a substantial self in a consciousness of my own existence can be excluded. The argument (call it 3') contrasts "inner experience," that is knowledge of my having some inner property, intuition or representation, with a consciousness of myself expressed in the cogito terms as "I am." 3' refers back to points made in the Transcendental Deduction about transcendental apperception and a consciousness of my existence which cannot count as genuine knowledge or inner experience (B157-59; chapter 16.3). The point is that reference to the self, for Kant, may either include a sensory factor or not. Only reference to the former can license genuine knowledge or experience, for these require both sense and understanding, but the inclusion of any sensory factor will involve representations which are themselves accidents or properties and so still require, rather than identify, a related substance. Such a representation or inner intuition may be a property of the subject either in virtue of its content ox: in virtue of its belonging to the subject.13

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The suggestion is that there can be no inner sense experience of the self even though all such experiences must belong to a self. The alternative of referring to a nonsensory self, that is, a pure understanding in (transcendental) apperception, which excludes any sensory factor and which Kant identifies with a consciousness that I am, cannot count as knowledge or experience because of the required reference to the senses (B157). This subargument needs to be made explicit; its premises should be ascribable to idealists, its conclusion will contradict their view, and the success of the whole proof will depend on its acceptability. It requires at least the following steps: 3'c.

Genuine experience of the self requires both sense and understanding (from B75-76).

3'd.

Any genuine experience of the self requires reference to inner representations, intuitions, which are accidents, and whose change is accidental change.

3'e.

Such inner changes, as accidents, require something permanent to set against their change.

3'f.

Such a permanent in inner consciousness, in relation to the self, could be only a pure understanding captured in the consciousness that I am, that is in transcendental apperception; otherwise it would have to satisfy 3'd, involve intuitions, and again have to meet the consequential requirement of 3'e and so involve a regress.

3'g.

But such a pure understanding excludes any sensory factor and therefore (by 3'c) cannot count as genuine inner experience or knowledge of the self.

The elaboration may seem complicated but it follows directly from the provisos Kant already made about transcendental apperception and the self in the Transcendental Deduction.14 Even 3'f, which might be queried on the general ground that we have no decisive reason to exclude some other way of identifying a permanent in inner consciousness, is forced on Kant's assumptions. Given those assumptions the remaining steps, 4 and 5, in the initial phase follow from this account. Once it is accepted that something permanent is required, and that there are only two possibilities of identifying it in either a transcendental consciousness or inner intuition both of which are disqualified, it is unavoidable to conclude that the required permanent is to be located elsewhere. If it is then accepted that the only alternative location for the required permanence is in outer objects, then their necessity even for a durable inner experience of the self is established. It is

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less clear that the targeted idealists would accept all Kant's assumptions and later I consider two further queries about it, but given Kant's assumptions the argument is plausible. The steps 6 and 7 are ambiguous but in one natural interpretation add nothing to the existing conclusion. The ambiguities concern the exact relation between consciousness of my existence and consciousness of things outside me. If 6 and 7 merely assert what the proof has already claimed, that these two things are essentially connected, that is, that consciousness of my existence in time requires some consciousness of outer objects, then they add nothing. If they additionally claim that whenever I am conscious of my existence in time I am also conscious of some outer object then this is open to question. It cannot be denied that there are occasions when a person is conscious of nothing but inner feelings, experiences, or thoughts, and not of any outer object. If the intention was to claim that 7, committed to that additional and dubious claim, actually follows from 6 construed only as the conclusion of the main proof, then the claim fails. Kant's position might be qualified in the light of his views elsewhere about the intimate connection between inner and outer sense. In the Aesthetic it was suggested that Kant's appeal to modes of spatial and temporal representing could be understood to claim that any experience makes a reference not only to a succession but also to a spatial environment, namely, the subject's body. In the preface footnote Bxl Kant reinforces that intimate connection with the further claim that "we derive the whole of our material for inner sense from outer objects," and this was discussed earlier (chapter 8.3.2). If Kant is now adverting to those earlier claims then even 6 and 7 might be accepted in a more substantial sense.15 Step 7 might then claim not that we always are aware of spatial objects such as our own bodies, but, more plausibly, that there always is in our consciousness an essential connection with such objects even if we are not always aware of it. It would reflect a general connection between inner and outer experience of the sort Kant identifies in note 3.

2.3. Comments on the Notes The discussion has shown already that note 1 forms an essential resource in the addition of steps 3'c-3'f in the proof, and I now add other comments on the notes. In addition to the points already made, note 1 identifies the two elements in the idealist opposition, that is, the claimed immediacy of inner sense alone and a consequent privilege attached to it. The same points are effectively made in the Fourth Paralogism A, but Kant may have decided to replace that passage with the Refutation of Idealism because the former seems at certain points to express a form of traditional

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idealism which it was his intention to reject. 16 It is nevertheless true, and important, that the central point in this argument, namely, the contrast between genuine experience of the self with sensory presentations and the abstract conception of an "intelligible" self in pure understanding, forms the basis in both A and B Paralogisms for Kant's rejection of rational psychology. That alleged discipline is a purported science dependent solely on a supposed pure rational knowledge of the self in transcendental apperception and the cogito. The footnote to note 1 shows Kant's effort to forestall a possible objection, namely that the argument does not yet prove that we have immediate awareness, with a genuine outer sense, of outer objects; the premises might be true and yet our apparent outer sense might be merely an exercise of imagination. Kant's first counterresponse is to claim that we must have a passive, receptive outer sense in order spontaneously to imagine it; the second is to claim that the hypothesis is incoherent since to have only an imagination of an outer sense would be both to allow imagination to "determine" the faculty of intuition and at the same time to "annul" that faculty. Two questions arise: is the original argument open to this objection? and are Kant's responses successful against such an objection? It is not obvious that the original argument is open to the objection. The original argument operates with a contrast between what is in inner consciousness and what is outer, and claims to establish that the temporal requirements, which even idealists recognize, can be achieved only in the latter and not by means of the former. Empirical idealists are represented as accepting that substance and temporal relations are necessary for experience, but that these can be adequately provided within each individual's private mental consciousness. Kant's transcendental idealism by contrast accepts that all experience occurs within a consciousness which allows the empirical discrimination of the mental and the physical. This is one way of representing the noted difference between talking empirically and talking transcendentally of "ideas." Empirically ideas, as ordinary mental states, are opposed to outer objects, but transcendentally they cover both inner and outer objects. Kant's central argument is that the empirical idealist belief is mistaken, and that neither a substance in inner consciousness nor intuitions in inner sense by themselves can adequately provide those necessary features of experience. To object that what is outer, where alone permanence can be located, might after all be part of the inner consciousness of imagination is to restate, in a variant form, the original skepticism about external objects which is at issue in the argument. It is to beg the question, but also to misuse the appeal to imagination. That misuse arises in a typically philosophical way by gratuitously extending the operation of imagination from the ordinary case, contrasted with representation of outer objects, to cover every representation.17 The

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claim that it is still possible that we only imagine and do not genuinely perceive outer objects may be true, but it represents a form of "idle" skepticism in this context which should be rejected, and which Kant was seen to reject in the earlier account of skepticism in chapter 11. In effect, the point insists that we preserve, as the original argument does, a genuine distinction between perception and imagination in order to consider whether inner perception alone meets the accepted conditions for experience. The objection can be understood, therefore, not as a bona fide gap in the argument, but as a failure to understand it, and Kant's responses can be understood as an effort to get the objector to grasp the argument. If that is accepted, then Rant's responses are formally unnecessary, even though they might help an opponent to grasp the force of the original argument. This rejoinder is all the more useful since the two further responses to the idealist claim are inadequate. The first response seems to rest on a Humean point about the limitations to imagination. Hume's view is that, with an odd exception, imagination cannot conjure up any new simple ideas, but can only construct new combinations from given simple ideas (B798). The combinations may be utterly fanciful, but the basic material from which they are constructed is given. If Kant has such a doctrine in mind, then he treats the representation of space as simple and consequently unable to be conjured up by imagination without already being given. This might seem to be at odds with his belief that space as an outer representation is a priori and not given a posteriori, but we have seen repeatedly that he accepts such representations as "given a priori." The real problem for Kant's position is not the a priority of spatial representation, but its simple, unanalyzable character. This is at least not evident either on Kant's view or, certainly, on that of other philosophers such as Leibniz,18 and this makes the point at best indecisive. The same difficulty arises in a Humean appeal to an empiricist simplicity. The second response is worse, since it is not difficult for a wide-awake idealist to evade the alleged incoherence of both accepting and "annulling" sensibility. The reply might be that the general faculty of intuition is not annulled, since imagination is claimed to act on inner sense to provide a spatial image. If Kant claims that at least the faculty of outer intuition would be "annulled" so that it couldn't properly be called "outer," then this is also inadequate. If imagination succeeds in generating outer images or presentations, in dreams for example, why should we not regard that as an outer sense? It would not be a veridical outer sense, except by accident, but to require veridicality would surely beg the question, and is not, according to note 3, at issue anyway. Kant's position is open to two problems. First is the alleged, but dubious, incoherence in the idealist hypothesis, and second the claim that

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imagination cannot achieve a spatial representation by operating on inner sense. It is not easy to understand imagination's operating on inner sense to provide spatial presentations, but an idealist might say that we can understand the claim just by attending to our inner spatial representations, or, if that seems too hard, by thinking of such things as after images or dreams, which provide spatial representations in inner sense. Kant's position will then be quite unclear and indecisive against an idealist. Neither of the two responses outlined is satisfactory, but if the earlier conclusion, that the objection rests on a confusion, is correct Kant does not strictly need to make them. Note 2 contains two points which confirm the account given of the proof. These are the empirical illustration of the priority of spatial features in realizing the category of substance, and the limitations of the purely intellectual reference to a thinking subject. For the first time Kant is explicit about the empirical realization of substance in experience as matter: "we have nothing permanent on which, as intuition, we can base the concept of substance, save only matter" (B278). Earlier (B154-55) Kant had offered more casual illustrations of a spatial model for time, but the connection between substance and matter is now firmly made, as one might expect in the context of a proof that outer experience is generally prior to inner. I take this as confirmation of the idea that up to this point Kant's arguments operate on the assumption of a general parity between space and time. Even in this explicit context the realization of the category substance in matter is an empirical illustration of the general point. It does not license those interpretations of the First Analogy which refer to the measurement of duration through physical devices, or those interpretations of the Transcendental Deduction which associate objectivity exclusively with outer objects. The second point confirms Kant's argument for rejecting an appeal to the thinking subject of the cogito or of transcendental apperception as an alternative way of identifying what is permanent in consciousness. Pure transcendental apperception belongs to understanding and not to sense. Its role is that of an abstract contributor to experience which can be realized only in intuition, and provides no genuine experience without that reference to intuition. With a reference to what is presented in intuition the argument reverts to the search for permanence in inner sense which has already been rejected. Those who cannot accept Kant's distinction between sense and understanding, with its resolution of the "blindness" problem, may not accept this account of the limitations of a purely conceptual reference to apperception without intuition. Similarly those who reject any appeal to an inner sense in parallel with outer sense, or who reserve the term "perception" for outer perception, will find this Kantian disclaimer puzzling and unsatisfactory. It is, nevertheless, the central point

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at this stage in the argument, and it forms the essential basis for Kant's warnings about the cogito and transcendental apperception later in the Paralogisms.19 Kant's argument faces the difficulty not only of relying on his challengeable assumptions but also of ascribing essential assumptions to the targeted idealists. It is not difficult to find expressions in both Descartes and Leibniz which can naturally be understood in Kant's way, but they usually also contain some ambiguity as in the following passages: on attentively examining what I was . . . I knew that I was a substance whose whole essence or nature is simply to think, and which does not require any place, or depend on any material thing in order to exist. . . . This T—the soul by which I am what I am—is entirely distinct from my body. (Descartes 1952, 141) So far as the details of the phenomena are concerned everything takes place in the body as if. . . man were himself only an automaton. . . . But internal experience, the consciousness within us of this Ego which perceives the things occurring in the body . . . makes us recognise an indivisible substance in ourselves. (Leibniz 1969, 577-78)

Descartes seems in the passage to rest a recognition of our substantiality on an argument rather than on an immediate sense presentation, but for him "thinking" covers what we would call "perceiving." Other references to the "cogito" suggest a sense presentation, but the phrase "attentively examining" is ambiguous. In the second passage Leibniz's reference to "internal experience" might refer to a Kantian inner sense, but is also described as a "consciousness" of a substantial ego distinct from a perception of bodily phenomena. Even if Kant's appeal to "blindness" in distinguishing between sense and understanding is questionable, the distinction has the merit of disambiguating these appeals, in the "cogito," variously to a sense presentation of the self or to an intellectual argument and consciousness of it. That disambiguation clearly plays an essential role in Kant's argument. Note 3 reinforces the point that Kant's project is not that of a traditional interest in skepticism about external objects based on the facts of illusion. Like Berkeley Kant sets the issue of illusions aside as concerned with the empirical criteria which determine among our perceptions which are illusory and which are veridical.20 That issue occurs in a context where it is assumed that there are veridical perceptions, or at least where they are a real possibility. The issue in the Refutation concerns the more general question whether we are ever able to talk legitimately of outer objects, on the assumption of the idealist priority accorded to inner experience. Kant's refutation has the limited aim of demonstrating that with such an assumption our references to outer objects are as legitimate, as immediate and as

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necessary, as those to inner experience. The idealist's game is played against idealism in this way: That in the proof idealists' doubt about legitimacy in talking of outer objects makes their own assumptions about inner experience illegitimate. Idealists can evade this conclusion, if Kant's proof is correct, only in the intellectual suicide of abandoning their original belief in the independent legitimacy of inner experience.21

2.4. A Concluding Summary and Evaluation The formal argument now has the following steps: 1'.

We have experience of the self in an objective time. This is assumed to be agreed between Kant and the idealists.

2'.

Since objective time relations cannot be perceived there is a need to find some representative in intuitive experience. The need is to locate something permanent in experience to stand for "substance" and "temporal duration," and the central issue is that the idealists believe, and Kant denies, that this can be achieved purely through inner experience.

3'.

There are only two possibilities for the idealists' inner substance, namely, through an appeal either to inner intuition or to intellectual consciousness.

4'.

Inner intuition is insufficient because it leads to a regress. Any such intuition yields only a property or accident of the self; it presupposes a self but does not identify it.

5'.

Intellectual consciousness, understood as it should be in terms of transcendental apperception, is equally insufficient. It is no more than an abstract intellectual representation of the self and requires, for genuine knowledge, a realization in inner sensory intuition. Without that realization the concept provides no knowledge or genuine experience of a substantial self; but with it the argument returns to the regressive alternative of inner intuition, already rejected under [4'].

6'.

If these are the only inner possibilities, then substance and objective temporal duration can be realized primarily only in outer sense. Since experience requires that realization for its discrimination of objective time what idealists call "inner experience" is possible only on the assumption of outer experience.

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Any assessment of the argument rests on the identification both of Kant's assumptions and of those ascribed to the targeted idealists. The proof, in the First Analogy, of a general link between substance and objective time and Kant's resolution of the "blindness" or "emptiness" problems are assumed in the argument and may be rejected. The argument can be assessed either in relation to those background assumptions, or independently of them in providing a general argument for the claimed priority.22 The crucial part of the argument against the idealists is the identification and rejection of the only two candidates for an inner substance, namely, an inner sensory intuition and a purely intellectual apperception of the self. If those are the only candidates available to idealism and both are rejected, then primary substances have to be located elsewhere and presumably in outer experience. Kant's target is undoubtedly a traditional idealist, Cartesian picture of an immediate and certain inner experience of the self and its states of consciousness from which knowledge of an outer world is to be derived. Traditional idealists or later phenomenalists might accept that inferences to an outer world can be justified, but their framework, with its priority for inner experience, insists that an inferential justification is needed. Even if that challenge is met in some phenomenalist construction the need for it in idealism presumes a doubt about the outer world. Kant's strategy is unusual and not designed to offer such a constructive or phenomenalist solution, but to reject the underlying idealist assumption that any inference or construction is needed. Kant does not accept the challenge and seek to meet it within the idealist framework but questions and rejects the framework which generates the doubt. He does so not, as in the Aesthetic, by claiming a parity between inner and outer sense but by affirming a disparity which gives a priority to outer experience over inner. If inner experience is possible only on the assumption of outer the idealist priority of inner over outer is not merely denied but reversed. Underlying assumptions such as 2' and 3' in the argument may be queried and have been already discussed, but the inferences at the heart of the dilemma for idealists in 4 ' and 5' are open to question. In those inferences the central problems are first the restriction in inner intuition to the presentation of properties, and second the rejection of a rational self, independent of the senses. The argument rests on the dilemma that idealists have an exhaustive choice between locating a substantial self either through intuitive properties or in some nonsensible intellectual consciousness, and that neither is adequate. The former is rejected because it presents only properties or accidents of the self and not the required substance; the latter is rejected on the ground that the appeal is to a Kantian transcendental apperception which is a condition of experience

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and not an object in experience. In neither case is the substantial self well grounded, but both lines of argument can be queried. We can ask why only properties are presented in intuition, and whether Kant's conception of transcendental apperception is correct? Idealists who had made the dubious assumptions Kant ascribes to them might change their view, but are all traditional idealists forced to do so? The claim that intuition presents only properties might be defended in various ways, but Kant's defense is made difficult by two of his background views. He claims in the Aesthetic that intuition presents particulars in contrast to the understanding which deals with general concepts; and in the Analytic he recognizes that the relevant formal category is not "substance" by itself but the package "substance/accident." The former claim conflicts with the assumption that intuition provides only properties, and the latter with the belief that we might be presented in experience with properties unattached to any bearer. Two common responses have been made to strengthen Kant's position at this point. One is Mill's and James's claim that inner sense is too volatile and fleeting to present anything of the required permanence, and another appeals to Hume's claim that "I can never catch myself at any time without a perception."23 I argue that the former resource is unhelpful but that the latter is more promising. The claim from Mill and James is open to strong objections. It requires there to be some fundamental difference between the stability of outer sense and the volatility of inner, and is open to the objection that even if inner sense is volatile it is not significantiy different in this respect from outer sense. What we intuit in spatial outer sense is also constantly changing and this makes it difficult to accept a fundamental difference between inner and outer sense. That difference is even more difficult for Kant to accept since his view is that all sense presentations, including outer, also belong to inner sense. It might be argued that outer senses are somehow less volatile than inner, but such a view looks hopeless in the light of two obvious difficulties. First, it is quite unclear how to devise a suitable measure of volatility to establish the difference of degree. Second, even if such a measure were available the most it would show is that outer sense provides a more obvious candidate for permanent substance, and not that inner sense can provide no such candidate. Kant makes some reference to these limitations on "inner observation" in the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences (Ak. 4.468), but he does not appeal to them in the Refutation of Idealism. Hume's point is more complex. It seems initially unhelpful merely to report that throughout one's perception the presumed self fails to appear, but Hume and Kant may have wanted to make another point. To the natural view that we are immediately presented in intuition with a substantial self it can be responded that whatever inner intuition is present, and what-

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ever its content may be, it does not present, but always presupposes, the self which has it. 24 Viewed in this way, the intuitive experiences may be regarded not as constituting or providing a ground for the self but as only presupposing it in some nonsensory form. It must be some one impression that gives rise to every real idea. But self or person is not any one impression, but that to which our several impressions and ideas are supposed to have a reference. (Treatise 1.4, §vi)

Hume expresses in this way a view comparable to Kant's claims about transcendental apperception as a condition of experience rather than an object in experience. It reflects also Kant's distinction between what he calls the "determinable" and the "determining" self. Hume talks of this reference as a "fiction," and Kant agrees that it is not a designation of any object but he reserves a role for it in experience as an a priori condition of that experience. Hume consequently thinks that this casts doubt on our empirical belief in personal identity while Kant's reservations about the role for transcendental apperception do not need to carry over to the empirical self. That response provides an answer to both earlier queries. Kant does not deny that in our experience we are presented with properties and their bearers. The categorical judgment form, and the associated formal category, ensure that inner accidents are ascribed to a self in experience, but that is not sufficient to establish the self as a schematized substance. There must be a formal subject to which the properties belong, but it does not follow that the mere conception of a formal subject is a substance. Hume notes the same grammatical pull of identifying the self as the possessor of properties. all the nice and subtie questions concerning personal identity can never possibly be decided, and are to be regarded rather as grammatical than as philosophical difficulties. (Treatise 1.4, §vi)

Kant's argument at this point applies the regress by insisting that whatever inner intuitions are involved they will all be inadequate to establish the self as a substance. The intuitive contents, or properties, in the "determinable" self, all presuppose a subject but do not identify it as a substance. The only alternative, which both Hume and Kant identify, is that conception of an intellectual precondition of the self which cannot be regarded as an object in experience, since it lacks an intuitive realization. The dilemma with which Kant confronts the idealists of a choice between intuitive properties and a formal apperception is elucidated earlier in the Transcendental Deduction and later in the Paralogisms. In the former Kant limits the role for transcendental apperception and in the latter he uses that limitation to reject the claims of a rational psychology built on

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an erroneous conception of transcendental apperception as a substantial self. The presuppositional role for transcendental apperception means that it says nothing informative about the way in which that condition is realized in empirical experience. At this point Kant's argument is negative: It offers the idealists just the two options of intuitive properties or a formal apperception and denies that either can provide a substantial self. If the argument is accepted it goes on to establish that the only way "substance" can be introduced is by means of outer, not merely inner, sense. Kant is not here denying a legitimate, empirical, recognition of self, as Garve thought, but he is not offering any more positive account of it (chapter 1). Kant's dilemma is effective against traditional idealists who are prepared to accept the exhaustive alternatives of a reliance on intuitive properties or a formal self, but it evidently has a gap if that restriction is not accepted. Perhaps the most obvious way in which the gap appears is by asking how Kant deals with the empirical self. The suggestion is that Kant has no answer in the Refutation argument to the question how a formal conception of the subject is realized in empirical experience. It has been suggested, and remains possible, that Kant allows selves to be empirically substantial just insofar as they retain an outer character as physical bodies. Nothing in the Refutation argument indicates such a view, but later in the Paralogisms Kant's discussion points in that direction. Kant might appeal to two further circumstances, although neither appears in the formal argument or is satisfactory. One is simply to acknowledge that in ordinary life and in natural science we have a paradigm of substance in outer objects and space; the other is to point out that an inner substance would be private to each subject and would leave a serious doubt about its use in developing an objective time and duration. The former has the weakness that it moves away from the advertised argument in favor of an a posteriori fact, and the latter gets Kant's evident intention the wrong way round. His claim was that the formal argument explains why outer objects and space provide the paradigm use of "substance" in grounding objective time. He cannot now appeal to that paradigm use in order to bolster the argument. The argument has consequently only limited success. It is adequate against an opponent who recognizes no other cases than intuitive properties and formal apperception, and it is plausible that some traditional idealists are committed in that way. The strategy, of "turning the idealists' game against itself" and reversing their priority of inner over outer experience, is revolutionary but not totally successful. It does not aim at a constructive justification for outer beliefs on idealistic premises, but seeks to show that those premises and the conception of a purely inner experience are incoherent. Their belief is that inner experience provides the only adequate basis on which to justify belief in an outer world, and that inner

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experience remains viable even without that justification. It is as if a purely inner experience mirrors ordinary life except that it lacks justified reference to that outer world; or as if we could subtract that reference and retain a viable experience much as we might subtract from our visual experience all shades of color except black, white, and grey, and still retain a viable perception. Kant's point is that if there is no room for the introduction of the schematized category of "substance/accident" into the idealist world, then the deficit is far more serious. If Kant is right it would prevent us from having any conception of objective temporal duration, and it would prevent us from ascribing any substantial existence to ourselves. The idealist world is not merely like ours but without a few minor features; it is reduced to a kaleidoscope of change without any order, any time, or any substantial self. The idea that such a world provides the basic certainty for the whole of our experience is, on Kant's view, misconceived.

[19] Concluding Sections of the Analytic of Principles

T h e two final sections of the Analytic of Principles summarize the position Kant has reached in his argument, and point towards the errors to be unmasked in the following major section, the Dialectic. Kant had earlier anticipated the "logic of illusion" in the Dialectic as part of his campaign against the misuses of logic, understanding, and reason (B85-86; B185-87). In these final sections of the Analytic he clarifies the vocabulary which marks the relevant errors and diagnoses our temptation to succumb to them (B306-7, B342, B344-45). The basic rationalist fallacy, which wrongly infers the existence of objects beyond experience from a priori elements in experience, stands as a paradigm example of such errors (B342^3, B345). The diagnosis emphasizes the limits imposed on a priori elements, such as categories, that they require a realization in sensory intuition if they are to have a use, and a resulting natural but erroneous temptation to overstep those limits. Kant's claim, in opposition to that basic fallacy, is that a priori elements are not derivable from experience but can be legitimately used only in connection with it (B295-96). The distinction between "phenomena" and "noumena" is one way of expressing the boundary between what we can know (phenomena) and what we cannot know (noumena), and is the primary focus of the clarification. That central distinction is surrounded by an additional vocabulary of "appearances," "phenomena," "things in themselves," "things in general," and "the transcendental object," which has been partially considered before but needs to be explicitly addressed. Both sections underline, in different ways, the project of descriptive metaphysics. In Phenomena and Noumena the section begins with reference to the map of experience so far constructed in the Aesthetic and Analytic, which represents our central concepts in their rightful places, licenses our possession of their proper domain, and shows the error, and intellectual dangers, of attempting to transcend it (B294-96; Prolegomena 523

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preface). In the Amphiboly, the same point is made by referring to the procedure of "transcendental reflection" in the project of a "transcendental topic" (B324) in which every concept is properly located in relation to our senses and understanding. Both sections contribute to the offer to establish "with certainty" the limits of our experience captured in the distinction between phenomena and noumena (B300). A formal argument for the required conclusion is oudined primarily in the first section from B297-305, and claims that it "undeniably follows" (B303). The Amphiboly follows this primarily with illustrations of transcendent errors in Leibniz's philosophy, with some reference to Locke, and a renewed diagnosis of the temptation to commit them. Both sections pursue the diagnosis of dialectical illusion noted earlier in the Schematism passage at B186-87. Two preliminary points need to be made. The first is that Kant's formal arguments about these errors evidendy make a reference to meaning, and the requirements which have to be met for concepts to be meaningfully employed. It would be natural, therefore, to expect that these sections would oudine a theory of meaning, and perhaps a verificationist theory of meaning. I shall argue, as I have done already, that Kant does not endorse a verificationist semantics, and indeed has no fully developed theory of meaning at all. Kant's argument does not amount to an adequate semantic theory but it may be all that he needs to draw his central conclusion. His interest is in the epistemological and metaphysical aspects of the issue rather than its pure semantics. The second point is to note a familiar terminological aspect of Kant's formulation of his conclusion, in which a legitimate empirical employment for a priori concepts is contrasted with an illegitimate "transcendental" employment. The latter is evidendy a supposed use for such concepts beyond our sensory experience, and might more explicitiy have been designated a "transcendent" use, but Kant draws the distinction between the transcendental and the transcendent only later at B352. That ambiguity was resolved in chapter 5, and I shall take it that the contrast to be drawn is primarily between a legitimate empirical use of concepts, for example, in science, and an illegitimate transcendent use of concepts, especially in philosophy. The contrast is firmly underlined in the Doctrine of Method where Kant notes that a critique of reason is needed in philosophy but not in natural science or mathematics (B738-39). The distinctive, higher-order and transcendental use of concepts in Kant's reformed philosophy is a third use, neither transcendent and illegitimate nor merely empirical and scientific. Kant does not suggest that all philosophical uses of concepts are transcendent and illegitimate, but the legitimate exceptions belong to his own transcendental project.

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1. On the Distinction between Phenomena and Noumena The earlier summary of this section points to two related issues in Kant's discussion. The first has to do with the argument to establish his conclusion about the limits of our knowledge, and the role that meaning plays in it; the second has to do with the attempt to clarify and explain the extensive vocabulary associated with the central contrast between phenomena and noumena.

1.1. The Appeal to Meaning and Use The relevance of meaning to Kant's conclusion is made clear at B298: We demand in every concept, first, the logical form of a concept (of thought) in general, and secondly the possibility of giving it an object to which it refers. In the absence of such an object it has no meaning [Sinn], and is empty of con. tent, though it may still contain the logical function required for making a concept out of any presented data. . . . Therefore all concepts and all principles, even those possible a priori, relate to empirical intuitions, that is, to the data for a possible experience. Apart from this relation they have no objective validity, and in respect of their representations are a mere play of imagination or understanding.

Examples are given of the general claim even from mathematics at B299 and A 2 4 4 ^ 5 : these a priori principles would mean [bedeuten] nothing were we not able always to present their meaning [Bedeutung] in appearances, that is, in empirical objects (B299) only in virtue of the general condition of sensibility can they possess a determinate meaning [Bedeutung] and relation to an object. (A244^15)

It should be noted in the former passage that although an appeal to the determinants of meaning is made in the opening sentences the conclusion is not that in their absence concepts or principles are meaningless, but that they are not objectively valid and are a "mere play" of representations. The same points were made earlier in relation to mathematics at B146-49 (chapter 13.3.2). The formal argument is outlined in the following terms: Pure categories, apart from formal conditions of sensibility, have only transcendental meaning; nevertheless they may not be employed transcendentally

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. . . [since] all conditions of employment in judgement are then lacking, namely subsumption of any ostensible [angeblich] object under these concepts. . . . Since, then, as pure categories they are not to be employed empirically, and cannot be employed transcendentally, they cannot, when separated (abstracted) from all sensibility, be employed in any manner whatsoever, that is, cannot be applied to any ostensible object. (B305) it undeniably follows that pure concepts of understanding can never admit of transcendental but always only of empirical employment, and that [its] principles can apply only to objects of the senses under the universal conditions of a possible experience, and never to things in general without regard to the mode in which we are able to intuit them. (B303)

Kant may seem to contradict himself in denying at B305 and asserting at B303 a use for pure concepts empirically but this is not a real problem.1 Pure concepts without any reference to conditions of sensibility cannot be used empirically, since any such use requires just those conditions, but the pure concepts have a legitimate use precisely when they are related to those sensory conditions. Kant's point is that they cannot be used empirically without some reference to the conditions of sensibility, and that this excludes both an empirical and a transcendent use independendy of those conditions. The fault in both cases is that of indeterminacy, which can be remedied in the empirical and sensory but not in the transcendent and supersensible context. Kant's argument in these passages raises three related questions: (1) How should we understand the "meaning requirements" on which the argument rests? (2) Are these requirements acceptable? (3) Is the argument, understood in the resulting ways, valid? (1) In the quotation from B298 Kant outlines meaning requirements for all concepts, but it is clear that these operate differently for a posteriori and a priori concepts. Put generally, the requirements are first that every concept must be relatable to judgment forms, since it is only in judgments that concepts have a use; and second that for "determinate meaning" every concept must be relatable to an "ostensible" item given in sense experience. Kant follows a philosophical tradition in which meaning is understood in terms of both "top down" and "bottom up" considerations, the former traditionally associated with such notions as "connotation" or "intension," and the latter with their correlatives "denotation" and "extension." The same tradition can be seen in Frege's different and superior account of Sinn and Bedeutung, but the passage at B298-99 shows that Kant's use of the terms is different from Frege's. Kant's requirement that

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concepts should relate to ostensible items in sense experience indicates a condition for reference but in the passage both Sinn and Bedeutung are used for this. That requirement is spelled out in a way later associated with Russell, Strawson, and Evans2: By means of this form or function of a concept... we cannot in any way know and distinguish what object comes under it, since we have abstracted from the sensible condition through which alone objects can come under it, . . . Apart from such application they are not concepts through which an object is known and distinguished from others. (A245) Russell held the view that in order to be thinking about an object or to make a judgement about an object, one must know which object is in question. . . . Russell took this Principle to require that someone who was in a position to think of an object must have a discriminating conception of that object—a conception which would enable the subject to distinguish that object from all other things. (Evans 1982, 65)

Kant's comments mark not only a Russellian requirement that we should be able to distinguish the relevant object from others, and so to satisfy the requirement for determinacy, but also another factor in meaning, namely reference to a judgment form in which concepts have their use. Although every concept requires an appeal both to determinable objects in sense experience and to judgment forms in which they have a use, nevertheless the roles of these factors differ in the cases of a posteriori and a priori categorial concepts. While the categories are each connected with specific judgment forms, this is not true for either a posteriori or noncategorial a priori concepts. The latter both require reference to some judgment form or other if they are to have a use, but categories require reference to specific judgment forms to provide their distinctive sense. So "substance/accident" is associated specifically with subject-predicate forms of judgment, and "cause/effect" specifically with conditional or hypothetical forms. This difference means that the relative importance of the two factors is reversed for a posteriori and categorial concepts. The former have their distinctive meaning determined by specifiable items in sense experience, by their "reference" or "extension"; the latter have their distinctive meaning determined more by their relation to particular forms of judgment but also to a priori and ultimately a posteriori sensibility. Both require the same two factors, judgment forms and sense experience, but the two factors contribute differently to their determinate meaning. (2) Kant's account of meaning differs from other accounts even within the same tradition, but does not provide an adequate theory for the principal types of expression in language. Kant makes the same requirement for determinate use as Russell, but provides no explicit differentiation between

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the varieties of linguistic expression, such as names, predicates, demonstratives, or definite descriptions, which fulfill that requirement in diverse ways. Evans's own interest in what he called "Russell's principle" noted its unclarity and sought to remedy it by exploring those varieties of reference. Similarly, although Kant insists on a role for judgment and judgment forms in determining the meanings of concepts, he offers no Fregean account of the different roles in judgment played by varieties of sub-sentential expressions. His interest is, first, in identifying the two general factors, judgment forms and ostensible reference, which provide a full, determinate use for concepts, and second to mark the ways in which these requirements are variously met for a posteriori concepts and categories. These points reinforce the claim that Kant is not canvassing a verificationist theory of meaning. It is not verificationist in its appeal to judgment forms as a contributor to the meaning of categories so that even in the absence of observational verifiability they retain a "formal" or "transcendental" meaning. It is not verificationist in its interest in the meaning of concepts in the formal disciplines, such as mathematics, where observational verification is not at issue. And it is not necessarily verificationist since its requirement for determinate meaning through sense experience could be satisfied by other theories of meaning. If we ascribe to Frege the requirements for "meaning" that an expression have both Sinn and Bedeutung, and that the former, as the "mode of presentation" of the latter, requires a referent, then this theory can satisfy Kant's conditions at least as well as semantic verificationism. Kant's account does not anticipate but is compatible with Frege's theory.3 In its weakest form, in which the components of meaning are unspecific judgment forms and sensory reference, the account is acceptable for a posteriori concepts as far as it goes. Even for categories such an account is acceptable, although Kant adds to them the stronger link with specific judgment forms. All that is required to validate the latter cases is the claim that the pure categories are what the relevant judgment forms schematically express, and this is also not difficult to accept. The suggestion in both kinds of case is that for full determinate use concepts require a potential link not only with forms of judgment but also with a priori sensory conditions and ultimately a posteriori instantiation. If the latter is absent for any a priori concepts, as it is when we divorce them from sensory conditions, they lack not meaning but a sensory reference and consequently any cognitive use. For pure a priori concepts with such a deficiency there will be no procedure for settling any disputes involving their use, and this may, mistakenly, encourage the ascription of a semantic verificationism to Kant. The most that should be said is that a priori concepts in this position lead to unverifiable claims and undecidable disputes but not that they are then meaningless. Such claims and such disputes, with their relevant concepts,

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are "empty" and "futile" (B507n), 4 but they are not totally meaningless. Their emptiness in such cases is that of lacking the requisite possibility of sensory instantiation, lacking "objective reality" rather than any meaning at all. This is consistent with, and explains, the step at B298 above which argues from meaning-determinants to a cognitive rather than a semantic deficit. (3) With such an account it follows, as Kant says at B303, that categories and their principles can have a legitimate use only in relation to their experiential realizability through the senses. Without that latter component the concepts are empty and disputes about their principles are undecidable. If we are prepared to accept that categories have also a substantial component of meaning in the a priori judgment forms which express them, then Kant's twin claims are established: Categories have a meaning dimension which goes beyond their sensory, empirical realization, but they lack any cognitive use once we divorce them completely from that sensory basis. In chapter 17.1.2 it was shown that Kant did not identify "meaning" and "use," and now he makes clear that although "use" is a contributor to full determinate meaning, its absence is primarily a cognitive rather than a semantic failure. A priori concepts both encourage, and enable, us to envisage what is beyond our cognitive experience, but they do not enable us to make any cognitive use of them beyond that experience in a supersensible realm.5 That character, which makes possible both a necessary cognitive use in experience and also an illegitimate temptation to transcend it, explains what was earlier called the "two faces of reason" and the rationalist fallacy in chapter 2. It echoes Wittgenstein's memorable comment on the "bewitchment of our intelligence by language," and points to Kant's therapeutic treatment of that temptation in the Dialectic. It is a key part of Kant's diagnosis of dialectical illusion that concepts enable us to extend our thought beyond what is presentable in experience through such a concept as that of a "thing in general," and that this capacity has both a valuable and an illusory side. Its value is in enabling us, in imagination, to think beyond our current experience in scientific innovation, or to postulate a global structure for experience in science or a Kantian metaphysics, or to constitute principles in such practical spheres as morality and politics. Its illusion is to suppose that we may also discover truths about objects wholly divorced from any possible experience in extending our thought through things in general to transcendent objects. But it is also evident that although the schemata of sensibility first realise the categories, they at the same time restrict them . . . to conditions which lie outside the understanding and are due to sensibility. . . . If we omit a restricting condition we seem to extend the scope o f the previously limited concept. . . .

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We conclude that the categories in their pure significance, apart from all conditions of sensibility, ought to apply to things in general, as they are, and not, like the schemata to represent them only as they appear. They ought, we conclude, to possess a meaning independent of all schemata, and of much wider application. Now there certainly does remain in the pure concepts of understanding, even after elimination of every sensible condition, a meaning; but it is purely logical, signifying only the bare unity of the representations. The pure concepts can find no object, and so can acquire no meaning, which might yield knowledge of some object. (B186-87)

In the final sentence, as Kemp Smith noted, Kant himself altered "might yield a concept of some object" to "might yield knowledge of some object," and so reinforces the account given above in which semantic considerations underpin a cognitive limitation.6 That early passage already anticipates Kant's later attempt at B313-14 to make clear his discriminations between objects as "appearances" or "phenomena" and as "things in themselves" and "noumena."

1.2. The Vocabulary of Phenomena and Noumena and their Associates Some aspects of this vocabulary have been considered already in confusions over the so-called two aspects and two worlds interpretations in chapter 2.3.2.2, and the rejected traditionalist assumption of an appeal to noumenal causation at B32-33 in chapter 7.1.1. It is now time to resolve other controversial issues about these terms and the cognitive restrictions they embody in the section on "Phenomena and Noumena." The more general problem about Kant's commitment to noumena, or things in themselves, goes beyond that section and is considered finally in discussing Adickes's Kant und das Ding an Sich, and Kant's Lehre von der doppelten Affektion unseres Ichs in chapter 22. Initially I do not differentiate things in themselves and noumena, but consider that later in the light of Arthur Collins's discussion in his Possible Experience.7 There are some uncontroversial, or at least indisputable, Kantian claims which it is useful to list at the start: (1) We have no knowledge of noumena, and have knowledge only of phenomena, or appearances. (2) We are sometimes tempted, by virtue of our conceptual capacities, to think that knowledge of noumena is attainable; this temptation can be explained and diagnosed by distinguishing the semantic and the cognitive scope of concepts (B186-87).

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(3) Those temptations, and their explanation and correction, are distinctively philosophical matters (B296-97). The transcendental distinction between "things as they appear" (phenomena) and "things as they are" (noumena) is not our ordinary empirical distinction between the way objects may appear to us and the way they actually are (B313). (4) Despite (1) we can take it for granted that things beyond our cognitive powers may very well exist (B309). We cannot know such things, but by the same token we do not know that they do not exist and cannot rationally deny their existence (B344). The concept of a noumenon is for us acceptable only in that negative sense as a "problematic," not "assertoric," concept (B308-9, B310-11, B342-^4). (5) In the negative, problematic sense, the concept of a noumenon is not an "arbitrary invention," but something we are bound to conceive as a correlate of "appearance," which functions only as a "limiting" concept (A251-52, Bxxvi-xxvii, B310-11). In this package, as in the whole passage, there is no backtracking on the central claim in (1) that we have no knowledge of noumena. Kant may seem to qualify that claim, at B 308-9 and A251-53, but the qualifications are not significant (cf. B148^i9). They are that we may suppose objects to exist outside our cognitive range under the "negative" conception in (4) of noumena, and that we are bound to conceive of noumena, or things in themselves, as mere correlates of appearances and as "limiting," "problematic" concepts (A251-52, B310-11). The concepts of a noumenon or thing in itself are an inevitable shadow cast by understanding and reason, which merely reflects our empirical experience but may be misconstrued as designations of real transcendent objects. It is that natural misconstruction which generates the bewitchment of our intelligence by language. The former qualification plainly amounts to no more than what has been called Kant's epistemic modesty.8 Just as we have no good reason positively to deny the existence of noumena, so we have no reason, beyond a misplaced anthropocentric arrogance, to suppose that our cognitive powers are the only possible ones. Epistemic modesty inclines us to say instead that there may well be beings in other possible worlds with other cognitive powers and access to objects beyond our cognitive and sensory range, just as we now say in cosmological modesty that humans do not occupy a location at the center of the physical universe. If Kant held a verificationist semantics, or believed for some other reason that any reference outside our cognitive experience was strictly meaningless, then his epistemic modesty would be untenable. But Kant did not subscribe to such a verificationism,

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and plainly allows references to other cognitive powers to be meaningful but problematic. The relativism in his transcendental idealism turns on the possibility of other cognitive powers in other possible worlds (B42-44). Epistemic modesty goes along with the claims, frequendy noted, in which our a priori principles are synthetic and may not hold in all possible worlds, and the difference between negative and positive conceptions of noumena is consistent with these claims. The negative conception is that of objects outside our sensory range covered by the "indeterminate thought of something in general" (A252, B307). The positive conception is that of an object of a specific nonsensory intuition. Of the latter Kant says that we have no ground for assuming another kind of intuition and are not justified in presupposing its (real) possibility (A252, B309). He adds that we cannot even comprehend its possibility, as he had earlier said that we cannot form the least conception of an intuitive intelligence9 (B307, B139). These claims amount to no more than the denial, implied at A253 and A241n, of the "real" possibility of objects designated by such conceptions, but in any case Kant rejects the positive sense in favor of the negative conception of a noumenon necessarily developed as the limiting, problematic, correlate of appearances. The second qualification at A251-53 provides an explanation for our ability to construct the concept of a noumenon as something more than an arbitrary invention, and for its characterization at B310-11 as problematic and limiting. The explanation proceeds in this way: The concept of an appearance implies that "something not itself appearance must correspond to it," and that must be "something in itself, an object independent of sensibility" (A251-52, B306). The suggestion is that just as the colloquial notion of "appearance" implies that of something which appears, so the transcendental notion of "appearance" inevitably implies its correlative notion of a something. The two cases are formally but not materially congruent. The somethings related to empirical appearances are the objects of experience which appear variously to different subjects; those related to transcendental appearances are things in themselves beyond experience and supposedly accessible only to reason. Kant made the same point in the preface (Bxxvi-xxvii) which admits a conception, and the bare possibility, of objects as things in themselves while rejecting any knowledge of such things. That latter passage remains firmly within the restrictions of (l)-(5), although it is tempting to take the passage at A251-53 to conflict with (1). Kant allows that we can, and are bound to, construct from the concept of an appearance a relation to something in itself, but he goes on in the passage to explain and restrict the significance of that construction. What we construct is "not a determinate knowledge of anything," but only the "thought of something in general"; it is not a "true object," 10 and leaves open whether it signifies "any object

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whatsoever." It is a "notional" correlate of sensibility for which the unknown X stands in the transcendental object formula at A109, and it points in those two different directions: correctly towards our immanent experience, and incorrecdy towards a supposed transcendent realm. These provisos echo the distinction between the positive and negative conceptions of a noumenon. At the end of the passage he reinforces his general point that pure concepts of the understanding do not genuinely refer to corresponding things in themselves or noumena, but have a use only in connection with intuition and the senses. The passage is not at odds with ( l ) - ( 5 ) but a restatement of it. The concept of a noumenon is characterized as problematic and limiting. It marks a limit to our knowledge and sensibility by initially allowing a conceptual extension beyond sense experience and then restricting that understanding by denying it the tide of knowledge. The concept is problematic, rather than assertoric, because it marks only a limit to our knowledge and not a knowledge of any determinate object. It is sometimes objected to this conception that it requires us to "think both sides of the limit" and that this is in some way impossible, but it is difficult to attach a clear sense to the objection.11 It seems to rest on the rejected belief that for Kant what is transcendent and beyond experience is stricdy meaningless. But for Kant "thinking the other side" is not nonsensical though it is cognitively handicapped. We can form meaningful concepts of what is transcendent and in some metaphysical issues are strongly tempted to do so as the Dialectic demonstrates, but the results are only fictional claims and undecidable disputes.

1.3. The Associated Vocabulary It would be wrong to represent this account as "defending" or "reconstructing" Kant against traditionalist objections. It is not a defense of Kant but an accurate and consistent record of his text. Nevertheless the account points to, but does not yet satisfy, the need for further elucidation of Kant's extensive vocabulary. Something has been said in chapters 14-15 of Kant's use of the term "transcendental object," but nothing in the account given so far outlines the contrasts between "noumenon" and "thing in itself' on one side, and "appearance," and "phenomenon" on the other. I consider first whether we should simply identify the items in each pair, and then an argument from Arthur Collins's Possible Experience which insists on a distinction between noumena and things in themselves. In earlier discussions the transcendental notion of an appearance was explained as a general characterization of what is presented strictly to the senses and abstracts from the conventional descriptions due to the under-

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standing. The term "phenomenon" is used instead to mark those presentations to the senses with their conventional descriptions. Phenomena just are the items perceived in inner and outer sense understood and described in conventional ways: "Appearances, so far as they are thought as objects according to the unity of the categories, are called phenomena" (A248-49). Phenomena are those objects designated by an application of concepts or categories to a sense experience of appearances. Categorial concepts and principles have no use apart from such applications to possible experience, and are no more than "rules for the exposition of appearances" (B303). In a later passage Kant contrasts that immanent use of categories with Plato's transcendent account of "Ideas": "For Plato Ideas are archetypes of the things themselves, and not, in the manner of categories, merely keys to possible experience" (B370). Evidently appearances and phenomena are intimately related. They are extensionally equivalent designations of the proper objects of our knowledge, and make that essential reference to the senses and understanding expressed at B75-76. The earlier account of Kant's conceptions of the transcendental object and noumena in chapters 14-15 are related to appearances and phenomena in the way indicated earlier. The notion of a noumenon constitutes a mistaken solution to the equation of the "transcendental object = X , " while the immanent conceptions of appearances and phenomena provide the correct solution. The mediating notion of a transcendental object is, by itself, neither correct nor mistaken. It points correctly to phenomena, or appearances, and mistakenly to noumena, or things in themselves. In the discussion of the Aesthetic it was pointed out that within the scope of our immanent experience appearances are not to be understood idealistically or phenomenalistically as fragments of inner experience which might be used to construct knowledge of outer objects. Kant's invented, technical use of "appearance" in the transcendental sense allows reference to inner and outer appearances and covers both inner and outer experience, both inner and outer objects. It represents that theoretical, artificial appeal to what belongs strictiy to a sense presentation once we abstract from its conventional descriptions. Kant's explicit distinction between appearances and phenomena at A248-50 both raises these issues and settles them in favor of that nonidealist, nontraditional view, but it leaves open the relation between noumena and things in themselves. I note first some passages which define the central sense for "noumenon": if we entitle certain objects, as appearances, sensible entities [Sinnenwesen] (phenomena), then since we distinguish the mode in which we intuit them from the nature that belongs to them in themselves, it is implied . . . that we

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place the latter, considered in their own nature, though we do not so intuit them, or that we place other possible things which are not objects of our senses but thought as objects only through the understanding, in opposition to the former and call them intelligible entities (Verstandeswesen^ noumena). (B306) The concept of a noumenon—that is, of a thing which is not to be thought as object of the senses but as a thing in itself, solely through a pure understanding—is not in any way contradictory. (B310) Understanding and reason are indeed employed in dealing with appearances; the question to be answered is whether they have another employment, when the object is not a phenomenon (i.e., is a noumenon); and it is in this latter sense that the object is taken when it is thought as merely intelligible, that is, as being given to the understanding alone and not to the senses. (B313) Now whence, I ask, can the understanding obtain these synthetic propositions when the concepts are to be applied, not in their relation to possible experience but to things in themselves (noumena)? (B315)

The same idea that noumena are supposed objects of pure understanding in abstraction from any "condition of the senses" is present throughout the passage, especially at A245 and B304, and the same close relation between noumena and things in themselves is made clear at A252 and B345. The passage begins by contrasting a pure and an empirical employment of concepts to "things in general and in themselves" on the former side and to appearances on the latter. It is only later at B306-7 that things in themselves are called "intelligible entities [Verstandeswesen] and noumena." The above quotations from B310 and B315 reinforce the picture of a close relation and overlap between things in themselves and noumena, and in other places at B307 and B345 the two are identified. Despite that close connection between things in themselves and noumena it has recently been claimed by Arthur Collins (1999, 24-30) that there is a special and important reason to distinguish them. I argue that although he is right to insist on some distinction between them his grounds for the distinction are misconceived. Collins's view is that if we do not distinguish them we encourage the erroneous ascription to Kant of a traditional idealism. He believes that what stops Kant from being an idealist is only his acceptance of the existence of things in themselves even though we have no knowledge of them. He also believes, with one proviso, that Kant is not committed to the existence of noumena, so that to identify things in themselves with noumena will entail that Kant does not accept the existence of things in themselves. His central argument is that if the only thing that prevents Kant from slipping into traditional idealism is a commitment to the existence of things in themselves, then with that identity it will be impossible to avoid ascribing the unwanted doctrine to

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him. The discussion throughout concerns the transcendental, not the empirical, sense for "thing in itself." The proviso that Collins righdy makes (1999, 187) is that what Kant calls the "negative sense" of "noumenon" can be identified with a thing in itself. The "positive" sense, outiined above, cannot be identified as a thing in itself, and it is that residual identification which, Collins thinks, must be avoided if Kant is to be correctiy separated from idealism. I agree, and have argued extensively, that to represent Kant as a traditional idealist is an error, but I do not accept that the error can be avoided only by Collins's proposal. To put it bluntiy I do not believe that Kant tries to avoid traditional idealism by committing himself to the existence of transcendent things in themselves. That conclusion was the outcome of the earlier discussion of Prolegomena §13 in chapter 10.2 and it still stands. I make three summary comments on Collins's argument: first, to resist the grounds on which he bases Kant's commitment to the existence of things in themselves; second, to outiine a distinction and overlap between things in themselves and noumena; and third, to add two final considerations which Collins overlooks or disregards. Collins locates Kant's commitment to the existence of things in themselves in three contexts, the Third Antimony, B32-3 3, and Bxxvi-xxvii, but I claim that none is adequate. The appeal to persons as things in themselves in the Third Antinomy is complex and should be set aside for two reasons. It concerns a practical, moral context of "faith" as well as the speculative context of knowledge at issue here, and its commitment to things in themselves is made only with substantial qualifications.12 Kant's commitment to actual things in themselves as causes of appearances at B32-33 was considered in chapter 7.1.1 and rejected. Other references to things in themselves as a metaphysical Grund of experience go beyond that causal commitment and are considered in the discussion of Adickes in chapter 23. The crucial claim rests on passages at Bxxvi-xxvii and A251-53 which Collins regards as a commitment to the actual existence of things in themselves. These have also been considered already and the Preface passage is examined in more detail in chapter 24, but the outcome is to reject that strong commitment. Kant insists on the conceivability, indeed the necessary conceivability, of things in themselves, but he is not committed to their actual existence and consistently claims that we can stricdy assert neither that such things exist nor that they do not. Necessary conceivability is coupled with an inevitable agnosticism over their actual existence.13 The relation between things in themselves and noumena can be understood in a way parallel to the earlier resolution of the relation between the transcendental object and things in themselves. Just as the notion of a transcendental object points in different directions, only one of which is that of a thing in itself, so the related notions of a thing in itself and a

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noumenon overlap but point in different directions as Arthur Collins rightiy notes (1999, 187). Although they overlap they are also separate because the notion of a thing in itself is directly related, as correlate, to the notion of sense experience and so to appearances, and then indirectly in the diagnostic route to illusion to the notion of a noumenon as an object of pure understanding or reason. The notion of a thing in itself arises primarily as a supposed correlate of sense perception, and that of a noumenon arises primarily in the basic rationalist fallacy from such pure disciplines as mathematics. That divergence in motivation maps a difference between two issues in philosophy: first, the traditional idealist issue of the status of objects of perception (things in themselves); and second, the status of objects of the formal sciences such as mathematics (noumena). Beyond that difference of motivation the outcome of the appeals to things in themselves and noumena is not fundamentally different. In neither case can we aspire to genuine knowledge of such purported things or make a real commitment to their actual existence, and in both cases their conceivability, and our ignorance about them, is inevitable. Both are subject to Kant's provisos in admitting a "negative" conception of them but denying any such "positive" conception. Both mark a division between what is properly immanent in our experience and what is transcendentiy beyond it. Collins's claim that the "negative," but not the "positive" conception of a noumenon can be identified with that of a thing in itself is consistent with this account, but a final point should be made to qualify his view. He takes no account of Kant's distinction between empirical and transcendental senses of "thing in itself' in reaching his conclusion. Collins believes that it is only Kant's acceptance of the existence of things in themselves, even though we have no knowledge of them, which prevents him from accepting a traditional idealism. Such a view has the advantage of distancing Kant from empirical idealism but the price he exacts is too high. It yields the familiar and bizarre claim that Kant asserts the actual existence of things in themselves as an integral part of transcendental idealism, and yet denies us any knowledge of that existence. An essential foundation for the doctrine is identified but characterized as unknowable. This is a central claim in Adickes's interpretation which I outline and criticize in chapter 23, but I note one passage where Kant rejects just such a position. At B709 he says: This object, as thus entertained by reason (ens rationis ratiocinantes), is a mere Idea; it is not assumed as something that is real absolutely and in itself but is postulated only problematically. . . . We misapprehend the meaning of this Idea if we regard it as an assertion, or even as the assumption, of a real thing, to which we may proceed to ascribe the ground of the systematic order of the world.

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The example is that of the Idea of systematic unity conceived as such an absolutely real thing in itself, but the point holds generally for the conception of things in themselves. The misapprehension identified is that of attaching a reality to an Idea of reason which can be only a reality of things in themselves or noumena. It is unbelievable that Kant should reject as a misapprehension in this case what Collins and Adickes regard as a foundation for his own philosophy. Collins is right to distance Kant from the combined transcendental realism and empirical idealism which the Critique explicitly rejects, but the consequence is a realist commitment to things in themselves. The revolutionary view I have outlined and supported against the traditionalist account in the preceding pages shows that it is unduly pessimistic to regard this as Kant's only way of evading empirical idealism. There are other, and better, ways of outlining Kant's position which also distance his account from empirical idealism, and do so without falling into transcendental realism, or into a commitment to the actual existence of things in themselves. Collins is motivated in that unfortunate direction primarily because he fails to note Kant's general distinction between an empirical and a transcendental sense of the terms "appearance" and "thing in itself' (B313-14, B62-63). The point is made, and was discussed in chapter 9.1-2, in relation to numerous passages in the Aesthetic which draw that distinction, but it is also made firmly in this later context at B313-14: When . . . we say that the senses represent objects as they appear, and the understanding objects as they are, the latter statement is to be taken, not in the transcendental, but in the merely empirical meaning of the terms, namely as meaning that the objects must be represented as objects of experience, that is, as appearances in thoroughgoing interconnection with one another, and not as they may be apart from their relation to possible experience (and so to any senses), as objects of the pure understanding.

Kant refers to a bad philosophical habit of supposing that Newtonian natural science provides access to an underlying reality of things in themselves beyond any possible experience. The concluding clauses make it clear that reference to a transcendental sense for "objects as they are" is a reference to things in themselves and noumena, that is, as things apart from any relation to the senses and as objects of pure understanding.14 It is that realm of objects, or pseudo-objects, of which we are tempted to claim knowledge in Kant's diagnosis of the route to error. By contrast empirical objects, things in themselves in the empirical sense, objects of experience, appearances and phenomena all define the domain in which objective knowledge is possible for us. It is their existence, and our knowledge of them and their existence, which prevents Kant from falling into empirical idealism, and not the dubious, problematic exis-

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tence of things in themselves.15 Kant's formal argument against idealism in the Refutation of Idealism demonstrates not the existence of transcendent things in themselves or noumena but the existence of immanent outer appearances, outer phenomena, or outer objects of experience. It is the existence of the latter not that of the former which prevents Kant from falling into empirical idealism. There is in all these passages no backtracking on Kant's views that we are bound to construct concepts of transcendent objects, and on grounds of epistemic modesty cannot deny the existence of such objects, to which we have no sensory access and of which we have no knowledge. Kant recognizes in such claims the significance for his own transcendental idealism of the possibility of other worlds with cognitive powers and commitments different from ours. The package of claims ( l ) - ( 5 ) is not rescinded or even modified. It represents a coherent diagnosis of the way in which philosophers may come erroneously to believe in the existence of "intelligible," transcendent pseudo-objects, but it does not endorse those steps. It is a diagnosis which in the Dialectic has strong affinities with Wittgenstein's therapy for identifying and treating philosophical temptations such as Plato's view of mathematics. Kant endorses Plato's "archetypes of the things themselves" in the field of the practical, but rejects a parallel view of the objects of mathematics: [Plato] extended his concept to cover speculative knowledge . . . even to mathematics, although the object of that science is to be found nowhere except in possible experience. In this I cannot follow him, any more than in his mystical deduction of these Ideas, or in the extravagances whereby he, so to speak, hypostatised them . . . although [his] exalted language is quite capable of a milder interpretation. (B370-71n)

2. The Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection The title of this section marks Kant's transition to the therapeutic, diagnostic treatment of philosophical illusion and error in the Dialectic. An "amphiboly" is outlined at B512 in the following terms: "we have only to take care . . . to avoid that amphiboly which transforms our idea [Idee] into a supposed representation [Vorstellunjj] of an object that is empirically given and therefore to be known according to the laws of experience." The term "amphiboly" stands, like another unfamiliar term, "subreption," for a confusion among our "Ideas" about their designating empirical or transcendent objects (B647, B671 and elsewhere: chapter 24). The confusion arises especially from "Ideas" of reason (Ideen, not Vorstellunjjen) and pure unschematized categories which may have

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no sensory component and consequentiy no immediate realization in our possible experience. The passage repeats the diagnosis of dialectical illusion from Phenomena and Noumena and the Schematism, the Kantian "bewitchment of our intelligence by means of concepts." The diagnosis is now expressed in the new terms of "transcendental reflection" and a "transcendental topic," and is applied in some detail to Leibniz's philosophy. Locke's "transcendental realism" is also criticized for making related errors, since both philosophers are criticized for their one-sided diets in overemphasizing the exclusive demands of sensibility or reason, but Leibniz's alleged mistakes are the focus of Kant's attention. I divide the discussion into those two issues, namely transcendental reflection and topic, and the illustrative diagnosis of error in Leibniz.

2.1. Transcendental Reflection and a Transcendental Topic Kant distinguishes "transcendental" reflection from the reflection involved in all judgments and comparisons of concepts, and from "logical" reflection (B317-18). He explains that reflection is not concerned with concept learning, the "derivation of concepts from objects," and that "logical" reflection concerns only formal comparisons between concepts without considering their content, and not the associated relations among objects. Transcendental reflection by contrast compares concepts according to their "subjective conditions" in sensibility or understanding, and is concerned with relations between the associated objects. It deals with what I earlier called the "provenance" of concepts in belonging either to sensibility or to understanding, is not part of empirical psychology or a purely logical comparison of concepts, but an epistemic aspect of Kant's overall metaphysics. A linguistic analysis which outlined the structural diversity among different referring expressions, as demonstratives, names, and definite descriptions without considering the type of objects to which these refer, would qualify as a "logical" comparison. Transcendental reflection by contrast ascribes concepts to sense or understanding, is concerned with the relation between concepts and their objects, and with the distinction between objects of the senses (appearances/phenomena) and objects of understanding or reason (things in themselves/noumena). In earlier discussions transcendental reflection and the resulting transcendental topic have been associated with a descriptive metaphysics of experience which catalogues concepts, primarily a priori concepts, as designating elements in our experienced, immanent, reality. The transcendental topic displays the preface's map or inventory of our concepts, and locates them in their rightful places in experience and in relation to each other. The topographical imagery reinforces the related claim that Kant's

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positive project is neither a traditional idealism which attaches an epistemological priority to subjective mental states, nor a normative attempt to justify on that basis our belief in an external world. In considering the relation of concepts to objects Kant does not mean merely outer or physical objects. But the project has also a negative, therapeutic aspect which repeats earlier points (e.g., B186-87). The error, which quite obviously is the cause of this mistaken venture and excuses but does not justify it, lies in employing the understanding contrary to its vocation, transcendentally, and in making objects, possible intuitions, conform to concepts. . . . what we do is to think something in general and while on one hand we determine it in sensible mode on the other we distinguish from this mode of intuition a universal object represented in abstracto. What we are left with is a mode of determining an object by thought alone—a mere logical form without content but which seems to us to be a mode in which the object exists in itself (noumenon) without regard to intuition. (B 34 5-46)

In recording the inventory, or drawing the map, of our concepts we are able consequendy to correct misunderstandings about their character and relations. The distinctive error exposed in the Amphiboly is to think that concepts rightly allocated to our understanding or reason, and not to sensibility, must consequently designate nonsensory objects (noumena/things in themselves). The basic rationalist fallacy is such an example of inference from the nonsensory character of a priori concepts to the existence of designated nonsensory, "intelligible," things in themselves. It infers from the categories' a priori independence of experience that they designate objects independent of that experience. "We cannot call the noumenon such an object; signifying as it does the problematic concept of an object for a quite different intuition and a quite different understanding from ours, it is itself a problem" (B344). In the Amphiboly that fallacy is associated particularly with Leibniz in the charge that his "supposititious system of intellectual knowledge" rests on his lacking the discipline of a transcendental topic and being deceived by the amphiboly (B336, B326). Kant's view, already outlined at B75-76 and in the previous section on Phenomena and Noumena, is that a priori concepts do not derive from experience but have a use only within, and not beyond, that experience. Categories are "keys to possible experience" and not, as Plato thought, "archetypes of things in themselves" beyond it (B 370). Kant's framework raises familiar difficulties which can be summarily set aside. If it is objected that Kant aims to map not only a priori concepts but a priori intuitions then it can be replied that a priori intuitions are identified through their conceptual expression. That is why in the Aesthetic an account is given of the concepts of space and time even though they are classified as "intuitions," and why for Kant philosophy is

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"conceptual," not in canvassing purely analytic truths but in dealing with our conceptual representations and mapping their dependences. The point has been made before and will be underlined in chapter 29 on the Doctrine of Method. Similarly it may be objected that a transcendental topic which allocates concepts variously to sense or to understanding must be vulnerable to the "blindness" problem. It may be said that it makes no sense to assign a concept to the senses, or that if it does it contradicts the idea that the senses are "blind." That issue can also be set aside because the "topical" task of assigning concepts to sense or understanding is separate from the blindness problem, and because I have argued that the blindness problem is not insuperable. Kant's exercise can be understood as a way of abstracting diverse elements in our experience which cannot be literally separated, and theoretically assigning them to one or other faculty. The procedure is no different from abstracting acoustic, phonological, syntactic, and semantic aspects from a spoken utterance in which those elements are literally inseparable. Finally it may be objected that the task of a transcendental topic revives the anxieties about the intrusion of psychology into Kant's epistemology and metaphysics. Kant's transcendental task, his topic, is explicitiy distinguished from the empirical psychology of concept learning and from an objectionable transcendent psychology. It has as clear a philosophical and therapeutic outcome as more recent category disciplines in Wittgenstein or Ryle. The central point of allocating concepts to sense or understanding is to underline the need for sensory instantiation of concepts, even a priori concepts, and to warn against the errors of conjuring up bogus references to supposed objects beyond experience as if the need for sensibility could be avoided. These are essentially epistemological and therapeutic rather than psychological issues. Kant's transcendental topic, the allocation of concepts either to sense or to understanding with its associated corrections of the map of our experience, is a compound of doctrines canvassed elsewhere in the Critique. Among these are: (1) the rejection of the basic rationalist fallacy in the prefaces and the anti-Platonic passages at B8-9 and B 370-72. (2) the essential connection between sense and understanding for genuine experience and knowledge at B75-76, and the requirement of instantiability through the senses even for a priori concepts at B174-75 and elsewhere. These requirements are part of an already noted "residual" empiricism underlined explicitly in the appeal to the "empiricist principle" at B496.

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(3) the classification of space and time in the Aesthetic as "intuitive," and belonging to sense, rather than "discursive," and belonging to understanding. (4) the sketch of meaning which distinguishes a posteriori and a priori concepts in Phenomena and Noumena, provides the basis for the only legitimate, immanent, use for a priori concepts, and marks the frontier between what we can properly claim to know, phenomena, and what is out of our cognitive range, noumena. The distinctively Kantian features in the package may still be questioned, but the general position, and particularly its therapeutic discipline for a serious philosophy, are not hard to accept. Its apparatus of concepts and intuitions, understanding and sensibility, its account of synthetic a priori principles, and its sketch of the meaning of a posteriori and a priori concepts, may be thought misleading, dubious, or even rejected. But the presupposed goal of a descriptive metaphysics with its correct inventory or map of our experience and the location of its most fundamental features in their rightful places would be congenial to many contemporary philosophers. The basic rationalist fallacy surely is a fallacy, and to point it out represents a distinctively philosophical discipline. A transcendental topic in which philosophers categorize the essential elements in our experience, and use it as a corrective, zVthat of a Wittgensteinean therapy, a Rylean category discipline, or a Strawsonian descriptive metaphysics.16 Those latter projects, rightly or wrongly, were also designed to point to errors in the map of experience tacitly committed by philosophical enthusiasts. They point, like Kant's project, to a reformed philosophy with a new direction of interest. That such a direction was revolutionary at the end of the eighteenth century is shown in the detail of the Amphiboly where Leibniz's alleged errors are used as an illustration of Kant's revolutionary reform of philosophy. Those more recent disciplinarians show that it was still revolutionary in the middle of the twentieth century.

2.2. The Diagnosis of Error in Leibniz Kant makes it clear that the specific criticisms of Leibniz rest on the ambiguity noted above in the conception of objects as objects of the senses (phenomena) or of understanding (noumena). Leibniz's claimed mistake is to have failed to mark that distinction through lacking an apparatus to ask the transcendental topic's question: Does this concept belong to sense or to understanding? With that handicap Leibniz drew what are for Kant the erroneous conclusions that objects of the senses and objects of the

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understanding are the same things, and that the former are confused representations of the ultimate reality of the latter. In two different, and repetitive, passages Kant detects the ambiguity in four relations in Leibniz's philosophy, namely identity/difference, agreement/opposition, inner/ outer, and matter/form (B319-24; B327-33). According to Kant the Leibnizian contrasts are always between the terms of these relations as noumena or as monads, and the basic objection is that Leibniz failed to see that the relations can properly hold in our experience only among phenomena and not among noumena. Kant's claim is that the underlying ambiguity and Leibniz's failure to recognize it are responsible for the central errors of the latter's philosophy: Having no such transcendental topic, and being therefore deceived by the amphiboly of concepts of reflection the celebrated Leibniz erected an intellectual system of the world, or believed that he could obtain knowledge of the inner nature of things by comparing all objects merely in the understanding and the abstract [abgesonderten] formal conditions of thought. (B326) [this] . . . misled one of the most acute of all philosophers into a supposititious system of intellectual knowledge which undertakes to determine its objects without any assistance from the senses. For this reason the exposition of the cause of what is deceptive—occasioning these false principles—in the amphiboly of these concepts is of great utility as a reliable method of determining and securing the limits of the understanding. (B336)

That underlying ambiguity is said to show what is wrong with Leibniz's appeal to the identity of indiscernibles, and more generally how he comes to conceive of a world of intelligibilia accessed not through sense experience but solely through reason. The former principle holds for objects of the understanding so that they cannot be distinct unless there is some conceptual difference between them (B320). Since a conceptual distinction excludes what Kant regards as intuitive differences, such as spatial or temporal location, the identity of indiscernibles has a counter example. Two drops of water may be conceptually indiscernible but are patently not numerically distinct when they occupy different spatial locations. Kant suggests ironically that if the principle were defended by refusing to make the contrast between purely conceptual and intuitive properties it would then be purely formal and trivial. If we here wished to resort to the usual subterfuge, maintaining as regards realitates noumena that they at least do not act in opposition to one another, it would be incumbent on us to produce an example. . . . But no example can be obtained otherwise than from experience which never yields more than phenomena. This proposition therefore has no more meaning than that a concept which includes only affirmation includes no negation—a proposition we have never doubted. (B338n)

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In failing to draw any distinction between objects of "sense" and of "understanding" it fails also to provide any substantial information about the identity of real objects, that is, phenomena.17 The same issue arises with respect to criteria of identity and difference for concepts and the things they designate. Kant's point is that concept identity is determined by, and only by, the features included in the meaning of the concept but that the identity of things falling under the concept is not determined solely in that way That explains the more general criticism Kant makes, namely, that Leibniz confuses two different nonequivalent versions of the dictum de omni et nullo. The correct version says that whatever agrees with a concept agrees with everything that falls under it, while the incorrect version says that what is not contained in a universal concept is also not included in the particular concepts which fall under it (B337). The intensional identity of concepts is confused with extensional characteristics of their objects in experience. All these alleged errors are connected. They rest on the views, attributed to Leibniz, that in metaphysics it is possible to discover truths about real, nonsensory objects simply by analysis of their concepts due solely to reason. Given those assumptions it is natural for Leibniz to hold that only reason provides us with the underlying truth about reality and that although the senses access the same things they do so only partially and confusedly. Kant adds a third objection to Leibniz's monadology in the latter's account of "inner" features of monads (B330). Kant notes that since outer, spatial relations are not compatible with the supposed simple, inner, essential properties of monads the latter can be understood only in terms of our understanding of mental, representative features of our inner sense. Such a connection further conflicts with Kant's own contrast between inner sense and understanding's apperception and with the conclusion of the Refutation of Idealism, but the objection explicidy noted is its consequence in the doctrine of a "preestablished harmony," which Kant here and elsewhere regards as absurd. The primary point is to understand Kant's response to the advertised views of Leibniz rather than to consider if Kant's account of Leibniz is wholly accurate, but Kant is right about some central features of Leibniz's monadology. Leibniz did hold that our perception provides only a confused access to a reality of monads, intelligible objects, some of which have reason and all of which are accessed through reason, and he did accept a difference in degree of clarity between our sensory and rational access to those same objects. He did regard every concept of an object as analytically containing all its characteristics, past, present, and future,18 and so allowed the possibility of discovering everything about those objects through a priori analysis of their concepts. It is true that he did not think that this was practically feasible for humans, but in principle the truth was contained in

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concepts waiting to be discovered. Unlike Kant Leibniz accepted an ontology of noumena of which we have knowledge through understanding and reason, and modeled this knowledge on the formal systems of mathematics and logic. Although Kant retains traces of a Leibnizian account from an earlier preCritical influence he differs essentially from him in all these ways. Kant's view is that whether noumena exist or not they provide for us neither knowledge nor immanent reality. Sense perception provides us not with a confused representation of real noumena but with access to the only real objects of experience, namely phenomena conceived as distinct from noumena. One of Kant's central complaints against Leibniz's views in the polemic against Eberhard, discussed in chapter 23, is precisely that they confuse that difference of kind with a mere difference of degree. Kant deploys a formal, especially geometrical, model for the project of his descriptive metaphysics, but it is very different from Leibniz's similar appeal. It is qualified by significant differences between metaphysics and mathematics, and it does not yield knowledge of noumena even in the mathematical context (B740ff.). In line with his rejection of real noumena Kant vehemently rejects Platonic views about the nature of mathematical objects at B8-9 and B371. Kant's conception of mathematical and metaphysical principles as synthetic a priori is a radical amendment to Leibniz's conception of analytic or necessary truth, and Kant has no appeal to a conception of a deity with analytic access to every truth about every individual. Those significant and wide-ranging differences between Kant and Leibnizian views make it hard to understand how some recent commentators nevertheless take Kant to follow Leibniz even in the later Critical philosophy. I have suggested that the Critique's envisaged progress in philosophy from the childhood of rationalist dogmatism through empiricist skepticism to a mature Critical discipline attaches more merit to Hume than to Leibniz. Kant's disparaging comment about "windy metaphysics" in the response to Garve quoted in chapter 1 suggests that he would have applauded the following comment of Hume's if applied to Leibniz's monadology: Though the chain of arguments . . . were ever so logical there must arise a strong suspicion, if not an absolute assurance, that it has carried us quite beyond the reach of our faculties when it leads to conclusions so extraordinary and so remote from common life and experience. We are got into fairyland long ere we have reached the last steps of our theory. (Enquiries, Section VII, Part 1.)

In the polemic against Eberhard Kant speaks of his own philosophy as the "true apologia for Leibniz," and this is not surprising given his pre-Critical Leibniz-Wolffian background. But the claim is compatible with Kant's

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characteristic goal of correcting what is erroneous in the tradition of rationalism, empiricism, and idealism, and preserving what is residually correct in those doctrines. Something remains of Leibniz's conceptual scheme after its correction but not the commitment to a monadic reality. The point is summarized in chapter 30. It is consequently hard to accept the view of Rae Langton in her Kantian Humility that the Amphiboly expresses a Leibnizian view. Her claim is that with one proviso Kant accepts Leibniz's metaphysical account of noumena, or monads, with "intrinsic" properties and accepts his view that noumena and phenomena are the same objects but with different "aspects" (1998, 31). Since Kant denies knowledge of the inner, intrinsic properties of noumena, the claim is that he regards phenomena as no more than extrinsic, relational properties of noumena. Phenomena and noumena are the same objects but our knowledge of those objects is restricted to their relational properties. The suggestion is that for Kant "true" substances are noumenal, and phenomenal substance is not a genuine substance at all but only a set of properties. Her view is governed by two background claims: first, that Kant is committed to the real existence of noumena or things in themselves; and second, that noumena or things in themselves causally affect our senses in initiating our perceptual experience. This is essentially a Leibnizian account of phenomena and noumena with the one proviso that while Leibniz believes that we have knowledge of noumena through reason Kant denies this. That denial, like Hume's dismissal of "fairyland," may seem to make Kant's position more congenial, but in the context it adds to his problems. For Kant is then taken to assert that noumena play a necessary causal role in the initiation of our experience and yet that we have no knowledge of them. If those noumenal causes are taken to be objects whose existence is to be justified on the basis of their effects on our senses in a traditional idealism then the position is even more objectionable. Such views effectively ascribe to Kant a traditionalist account vulnerable to the usual transparent objections, and they are the target of his criticism in the Fourth Paralogism in A. 19 That background traditionalism has been considered earlier in relevant passages of the Critique, and I have argued that it does not represent Kant's views, and here consider only the grounds given for ascribing these Leibnizian views to Kant on the basis of the Amphiboly. Those grounds rest on four passages quoted from the Amphiboly (Langton 1998, 33-34) of which I reproduce the central parts: (9) (B321): The inner and outer (intrinsic and extrinsic). In an object of pure understanding the inner (intrinsic) is only that which has no relation to anything different from itself. It is quite otherwise with a substantia phenomenon

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in space; its inner (intrinsic) properties are nothing but relations and it is itself entirely made up of mere relations. We are acquainted with substance in space only through forces. (10) (B330): Substances in general must have some inner (intrinsic) nature . . . free from all external relations (such as place, shape, contact, or motion). (11) (B333): Matter is substantia phenomenon. I search for that which belongs to it intrinsically in all parts of space, . . . and [its] actions, but these can be only appearances. I have nothing absolutely but only what is comparatively inner (intrinsic), and constituted by external relations. (12) (B341): All that we know in matter is merely relations (its inner [intrinsic] properties are only comparative), but some are self-subsistent and permanent. It is startling to hear that a thing is to be taken as consisting wholly of relations . . . but such a thing is mere appearance.

I have given the term "inner(e)" as both "inner" and "intrinsic" since the latter translation is a conclusion from Langton's account and cannot without question-begging be assumed to signify only the metaphysical "intrinsic/relational" distinction. Kant has in fact another, epistemic basis for his use of the contrast "inner/outer," in which it reflects a "mental/physical" contrast and was noted above in the reference to B330.The passages evidently make some reference to Leibnizian views about an intrinsic nature belonging to noumenal substances, but the issue is how far, if at all, Kant's comments express his own commitment to those views. I argue that such a commitment can be identified only through an inaccurate and tendentious reading of the passages. One of the passages, (10), can be immediately set aside. The text makes plain that Kant here rehearses what he takes to be Leibnizys view and does not endorse it. It occurs as the third review and criticism of Leibniz's comparison of "objects of the sense in regard to understanding, taking them as things in general" (B327). The description of progress from concepts of the understanding to things in general already marks Kant's diagnosis of what is for him a step towards dialectical illusion. Under that assumption the point describes the basis of "Leibniz's monadology" in the "inner/outer" distinction. Kant pursues Leibniz's position up to the consequences that monads are simple and have representative inner powers comparable to our own mental representations. Leibniz's "inner/outer" distinction is taken not just as a metaphysical contrast between "intrinsic" and "relational" properties, but as an epistemic division between the mental and the physical. The paragraph ends with the summary of what has been taken throughout as Leibniz's, not Kant's, position: "This therefore completed the conception of the monads. . . . " Kant's immediate criticism of Leibniz's position is that it entails the doctrine of a preestablished harmony which Kant rejects in the letter to Herz as a Hirngespinnst. To treat

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the discussion as a Kantian commitment to a Leibnizian doctrine he strenuously opposes is simply inaccurate. (9) and (12) make the central point in Rae Langton's case that phenomena, and phenomenal substances, "consist of relations" and have no inner or intrinsic properties. The claim is that there must be something with intrinsic properties which can consequently be only a "true" noumenal substance, but that conclusion is unwarranted. First, Kant talks in both cases of our "knowledge" of, or "acquaintance" with, matter as restricted to its relational properties. The principal point might consequently be taken to insist only on the general claim that we know phenomena but not Leibnizian monadic noumena. Nothing, in that case, follows about the nature of phenomena as properties. Second, even knowable phenomenal substances have inner, intrinsic features although they are only "comparative" in relation to Leibniz's conception of what is "absolutely inner." Just as Kant rejected the absolute reality of time in the Aesthetic at B54, so he now firmly rejects Leibniz's absolute conception of substance. Kant characteristically associates such absolute conceptions with dogmatic views and rejects them. Langton follows those commentators who take Kant to ascribe a primary, superior reality to the absolute features of noumenal reality and to treat knowledge of phenomena as a second class, inferior resource. On that basis she concludes that "Kant's label of 'phenomenal substance' is the implication of something that is not a substance" (1998, 52-53). But it has been pointed out earlier that such passages as B195, B270 and B517, and the whole tenor of Kant's appeal to "possible experience," point in the opposite direction. She supports her view with references to Kant's conceptions of "phenomena substantiata" (1998, 53-54), but those Reflexionen are dated before the Critique which does not use the expression. For Kant the immanent reality of possible experience is our reality, and noumena constitute at best a metaphysical conception of a necessary but problematic kind outlined in the quotation from B344. The belief that such a metaphysical conception provides for Kant the only reference to a "true" substance is unwarranted. For Kant the relational properties through which we know phenomenal substance are sufficiently "self-subsistent and permanent" to provide us with a "determinate object." What Kant rejects are not inner properties of phenomenal substances but only those absolutely inner properties which Leibniz attached to noumenal substance. Langton excludes from (11) Kant's admission of an extended ability to investigate the inner properties of phenomena: "Through observation and analysis we penetrate to nature's inner recesses and no one can say how far this knowledge may in time extend." We can assume that Newton's theories investigate nature's inner recesses, but the quoted passage at B313-14 makes unequivocally

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clear that for Kant it would be a Leibnizian mistake to regard such theories as referring to transcendental things in themselves. Kant's evident commitment to phenomenal substances as self-subsistent and permanent determinate objects, to their inner properties, and to our investigation of those properties is in conflict with a note of Langton's. She questions Kemp Smith's translation of selbstandige und beharrlich in the following terms: Given that the purpose of the passage is to show among other things that phenomenal substance is precisely not self-subsistent in the manner of a true substance, I would translate this as 'independent and permanent' where the independence in question is not taken to be absolute independence but independence from the flux of change, in line with the First Analogy and the B Refutation of Idealism.

What is correct here is the admission that the inner properties of phenomenal substance are not "absolutely inner" as Leibniz requires, and that Kant's aim throughout the Analytic in the First Analogy and the Refutation of Idealism has no concern with Leibnizian monadic substances. The First Analogy, as I indicated in chapter 19, is about phenomenal substance but not necessarily or only matter; and the Refutation of Idealism is about outer, spatial, phenomenal, and not noumenal, objects. The difficulty arises not from these correct claims but from the belief that Kant accepts only Leibnizian monadic substances as "true substances." Langton says that the purpose of the passage is "precisely" to express Kant's view that phenomenal substance is not a "true substance," but I have been unable to find any such claim throughout the Amphiboly. An underlying ground for the ascription of Leibnizian views to Kant arises from the use, or misuse, of the "two aspect" label for the contrast between phenomena and noumena which I noted in chapter 2. Langton's appeal to the "two aspect" account provides a clear example of those dangers. If it is thought that phenomena and noumena are merely two "aspects" of the same things it is almost inevitable that they should be construed as properties. Kant himself does not use the term "aspect," which is a commentators' invention, but talks of different points of view which, whatever they are, cannot be simply identified with properties. They represent, as I have suggested, two different philosophical accounts of the objects of experience and knowledge, as either always modified by the senses (phenomena) or distinct from the senses and associated only with reason (noumena). If phenomena and noumena are understood as "aspects" and "properties" we are bound to ask which things these two aspects are aspects or properties of, and the answers will inevitably be unsatisfactory or absurd. How can a property of a phenomenon be a phe-

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nomenon, or a property of a noumenon be a noumenon; and how could that property belong to some so far unidentified third item? Langton's solution is to put all the weight on the Leibnizian appeal to "true" noumenal substances as property-bearers and to demote phenomena to the level of noumenal extrinsic/relational properties. Apart from Kant's noted lack of commitment to a Leibnizian true noumenal substance in the passage, the solution conflicts with Langton's apparent identification of phenomena and things in themselves, discussed and criticized earlier in chapter 10.2.3 in relation to Prolegomena §13. It suffers also from the difficulty to be mentioned in chapter 23 that Kant evidently envisages both categorial terms "substance" and "property" as applicable to both phenomena and noumena. Kant accepts conceptions of phenomenal and noumenal substances and their associated properties, but allows knowledge only of the former. The category of "substance/accident" whether applied in its unschematized form to noumena or in its schematized form to phenomena allows room in both cases for substance and properties. The category is not the separate concepts of "substance" and "accident" but a package which essentially includes both. In the light of these problems Langton's account of the quoted passages cannot justify the conclusion that for Kant phenomena are relational properties of noumena whose intrinsic properties are unknown to us. Since Kant is willing to accept that even phenomena have intrinsic properties, which can be investigated without apparent limit in science, Kant has no need to appeal to noumena as the repositories of intrinsic properties. His account in the Amphiboly is not a modified acceptance, but a radical rejection, of Leibniz's "supposititious system of intellectual knowledge" in the monadology. Adickes and other commentators, such as Ameriks, have regarded Kant's Critical philosophy as monadenartig, and Langton follows that tradition, but the Amphiboly provides on this basis no adequate ground for such a view. Adickes's and Ameriks's views are considered in detail in chapter 23. Kant's diagnosis of Leibniz's faults concedes that he was right to identify "noumenon" as a necessary conceptual resource in our experience, but insists that Leibniz misconstrued its nature in taking it to refer to a supersensible reality. The concept casts a misleading shadow which can "bewitch our intelligence" and leads directly to dialectical illusions such as Leibniz's. If we misconstrue that conceptual shadow as a genuine designation of real noumenal objects beyond our experience then we succumb to the illusions of amphiboly and subreption. The transcendental topic which resolves those ambiguities is an essential aspect of Kant's therapeutic diagnosis of dialectical illusion, begun in the Analytic of Concepts, Phenomena and Noumena and the Amphiboly, and continued throughout the Dialectic. Kant's criticism of Leibniz in the Amphiboly cannot be divorced from that

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therapeutic diagnosis of philosophical error. Langton's account suffers from faults of omission in overlooking that therapeutic dimension, but is also unreliable in faults of commission such as the misinterpretation of (10).

[19] The Wider Theoretical Context of Kant's Appeal to Things in Themselves T h e previous section oudined Kant's account of things in themselves, noumena, appearances, and phenomena as it is given in the two final sections of the Analytic of Principles. Put quite generally the message is that we have no knowledge of things in themselves and cannot rationally assert their existence or debate about their properties. But the concept of such things is necessarily implied as a correlate of a philosophical conception of a pure sensibility, and there is as much reason nominally to suppose that they exist as there is to suppose that our world is not the only one possible. That necessity provides a temptation to suppose that we might be able not only to conceive such things but to attain knowledge of them through reason and in the a priori contexts of mathematics or pure natural science. Kant denies the claim at B9 and B371n but recognizes the motive for thinking that mathematics provides knowledge of a Platonic realm of things in themselves quite divorced from any sense experience. Kant thinks it fallacious to infer such an ontological conclusion from the a priori status of mathematics. His diagnosis of the error leaves a purified, but acceptable, concept of a thing in itself or noumenon as only negative, problematic, and limiting. Traditionalist commentators insist that even if this correcdy portrays the thought in those two sections other contexts, both within and outside the first Critique, commit Kant to far more. It is a common view that although he undeniably and persistendy rejects knowledge of things in themselves, he errs, to the point of inconsistency, in also assuming, claiming, or being committed to just such knowledge as an integral part of his metaphysics. To deny knowledge of things in themselves is certainly compatible with a belief in their existence, but to deny such knowledge and assume that existence as a premise in a metaphysical system must be unsatisfactory. How can a system seriously both accept an essential premise and at the same time deny that we can have any knowledge of its truth? It is not as if Kant's rejection of such knowledge permits a probabilistic belief 553

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warranted by evidence; the world of things in themselves is officially out of our cognitive range and can never supply evidence for such a belief. Similar faults arise from Kant's references to things in themselves if he is taken to accept a verificationist semantics, for his claims about things in themselves would then be unverifiable by us and so meaningless. I have argued that Kant did not accept a verificationist semantics, but even so there is a prima facie conflict between his claim that the categories cannot apply to things in themselves and his frequent application of categories, such as causality, to those very things. Commentators endorse these alleged faults with varying degrees of support from the text. Some simply take for granted that the text exemplifies these faults, while others document their conclusions extensively. Just as traditionalists may simply assume that Kant is committed to an empirical idealism in his characterization of appearances as "ideas," so they may simply assume that Kant is committed to the other side of the traditional dualism, that is, to the independent existence of transcendent things in themselves. That latter conviction runs immediately against Kant's official rejection of knowledge of such independent things in themselves, but the conclusion may be that his philosophy is riddled with inconsistency. I have argued already that Kant's characterization of appearances as "ideas" does not commit him to an empirical idealism which he explicitly rejects, and I add that his commitment to things in themselves does not commit him to a transcendental realism which he also explicitly rejects. In surveying the wider context of reference to things in themselves I shall not distinguish, as I did in the previous chapter, between the notion of a thing in itself and that of a noumenon, and I concentrate almost exclusively on the speculative, theoretical context and not on the practical. I consider the issue by examining Erich Adickes's views about things in themselves in his two works, Kant und das Ding an Sich and Kant's Lehre von der doppelten Affektion unseres Ich, but I also refer to Karl Ameriks's recent discussion. Adickes's work remains one of the most careful and extensive surveys of Kant's account of things in themselves, but I came to think in the 1950s that it was flawed.1 In reproducing my earlier difficulties with his view I hope to show how inadequately it supported his own conclusions, and to suggest that if Adickes failed then it is unlikely that those who have drawn similar conclusions from less careful and extensive surveys can succeed. In section 1, I outline Adickes's general position in order to identify areas of agreement and disagreement; in 2 , 1 consider the passages Adickes appealed to in order to support his thesis and question his interpretation; in 3, I draw some conclusions from the examination; and in 4, I consider the smaller range of passages used by Karl Ameriks for a similar purpose.

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1. Adickes's General Position Adickes held that Kant accepted a commitment to the existence of a "multiplicity of trans-subjective, extra-mental things in themselves" as "self-evident." That commitment went beyond the restrictions of Phenomena and Noumena in which the notions of noumena and things in themselves were negative, problematic, and limiting. It went beyond a commitment to the concept of things in themselves as inevitable or necessary, and accepted the actual existence of such things as an essential premise, or starting point, in the Critique. According to Adickes, Kant holds that the existence of things in themselves is self-evident but that we have no knowledge of their properties.2 That additional commitment marked, for Adickes, the strong realist, anti-idealist tendencies deeply entrenched in Kant's psychology, which rested on no intellectual ground, and provided an unargued premise which it never occurred to him to doubt. Those tendencies reflected, as Adickes puts it, an "immediate manifestation, or breath, of the transcendent" in our experience. Adickes also held that Kant's commitment included a "double affection" in which things in themselves causally affect subjects in themselves, and objects of experience causally affect empirical subjects. But he was adamant that Kant's acceptance of things in themselves did not rest on a causal inference from those empirical effects on our senses to the existence of their noumenal causes.3 That latter view was endorsed in the discussion of B32-33 in chapter 7.1.1. In many other respects Adickes rightly acknowledged aspects of Kant's position which I have also underlined. He evades the apparent contradiction, that Kant applies categories to things in themselves but officially denies such an application, by stressing the distinction between schematized and unschematized categories, and by construing the official denial as a prohibition of any cognitive application. As I claimed in chapter 22 Kant thought the application of categories to things in themselves was meaningful but not for us knowledge-yielding. Adickes also importantly acknowledged Kant's contrast between an "empirical" and a "transcendental" sense for "thing in itself' at B45, B63, B313, B393 in a way in which many later commentators have not. 4 If that distinction is not noted, then Kant's references to things in themselves may, sometimes mistakenly, be understood only in the transcendental rather than the empirical sense of the term. Adickes's editorial examination of the Opus postumum led him also to document the extent to which Kant's Critical account of things in themselves is reproduced, or altered, in that final work. There are new ideas in that later work, for example the contrast between "appearances" of the first and second level, but the common belief that the Opus postumum makes a final, more substantial commitment to things in themselves is not, as Adickes insisted, supported by his extensive survey of it. For that

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reason I shall not pay further attention to that concluding unpublished text.5 The methodological background to Adickes's account emphasizes the need for an "historical and scientific" approach to Kant, and he castigates opponents for a one-sided disregard of passages not favoring their view. He repeatedly describes his own interpretative conclusions as utterly clear and unambiguous, and rejects alternative accounts with the chilling comment that "the facts tell a different story." He represents other commentators, such as Schlettwein and Fichte, as seduced by a misconceived wish to find in Kant some contemporary philosophical value, or to minimize or conceal the errors Kant had made in his historical context. He calls that former wish a "curse" for the historical approach, and represents that approach as properly quite indifferent to the question of Kant's value for contemporary philosophy.6 There is in this insistence on an historical, scientific method more than a trace of rhetoric. Adickes was undoubtedly a meticulous commentator on Kant's texts and deserves full credit for that, but in the end he is obliged, like all other commentators, to provide an interpretation of those texts which is often not simply a matter of demonstrable scientific, or historical, truth. In fact Adickes provides very little in the way of historical information, and his science amounts to little more than that meticulous attention to the text. His own accounts of Kant's unargued but essential commitment to things in themselves, of Kant's psychological inclination towards a realist "breath of the transcendent," and of the complex double affection owe at least as much to his interpretative as to his scientific or historical skills. Throughout my survey of the Critique I have recommended a different interpretative approach partly because such claims for an historical, scientific method are exaggerated.

2. Approaching the Textual Evidence Adickes's appeals to the text are very extensive and it would require a book to consider them in detail.7 The task can be shortened, however, in two ways: first, by identifying the distinctive features of Kant's claimed commitment to things in themselves which are at issue; and second, by classifying the types of expression on which those claims depend. I have made it plain that much of what Adickes extracts from the text is in line with the accounts I have already given. The point of the examination is not to reinforce those points of agreement, but to assess the nature and extent of the additional commitments which Adickes also finds in the text. Adickes's case for the latter rests essentially not so much on the quantity of texts,

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impressive though that is, as on certain recurring claims or modes of expression which run through them. If those recurrent items can be identified and examined, then the essence of his case can be judged without considering all the different passages in which they occur. This procedure has the additional advantage that other passages, which Adickes may have missed, may nevertheless be able to be fitted into one or other of the classified types. Although I do not claim to examine all Adickes's cases with the same thoroughness I consider representative examples under each of the classified headings. I list summarily, under A, the items in Kant's commitment to things in themselves which are not at issue, and under B additional items in dispute for which Adickes argues. A1 Kant undoubtedly envisages a negative, problematic, limiting role for our concept of things in themselves and regards their conceivability as necessary. B1 Adickes accepts A1 but believes that Kant's commitment goes further in a commitment to the actual existence of a multiplicity of "trans-subjective, extra-mental things in themselves." A2 Kant equally clearly envisages a regulative role, and a moral application, for a conception of things in themselves throughout the Dialectic and in later Critiques. These oudine in detail what had been generally anticipated in the preface as the domain of faith (Glaube) rather than that of knowledge (Bxxx). B2 Adickes accepts A2 but is also willing to ascribe to Kant a further commitment to a constitutive role for things in themselves in the Dialectic and elsewhere, especially in the Third Antinomy and B157-59 in relation to selves as such things in themselves. A3 Kant accepts that there are causal relations between objects and our senses which exclude reference to things in themselves. B3 Adickes agrees with A3 and spends considerable time in Kant's Lehre von der doppelten Affektion unseres Ich outiining the passages where Kant affirms this immanent causal relation. He provides in this way a useful and correct antidote to the view that Kant always thinks of this causal relation as involving things in themselves, for example, at B32-33. But Adickes also insists that Kant accepts a parallel transcendent causal relation between things in themselves and subjects in themselves. It includes what Kant calls "self affection," that is, affection of inner sense by the understanding (B157-58).

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A4 The distinction between appearances and things in themselves is, as Kant repeatedly says, between two ways of considering one and the same thing. They are, as Kant says at Bxxvii, two ways of considering objects of experience. B4 Adickes accepts A4, but adds a commitment, in line with B l , to the existence of two worlds, phenomenal and noumenal, in which the latter functions as the explanatory premise in B3. A5 Some objections to Kant's application of categories to things in themselves can be defused by distinguishing between schematized and unschematized categories; between "absolute" and "relative" meaninglessness; and between "thinking" and "knowing." We must be able to conceive, or think, of things in themselves but cannot have knowledge of them. B5 Adickes's provisos in AS generally match the account I have given.8 They indicate serious restrictions on the way categories may be used of things in themselves, and on the meanings they then have. Put generally, we are able to "think" such things but not to "know" them. But Adickes insists that the transcendent causal relation in B3 acts as a fundamental, unargued, and self-evident premise in Kant's theory, motivated by his psychological inclination to realism and required in order to initiate and explain our immanent experience. The question is whether the passages Adickes cites are sufficient to establish the distinctive commitments in B l - 5 , and I shall suggest that even where the cited passages appear to commit Kant to those stronger claims a more carefixl scrutiny both allows and indicates an alternative view. I list and classify Adickes's references under two headings: 2.1, commitment to the actual existence of things in themselves; and 2.2, legitimate roles for the concept of things in themselves.

2.1. Commitment to the Actual Existence of Things in Themselves 2.1.1. Arguments based direcdy on the term "appearance" (Bxxvi; Prolegomena §57; Prolegomena §32; Ak. 5.196; Ak. 8.215-19) 2.1.2. Arguments based on what "correlates with" or "corresponds to" appearance (A251; B522-23; B182) 2.1.3. Explicit or tacit references to appearances as " o f " things as they may be in themselves (A38; Prolegomena §12; Prolegomena §13; B69; A387)

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Commitment to a role for a concept of things in themselves

2.2.1. Things in themselves as the Grund of appearances, underlying, causing, and presupposed by the latter (Prolegomena §57-59; B564-66; Ak. 4.459; Prolegomena §11; Ak. 8.207-8; Ak. 5.6, 42, 97; A380; Ak. 5.196) 2.2.2. A more positive role for a concept of things in themselves as regulative Ideas of completeness (Prolegomena §57-59; B564-66; Ak. 8.153; Ak. 5.196) Some commentators may be tempted to disregard examination of these sample passages as too convoluted. Unlike Adickes, who took the examination seriously, they may prefer to assume that in them Kant expresses a traditionalist idealism with a commitment to the actual existence of things in themselves. The discussion is inevitably complex and turns sometimes on details of German syntax and of the surrounding texts, but I do not see how that can be avoided. More generally the issues focus on three previously oudined ideas: first, Kant's diagnosis of philosophical error in coming to believe in, and dispute about, a realm of supersensible things in themselves; second, the fourfold distinction between empirical and transcendental uses of the terms "appearance," "thing in itself," and "object"; and third, the contrast between a commitment to the meaningfulness and conceivability of things in themselves and a commitment to their actual existence as a premise in Kant's theory. I claim that the examination shows initially that Adickes's traditionalist conclusions are not obligatory and subsequendy that an alternative account is preferable. 2 . 1 . 1 . ARGUMENTS BASED DIRECTLY ON THE TERM "APPEARANCE"

Adickes relies on four central passages for his claim that Kant accepts not only the concept of things in themselves, or the thought that they exist, but their actual existence9: These are Bxxvi-xxvii, Prolegomena §32, Prolegomena §57-59, and the polemic against Eberhard at Ak. 8.215-19. I consider the Eberhard passages under 2.2.1. Bxxvi-xxvii: although we cannot know these objects (of experience) as things in themselves, we must yet be in a position to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears.

The main point of the passage is to repeat Kant's denial that we know things in themselves with the proviso that we must be able to "think" them, and this is in line with Adickes's B5 acceptance of the distinction

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between "knowing" and "thinking" things in themselves. But the added claim is that Kant commits himself to the argument that since there are appearances there must actually be things in themselves. Already that suggestion goes further than the text in two ways: the passage argues that if it were impossible to think things in themselves, if the notion were inconsistent or meaningless, then we could conclude, absurdly, that it would be possible to have (think) appearances without (there being) anything that appears. The argument rests on the possibility of appearances without anything that appears, and if it licenses a conclusion to the existence of anything it is to that of "something that appears" rather than of "things in themselves." Adickes's conclusion would follow if these notions are taken to be identical, that is, if "something that appears" is the same as "a thing in itself," but there is every reason not to make that identification. The relation of "appearance" to "something that appears" is ambiguous and can be understood in either the empirical or the transcendental senses of these terms. Empirically things that appear are appearances, and coupled with conceptual rules are phenomena or objects of experience, but not things in themselves. Transcendentally the correlates of a purely sensory "appearance" are things in themselves, which we can conceive but of which we have no knowledge. That distinction was extensively outlined in discussing the Aesthetic and committed Kant to the conceivability of things in themselves but not to their actual existence. Kant's formal argument in the preface can be represented in the following way. [1]

There are appearances, that is, things that appear

[Assumption]

[2]

It is inconceivable that there are things in themselves

[Assumption]

[3]

If things in themselves are inconceivable, then things that appear would also be inconceivable

[Kant's "diagnostic" principle]

[4]

Things that appear are not inconceivable

[i]

[5]

Hence, things in themselves are not inconceivable

[3], [4], MTT

[6]

[2] and [5] are together inconsistent

[7]

[2] is false or absurd

(RAA)

The argument is conducted in terms of "(inconceivability" in order to mark Kant's "know/think" distinction, but might have used "(im)possi-

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bility." There is no good reason to suppose that these alternative terms are equivalent, but Kant formulates the argument in terms of "conceivability" or "thinkability." The conclusion, [7], does not, pace Adickes, assert the actual existence of things in themselves, but only their possibility, or "conceivability," and this is in line both with the text and with Kant's general position. The argument is valid and, apart from [3], and the general query about possibility and conceivability, it is sound.10 It offers with those provisos a reasonable formal ground for the conceivability, but not actual existence, of things in themselves. The questionable points concern the assumptions in the argument, particularly [1] and [3]. [2] is involved only as a formal assumption to be discharged by RAA in the conclusion at [7], and included only because Kant's reference to an absurdity suggested the use of RAA. But the proof could dispense with [2] since conclusion [5] follows intuitively from [1] and [3] even without that detour. Some may be inclined to reject the equation in [1] of "appearance" and "thing which appears" and the "diagnostic" assumption in [3], but they undoubtedly represent Kant's views. For Kant, appearances are the objects of intuition, and they form the sensory basis for our discrimination under conceptual rules of phenomena and objects of experience. Phenomena and objects of experience are simply conceptualized appearances, and qualify for what Kant calls the empirical, as opposed to transcendental, sense of "thing in itself." To talk transcendentally of the "objects" of appearances points in two radically different directions: In one it points to a transcendent conception of things in themselves distinct from appearances as objects of reason, and in another to immanent phenomena or objects of experience which are conceptualized appearances. The former things in themselves are conceivable, but it is only the latter which really exist in our immanent experience. The "diagnostic" assumption [3] may also be queried, but has already been outlined and is explicitly expressed at B186-87 and B335-36. Kant's diagnosis represents the general notion of an "object," a "transcendental object," branching into the illegitimate concept of a thing in itself on one side and the legitimate concept of a determinate object of experience on the other. Both branching lines are regarded by Kant as necessary consequences of our generic notion of an object. Without that notion of an object in general we could not conceive either things in themselves or things that appear, either noumena or phenomena. The illegitimate concept is not, for Kant, an optional extra like a bogus marketing offer, but is built into the structure of our experience. The two concepts on which the proof turns in [3] are necessarily connected sides of the same coin, and both are dependent on the concept of an "object in general." All three concepts are inseparably connected, but their connection licenses only a commitment to conceivability, not the actual existence, of

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things in themselves. That integral conceptual link between "thing in general," "object of experience," and "thing in itself' is important in the Dialectic, especially the Third Antinomy, and is emphasized in Adickes's quotations. Contrary to Adickes's account no more than that diagnosis is needed to arrive at the conclusion not that things in themselves actually exist but that they have to be conceivable.11 The example from Prolegomena §32 seems obviously to support Adickes's interpretation, and it is, therefore, instructive to see how closer attention provides a different account. It occurs in a context where Kant rehearses the traditional distinction between sensory phenomena and intellectual noumena, and rejects it. In fact if we regard objects of the senses, righdy, as mere appearances we admit at once that a thing in itself is their ground [ Grund], even though we know nothing of what it is like, and know only its appearance, that is, the manner in which our senses are affected by this unknown something. Understanding therefore just by accepting appearances, admits also the existence of things in themselves so that we can say: the idea of such beings, as the ground of appearances, and so (the idea of) pure intelligible beings [ Verstandeswesen] is not only permitted but also unavoidable.

The first sentence might be read as part of the rejected traditional view, but Kant's commitment to things in themselves as a causal Grund of appearances is considered under 2.2.1. What Adickes insists on is Kant's apparent claim in the second sentence that understanding "admits the existence of things in themselves" but the syntax importantly qualifies this in two ways. It would be natural, but wrong, to take the final clause to recognize the existence of "pure intelligible beings." Although Kant does not repeat the bracketed expression "the idea o f " it is implied in the text and makes a commitment only to the idea of intelligible beings and not their actual existence. This is evident since "pure intelligible beings" is in the genitive, and the verb at the end of the clause is sei in the singular and would have to be plural if the subject were "intelligible beings." The earlier clause is qualified in line with that claim in a way which is not clear in the given translation. It should read: "Understanding just by accepting appearances admits the existence of things in themselves just in so far as we can say [sofern konnen wir sagen] that these ideas are permitted and unavoidable." The commitment is only to the unavoidability of the idea of things in themselves, not to their actual existence. The passage occurs in a context (Prolegomena §§30-34) in which the overwhelming emphasis is on the errors of illegitimate reference to things in themselves. The two sentences are written as a modest proviso to that background vigorously re-expressed immediately afterwards:

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In this way intelligible beings [Verstandeswesen] are permitted, but with an insistence on this rule, which permits no exception: that we know, and can know, nothing determinate of such pure intelligible beings, because our pure concepts of the understanding and pure intuitions concern only objects of possible experience, that is only sensible beings [Sinnenwesen], and any attempt to transcend these leaves those concepts with not the slightest significance.12 (My emphasis)

Kant speaks disparagingly of attempts to "go beyond objects of experience into the realms of fantasy [Hirngespinnst]" (§31), and of the temptation to ascribe to concepts of the understanding a content which goes beyond their use in experience, and so to "build a slum next door to experience [Nebengebdude] filled with pure thought-entities" (§33). Finally, consider Prolegomena §§57-59. Our reason sees, as it were, a space for knowledge of things in themselves, even though it can never have determinate concepts of such things, and is restricted to appearances. . . . The sensible world is nothing but a chain of appearances linked according to general laws, has no standing [Bestehen] in itself, is not properly a thing in itself, but therefore necessarily indicates what is its 'Grund', and so beings which may be known not merely as appearances but as things in themselves. In such knowledge alone can reason hope to see its desire for completeness . . . fulfilled. . . . So we conceive immaterial beings, a world of understanding, a supreme being (pure noumena) . . . because appearances presuppose something different as a thing in itself whether we can get closer to knowing it or not. (Ak. 4.353; my emphasis)

The passage rehearses a temptation which Kant does not endorse but warns against. The reference to a Grund which may be known as a thing in itself does not suggest that we can know such things, but typically admits the possibility of other cognitive powers in other possible worlds of which we have no knowledge. The envisaged "space for knowledge of things in themselves" is an inevitable demand of our reason which Kant makes clear throughout the Dialectic cannot be met. The supposed space for such knowledge changes in the passage into their conception, just as Kant makes it clear that the hope of getting closer to knowing such things in themselves is vain (Ak. 4.354: in der That auch nicht zu hoffen ist. . . ). Since we can never know these intelligible beings as they are in themselves, i.e. determinately, but nevertherless must accept them in a connection [ Verkniipfung] relating them to the world of sense, we are able to conceive (think) this connection by means of concepts expressing a link to the world of sense. (Ak. 4.355)

Kant nevertheless accepts that our conception of things in themselves is generated by a philosophical demand of reason for an ultimate Grund

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of, and beyond, our immanent experience. That demand is considered later in 2.2 where the connection is explained as a limited "analogy" between an immanent experience and what transcends it, but even in that concession Kant allows that we can do no more than conceive the relation. It is difficult to see in this account anything that could justify a supplementation of A l - 2 along the lines of B l - 5 . Kant remains committed to the necessary conceivability of the transcendent but not to its actual existence. 2.1.2.

THINGS IN THEMSELVES AS "CORRELATES O F , " OR "CORRESPONDING T O , " APPEARANCES

Two of the passages cited by Adickes under this heading can be neglected. B182 contains a disputed text, which even Kemp Smith emends with good reason in a way which does not support Adickes,13 and the passage at A251 was extensively surveyed in chapter 22. Essentially it marks again the route of Kant's diagnostic explanation for our concept of a thing in itself and of the point at which errors arise out of it. We form a conception of an intelligible correlate to what is given to the senses through the notion of an object in general, and then come to think of this as something quite distinct from our sense experiences, access to which is provided only by pure reason or understanding. The crucial branch in this route occurs at the point where we construct a transcendent notion of an intelligible thing in itself instead of moving in the different, correct, and immanent direction towards the notions of phenomena or objects of experience. That correlation or correspondence relation is already a sign of illusion even though Kant thinks of it as inevitable. The passage from B522-23 repeats the points already found in the earlier references to a "transcendental object" at, for instance, A09. The non-sensible cause of these representations is completely unknown to us, and cannot therefore be intuited by us as an object. Such an object would have to be represented as neither in space nor in time . . . and apart from such conditions we cannot think any intuition. We may, however, entitle the purely intelligible cause of appearances in general the transcendental object, but merely in order to have something corresponding to sensibility viewed as receptivity. . . . We can say that the real things of the past are given in the transcendental object of experience; but they are objects for me and real in past time only in so far as I represent to myself... a regressive series of possible perceptions in accordance with empirical laws . . . which can be represented as actual not in itself but only in the connection of a possible experience.

The notion of a transcendental object marks exactly that point in the diagnosis of error at which we conceive a correlate of appearance in general and then mistakenly detach it from any possible experience. The

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notion of an independent thing in itself, in that transcendental context, marks a natural philosophical hypostatization of what is properly an account of the series of connections among items of a possible experience (Cf. B610-11 and later under 2.2.2). 2 . 1 . 3 . APPEARANCES AS, EXPLICITLY OR IMPLICITLY, APPEARANCES " O F " THINGS IN THEMSELVES

There are many passages where Kant makes a reference to things in themselves and then talks of "their" appearances (for example, the earlier passage from Prolegomena §32). Less often he explicidy uses such phrases as "appearances of this object," where the object may seem to be a thing in itself. The conscious ambiguity in such expressions has been made clear already on many occasions, especially in the discussion of Prolegomena §13 in chapter 10.2 and in chapter 13.2.3. The relation can be variously construed. It might indicate a naive representation relation between an intermediary perceptual mental state and some outer object of which it is a copy in a basic empirical idealism which Kant rejects. It might indicate Kant's distinction between an indeterminate sensory manifold and its determinate discrimination in conceptual terms through understanding. Appearances may for Kant be " o f " things in general, but this breaks down into the noted branching line which designates either a transcendent or an immanent object. If the passages are not read with these deliberate ambiguities in mind, and "thing" is identified with both immanent appearance and transcendent thing in itself, absurdities and inconsistencies are inevitable. One of the main difficulties in understanding Kant arises from the failure to separate that first empirical idealist relation from the others which Kant accepts. A38, Prolegomena §§11-13, B69, and A387 provide a sample of such passages which Adickes appeals to. A38: idealism which teaches that the reality of outer objects does not allow of strict proof. On the other hand the reality of the object of our inner sense (myself and my state) is [they argue] immediately evident through consciousness. . . . What they have failed, however, to recognise is that both are in the same position; in neither case can their reality as representations be questioned, and in both cases they belong only to appearance, which always has two sides, the one by which the object is viewed in and by itself (without regard to the mode of intuiting it— its nature remaining problematic), the other by which the form of the intuition of this object is taken into account. This form is not to be looked for in the object in itself, but in the subject to which the object appears; nevertheless it belongs really and necessarily to the appearance of this object.

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The context of the passage is Kant's first explicit rejection of traditional idealism, and his first explicit statement of the parity between outer and inner sense in the Critique. Garve thought that this parity entailed Kant's abandonment of even the idealist certainty for inner experiences and the self, whereas Kant intends it to express equal certainty for both inner and outer experience. The passage may seem to commit Kant unavoidably to the existence of things in themselves, and to the idea that appearances are appearances of things in themselves. It may seem to reinforce that rejected reading of Bxxvi in which the term "appearance" entails the existence of a thing in itself which appears, and to identify things in themselves with outer, physical, objects whose existence can be inferred from their appearances. That such an account is evidently at odds with the rejection of traditional idealism in the passage may only strengthen the belief that Kant is hopelessly confused. Yet there is a decisive way of rejecting such an account so long as we recall the ambiguities in Kant's use of the term "object." Traditionally, in empirical idealism, the phrase marks a transcendent relation between appearances and independent things in themselves which Kant rejects. Such an account treats appearances as intermediary mental representations " o f ' an outer object which is independent in requiring an inference, perhaps causal, from those representations. Kant rejects that empirical idealism and treats appearances neither as mere mental representations, nor as intermediaries from which outer objects are inferred. These familiar considerations underline the inevitable difficulties in Kant's efforts to capture that complex situation by referring concisely to "objects," unknown as they are in themselves, which affect our senses, or to appearances " o f " objects unknown as they are in themselves.14 Such expressions are complicated by the noted ambiguities in referring to empirical and transcendent "objects," and their different cognitive relations to our senses. They are made even more complicated by Kant's insistence that we can meaningfully talk of things in themselves and their causal relations even though we have no knowledge of either. Kant could have spelled out these implications every time he uses the expressions but it does not require much imagination to understand why he tends not to do so. If the expressions are understood in terms of their apparent verbal form they will generate the familiar traditionalist inconsistencies. Those who assume that Kant is a traditional idealist with a strong commitment to the actual existence of things in themselves will claim that the more complex construal of the expressions is counterintuitive and unnecessary, but there is no serious doubt that it rests on the noted ambiguities. Kant makes the same apparent references to, and acceptance of, things in themselves at numerous places especially in the Prolegomena §§11-13

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discussed earlier. I repeat only the central conclusions for two representative sentences from §13. I say (against idealism): There are things given to our senses as objects located outside us,15 but of what they may be in themselves we know nothing; we know only their appearances, that is, the representations which they cause in us in affecting our senses.

Kant goes on to say that he admits outer things, physical bodies, even though we know nothing of what they may be in themselves, and ends: "where the word 'body' signifies only the appearance of that unknown but nonetheless real object. Can one call this idealism? It is precisely the opposite." Adickes's account of the former passage rests on his conviction that the pronouns sie and ihrer (italicized above) must signify the same thing on each occurrence, and must signify not appearances but things in themselves. His objection to the only alternative he considers, that the pronouns refer throughout to appearances, is that this entails that we know nothing of bodies which Kant plainly denies. But the assumption in Adickes's argument, that the pronouns must refer to the same things, that is, either always things in themselves or always appearances, is unwarranted. It is an essential part of Kant's position, as Adickes in other contexts rightiy admits, that references to "objects" or "things" are systematically ambiguous in the philosophical context, sometimes accorded the status of appearances, sometimes that of independent things in themselves. This is the basis for Kant's persistent belief that philosophers may construe the term correctiy in one way or incorrectly in the other. The passages consequently can, and should, be read in the following way: Things (undetermined) are given to our senses as outer objects (i.e., spatial appearances), but of what they (appearances) may be as things in themselves we know nothing; we know only the appearances 'of' (undetermined) objects which affect our senses. where the word 'body' signifies only the appearance of that real object which is unknown as it may be in itself. . . . This is precisely the opposite of idealism. Adickes's assumption that the referent must be univocal and the same throughout would make Kant's rejection of traditional idealism rest on an acceptance of the real existence of things in themselves of which we have no knowledge. That conclusion has been drawn by some commentators (chapters 10.2.2 and 22.1.3), but as a rejection of traditional idealism such a response is transparently unconvincing to the point of absurdity. It

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conflicts with Kant's own account of his divergences from empirical idealism in the Prolegomena (appendix) and the Refutation of Idealism. On the alternative reading Kant's rejection of traditional idealism is an acceptance not of unknowable things in themselves but of outer, spatial objects of experience. It reflects the conclusion of Kant's official Refutation of Idealism which establishes knowledge of immanent outer, spatial objects of experience, but not of transcendent things in themselves. 2.2.1.

THINGS IN THEMSELVES AS THE GRUND OF APPEARANCES

Many of the passages already quoted show Kant's willingness to talk meaningfully of things in themselves as causes of appearances, but more generally he also characterizes the former as a metaphysical "ground" (Grund) of the latter. In chapter 29,1 underline the point that Kant uses this expression not in the normal sense of the English "ground" but as a special metaphysical basis for experience. I have for that reason sometimes written Grund instead of "ground." 16 It is undeniable that Kant is prepared to speak of things in themselves as underlying, presupposed by, providing a ground for, causing, appearances, even though such locutions do not determine the nature of his commitment. Kant evidendy regards a conception of such things in themselves as metaphysically inevitable, but denies that this requires the commitments of Adickes's B l , B3, and B5. Kant does not automatically commit himself to the actual existence of things in themselves in these locutions, but since he believes that traditional philosophers had made serious mistakes in making such a commitment he admits such claims as meaningful but mistaken. Kant's appeals to a transcendental Grund are complex but the following passages, quoted by Adickes, throw light on this complexity. One of the most important and revealing accounts of that commitment is given in the quotations from the polemic against Eberhard (Ak. 8.206-7; 214-19). Two such passages are: Eberhard says: 'Space and time have subjective and objective grounds, and the latter are not appearances but real knowable things . . . whose ultimate grounds are things in themselves'—all of which the Critique faithfully and repeatedly asserts. [But] he [Eberhard] wanted the reader not to notice that his 'objective grounds', which are not appearances but things in themselves, are merely simple parts of appearances . . . for the impropriety of such a claim would then have been immediately detected. . . . for parts are indeed grounds of their composites, and in this account of ultimate grounds which are not appearances he agrees with the Critique. But if he had straightforwardly spoken of those parts of appearances, not appearances themselves, as something sensible consisting of parts which are not sensible, then the absurdity would have been apparent.

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[Eberhard] asks: 'What provides the stuff for our sensations?', and thinks that he counters the Critique by answering: 'Choose what you like, so long as you ultimately arrive at things in themselves'. But that is the constant claim in the Critique—except that this ground of sensible representations is located ultimately not in objects of the senses, but in the supersensible . . . of which we can have no knowledge. (My emphasis)

A casual reading might give the impression that in agreeing with Eberhard Kant commits himself to the indisputable existence of things in themselves as grounds of appearances, but there is a crucial difference between Eberhard's and Kant's acceptance of an ultimate Grund. For Eberhard it lies in the simple monadic parts of which appearances are ultimately composed, while for Kant any such simple parts must be themselves appearances whose ultimate ground must be located beyond the realm of sensibility and appearances. For Eberhard the difference between appearances and their ultimate grounds is only the Leibnizian difference of degree between a confused and clear representation of things in themselves, while for Kant it is a difference of kind between appearances within the framework of our experience and things in themselves beyond it. Kant licenses a reference to an ultimate ground but only with the proviso that we have no required intellectual intuition to represent it and no knowledge of it. We cannot hope, as Kant insisted in Prolegomena §57, to get closer to knowledge of things in themselves as if this were like the difference in the degree of perceptual clarity of individuals as we approach a crowd. Evidendy the notion of an "ultimate Grund" is ambiguous and contested, and Kant summarizes the disagreement by charging Eberhard with confusing a Grund within experience and one beyond it, that is, confusing immanent and transcendent grounds.17 Kant is prepared to license a reference to the latter, but only at the expense of denying knowledge of it. The word 'Grund' conceals all this. For the incautious reader assumes that the word signifies what is completely different from intuitions, as the Critique says, and persuades himself of a proof that we can know the supersensible through the understanding even in objects of the senses.

In other passages such as Prolegomena §59 Kant indicates a further significance in talking of ultimate grounds. In this way the above claim, the outcome of the whole Critique, remains in place: That our reason in all its a priori principles teaches us about nothing other than objects of possible experience, and of these nothing more than can be known in experience. But this limitation [Einschrankung] does not stop us pointing to an objective boundary [ Grenze] to experience, namely reference to something which is not itself an object of experience but their ultimate [oberst]

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ground, even though this tells us nothing about it as it is in itself, but only about reason's own most complete and ultimate use in the realm of possible experience. (Cf. Ak. 4.353, quoted in 2.1.1)

The contrast between Kant and Leibniz at this point is reinforced by the related distinction Kant draws in the Prolegomena §§57-58 between two kinds of "limit," Grenze and Schranke. The central suggestions are that Schranken are negative and mark restrictions on the pursuit of some ongoing discipline, such as mathematics or natural science. In that use of understanding this is not a practically insuperable barrier so that mathematics can envisage continuous progress in pursuing its interests within its proper sphere. That restriction to its proper sphere is provided neither by understanding nor by experience itself but by a higher order reason, whose dialectical Ideas indicate not just practically superable Schranken but insuperable Grenzen. It is reason's job to mark a Grenze to mathematics which identifies the latter's proper sphere in experience but not beyond it. That notion of a Grenze is positive in the sense that it presupposes some space beyond the limit, and this is indicated by reason's restricting mathematics to experience and up to the boundary marked by a Grenze. In this way reason provides a complete map of our knowledge with its limits, but this concerns, as Kant says, "only language \Sprache\ not things." Reason and philosophy are confined to our concepts in such matters and cannot represent their enquiries as investigations of actual objects beyond the relevant boundaries. Kant's discussion suggests a picture of our knowledge and its limits as that of an endless tube in which progress along and inside the tube represents the theoretically unrestricted progress of scientific enquiries like mathematics. Progress in science is in principle unrestricted along that axis which may be held up in practice, but it cannot in principle proceed at right angles through the tube walls. Practical progress moves only in one direction along the tube of possible experience and not outside it. Reason and metaphysics, not understanding and science, provide this picture of such limits to science and experience in order to complete the map of experience in Kant's transcendental topic. They can offer some limited "analogies" with which to grasp the relation between the inside and the outside of the tube, and these have special significance in the practical areas of morals, theology, and politics. For Leibniz the tube walls are cognitively permeable but for Kant they are cognitively impermeable. This restriction on the scope of an appeal to an ultimate ground, and its allocation to philosophy rather than to science, are made clear at Prolegomena §57: "Natural science will never reveal to us the intrinsic properties of objects, that is, what is not appearance but might serve as the ultimate explanation of appearances; but that is in any case not needed for

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their physical explanation." That metaphysical restriction should be contrasted with the unlimited scope for explanation within the sciences which Kant expresses at B334 (chapter 22). In a related way Kant also uses the term Grund to indicate not such an inaccessible ultimate ground but rather the kind of ground provided by his transcendental philosophy, for example at Prolegomena §11: The task of the present section is resolved. Pure mathematics is, as pure synthetic a priori knowledge, possible only in so far as it concerns mere objects of the senses, for whose empirical intuitions a pure intuition (of space and time) lies a priori as their ground [Grund],

Kant's threefold distinction, outlined in chapter 5, between the empirical, the transcendent, and the transcendental draws the relevant distinctions. Work in mathematics itself has no necessary connection with philosophy and qualifies as immanent and empirical, where "empirical" is opposed to "transcendental" and not to "a priori." A legitimate enquiry into the character of mathematics to explain its a priori character would qualify as "transcendental" and correspond to what we call "philosophy of mathematics." But Kant's scheme distinguishes between such a legitimate transcendental enquiry and a transcendent appeal to an ultimate ground for such a discipline. The former is legitimate and might throw light on the character of the discipline, but the latter represents an unmanageable project in a transcendent metaphysics. Kant objects in that way to Plato's determinedly transcendent account of the noumenal character of mathematical objects (B9, B371n). Kant regards the former problem as resolved within his own philosophy, but the latter is problematic in the intractable way that references to things in themselves and noumena were earlier said to be at B310-11. 1 8 It remains nevertheless an important part of reason's role in philosophy to map both that cognitive limit and its peculiar intractability. The complaint against Eberhard and Leibniz is that they confuse these different aspects of an "ultimate Grund." With even this degree of complexity in talking about ultimate grounds it is not hard to find apparent inconsistencies in Kant's accounts of them. Adickes insists against Vaihinger that for Kant they, and their references to things in themselves, are not "mere fictions," and this is explicitly asserted by Kant at Ak. 5.6 ("not taking everything supersensible as a fiction, and its concept as empty of content.") 19 But at B605-8 he says: The concept of such a being is the concept of God, taken in the transcendental sense. . . . In any such use of the transcendental Idea we should be overstepping the limits of its purpose and validity. For reason, in employing it as the basis for the complete determination of things has used it only as a concept of all reality, without requiring that all this reality be objectively given and be itself

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a thing. Such a thing is a mere fiction in which we combine and realise the manifold of our Idea in an ideal, as an individual being. (B608; my emphasis; cf. B573) It is obvious that reason in achieving its purpose . . . of representing the necessary complete determination of things, does not presuppose the existence of a being that corresponds to this ideal, but only the Idea of such a being, and this only for the purpose of deriving from an unconditioned totality of complete determination . . . the totality of the limited. (B605-6; my emphasis)

Evidently Kant is not prepared to go beyond the "Idea" of a thing in itself towards even a qualified admission of its existence. The apparent inconsistencies can be resolved so long as we distinguish between what it makes sense to say of things in themselves, what we can stricdy know of them, and any more positive, regulative role such ideas may be allowed to play. At B605-8 Kant disallows the existence and reality of any "thing" corresponding to a dialectical Idea. We may talk or think of some such thing but to go beyond a regulative employment in that way is to hypostatize, or even personalize, a concept whose legitimate function is quite different (B610-11). It makes sense to talk in this way and to find a regulative role for such concepts, but the general prohibition, the "whole outcome of the Critique," is that we can have no knowledge of any corresponding thing or its existence (Prolegomena §59). There is a powerful, even inevitable, metaphysical motive to insist on "ultimate grounds" which Kant acknowledges, but it has to be qualified by a proper understanding of its status and limitations. Kant sometimes includes a transcendent causal role for things in themselves when he talks of a Grund for appearances. we admit thereby that a thing in itself lies as their 'ground', although we know nothing of how it is in itself, but know only its appearance, that is, the manner in which our senses are affected by this unknown something. (Prolegomena §32)

The passage reproduces several of the controversial expressions discussed earlier, such as that of an "appearance 'of' something unknown as it may be in itself." At A358 Kant indicates particularly clearly the ambiguity in the notion of an object affecting our senses: although extension, impenetrability, cohesion and motion—in short everything which outer senses can give us—neither are nor contain thoughts, feeling, desire, or resolution, these never being objects of outer intuition, nevertheless the something that underlies the outer appearances and which so affects our sense that it obtains the representations of space, matter, shape etc., may yet, when viewed as noumenon (or better as transcendental object) be at the same time the subject of thoughts.

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The qualification "when viewed as noumenon" which is added to "something which affects our sense" would make no sense if such a something were always to be construed as a thing in itself, or noumenon (chapter 15.1.2). Kant's expression implies that we can speak of the something that affects our senses as a phenomenon or appearance within our empirical, causal experience. The passage reinforces Kant's willingness to talk at two levels of the empirical, immanent and the noumenal, transcendent causes, or "grounds," of our experience. His principal concern, as in the criticisms of Eberhard, is that the levels should not be confused, so that ultimate grounds are taken as transcendent and knowable, accessible by reason both in science and philosophy. Adickes is right, in his "double affection" theory, to ascribe this distinction of levels to Kant in which both immanent and transcendent modes of speech are recognized and given distinct roles in science and philosophy. But Adickes takes the distinction and the two levels as a material difference between two types of object or realm within which causality may operate, when Kant's qualifications take it as a formal distinction between different modes of thought or speech.20 Adickes is wrong at least to assume that the transcendent mode straightforwardly asserts another material but supersensible causality parallel to the network of empirical causes and their laws. This is to make the same mistake as that attributed by Kant to Eberhard and explicitly underlined in the passage at B88: In the absence of intuition all our knowledge is without objects and remains empty. . . . But since it is very tempting to use these pure modes of knowledge of the understanding and these principles by themselves, and even beyond the limits of experience, which alone can yield the matter to which those pure concepts can be applied, the understanding is led to incur the risk of making with a mere show of rationality, a material use of its pure and merely formal principles, and of passing judgements on objects without distinction—upon objects which are not given to us and perhaps cannot in any way be given. (My emphasis) 2 . 2 . 2 . A M O R E POSITIVE ROLE FOR THINGS IN THEMSELVES

Although the concept of a thing in itself has a primary use as a general Grund of appearances or of experience, Kant also differentiates specific uses which fall under it. Some indications of that more positive role have been reported already in Kant's notions of a "symbolic anthropomorphism" and "analogy," which outiine, hesitantly and with many qualifications, relations between the known and the unknown. That more positive role is identified by Adickes in such passages as Prolegomena §57-59, Ak. 8.153-54, and Ak. 5.196. In these contexts Kant offers to explain the peculiarities of the steps which enable us not merely to conjure up the idea of things in themselves as an "ultimate Grund" of experience, but also to

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make such ideas more elaborate, for example through some nonstandard "analogy" with items in our experience. In practical contexts Kant goes further than this and insists on an efficacious causal role for such Ideas. But it is not only where human reason exhibits genuine causality, and where ideas are operative causes (of actions and their objects), namely in the moral sphere, but also in regard to nature itself that Plato righdy discerns clear proofs of an origin from Ideas. (B374)

In that context Kant is thinking of such down-to-earth, immanent cases as the construction of political constitutions and moral policies, and the less clear cases of design and purpose in nature. These are attached firmly to possible experience in their social, political, and natural contexts, but their connections to a transcendent Grund are more obscure. Kant's position is that of one who denies firmly any cognitive passage through the impermeable bounds of our experience, but admits a restricted scope for an "analogical" grasp of what lies beyond those bounds. The first thing to notice about these efforts is how qualified, hesitant, and limited they are. They are throughout coupled with Kant's continued insistence on the familiar cognitive limitations of such references. Adickes sees these references as further evidence of Kant's positive commitment to things in themselves as "trans-subjective, extra-mental" items in a parallel, supersensible, and material realm with properties, such as causality and existence, like those of objects of experience. Kant's provisos about the nature of such claims, and the nonstandard "analogy" on which they rest, indicate a less enthusiastic and less powerful commitment. I shall argue that these efforts can be understood not as a further commitment to the real existence of things in themselves, as Adickes suggests, but as a commitment to a more flexible, less rigid, and less dogmatic approach to the limits of experience than is commonly ascribed to Kant. Understood in this way Kant's claims reinforce accounts given earlier of distinctions between "core and deviant," or "default and exceptional" cases, and of his use of the "abstraction" procedure in a descriptive metaphysics. These accounts belong together and paint a picture different from that of Adickes. Kant speaks succinctly of the "analogy" which relates the "known to the unknown" in the Prolegomena §59. There he offers a parallel case in which we may liken reciprocal obligations or permissions in morality to the actions and reactions of forces in nature. His suggestion is that the two sets of items, rights and forces, are quite different, but that aspects of their relationships can be assimilated. Just as my behavior towards someone gives that person a right to behave similarly towards me in appropriate conditions, so one object's acting on another implies a reaction from the second

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to the first. The case of beliefs about God produces an analogy between parents' regard for their children's welfare and God's relation to the human race as a whole. Of this case Kant says that we cannot treat that latter attitude as like human parental love but that the analogical relation can be used to give a more elaborate sense to our conception of God. Kant associates that step with a legitimate theism and a natural theology, and approves of Hume's rejection of a deism associated with transcendent theology. Passages at Ak. 5.196 and Ak. 8.153-54 offer other such "analogies." In these examples the crucial question is how far these modest concessions to the realm of things in themselves can be reconciled with Kant's standard restrictions, and how we should assess the strength of the resulting commitment. Adickes admits that once we accept that Kant is not both affirming and denying knowledge of noumena, whether of their existence or of their properties, and that he is not committed to the strict meaninglessness of such references, the concessions are at least consistent. None of the passages considered makes an explicit claim to know the nature or existence of things in themselves, but Adickes does not notice that Kant's positive accounts of things in themselves can be understood as an appeal to deviant experiences, in which it is feasible to conceive experiences differing radically from our own in other possible worlds. Nor does he notice Kant's program of identifying the distinctive character of discourses in moral, political, teleological, and metaphysical contexts. The suggestion is that we can make sense of some even quite radical deviations from our own experience, even though they may become purely formal or even meaningless at the limit. His hesitant characterizations of our understanding of an intuitive intelligence show rather than explicitly say that the concept veers towards the incomprehensible, and the appeals to nonstandard analogies to help us over those constraints underline the same general point. The analogies provide a minimal grasp of what deviations from our experience are like, but there is no suggestion that such a license always yields significant results. Kant's development of these resources is neither obviously inconsistent nor absurd, and Kant himself insists on their limitations. The question whether such resources have any more positive function is examined by Kant in detail in the Dialectic. A general query may be raised about the adequacy of such resources independently of Kant's appeal to them. They are so far only sketchy, and indicate that Kant is disinclined to make strong or enthusiastic claims for them, but they may independently be inadequate for the more elaborate, positive, roles in theology, morals, politics, or metaphysics which Kant considers in the Dialectic. The obvious way of rejecting the analogies would be to use a semantic theory to demonstrate that they had no meaning, but such a project is problematic. It is not clear that we have an established theory of meaning with sufficient weight to carry out such a demonstration,

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and Kant's position could rely on the way we construct meanings by deviating from core uses, which might be thought a requirement for an adequate natural language semantics. It points to the need for the kind of creative imagination on which Kant himself places such weight in all the Critiques, and more specifically for explanation of metaphorical, figurative language21 and other innovative uses of concepts in science, art, and literature. Kant pursues these issues in the Dialectic and the third Critique.

3. Concluding Summary Adickes draws the general conclusion from his survey of the cited passages that Kant accepts an unargued appeal to things in themselves as a self-evident, necessary premise in his system. Adickes's conclusion is vulnerable to the detailed criticisms of his account of those passages, but his conclusion is also unclear in three general ways. It is not clear whether self-evidence amounts to, or entails, truth, what significance attaches to the role of a premise in the system, or how we should understand Adickes's reference to Kant's underlying realist psychology. If Kant holds that the unargued premise is self-evidendy true, then his commitment to it conflicts with his denial that we have any knowledge of things in themselves. To treat the premise as self-evidendy true is at odds with Adickes's correct rejection of Kant's commitment to knowledge of things in themselves, but it is quite unclear how else "self-evidence" should be understood. Adickes draws a distinction between Kant's commitment to the existence of things in themselves and his denial that we can identify their properties,22 but that does not remove the unclarity for two reasons. First, it leaves the issue of reconciling the self-evident premise that things in themselves exist with our admitted ignorance of those things. Second, Kant's claims about things in themselves are not restricted purely to their existence, but include the ascription of various other, even categorial, properties to them. All such claims are made on Kant's assumptions that they are meaningful but provide no knowledge for us, but if Kant can admit a self-evident premise about the existence of things in themselves there is no reason why he should not also accept self-evident premises about their properties. Adickes's view is that the self-evident existence of things in themselves functions as an unargued premise in Kant's metaphysics, but that function is also unclear. The Critique is not a strict deductive argument from given premises in the rationalist style, but there is a further indication that Adickes's view gets Kant's account the wrong way round. The restrictions on the role of things in themselves and the hesitant account of their more positive function come at the end of the work, in the concluding stages of the Analytic of Principles and the Dialectic, rather than at the beginning.

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They are conclusions from Kant's enquiry into the structure of our experience and provide his diagnosis of a temptation to philosophical error.23 Throughout that discussion Kant's self-evident starting-point is more plausibly the standard character of our empirical experience whose presuppositions, a priori categories, and intuitions are to be disclosed in Kant's metaphysical inventory, in a descriptive metaphysics of experience. That appeal to possible experience is neither a commonsense resource against skepticism, nor a license to infer the actual existence of things in themselves. The necessary conceivability of such things is a consequence of the necessity of concepts in our experience, but to infer their actual existence is for Kant a fundamental fallacy. It may be objected that Adickes's conviction rests on the correct claim that in the Aesthetic, at B32-3 3, Kant had assumed the existence of things in themselves as material causes whose effects initiate the whole of our experience. This is a traditional view exemplified in familiar criticisms of the Critique made by Garve and Jacobi, but it was shown to be unwarranted and rejected in chapter 7.1.1. A self-evident belief in the existence of things in themselves is not a premise in Kant's theory but a potential illusion responsible for distortions in traditional philosophy whose origin and strength Kant seeks to diagnose. Kant admits that the concept of a thing in itself may function as a metaphysical Grund of our experience, but his primary concern is to resist the conclusions that such things themselves actually exist and that we have any knowledge of, or insight into, them. 24 Adickes might say that the alternative account demonstrates the "curse" of an overcharitable ahistorical approach, but it is put forward here not because it avoids the noted inconsistencies but because it reflects Kant's own claims. Adickes also outiined certain conditions which would have to be fulfilled if his own account were to be rejected. They depend upon his suggestion that to take the existence of things in themselves as self-evident was a consequence of Kant's realistic psychology and an associated sympathy for Leibniz's monadology. He describes Kant's basic position as monadenartig, and encourages a closer assimilation of Kant's views to those of Leibniz than is plausible in the light of Kant's severe criticisms of Leibniz in the Amphiboly (chapter 22). Because Adickes treats these background assumptions as part of Kant's temperament, he requires his critics to provide not only alternative readings for the texts but also a convincing account of Kant's underlying psychology. Such a requirement surely has no significance for the understanding of Kant's philosophy, and is strikingly at odds with Adickes's expressed commitment to a strict scientific and historical method. Even with Manfred Kiihn's excellent biography25 we know very little about Kant's underlying psychology. Even if conjectures are made about

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the relation between his underlying psychology and his philosophical system, they require some prior account of what the system is. The alternative account I have offered does not in any case require any denial of, or alternative to, Adickes's psychological hypothesis. It does not encourage a close connection between Kant and Leibniz, but it allows Kant temperamentally and philosophically to be as realistic as common sense about inner and outer empirical objects of experience. That consideration points to a final difficulty in Adickes's account. He represents Kant's unargued, self-evident premise as the acceptance of "a multiplicity of trans-subjective and extra-mental things in themselves," and as Kant's essential repudiation of traditional idealism. It was that repudiation which, for Adickes, reflected Kant's underlying realistic psychology, but such a claim is confused and counterintuitive. It makes traditional idealism ambiguous in its acceptance of outer things, and wrongly implies that Kant's Refutation of Idealism proves the existence of things in themselves. The point has been made before that whether Kant had a private psychological inclination towards realism or not, the argument against traditional idealism in the Critique concerns the existence not of things in themselves but of outer, spatial objects of experience. That is the undeniable conclusion of the official Refutation of Idealism, and of other references such as that noted above from A38. If Kant's appeal to things in themselves is the basis for his realism, then it is a realism not about outer, spatial objects but about items of an unspecified Platonic kind, characterizable neither as physical nor as mental, in a supersensible realm beyond our experience. That kind of realism is evidentiy at odds with Kant's rejection of empirical idealism, with his account of mathematics, and with his general rejection of Platonism and of the basic rationalist fallacy. In the Prolegomena Appendix Kant denies traditional idealism's belief in the independent existence of supersensible things in themselves. Kant's account of mathematics repudiates Plato's realism, and even his commitment to a role for a concept of things in themselves in the practical sphere at B371-72 can be called Platonism only with qualifications. Adickes's account pushes Kant towards doctrines he vigorously rejects and away from views he expressly advocates. With that background I list the claims which are either supported or licensed by the given texts, and compare them with Adickes's distinctive claims in B l - 5 . (1) Kant never rescinds the essential restrictions in any reference to things in themselves, in the "outcome of the whole Critique" and the "rule which permits no exception." The meaning of such concepts is limited, and we can have no knowledge of any corresponding objects. In so far as we have knowledge in experience

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through scientific or ordinary enquiry it has to do with objects of experience, things in themselves in the empirical sense, and concerns appearances. Kant's central commitment is to the conceivability of things in themselves and not, as Adickes claims, to their existence as in B l . (2) Adickes is motivated in his account by the natural wish to represent Kant as a realist opposed to traditional idealism. But that realist aim is achieved by Kant in his claims (B195, B270, B517) that reality concerns phenomena and not noumena, and by his Refutation of Idealism which proves the existence not of transcendent things in themselves but of immanent outer, spatial objects. Adickes's unargued, self-evident assumption of the existence of things in themselves in B2 has no serious role to play in that aim. (3) The most general way of indicating the place of our idea of a thing in itself is as an ultimate Grund beyond experience which purports to explain that experience as a whole. Such a Grund may be conceived in different ways, but is not to be confused with the scientific explanations we offer within empirical experience. Eberhard's error lay not in canvassing the idea of an ultimate explanation, which he shared with the author of the Critique, but in his confusing its transcendent status with science, confusing respectively what is not in principle knowable with what is. That error is implicit in Adickes's appeals to B3 and B4. The conception of such a Grund is inevitable, but still subject to the standard restrictions in (i).

(4) Notional references to things in themselves are inseparable from the dialectical Ideas, which have an important regulative function in such practical spheres as morality or religion and in metaphysics itself. Even in those contexts we are not stricdy entided to speak of a hypostatized, or personalized, "thing" corresponding to such Ideas. Even in the defense of transcendental freedom Kant denies that he has established its existence or even possibility (B586). Appeals to a thing in itself in Kant are negatively diagnostic of philosophical error, and more positively regulative but not constitutive of our experience. They do not function as Adickes's necessary but unargued premises as in B3. (5) Adickes attaches a metaphysical priority to the reality of things in themselves over the reality of appearances or phenomena, but that conflicts with the counter claims in (2). Those claims leave room for a conception of reality in a supersensible realm, and for a recognition of its role among dialectical Ideas, but that recognition is

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Part IV: The Analytic of Principles understood only within the earlier restrictions in (l)-(5). Because Kant thinks of those Ideas as having a legitimate, but not constitutive, role it is especially necessary for him to insist that those restrictions are not violated. They do not damage but safeguard Kant's doctrine of "the primacy of the practical" (B868). 2 6

4. A Note on Karl Ameriks In Kant's Theory of Mind (1982, 299), Karl Ameriks described my view that appearances and noumena "are two ways of looking at the same thing only because, on Kant's view, there is only one thing at which to look, namely appearance" (Bird 1962, 29) as too "innocuous." He then notes a number of passages to support his contrary view that "noumena . . . constitute for Kant a more fundamental, though unknowable for us, layer of reality." Although this is not the principal point I want to examine I draw attention to one passage, already noted, which influenced my claim, namely, Bxxvii: "the principle of causality therefore applies only to things taken in the former sense, namely, insofar as they are objects of experience—those same objects, taken in the other sense, not being subject to the principle— . . . ." Kant's positive uses for our conception of noumena, like his diagnosis of the route to philosophical error about noumena, evidendy rest on our misconceiving objects of experience as noumena or transcendental things in themselves. That textual point may be disregarded because Kant is thought to need to justify his belief in objects of experience before he can assume their primary existence. This is to assume that Kant's project is a standard antiskeptical, normative, and idealist epistemology, but the account of Kant's descriptive metaphysics of experience given here, and in Kant's Theory of Knowledge, rejects that assumption. The main issue concerns the priority Ameriks attaches to the "more fundamental layer of (noumenal) reality" which he claims to find in the quoted passages. The discussion arises from his claim (1982, 269) that "often the contrast Kant makes between what a thing is in itself and what it is as a phenomenon is a contrast between a thing qua its substantiality and qua what merely attaches to it." Ameriks qualifies that claim by noting, "Generally, instead of direcdy equating substances with things in themselves and mere determinations with phenomena, Kant distinguishes things in themselves from mere determinations, and substances from phenomena" (1982, 299). That qualification seriously weakens his position, for the statement on p. 299 does not entail Ameriks's conclusion. Kant might distinguish a thing in itself and its properties on one side and substances in themselves from phenomenal substances on the other without equating things in themselves with substances, or properties with phenomena.

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If the question is whether Kant distinguishes, on one side, "things" and "properties" for both noumena and phenomena, and on the other phenomenal and noumenal substances, there is no serious doubt that Kant makes both distinctions. The category "substance/accident" is a package in which neither component can be separated from the other. It has its primary cognitive use only in relation to phenomena, but Kant recognizes that we may apply such a categorical package to both phenomena and noumena subject to the usual conditions. Kant's apparatus makes room for properly qualified uses of both "substance" and "accident" at both phenomenal and noumenal levels. Ameriks's background argument is consequentiy inadequate, but the cited passages may remedy that defect. The passages in question are from two contexts, first (1-4) unpublished lectures on metaphysics and Reflexionen, and second (5-7) the Paralogisms. I shall suggest that Ameriks's conclusions from them are at best inconclusive and in some cases evident misreadings of the text.

4.1. Lectures on Metaphysics and Reflexionen 1. (Ak. 28.591): "We do not know the substrate or ground of the soul but only its appearances . . . bodies are not substances but only appearances." The context of this brief excerpt from Metaphysics L2 is a discussion of rational psychology, which follows the similar discussion in the Paralogisms. Kant rejects as fallacious certain arguments about the simplicity and substantiality of the soul, and sets the scene for the discussion of the mind-body relation by referring to the "substratum" or Grund of the soul, which we do not know. In that context the relation between mind and body conceived as noumenal substances is impossible to determine. "We cannot explain Grundkrafte," as he concludes. The first sentence is, in that context, a reference to a transcendent Grund of the soul and this usage, with its standard limitations, has been explained above in relation to Eberhard's misunderstandings. It is evidentiy Kant's primary aim in the passage to reinforce those limitations. The second sentence should be understood therefore to refer to noumenal substance in order to keep the evident contrast between what is known (appearance), and what is not (noumenal Griinde). In other such passages where Kant talks of empirical, not rational, psychology (e.g., Ak. 28.259ff.) he is quite willing to speak of both sides of the mind-body relation: "There must be a bodily connection in thinking. The brain is affected by the soul in thinking; it is the slate [Tafel] on which the soul writes." In

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that context Kant is rehearsing an empirical psychology in which the objects, mind and body, are phenomena and not noumena. 2. (Ak. 28.682): "A phenomenon is in itself no substance." This passage from Metaphysik Dohna turns on our understanding of what it is to deny something of a "phenomenon (as it is) in itself." It would be entirely natural to construe such a denial by writing: "Phenomena are not substances in themselves." In that construction the claim is unremarkable and in line with the standard view agreed with Adickes at A l - 5 . Kant continues by saying, equally unremarkably, that what we call "substance" is only an appearance to our senses, that is, phenomenal substance. Subsequently Kant makes a point which might better have supported Ameriks, despite its acknowledgement of phenomenal substance, when he says: "substantia phenomenon must have a noumenon as substrate. . . . That is transcendental idealism." But all these locutions, "appearances coP noumena" and noumena as a "substrate" or Grund of appearances have been considered before. Kant undeniably makes such references, but the suggestion has been throughout that they can be properly made only within the cognitive and semantic limitations imposed on references to the supersensible. Neither the quoted sentence nor the subsequent discussion provide any reason to reject those limitations. But if those limitations are respected, and if reality is for us primarily phenomenal as at B195, B270, and B517, then Ameriks's fundamental priority for noumenal reality is not supported in the passage. 3. (Ak. 28.261): "who [der] asserts that the soul is no special [besondere] substance but only a power, and so a phenomenon and accident " This passage from Metaphysik L^ taken in context implies the opposite of what Ameriks intends. It occurs in a context in which Kant allows mind and body to be empirically related (see 1), and gives simple examples of their interaction (bodily exercise cheers up the spirits). He goes on to consider whether we can identify the soul as a Grundkraft, as Wolff had done, and asserts that such a claim is false (see 1). The sentence quoted then outlines an implication of such a view: "Whoever (like Wolff) says that the soul is a force asserts that the soul is not a substance but only a power and so a phenomenon and accident." The antecedent in the implication is, however, a claim which Kant, unlike Wolff, regards as mistaken. Kant is not making this claim, or accepting its implication, but rejecting it as false. Nor is he necessarily identifying "phenomenon" and "accident." If we speak empirically of the soul, as Kant does in the examples of interaction, then

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we speak of a phenomenon which is not merely a power. In that empirical context powers, as accidents, are phenomena, but it does not follow that phenomena are accidents. Ameriks's reading is unwarranted on both counts. 4. (Ak.18.145): "The substantial is the thing in itself and unknown." This is an unremarkable claim so long as the context is outside the scope of phenomena or objects of experience, as it is, for example, in the context of a rational psychology (see 5-7 below), or when Kant speaks of a transcendent Grund of experience. The passage itself does not settie the issue, but it is entirely natural to understand it in that way. Once these passages are properly located within their contexts, they do not decisively assert anything more than has been examined in Adickes's texts. They suffer also from the typically fragmentary and inconclusive character of Kant's Nachlass, but do not in any case establish Ameriks's position.

4.2. Passages from the Paralogisms The other passages from the Paralogisms (B402; A360; A385), are not fragmentary in that way but because the background context is fuller and clearer they can be shown to be even less adequate. Because they are drawn from Kant's discussion of rational psychology from the Paralogisms they have obvious similarities to the earlier discussions of rational psychology (in 1-4), and it would be entirely natural to interpret the earlier passages in the light of the fuller contexts provided for the later ones. In the Critique, unlike the lectures on metaphysics, Kant is concerned not with empirical psychology, but with a rational pseudo-psychology which purports to deal with minds in themselves. 5. (B402): "we begin with the category of substance, whereby a thing in itself is represented." The context is immediately that of Kant's preparatory division of the various claims about the self, or the soul, in rational psychology, and mediately that of Kant's understanding of rational psychology. With respect to the former the sentence merely indicates that the discussion is to start with the category of substance, and the claim that the soul is a substance. With respect to the latter such a claim in rational psychology is to be understood as separate from "every empirical element (and from) any special perception of my inner state." The claim in rational psychology is that the soul,

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or self, can correctly be viewed as a substance without any reference to inner sense, that is, as a thing in itself, and the quoted sentence merely underlines that background. Abstracting from the senses in this way is, for Kant, a standard way of identifying a thing in itself (A3 59-60; B522, and elsewhere). The sentence, consequently, does not assert that the category of substance ipso facto represents a thing in itself, which would violate what Kant says of the category throughout the Analytic, but only that that is how it is conceived in rational psychology. The quotation not only fails to support Ameriks's account, but by implication rejects it; for Kant's aim in the subsequent discussion is to show that such a claim in rational psychology is unwarranted and illusory. 6. (A360): "For it is obvious that a thing in itself is of a different nature from the determinations which constitute only its state." On the face of it the sentence merely underlines a general point made in relation to the earlier passages, namely that Kant is prepared to distinguish among both phenomena and noumena the "thing" and its "properties/determinations." The relevant category is that of "substance/accident," and in applying that category to phenomena and to noumena the distinction between thing and property is inevitably made for both. That outcome conflicts with Ameriks's association of thing in itself with substance and property with phenomenon. 7. (A385): "Matter therefore does not mean a kind of substance . . . but only the distinctive nature of those appearances of objects . . . the representations of which we call outer." The context is, again, that of a rational psychology, defined as above (B402), in which a question arises about the "communion" of soul and body, and of the former's beginning and end (A384). Kant's position, as he goes on to explain, is that within rational psychology these questions concern things in themselves by a delusive hypostatization, and consequently raise only a spurious problem (A384). The background is elaborated in the following claim: "they regard extension, which is nothing but appearance, as a property of outer things that subsists even apart from our sensibility, and hold that motion is due to these things, and really occurs in and by itself, apart from our senses." The relevant problem arises with respect to a communion between mind and body construed as things in themselves, and Kant's consistent view is that such a problem is spurious since we can know nothing of such things in themselves. In the passage Ameriks quotes Kant claims that matter, as we should understand it, is not such a kind of substance "distinct and heterogeneous from the object of

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inner sense," that is, it is not a substance in itself, but only an outer appearance. Kant evidently believes that the mind/body problem is manageable within the realm of appearances in an empirical psychology, but not manageable within the realm of things in themselves in a rational psychology. It reflects Kant's view that empirical psychology is a legitimate, and rational psychology an illegitimate, discipline. The same message was given in the earlier passages from Ak. 28.591 and Ak. 28.260-61. Neither set of passages supports Ameriks's position. Some, when properly understood within their context, point in the opposite direction and others merely repeat claims already discussed in relation to Adickes's quotations. There is no question but that Kant makes references to things in themselves, is prepared to apply categories to them, and thinks it inevitable that we construct the correlative notion of a noumenal Grund of experience. Nor is there any doubt that Kant thinks of these references as important enabling devices, especially in relation to practical issues such as morality, freedom, theology, metaphysics, and politics. But the crucial question, which Ameriks raises and attempts to answer from his quoted passages, concerns not the fact of these modes of expression, nor their importance to Kant, but the status he attaches to them. If, as I have claimed, such references are always to be understood within the scope of the familiar restrictions, then there is no justification for claiming that things in themselves form a "more fundamental layer of reality" than empirical reality. Nor is there sufficient reason to identify "substance" and "thing in itself' on one side, and "phenomenon" and "property" on the other.

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The Transcendental Dialectic and the Doctrine of Method

Introduction to the Transcendental Dialectic and the Doctrine of Method

T h e Transcendental Dialectic is an attempt to diagnose mistakes in traditional philosophy and to provide a therapy to mitigate their effects. Kant believes those errors to be responsible for the deplorable state of philosophy and his diagnosis and therapy to be a necessary part of the required reform in his revolutionary program. This is the great utility of the sceptical mode of dealing with the questions which pure reason puts to pure reason. By its means we can deliver ourselves at but a small cost from a great body of sterile dogmatism, and set in its place a sober critique, which as a true cathartic will guard us against such groundless beliefs and the supposed polymathy to which they lead. (B514)

Kant refers to his approved "skeptical method" rather than to the criticized idle skepticism of chapter 11, and the "supposed polymathy" is the arrogant belief that metaphysics can dictate to other sciences such as mathematics or physics by accessing an ultimate reality through reason. An essential part of Kant's revolution is to reserve only a modest but still valuable role for philosophy in place of such dogmatic pretensions, and in the final Doctrine of Method that modesty is a central and persistent theme. An essential aspect of that modesty is the denial that metaphysics can mimic the dogmatic methods of mathematics (B763). Commentators recognize Kant's therapeutic intentions but may find his identification and diagnosis of the mistakes incomprehensible. Kant requires not only to describe but also to explain the philosophical errors, but the apparatus used for these purposes is complex and not readily understood (B609). Three aspects of the operation can be distinguished: first, the Ideas [Ideen] which generate errors and require therapy; second, the apparatus which diagnoses and cures the errors; and third, their detailed faults of reasoning. The central Ideas which generate errors are those of the "unconditioned" and of a "completion" in enquiry. Kant holds that reason's role is 589

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to systematize our beliefs and that this entails a conception of a complete structure for enquiry. One nominal way of providing such a completion is to identify something "unconditioned," a metaphysical Grund, which both initiates and terminates enquiry and makes those beliefs finally intelligible. It is assumed that metaphysics traditionally pursued this task, but Kant's claim is that because it was misunderstood the project led to contradictions and the endless pseudo-disputes and mock-battles of the preface and the Doctrine of Method. The remedy for that misunderstanding is to identify the correct, modest role for metaphysics which abandons a polymathic claim to discover transcendent truths. The Ideas of an "unconditioned" and a "completion" of enquiry retain a necessary role in experience but it is not that of a pseudo-rational super-science. The apparatus for explaining and curing the errors is anticipated in earlier sections of the Critique. It includes Kant's version of a "bewitchment of our intelligence by means of concepts" at B186-87 in which a priori concepts are taken to refer to nonempirical objects in a world of pure reason separated from our sensory experience. It includes the distinction at B8 8-89 between formal claims about concepts and supposed material counterparts of these in such a pseudo-rational world. It includes the resolution of amphibolies in a transcendental topic which correctly maps elements in experience, and the related preference at B303 for a modest analytic of concepts rather than a grand traditional ontology. The Dialectic brings also the new apparatus of "subreption" and the distinction between "constitutive" and "regulative" principles. The term "subreption" was used extensively in the pre-Critical works, especially the 1770 Dissertation, and marks a way in which we may be misled by concepts through failing to understand their provenance and correct location in the map of experience. If we do not recognize that a concept belongs primarily to sensibility rather than understanding or reason then we may misuse it. We may treat a concept of reason, such as the unconditioned, as if it genuinely designated some object and belonged to the senses whose function is to present particulars. The fault is that of "surreptitiously" misusing a concept in inappropriate ways, and the remedy is to locate the concept correctly through Kant's form of category discipline. Kant argues that such confusions mislead us into thinking of the related principles as "constitutive" in designating a reality that can be only transcendent. Our ignorance of such a reality and the inability to resolve disputes about its character explain the endless and futile disagreements in traditional philosophy. The remedy is to recognize that such principles may have a legitimate and useful role as regulative but not as constitutive. They cannot legitimately designate a transcendent reality, but they can, in accordance with reason's organizing role, regulate our enquiries into immanent experience.

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The central fault throughout the Dialectic, which the notions of an "amphiboly" and "subreption" exploit, is that of an ambiguity in reasoning. All the dialectical illusions involve an inference, or an unnoticed slide, from immanent to transcendent reality. The concepts involved naturally encourage such errors, but the fault lies not with them but with their misuse. Kant makes plain that it is the use of Ideas which is immanent or transcendent, and it is their dogmatic, hyperphysical misuses which have to be corrected (B671, B763-65). Standard examples of such misuses are given in comments on Plato at B371 and Leibniz at B630 and B632ff. Kant's diagnostic therapy is an integral part of his anti-Platonism (B9, B146-50). The topics for the Dialectic's diagnosis and therapy are identified through the concepts of self, world, and God. Fundamental reference to the self in transcendental apperception is part of Kant's a priori inventory of experience, but he recognizes that it may be misused as a foundation of a pseudo-rational psychology in the fallacious inferences of the Paralogisms. The arguments in the Antinomies lead to the apparent contradictions in reason which stimulated Kant to examine and reform the appeal to reason in metaphysics. The resolution of those conflicts of reason is provided by the diagnostic apparatus and the same is true of the fallacious "proofs" of the existence of God in the Ideal. In all these cases the aim is not to dispense with the fundamental Ideas but only to correct our understanding of them and their role in experience. The Dialectic is not purely negative but has also the positive role of continuing the a priori inventory of sensibility and understanding into the domain of reason. Kant's treatment of particular issues about the self, the conflicts in the Antinomies, and theology are subject to general and detailed criticisms. The Dialectic's therapy is often thought to yield contradictory claims about understanding and reason, about constitutive and regulative principles, and about science and the notion of a "systematic unity." Beyond those general points, the detailed resolution of issues about the self, a first cause, freewill and determinism, and belief in God have all been interpreted differently and variously criticized. It is not difficult to raise queries about Kant's solution to the problems, but in the surveys of each section I argue that many of these queries can be answered. The Doctrine of Method looks back to the questions raised in the prefaces which motivated Kant's dissatisfaction with previous philosophy and his revolutionary aim of redirecting its future progress. It continues those themes in summarizing the outcome of the different uses of reason, legitimate and illegitimate, and distinguishes principles which belong to a fruitful metaphysics of experience from those which can be only transcendent and spurious. It insists throughout on a modest role for philosophy in providing a category discipline to clarify and sometimes reject traditional problems. Kant models his own reformed philosophy on a system such as

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Euclid, but the model is substantially qualified in the sharp distinction drawn in the Discipline between the properly dogmatic methods of mathematics and an improper dogmatism in philosophy. In the Canon Kant focuses on the practical and moral uses of reason, and in the Architectonic he oudines the structure of pure reason. A brief section on the history of philosophy identifies three sets of opposed traditional theories which Kant's revolution aims to transcend. Kant has an elegandy written summary of the Critique at B730-32, and expresses the sadly overoptimistic Austinian hope in the final sentence that all previous philosophical uncertainties may be resolved "by the end of the present century" (B884). I suggest in chapter 29 that that optimism was misplaced by around 100 years.

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t anticipates the Dialectic earlier in the Critique in the preliminary account of the Transcendental Analytic at B82-88. There he contrasts an earlier division of logic into an Analytic and Dialectic with his different but parallel division of transcendental logic into Transcendental Analytic and Dialectic. The dialectical logic of earlier times is represented as no more than sophistry in which by imitating methods of formal logic "ignorance can be made to appear as truth" to conceal "the emptiness of its pretensions" (B86). Just as Kant distinguishes general formal logic from its transcendental counterpart, so Transcendental Dialectic is distinguished from that instruction in sbphistry. Kant's Dialectic is designed not to encourage illusion but to unmask it. The second part of transcendental logic must therefore form a critique of this dialectical illusion and is called transcendental dialectic not as an art of producing such illusion (an art commonly practised by metaphysical jugglers) but as a critique of understanding and reason in respect of their hyperphysical1 employment. It will expose the false, illusory character of those groundless pretensions. (B87-88)

The passage testifies to Kant's skepticism about his fellow metaphysicians and his persistent rejection of a transcendent use for understanding and reason beyond our possible experience. In the introduction to the Dialectic Kant begins to outline the scope and character of those dialectical illusions, but it is left to the detailed discussions in the Paralogisms, Antinomies, and Ideal to support their identification and the proposed therapy to deal with them (B349-96). In this chapter I introduce the section by considering in section 1 the vocabulary and structure of the Dialectic, and in 2 the diagnosis of, and therapy for, the advertised illusions.

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1. The Vocabulary and Structure of the Dialectic 1.1. Negative and Positive Aspects The Dialectic is a critical, negative exposure of philosophical illusions, but it would be a mistake to regard it as exclusively negative. Like the Aesthetic and Analytic it is also part of Kant's reformed, positive metaphysics of experience. Just as the Aesthetic isolates and classifies the contribution of the senses to experience and the Analytic abstracts and classifies the contribution of the understanding, so the Dialectic isolates and classifies the contribution of reason. It is of the utmost importance to isolate the various modes of knowledge according as they differ in kind and origin and to secure that they are not confused, owing to the fact that usually, in our employment of them, they are combined. (B870) in treating of the transcendental concepts of reason, which in philosophical theory are commonly confused with others and not properly distinguished even from concepts of the understanding, we have been able to rescue them from their ambiguous position, to determine their origin, and . . . to fix their precise number. . . , presenting them in a systematic connexion, and so marking out and enclosing a special field for pure reason. (B395-96) The central question of the Dialectic is put at B362 and answered finally at B 6 7 1 and B 6 9 3 - 9 4 : Can we isolate reason, and is it, so regarded, an independent source of concepts and judgments which spring from itself alone, and by means of which it relates to objects; or is it a merely subordinate faculty, for imposing on given modes of knowledge a certain form, called logical . . . > (B362). Reason is never in immediate relation to an object, but only to the understanding . . . It does not therefore create concepts (of objects) but only orders them (B671) The cartographic role of transcendental reflection in Kant's descriptive metaphysics at B 3 2 4 - 2 5 is recalled in the Dialectic at B351 and presented as an antidote to dialectical illusion. In order to distinguish the specific action of understanding from the force which is intermixed with it, it is necessary to regard the erroneous judgement as the diagonal between two forces . . . and to resolve this composite action into the simple actions of the understanding and of the sensibility. . . . this is a task which falls to be discharged by transcendental reflection, through which . . . every representation is assigned its place in the corresponding faculty of knowledge (B351)

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The same "abstraction" or "isolation" procedure envisaged for sensibility and understanding, and likened to the artificial, theoretical separation of different forces acting on some object, is now deployed again for reason. In the same way reason is already involved in our experience along with the senses and the understanding (B870). These faculties, and their functional roles, are not given to us separately in experience any more than are the syntactic and semantic features of natural language utterances. They have to be disentangled in a Kantian metaphysics of experience, and that operation produces a formal, abstract reference to those simplified capacities. This accounts for some of the confusion arising over the characterization of reason, understanding, and sensibility, for their theoretical separation may suggest rigid distinctions although in practice their roles overlap.2 Consequently the Dialectic is not a distinct critique of metaphysics, purely negative and therapeutic, but a continuation, into the realm of reason, of the descriptive mapping of the elements in our experience begun in the Aesthetic and Analytic. This particular region of the map is all the more important for Kant since reason is preeminently the source of philosophy and logic. The project of clarifying, reforming, and revolutionizing philosophy requires attention to the role of reason which is essentially connected to reasoning and to logic. For Kant reason and logic have legitimate and illegitimate pretensions, and it is equally necessary to expose the illegitimate pretensions of logic as an organon, and of reason as providing constitutive principles (B85-86). The Dialectic is designed finally to fulfill the promise in the Prefaces to separate these pretensions and their associated principles (Aviii). It would be natural, but wrong, to think that the legitimate positive role for reason which Kant outlines is confined to its "practical" use. That practical context for reason is emphasized throughout the Critique from the Preface's remarks about "restricting knowledge to make room for faith" to the Dialectic's sharp division between Plato's views about morality and mathematics (Bxxx; B772-73). Plato found the chief instances of his ideas (Ideen) in the field of the practical3, that is, in what rests upon freedom, which in its turn rests on modes of knowledge that are a peculiar product of reason. Whoever would derive the concepts of virtue from experience . . . would make of virtue something which changes according to time and circumstance, an ambiguous monstrosity not admitting the formation of any rule. a He even extended his concept... to mathematics, although the object of that science is nowhere to be found except in possible experience. In this I cannot follow him, any more than in his mystical deduction of these ideas, or in the extravagances by which he, so to speak, hypostatised them. . . . (B370-71; see also B375)

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Kant attaches a "primacy" to practical reason but he reserves a philosophical role for the notion of a transcendental Grund even in theoretical contexts (Ak. 5.120-23). Although we may be misled about the character and status of Platonic Ideas they are not, as Kant says, "mere fictions of the brain" (B371, B596). The transcendental search for an underlying Grund in politics or morality is no different from the Kantian procedure of "going transcendental" in epistemology and speculative metaphysics.3 Those distinctively Kantian "transcendental" procedures were outlined in chapter 5 and are evident in all the contexts where the discussion moves from mere empirical circumstances in experience to their transcendental, nonempirical presuppositions. This was the basis for the earlier claims that a transcendental enquiry into the self or our fundamental cognitive powers does not disclose a distinctive self, or distinctive cognitive operations, separate from the familiar items in experience. What Kant insists on is that such moves make no reference to some new distinctive nonempirical object, but provide instead a new formal way of identifying the philosophical conditions for the objects of possible experience. The earlier contrast at B88-89 between such formal and material modes of thought or reference is underlined throughout the Dialectic (B353-54, B363, B409, B518-19, B537, B642-47, B665): "The formal condition of thought does not allow of being hypostatized as a material condition of existence" (B647). It matches Kant's rejection of "ontology" in favor of a more modest "analytic of concepts." And since that which is not appearance cannot be an object of experience, the understanding can never transcend those limits of sensibility within which alone objects can be given to us. Its principles are merely rules for the exposition of appearances; and the proud name of an Ontology that presumptuously claims to supply, in systematic doctrinal form, synthetic a priori knowledge of things in general . . . must therefore give way to the modest tide of a mere Analytic of pure understanding. (B303)

In both practical and theoretical contexts Kant evidently accepts the negative limitation of "going transcendental," that it does not license reference to a new kind of noumenal object beyond experience, and a more positive need to look for some transcendental Grund. In politics, for example, the transcendental search is necessary for what Kant calls the "simplifying of legislation" so that "instead of the endless multiplicity of civil laws we should be able to fall back on their general principles." But, he adds, that still does not entitle us to suppose that we are determining objects in themselves or identifying the very nature of things according to mere concepts (B358). The "visionary perfection" of Plato's political ideas is not merely that of an "idle thinker," is both fundamental and necessary, but still leaves a gulf between the idea and its realization (B372).

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A constitution allowing the greatest possible human freedom in accordance with laws by which the freedom of each is made consistent with that of all others—I do not speak of the greatest happiness for that will follow of itself—is at any rate a necessary idea which must be taken as fundamental not only in first projecting a constitution but in all its laws. . . . how great a gulf may be left between the Idea and its realisation are questions which no one can, or ought to, answer. (B373-74)

Kant is not saying that there is no such gulf but only that we cannot determine a priori the limits of a human freedom which might bridge it. The "actually existing hindrances" arise, he claims, not from human nature but from a "neglect of pure Ideas" that is a neglect of an adequate philosophical Grund which the Critical philosophy aims to clarify and provide. Although that transcendental reference to a Grund for our experience is common to both speculative and practical experience there is a major difference between the two kinds of case. Kant insists on the claim that in these practical contexts "human reason exhibits a genuine causality" which is not available in the theoretical sphere.4 He also regards it as essential to include some reference in a system of reason to the "ends" which provide a complete account of it. Reason is here indeed exercising causality, as actually bringing about that which its concept contains; and of such wisdom we cannot say disparagingly that it is only an Idea. (B385) experience, in this case of the good, is itself made possible only by the Ideas— incomplete as their empirical expression must always remain. . . . Whereas so far as nature is concerned experience supplies the rules and is the source of truth, in respect of moral laws it is, alas, the mother of illusion. (B375) just because it is the Idea of the necessary unity of all possible ends it must . . . serve as a standard in all that bears on the practical. (B385) The highest formal unity which rests solely on concepts of reason, is the purposive [zweckmdssige] unity of things. (B714)

The essential difference between the speculative and practical contexts is that whereas in the former our ideas must await some appropriate realization in actual given experience, in the latter we have an opportunity, however limited, actually to bring about the phenomena, in political constitutions, moral rules, or religious belief. The former has a "world to idea" fit in which our beliefs depend on a posteriori circumstances for their confirmation and use; the latter has an "idea to world" fit in which our concepts and ideals can actually change the world. Reason for Kant has in both cases a necessary role in the development of our experience in capturing the notion of an end or goal without which no system would be

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complete or completely intelligible. The system of reason in metaphysics is similarly subordinated to that idea of an end or goal, and the details of such a system are related in the way that the organic functions of some creature are harmoniously combined in its whole nature.5 But there are severe constraints of different kinds on the realizability of Ideas of reason in the speculative and the practical spheres.

1.2. "Ideas" [Ideen] and aideas* [Vorstellungen]; Rules and Principles; Sensibility, Understanding, and Reason Kant uses a central distinction in the Dialectic between the generic notion of an "idea" [ Vorstellunjj] and the more specific "Idea" [Idee] of reason. Although the contrast is not marked in that form in translations of the Critique, I write "Idea" for Idee and "idea" for Vorstellung. At B377 Kant provides a typical catalogue of different species of the generic "idea" in which the immediately relevant items are: A "concept" refers to objects mediately through what they have in common, and may be either empirical or pure. A pure concept, whose origin is in the understanding alone (and not in sensibility), is a "notion" [notio, Notion]. A concept formed from notions and transcending the possibility of experience is an "Idea" [Idee]. What Kant now calls a "notion" is a pure, a priori concept, such as a category which contains no direct reference to sensibility and intuition, and requires such a reference if it is to be used in experience. Ideas, which Kant likens to Plato's "forms" or "archetypes," are such pure notions with no possibility of a use in experience on their own, without supplementation from sensibility. What were called earlier "unschematized" categories would be examples of Ideas, and it is clear that Kant allows such formal categories to encourage a transcendent, and mistaken, use of this kind. The diagnostic passage at B186-87 insists on just this illusory temptation, and in the Dialectic other such illusions arise from reason's demands for unity, system, completeness, and the "unconditioned." That initial survey already involves relations between sensibility, understanding, and reason, and the associated concepts of "rules" and "principles." Kant recognizes that the latter terms are ambiguous, but associates reason strictly with principles and understanding with rules6 (B692). In the following summary, understanding relates primarily to ground floor

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and scientific beliefs while reason has primarily to do with a higher-order philosophy of those beliefs. Reason is the highest faculty for elaborating the matter of intuition, but understanding secures the unity of appearances by means of rules, while reason secures the unity of the rules of understanding under principles (B355-56, B359, B362-63). At B692-94 Kant repeats the claim that the understanding is an object for reason, just as sensibility is an object for understanding, but in unifying understanding which deals with appearances reason relates "indirecdy," transitively, even to objects of experience (B671). Whatever legitimate responsibility reason has in organizing understanding will have some impact even on what we perceive. In actual experience all these factors are mixed together, like resultant forces, and can be disentangled only in some form of Kantian transcendental topic or descriptive metaphysics. Kant insists that the strict principles of reason are never constitutive (B692). Pure concepts of reason are never "adequate," and prescribe no law, to empirical objects in experience, so that their purported objective use is always transcendent in relation to appearances (B356, B362, B365, B367, B383). Ultimately the rules of understanding are characterized as "constitutive," as making certain objective discriminations in experience possible, while the strict "principles" of reason are regulative. Concepts of reason enable us to conceive, but concepts of understanding enable us to understand (B367). Reason attempts to raise concepts of the understanding to the status of Ideas, which gives rise to dialectical illusions and errors of subreption (B557, B671). The central error is that of taking reason to be in direct relation to objects, and so inevitably to designate transcendent objects. Reason does not create concepts (of objects) but only orders them through its operations on rules of understanding (B671). Such an account may not be wholly clear but with one proviso the picture that emerges is not obviously incoherent.7 It represents not only our cognitive ability to formulate knowledge claims about, and within, experience but also the character and status of those claims themselves. It distinguishes, crudely perhaps, between our basic empirical knowledge in everyday life and science due to sensibility and understanding, and a higher order reason which can characterize, classify, and unify that ground floor experience. There is no good reason so far to make an impassable barrier between these abilities or their operations, and properly understood the higher order activity of reason is inseparable from the lower order activities of an equally inseparable understanding and sensibility. Rational reflection on science may enable us to unify different theories and so to contribute to the progress of that science and relate reason indirectly to ground floor experience. In distinguishing "conceiving" as the function of reason from understanding and explanation in the sciences Kant reinforces the distinction

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noted throughout chapter 23 between the necessary conceivability of Ideas of reason and the actual existence of an associated realm of noumena. Kant's negative suggestion is that the higher-order role of reason may generate an overambitious belief in our ability actually to establish truths of reason about objects distinct from those involved in empirical experience. Since the relevant concepts of reason, the "notions" obtained by metaphysical abstraction from experience, cannot be exemplified in any experience of ours there is a temptation to conjure up some special realm of existence for them to inhabit beyond experience.8 The point is nicely expressed at Prolegomena §33: Hence concepts of the understanding appear to have far more significance [Bedeutung] and content [Inhalt] . . . so that the understanding builds, unremarked, a much more extensive house adjacent to that of our experience, and fills it with pure thought-entities, not noticing that despite the legitimacy of the concepts it has moved beyond the bounds of their use.

In the tradition, reason and philosophy were recognized to have the responsibility to oversee ground floor experience and its refinement in science, but were also thought by dogmatic rationalists to be able to establish truths of that distinctive nonexperiential kind. Schonfeld's The Philosophy of the Toung Kant shows that Kant had himself held such beliefs during the pre-Critical period. Kant's early years were guided by a vision of combining a modern mechanical model of physical nature with the metaphysical assumptions of a uniform structure of nature, of a purpose to the world, and of the possibility of freedom. (Schonfeld 2000, 9) [A] reconciliation [between science and metaphysics] was needed because both perspectives are indispensable. . . . Natural science was supposed to be about the empirically accessible and quantifiable surface layer of nature and metaphysics concerned the rationally securable and non-quantifiable essence of the world.9 (Schonfeld 2000, 11)

The temptation is to regard the essence of the world as a set of truths about the hidden realm of things in themselves accessible only to a rationalist metaphysics which may then dictate to the sciences. Although in some early writing, such as Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Kant expresses reservations about this pre-Critical rationalist project, Schonfeld argues convincingly that it was only around the time of the Dissertation under the influence of Hume and Rousseau that Kant finally lost faith in it. By the time of the Critique Kant is more decisive and more hostile to those views. His belief now is that the ambitious claim of a rationalist metaphysics to establish truths about a supersensible essence of reality which

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might parallel and complete natural science is illusory. Reason can do no more than order our ground floor knowledge through understanding and sense, and the standard form for dialectical illusion, in the basic rationalist fallacy, is to infer from synthetic a priori knowledge to the existence of corresponding "a priori," that is, nonexperiential, transcendent objects. The dividing line from reason through understanding to a manifold of intuition is cognitively permeable and uniquely valuable, but to move from pure concepts of understanding away from sense experience and into transcendent realms of pure reason is a futile attempt to pass through the cognitively impermeable barrier noted in chapter 22.2.2,1 from Prolegomena §59. The central problem of the Dialectic and its answer, given in 1.1, mark that decisive change.

1.3. Completeness, Unity, System Kant has other controversial ways of characterizing his project in the Dialectic. On one side reason is required to provide a systematic oudine of its central topics, and Kant claims to be able to identify exhaustively three topics concerning Ideas of reason. The clue is provided by the connection between reason and reasoning in logic and its valid patterns of inference. Reason, considered as the faculty of a certain logical form of knowledge, is the faculty of inferring, i.e. judging mediately (by the subsumption of the condition of a possible judgement under the condition of a given judgement). (B386)

The relevant patterns of inference are identified in the classification of three types of syllogism, as categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive, and their associated topics are respectively issues about the self in the Paralogisms, the world in the Antinomies, and God in the Ideal (B361, B379, B392-93). Apart from that general clue each of the three major sections focuses on certain formal arguments and fallacies of reasoning which mislead us into transcendent beliefs and disputes. Three traditional problems of metaphysics, namely, God, freedom, and immortality, are also identified as the primary topics for discussion in the Dialectic, and this has seemed to some commentators to indicate a different classification and further confusion, but the immediate architectonic problems can be summarily resolved. The two guides considered so far are not totally distinct. The trio of "God, freedom, and immortality" is intended to reverse the order "self, world, and God," since freedom, with other Antinomies, raises questions about immanent and transcendent worlds, and immortality is linked to our conception of a persisting self

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(B395n). The classification of topics into "subject" and "object," with the subclassification of the latter into "object as appearance" and "object of thought in general" at B391, provides a further general, but understandable, plan. What remains is the claimed link between these topics and the three forms of deductive inference, namely, categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive syllogisms. Like the "clue" to categories in the Metaphysical Deduction a general connection between inference, or reasoning, and reason is plausible. It is natural to regard Kant's three faculties of sensibility, understanding, and reason as associated with certain functional aspects of our experience. Sensibility is associated with individuation or realization in perceptual experience, understanding with generality, concepts, and judgement, and reason with reasoning and patterns of inference in enquiry. But the implementation of this scheme in identifying topics in the Dialectic through specific syllogistic inferences is unclear and artificial. Any supporting ground for that detailed link must await the specific discussions and outlined fallacies in the Paralogisms, Antinomies, and Ideal. In a further link with logic Kant deploys an apparatus which relates inference to his central dialectical ideas of "completeness," "unity," "system," and the "unconditioned." Inference is seen either as a progress to further conclusions or as a regress to prior premises. Kant does not think that the former, progressive steps have any special philosophical significance,10 but the regress to prior premises introduces his conceptions of a "completion" for such regressive steps towards an "unconditioned" terminus (B388-89). The suggestion is that dialectical issues arise in relation to the idea of a "completion" for such an inferential series and of an "unconditioned" terminus which completes its systematic unity. Inferences are seen as conditional steps from premises to a conclusion in which validation of the premises allows the conclusion to be detached and asserted. Kant extends this natural account to cover enquiry generally in which we may progressively apply our principles to more and more detailed phenomena, or regressively seek for more fundamental premises or principles from which given conclusions may be deduced.11 The connection with reason arises not only through the role of such progressive or regressive patterns of inference, but also because that scheme points to two related Ideas, namely, the completion of some enquiry through arriving at a terminus. Put generally, the idea is that to arrive at some such terminus in enquiry and to demonstrate its outcome as a unified system is to have completed the series of steps and the system itself. The terminus to such a series which needs no further enquiry stands as a marker for what Kant calls an "unconditioned," subject to no other conditions. The higher order role for reason in providing such systematic completeness and order for a unified understanding is the underlying fac-

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tor in this inferential model but it is evidentiy ambiguous. Kant recognizes that reason cannot dispense with the demand for unity and completeness, which the "unconditioned" represents, but his primary aim is to ensure that we understand its character and are not misled by it. 12 This second structure for the Dialectic is widely criticized for its opaque and ambiguous accounts of inferential procedures, of the "unconditioned," and of the unity and completion of a series. We may, at the risk of excessive generality, impose the idea of a "condition-conditioned" relation on inference and regard inference rightly as essential in enquiry, but question the details in the picture. Inference in enquiry is not always deductive, and deductive inferences are not confined to syllogistic forms. Enquiries may use any number of informal and formal patterns of inference, and may have different formal and informal structures. Kant's account of reason as a higher-order reconstruction of scientific theory and metaphysics is thoroughly plausible, but its generality and restriction to syllogistic logic are handicaps. The general conception of regressive and progressive enquiries may encourage confusions between formal, deductive inferences and informal, inductive inferences, or between science and metaphysics, and may misrepresent scientific methods. The naturally regressive unification of different theories in science, say unifying relativity and quantum theory in the physics of "strings," cannot be properly represented in Kant's syllogistic, conditional structure. The later distinction between "reflective and determinant" judgement in the third Critique develops this point, and is anticipated in the discussion of systematic unity in the Dialectic, but the general account of regress and progress in enquiry may, for these reasons, seem opaque and objectionable. Similar difficulties arise from Kant's final step in outlining the project of the Dialectic. It develops the relation of condition to conditioned in two different and opposed ways, expressed in the following two principles (B364-65): I.

If the conditioned in a series is given then the whole series of conditions subordinated to one another—a series which is itself unconditioned—is likewise given, that is, contained, in the object and its connection. If the conditioned is given then the unconditioned is also given.

II. Find, for conditioned knowledge obtained through understanding, the unconditioned whereby its unity is brought to completion. If the conditioned is given, then the unconditioned is set as a task. The two principles anticipate Kant's therapeutic distinction between viewing principles of reason as genuinely constitutive or only regulative,

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discussed in chapter 28. I has the form of an assertion which refers to a supposed unconditioned, while II has the form of an injunction or imperative which leaves open whether an unconditioned can be found. Kant's general position is to say that principles of reason are never properly constitutive, material, or assertive but have only a formal, that is, regulative or imperative, function. This outiines his position at the end of the Dialectic in the Appendix where the result of his therapeutic apparatus is finally outlined (B670-96). That therapeutic resolution depends on the prior examination of the specific issues which implement it, in the Paralogisms, Antinomies, and Ideal, but there are prior problems in I and II. It was suggested earlier that Kant's central, but general, notion of reasoning from conditioned to condition was in danger of an over-general confusion between different types of inference, and I and II reinforce that danger. It is natural to understand I as a rationalist claim that once a conditioned has been given, then in theory its prior conditions may be rationally deduced. If the claim covers not only deductive but also inductive or causal relations, then the picture of rational deduction may yield confusions between deductive and inductive enquiry. Rationalists may have thought that causes and effects could be rationally related under a dogmatic principle of sufficient reason, but Hume's criticisms, which Kant accepts, demonstrate the weakness and implausibility of such claims. It is unlikely that Kant fell into the same confusion but I's formulation leaves the ambiguities unresolved. That formulation of I raises other queries. Even if we can deduce a condition from a given conditioned, it is odd to say that the condition is actually "given," for what is given is usually contrasted with what is inferred, as Kant himself notes at B 3 59-61. 1 3 It was noted in chapter 4 that Kant talks significandy of what is "given a priori," but even if that is accepted the relation between a given conditioned and its condition does not yet bring in any reference to what is "unconditioned." Kant's reference to an "unconditioned" is introduced as an added unity and completeness of such a regressive series, and these notions bring further ambiguities. Just as the "condition-conditioned" relation covers a variety of different cases, so do the notions of a "series" and of its "unity" and "completion." If the series is taken to be causal then it is not at all clear how to understand what might be meant by its termination, but this is the issue which Kant examines later in the Antinomies and must await that discussion. In his introduction Kant insists on leaving that issue open, but the idea of a completion may take other forms than that of a first or last member of a causal series (B388-89). If the notion of a series is understood on a mathematical model, or more generally, then other ambiguities appear. A series might be thought "complete" just in so far as all its members are brought under a general formula, whether or not it has a first or last member. A for-

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mula can be given for generating the infinite series of fractions between 1 and 2 but there is no first or last member of the series within the set of fractions. Such a series has another kind of "completion" in the whole numbers which bound the series but they do not belong to the series itself. Later discussions in the Dialectic are needed to resolve the ambiguities and to check whether they affect Kant's arguments. Discussion of I and II produces another kind of difficulty in Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic relations. Kant distinguishes the synthetic principle I from the analytic relation holding between conditioned and condition in reason's "logical" employment. If it is assumed that that analytic relation is deductive, like that between steps in a valid proof, then the reason for calling I synthetic is that the relation between conditioned and the unconditioned is different and not analytic. That point does not distinguish principle I from II since both make that nonanalytic reference to the unconditioned. Kant appeals to two other aspects of his discussion: first, to the idea that certain analytic principles presuppose a synthetic counterpart; and second, to the idea that the "unconditioned" stands for some terminus to, or completion of, a series such as that of the steps in a deductive proof. The evident difference between the declarative form of I and the imperative form of II reflects Kant's later important contrast between the constitutive and regulative use of principles (B670ff.).

1.4. The Structure of Dialectical Illusion; Subreption and Amphiboly Kant insists that he must not only describe but also explain the source of the dialectical illusions, and uses the expressions "amphiboly" and "subreption" for that purpose: "But merely to describe the procedure of our reason and its dialectic does not suffice; we must also endeavour to discover the sources of this dialectic, that we may be able to explain . . . the illusion to which it has given rise" (B609). "Amphiboly" refers to ambiguities whose resolution plays a large part in the Paralogisms and Antinomies, and "subreption" indicates a misrepresentation of one faculty in terms of another. The latter term is unfamiliar in English except for its derivative "surreptitious," and derives from ecclesiastical law in which some church office may be misrepresented, or some officer may misrepresent his role. Kant similarly speaks of one faculty "masquerading" as another in the Dialectic, but the same idiom is used in preCritical works such as Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and the Inaugural Dissertation. Kant's preoccupation with typical philosophical temptations to error evidently predates the Critical philosophy, but I shall suggest

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that there is a dramatic change in his view between the Dissertation and the first Critique. One of Kant's initial references to such error does not explicitiy use the term "subreption" but has been thought incomprehensible (B351-52). Kant offers an explanation or diagnosis for transcendental illusion which exonerates the faculties of sensibility and understanding separately, but convicts them in their joint operation in judgment. The diagnosis, which appeals to the "unobserved influence of sensibility on understanding," has been dismissed with the comment that this "conflicts with everything else Kant says on the subject, unless we reinterpret it intolerably."14 In fact the diagnosis is a standard expression of a "subreption" explicitly outlined later: I have tried to show by this distinction (constitutive/regulative) that there is no such constitutive principle, and so to prevent what otherwise, through a transcendental subreption, inevitably takes place, namely the ascribing of objective reality to an Idea that serves merely as a rule. (B537) the Ideal is not an assertion of an existence necessary in itself. At the same time we cannot avoid the transcendental subreption by which this formal principle is represented as constitutive, and by which this unity is hypostatised. (B647)

The error is that of taking a formal Idea or principle as a reference to some actual object, to some objective reality or constituted existent. It reflects the earlier danger of misconstruing a purely formal Idea as the designation of a material existence, and of "hypostatizing" it (B88-89; B611n). The issue is not whether Kant is right to explain specific faults in the Paralogisms, Antinomies, and Ideal, in this way, but only what the nature of the explanation is. The claim is evidentiy that we are led to conjure up, or fabricate, references to "real existents" by virtue of the forms of our expression of Ideas or principles of reason, but that this is to misrepresent their proper role. In Wittgenstein's terms, "we locate a substance lying behind a substantive" (Blue and Brown Books, 1), or "predicate of the thing what lies in our method of projection" (Philosophical Investigations, §§104, 139). Kant's account of the "unobserved influence of sensibility on understanding" is not a reference to the procedure in which our senses provide an instance of some concept, but to one in which our senses imaginatively represent, or misrepresent, some instance for a "notion," a pure concept, or an Idea of reason. Kant refers to the imagination in the case of empirical illusion, but outlines a transcendental counterpart in the note to B351: Sensibility, when subordinated to understanding, as the object on which the latter exercises its function is the source of real modes of knowledge. But the same sensibility, in so far as it influences the operation of the understanding, and determines it to make judgements, is the ground of error.

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The legitimate conjunction of the faculties occurs when the senses passively present instances of concepts, but it is illegitimate for the senses, or imagination, actively to construct, or fabricate, instances for pure concepts or Ideas of reason. The latter allow no genuine "schemata" but only what Kant calls an "analogon of a schema" (B693-94). In giving such an account, references to these faculties are understood in the earlier functional terms; sensibility has, or is, a "particularizing" or "realizing" function while understanding has, or is, a "generalizing" or "conceptualizing" function. The subreptive fault in the case of dialectical illusion is that the senses abuse their particularizing function in conjuring up or fabricating an imagined referent for Ideas which they cannot have in our experience. A diagnosis of the same form occupies a more prominent position in the Dissertation, but I claim that there Kant either has a different explanation in mind, or else has not yet separated two different versions of it. In section 5 §23, subreption is an error in which "intellect is contaminated by sensibility" and this makes it look as though the diagnosis is the same as that at B351. In the Dissertation Kant calls these faults "tricks of the intellect" in which we "seek out sensitive concepts as intellectual marks." For Kant "judgement, being conceived intellectually, pertains to objects, whereas determinations of space and time pertain only to (subjective) conditions of sensitive human knowledge." The underlying assumption is that only intellectual knowledge is genuinely universal and objective, while sensitive predicates will not hold in all possible worlds and are therefore neither objective nor universal. When we connect subjective sensitive properties to intellectual concepts in that way our limited sensitive knowledge masquerades as objective and universal intellectual knowledge, misrepresents that sensitive knowledge, and "contaminates genuine objective knowledge from the intellect." An example of such an error is that in which we might, wrongly according to Kant, deny the existence of "immaterial substances" on the ground that they cannot be identified through our subjective spatiotemporal intuitions. The suggestion is that such substances are identifiable, as Leibniz would claim, through reason and neither do, nor should be required to, meet those subjective, spatiotemporal conditions. Despite an apparent similarity of form the two accounts, in the Dissertation and the Critique, are different in content. In both, the combination of sense and intellect is subreptive, and in both it might be said that some function of the senses misrepresents or contaminates Ideas of reason. But in the Critique the subreption misrepresents pure concepts or Ideas of reason as genuinely objective, as having objective reality through that improper influence of sensibility on the intellect. In the Dissertation the subreption is virtually the opposite misrepresentation of supposing that subjective sensibility might achieve the genuine objective reality of con-

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cepts of the understanding. In the Critique the objective, or constitutive, legitimacy of Ideas of reason is rejected, even though they have some other regulative and subjective role. In the Dissertation it is assumed that Ideas of reason are objective and constitutive, while the sensitive representations of space and time are subjective. In the Critique the sensitive representations of space and time are empirically real, and this is the only reality available to us, but the Ideas of reason have no constitutive or objective reality. In both works the intuitive representations of space and time are relative to human experience and can be called "subjective," but in the Dissertation that is a weakness compared with the genuine objectivity of the intellect, while in the Critique the same feature is a strength required to qualify and limit the objective pretensions of reason. The issue is more complex15 but the account is undoubtedly one significant part of the truth about Kant's development from the 1770 Dissertation to the 1781 Critique. It marks, I suggest, a pioneering central step from a pre-Critical Leibnizian framework to a very different, almost opposite, posture in the first Critique. The account offered in the Dissertation is consistent with the Eleatic Idealism which Kant decisively rejects in the Prolegomena appendix (chapter 1). The assumption in the Dissertation is that only the intellect or reason provides genuine, objective knowledge of things in themselves while the senses are at best confused if not erroneous. The Prolegomena passage identifies that belief as central to Eleatic Idealism and expresses Kant's reversal of it, in which truth lies only in the senses and it is reason which distorts and confuses. To put it in its most general terms, the Dissertation expresses a traditionalist position which the Critique rejects and reverses. Those who interpret the Critique in traditionalist terms are really describing Kant's position of eleven years earlier and have failed to notice the dramatic change during that period. The point has been made earlier in relation to Kant's claims in the Aesthetic and Analytic, but is now reinforced in the diagnostic context of the Dialectic. To read Kant's account of the "contamination" of intellect by the senses in the Critique as a repeat of the Dissertation is to fail to see that although the illusion derives from the same source, the background is now reversed. The illusion in the later work is not, as it is in the earlier, that sensitive knowledge cannot pretend to be genuine and objective, but rather that intellectual knowledge is itself subjective, misleading, and if misrepresented as objective, spurious. In the Critique sensitive "knowledge" is transcendentally subjective but empirically objective, and that empirical objectivity is satisfied in our immanent reality. Ideas of reason, by contrast, inevitably tempt us to think of them as having objective reality, but the Critique''s diagnostic therapy demonstrates that such a reality can be only of supposed things in themselves beyond our cognitive range. In the Dissertation reality is still the intellectual reality of

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Leibniz's monadology,16 but in the Critique it is the Humean reality of immanent sensory experience.

2. Wittgenstein's and Kant's Philosophical Therapies It was suggested in chapters 5, 11, and 15 that Kant's revolutionary approach to metaphysics has something in common with contemporary revolutionaries such as Carnap, Wittgenstein, and Austin. Their approach was characterized by a radical rejection of earlier philosophy rather than merely advocacy of new methods for resolving previous problems. Philosophers characteristically represent themselves as reacting against, and rejecting, their predecessors, but there is a contrast between more or less radical revolutions. Some reject previous philosophy in order to strike out in a new direction with new problems, while others devise new methods but still address and aim to resolve the old problems. By that standard Leibniz and Locke are not radical revolutionaries since both accepted a framework of Cartesian idealism from which they drew different empiricist or rationalist conclusions. Kant, by contrast, is in intention a radical revolutionary who rejects that whole background and the specific doctrines—empiricist, rationalist, realist, idealist, skeptical, and dogmatic—canvassed within it. His aim is to reform philosophy root and branch, and on that basis to point the discipline in a new and more fruitful direction, away from "windy metaphysics" and towards the "fruitful bathos of experience." That revolutionary intention has been documented throughout the comments on the Critique. Kant, like the later Wittgenstein and Austin, thought the old traditional problems should be abandoned in favor of new issues, placed litde emphasis on technical logic, and did not embark on reductive programs of logical construction. Their attitude to the traditional idealist issue of the external world was not to accept the challenge and use a technical logic to reconstruct an external world through some form of phenomenalism, but to argue that the problem was misconceived.17 In a similar way Kant's Refutation of Idealism did not answer the traditional problem of the external world with a phenomenalist construction from empirical ideas or sense data. Instead it argued that the tradition had misconceived the problem by wrongly ordering the priorities or dependences between inner and outer experience. The traditional problem arose on the assumption that inner experience was epistemically prior to outer, but with a reversed order the skeptical challenge no longer arises. It is dissolved rather than resolved on its own assumptions and in its own terms. Wittgenstein's private language argument, understood in that traditional context, took the same view, and is part of the more general therapeutic diagnosis of philosophical illusion.

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Wittgenstein, like Kant, envisaged such a radical break with earlier philosophy. One might say that the subject we are dealing with is one of the heirs of the subject which used to be called philosophy. (Blue and Brown Books, 28) Why should what we do here be called 'philosophy'? Why should it be regarded as the only legitimate heir of the different activities which had this name in for-

mertimes?(Blue and Brown Books, 62)

It is typical of radical revolutionaries to advocate a break with the past, and a new direction for the future, in which the previous problems are set aside. Famously in Tractatus, Wittgenstein says: "The book deals with the problems of philosophy . . . I believe myself to have found on all essential points the final solution of these problems." But the final solution is of a special kind: "I believe that the reason why these problems are posed is that the logic of our language has been misunderstood." Wittgenstein does not accept the framework of previous problems and use new analytic techniques to solve them but shows instead that the traditional problems were misconceived. Kant, too, claims to have provided "if not the resolution at least the key to the resolution of all metaphysical problems," and it is evident from his responses to Garve and elsewhere that the key is to unlock a door to a range of new and more fruitful philosophical problems.18 Wittgenstein's early therapy in Tractatus (T) has distinctly Kantian themes but is too involved with the new logic of Frege and Russell to bear close comparison with Kant. Even where Wittgenstein is critical of Frege or Russell, the issues turn on formal logic in ways which were unknown to Kant. For that reason I consider primarily Wittgenstein's later philosophy in Blue and Brown Books (BBB), Philosophical Investigations (PI), Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (RFM,), and On Certainty (OC)19 In that later philosophy the idea of a philosophical therapy is made explicit: The [discovery] . . . gives philosophy peace, so that it is no longer tormented by questions which bring itself into question. Instead we now demonstrate a method by examples; and the series of examples can be broken off. Problems are solved, (difficulties eliminated), not a single problem. There is not a philosophical method, though there are indeed methods, like different therapies.

(PJ, §133)

Kant uses the same image at B513-14: This is the great utility of the sceptical mode of dealing with the questions which pure reason puts to pure reason. By its means we can deliver ourselves at but a small cost from a great body of sterile dogmatism, and set in its place a sober critique, which as a true cathartic will effectively guard us against such groundless beliefs and the supposed polymathy to which they lead.

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The two philosophers not only use the same imagery, but refer also to prior, higher order, issues about philosophy or pure reason itself. For Wittgenstein the central issues are the tormenting questions about the validity and authority of philosophy itself; for Kant the "conflicts of reason with itself" occurring mainly in the Antinomies raised the same problem about the nature, role, and authority of philosophy.20 Both philosophers reject, with the same imagery, a form of Platonism which stands as a paradigm of a metaphysics in need of therapy. We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction, and so the conditions are in a sense ideal, but just because of that we are unable to walk. We want to walk so we need friction. Back to the rough ground. (PI, §107) The light dove cleaving the air in her free flight and feeling its resistance might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space. It was thus that Plato left the world of the senses, as setting too narrow limits to the understanding, and ventured out beyond it on the wings of Ideas in the empty space of pure understanding. He did not observe that with all his efforts he made no advance—meeting no resistance that might . . . serve as a support on which . . . he could set his understanding in motion. (B9)

Earlier it was noted that Kant vehemently rejected Plato's account of mathematics, but thought more highly of Plato's account of moral or practical ideals, and recognized that he could be interpreted in "milder" ways (B371). Neither Kant nor Wittgenstein assumed that to reject Platonism was to accept its opposite, and both held that in some opposed doctrines the right conclusion was to reject both of the options represented, mistakenly, as exhaustive. To reject one side in such debates is compatible with an equal rejection of the alternative where both opposed doctrines rest on a common error, and that is the central point of Kant's distinction between "analytical" and "dialectical" opposites at B530-32. It is also a clear indication of the radical revolution favored by both philosophers in which the shared assumptions, and both sides of an opposition in "school metaphysics" and the consequent "mock debates" are rejected. Kant's background involves the therapeutic distinctions between "formal" and "material" claims (B88-89), between an "analytic" of concepts and a traditional "ontology" (B303), between "empirical" or "immanent" and "transcendental" or "transcendent" claims (chapter 5), and the associated apparatus of "subreption," or misrepresentation, of our cognitive functions. It rests on resolving amphibolies so that our cognitive resources are properly mapped in their rightful places in experience, and it points to a diagnosis of the errors resulting from mislocating those items. In Kant's case the diagnosis turns on the legitimate roles of sensibility and under-

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standing in our experience which, if misunderstood, lead to Wittgenstein's "bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language." Kant's central claim is that philosophers are apt to construct abstract, "pure" concepts and then mistakenly to think that they must signify some transcendent object beyond any possible experience. The question is not whether these respective critical therapies are endorsed by both philosophers, for that is indisputable, but only how they use and articulate these devices. It might be thought that the detailed background to Wittgenstein's therapy, and the diverse methods he deploys in it, will be of a very different kind from Kant's, but I argue that this is not so. I summarize relevant aspects of Wittgenstein's therapeutic recommendations under the two aspects of ambiguities and motives.

2.1. Central Ambiguities and Underlying Motives A central claim in Wittgenstein's later philosophy is that philosophical errors and illusions arise from a failure, misled by surface similarities of form, to recognize different types of proposition. Just as Kant separates "formal" and "material," or "empirical" and "transcendental," interpretations of certain claims, so Wittgenstein distinguishes different types of proposition, such as "metaphysical, philosophical, or grammatical" on one side and "ordinary, empirical, or experiential" on the other. More particularly there are different "uses" of what is nominally the same proposition where the identity of expression may mislead us about identity of meaning (T, 3.323, BBB, 66-67, PI, §251). Those ambiguities are associated with cases where we "confuse rules and their instances" (OC, 97, 139), or different categories (PJ, §401), or complexity in what is "open to view" with what is "occult" or "hidden" or "queer" (merkwiirdig, seltsam) (PI, §§89-93, 126, 196, 295, 435-36). The contrasts which the two philosophers indicate are connected also with Carnap's distinction between "internal" and "external" questions (chapters 5 and 15). They mark an ambiguity, a Kantian amphiboly, in which we may fail to see the different senses attached in philosophy to claims which have the same verbal form as ordinary empirical claims. In Carnap's case we may fail to recognize or appreciate the difference between the internal and external questions asked in the same verbal form. For Kant the claims that we are presented in experience with "objects" or with "ideas" have both ordinary, empirical senses, and extraordinary, philosophical, transcendental senses. If we do not properly grasp these ambiguities then we shall misunderstand the claims, and will be liable to commit the errors of subreption. Wittgenstein puts his view in the following terms:

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Philosophy simply puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. Since everything lies open to view (alles offen liegt) there is nothing to explain. For what is hidden . . . is of no interest to us. (PI, §126) In our failure to understand the use of a word we take it as the expression of a queer process. (As we think of time as a queer medium, of the mind as a queer kind of thing). (PI, §196)

Ordinarily, when we consider whether one event occurred before or after another, we have no general difficulty in understanding the alternatives, but if we ask questions about "time" in a general, abstract, way we may be at a loss even to understand the questions. Wittgenstein's contrast between what is open to view, or clear, and what is hidden, or obscure, makes the same point. His account has a background in which there is not necessarily any "essence" of language or meaning but only diverse "uses" of expressions whose understanding depends on their empirical settings. Philosophers are apt to take the same words out of those empirical contexts and give them a different meaning without noticing the change. Wittgenstein consequentiy recommends an examination of those diverse uses which rests not on formal philosophical classifications such as "analytic" or "synthetic," "a posteriori" or "a priori," but on attention to more subtle differences. In OC there is a deliberate blurring of the division between "language" and "fact" so that the "fundamental propositions" which "stand fast" against skeptical doubt cut across traditional categories of "empirical" or "logical" truth. "I want to say: propositions of the form of empirical propositions, not only propositions of logic, form the foundation of all operating with thoughts (and language)" (OC, §§403, 651). Some characterizations of these fundamental propositions, as those whose abandonment would mean giving up all judgement, or all discrimination between truth and falsity, echo Kant's transcendental arguments and identify Kantian "conditions of the possibility of (objects of) experience" (OC, §§494, 614, B679 2 1 ). As Wittgenstein's discussion proceeds, he moves from a harsh assessment of philosophers who behave "like savages" to a more sympathetic account of the need for therapy in which the "prejudice to be removed" is not merely a "stupid prejudice" (PI, §340). Kant similarly modifies his criticism of dialectical error by insisting that the illusions are natural and inevitable; like perceptual illusions we cannot avoid them but can take steps not to be misled by them. Both philosophers typically reject both sides of traditional oppositions by denying that we are forced to choose between them, and in both there is a characteristic reversal of received or traditional wisdom. For Wittgenstein the skeptic who insists that "I know I'm in pain" but cannot know that others are in pain gets it the wrong way round; it is correct to say "I know he's in pain," but not "I know I'm in pain" (PI,

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§222, OC, §482-83). Kant's reversal of philosophical opinion is clear in his Copernican revolution, in his application of skepticism primarily to philosophical authority rather than to nonphilosophical knowledge, in his Refutation of Idealism, and in his account of the relation between morality and happiness at B841. Wittgenstein's therapy, like Kant's, not only corrects but also diagnoses and explains philosophical illusions. Among the principal motives Wittgenstein identifies for succumbing to illusion are the "craving for generality" and an associated "contempt for particular (intermediate) cases" (JJBB, 17-18; PI, §52; PI, §§123, 133). Both the craving and contempt are for Wittgenstein part of the original philosophical sin of aspiring to be "scientific," to offer general theoretical explanations in philosophy as if it were another bona fide science, or to "analyze" items into their components as if philosophical analysis was like its chemical counterpart. It represents philosophers as having the expertise and insight of scientists which authorizes them to correct common sense views. Throughout Philosophical Investigations the distinction between what is "open to view" and what is "hidden" or "occult," reflects a discreditable dissatisfaction with a supposedly inexpert and uninformed common sense in which philosophers "find ordinary language too crude [roh]" (PI, §436). That discreditable attitude goes with a consequent wish to "penetrate" behind appearances in order to find some "super-reality" as scientists are supposed to do (PJ, §§436, 97-98, 192). Philosophers may be motivated in this spurious "scientific" direction through a recognition of the peculiar character of certain phenomena, especially those of logic, meaning, and mind. We recognize that these are radically different from, and less transparent than, assertions of fact, acoustic phenomena in speech, and overt behavior, and are consequently led towards the quasi-scientific idea of an underlying "super-reality." Less transparent aspects of the mind may tempt us to conjure up a spurious reference to "the unconscious," or to regard some puzzling expression as part of the "hocus pocus performed by the soul" (PI, §171, Pi, §454). Logic may inspire us to conceive of an ideal, Platonic, "crystalline purity" which encourages the noted pretensions of frictionless flight (PI, §107-8). In more mundane examples we may erroneously think that mental dispositions are really "hidden" occurrences, or that mere "possibilities" are really hidden actualities (RFM, I.125 2 2 ). PI, §401 talks of "interpreting a grammatical movement made by yourself as 'quasi-physical,'" and asks rhetorically whether we should regard sense data as ultimate components of physical objects. In all these cases we typically confuse "grammatical" and "empirical" propositions, and "like savages" draw the "queerest conclusions" (PI, §251, PI, §194, RFM, 1.125). We subvert the distinctively philosophical

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role of mapping the complex "intermediate cases" with a craving for theoretical generality, and draw ontological conclusions about a super-reality beyond experience from what should be a grammatical analysis of experience (PI, p. 222). Properly philosophy is "purely descriptive" (PI, §124), offers no explanations or general theories, and only "assembles reminders" (PI, §127) or "cures us of our wish to attack common sense" (BBB, 58-59). The suggestion is that common sense at least provides us with what is "open to view," not "hidden" or "occult," and that for philosophers in the tradition the ambition to penetrate behind that facade is powerful but illusory Common sense may not be the last word but it is the first. These aspects of Wittgenstein's therapy are not exhaustive and are variously interpreted, but they are central to his position and have striking similarities to Kant's therapeutic aims. They reflect the "quietism" considered in chapter 15.2.2 in which Wittgenstein resists a philosophical temptation to embark on quasi-scientific explanatory theories of those "hidden" aspects of experience. On the negative, therapeutic side, the most relevant characterization in Wittgenstein arises from his contrast between what is "open to view" and what is "hidden" or "occult." For that contrast is close to Kant's distinction between what is "immanent" in experience and what is "transcendent" beyond it. Neither Wittgenstein in his later philosophy nor Kant in the Critical philosophy think of what is "occult," "hidden" behind appearances, or "transcendent," as strictiy meaningless, but both think of it as a distinctively philosophical, "queer," tempting, but erroneous appeal, and a proper subject for correction, diagnosis, and therapy. In that way Wittgenstein's position merits comparison with Kant's distinctions between the "transcendental," the "transcendent," the "immanent," and the "empirical" as they were outlined and related to Carnap in chapter 5. Kant's "immanent" or "empirical" corresponds to Wittgenstein's "open to view" or "common sense," and the "transcendent" corresponds to what is "queer," "occult," or "hidden." It may be objected that Wittgenstein makes only a dual distinction between the "everyday" and the "occult," but he has also to make room for his own reports or comments on both. To classify a proposition as colloquial, everyday, and open to view, and to claim a philosopher's account misrepresents it as "queer" or "occult," is a third, legitimate philosophical claim corresponding to Kant's third category of the legitimately transcendental alongside the empirical and the transcendent. The more positive side of Wittgenstein's new direction for philosophy recommends a method of "examples" or "intermediate cases" as an antidote to the craving for generality and for resolving philosophical puzzles by making a close, subde, and discriminating examination of ground-floor language and its surroundings. Neither Kant's nor Wittgenstein's meta-

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physical interests are confined to everyday, nontechnical language and cover the sciences as well, but in both contexts they endorse that careful examination of the phenomena relevant to philosophical issues. Although Wittgenstein's attention to everyday examples was sometimes taken to be an appeal to common sense to refute philosophical skepticism, neither Kant nor Wittgenstein appeal to our experience or common sense for that purpose.23 Kant explicitly repudiates an appeal to "common human understanding" against skepticism in the Prolegomena preface. His appeal to experience in the transcendental topic is not a specific against skepticism but as a datum for a careful classification of its, especially a priori, elements. The prescription for a "transcendental topic" at B324 is that of locating "every concept according to the use to which it is put." Wittgenstein's discussion of philosophical skepticism in OC shows a similarly more subde response than merely an appeal to common sense. Like Kant, Wittgenstein is more interested in the ways in which philosophers, such as Hume or Moore, become entangled in potential pseudo-disputes between skeptic and antiskeptic than in the supposedly substantive debate itself. Two aspects of Kant's philosophy may seem at odds with Wittgenstein's prescription. It may be thought that the undeniable generality of Kant's project conflicts with Wittgenstein's appeal to intermediate cases. It may be thought that Kant commits the sin of craving for generality both in his method and in his project of "putting philosophy on the sure path of a science," but both objections are misleading. Kant's frequent detailed lists, such as his classification of "ideas" at B377, different kinds of "impossibility" at B348, or disciplines or topics at B870, demonstrate a Wittgensteinian or Austinian interest in the detail of "intermediate cases." In chapter 15.2.2 it was pointed out that the whole Critical philosophy is an attempt to classify correctiy the different discourses we use in theoretical, practical, aesthetic, and other contexts. It is also true that that interest occurs, as the following quotation shows, within the framework of a general classification of philosophy and other disciplines: It is good to determine the boundaries between sciences and to depict them in a system; otherwise we are always apprentices and know nothing. For example, how psychology and metaphysics are related, and whether they do not involve several different disciplines. . . . The reason why metaphysics was confused with empirical psychology was that we didn't know exactly what metaphysics was, and hadn't outlined its boundaries. So much was included under the heading 'First Principles of Human Knowledge'. (Metaphysics L : Ak. 28.223; B876-77)

A similar qualification has to be made to Kant's projected reform of philosophy by putting it "on the sure path of a science." Kant wished to

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make philosophy "scientific" by restricting its claims to those for which there is a possible decision procedure. He uses Euclid as a model for his descriptive metaphysics, but that comparison is qualified by detailing the significant differences between a modest metaphysics and dogmatic mathematics (B741-66). In particular the goals of philosophy, but not mathematics, are identified by its higher order role in transcendental reflection not only on our general experience and on particular sciences but also on philosophy itself. Both philosophers have a profound interest in the sciences, but both differentiate philosophy from those other disciplines. Wittgenstein's "original sin" among philosophers of likening their own discipline to the theorizing of science in a craving for generality is not committed by Kant and the latter's diagnostic therapy is an antidote to it. The traditionalist view of transcendental idealism may violate Wittgenstein's prohibitions but Kant's project of a descriptive metaphysics of experience does not. 24 Wittgenstein's and Kant's primary interest is in the "fruitful bathos" of "ordinary," "empirical" phenomena including science, which are "open to view" but do not satisfy philosophers, like Plato or Leibniz. The latter claim to "penetrate" behind mere appearances in order to grasp an ultimate, hidden and occult, super-reality in a "windy metaphysics" with its supposed explanatory powers and theological significance. The general error is that of succumbing to the temptation to suppose that instead of being related, perhaps in complex ways, to an ordinary experience which is "open to view," the relevant propositions and disciplines designate a hidden super-reality of their own behind that ordinary experience. In Wittgenstein's terms we draw the queerest, transcendent, ontological conclusions from what is a distinctive, grammatical analysis of immanent experience (PI, §104,139). We take, in Kant's terms, what is purely "formal" or "grammatical" as a reference to a "material," but "hidden," "hyperphysical," "transcendent" reality. Philosophy, in Kant's reformed version, is directed towards the "analytic" task of discriminating and clarifying these aspects of experience, and away from the "ontological" temptation to classify them as distinct realms of reality. That reformed task is not the reductive task of translating items of one category into those of another, but of the categorial discipline in a transcendental inventory marking the differences between intermediate cases and the varied uses of words, in order to understand and avoid confusing them. Their differential locations mapped in a transcendental topic clarify their character and guard against those confusions. That interest and style extends in both Wittgenstein and Kant to the differentiation of diverse discourses noted in chapter 15. The aim is not to dispense with the puzzling items in favor of some more basic ingredient but to dispense with the puzzle by differentiating those categories.

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3. Therapeutic Anti-Platonism and Quietism That summary shows that if there is one central philosophical temptation to which both Kantian and Wittgensteinian therapies are directed it is Platonism with regard to the contentious and puzzling categories. Construction of a slum next door filled with bogus thought-entities is a typical image for certain forms of what has been called "rampant" Platonism.25 There is no doubt that both Wittgenstein and Kant reject such doctrines and intend their therapies to dissuade us from accepting them, but there may be reservations about the value and the success of such a "quietist" therapy. One reservation is that the recommended "quietism" is inadequately explained or just mistaken, and another that the lessons were valuable but have now been understood and are no longer needed. According to the former the quietist position is incorrect, but according to the latter so obviously correct as not to be worth repeating. Resistance to the therapy might be strengthened by reflecting, as Kant did, that "rampant" Platonism is in any case an extreme version of what might be acceptable in milder forms. Those doubts about a quietism ascribed to Kant and Wittgenstein can be reinforced by considering that their picture is still in need of support. Kant and Wittgenstein may be said to have outlined a seductive and robust picture in favor of ordinary and scientific experience and against certain traditional metaphysical debates, but not yet to have produced any clear arguments to support it. If Platonism comes in different strengths, then it may not even be clear what is at issue in those debates. Whether Kant's therapy applies to any particular philosophical issues must await examination of those issues in the Paralogisms, Antinomies, and Ideal, and acceptance of Wittgenstein's may also depend on a recognition of particular temptations and errors exposed in his works. I therefore recapitulate the outline of Carnap's arguments from chapters 5.3, 11.3.2, and 15.2 in support of the quietist position. Carnap follows Kant and Wittgenstein in rejecting both sides in the traditional disputes about the existence of abstract objects such as numbers. According to Carnap, and like Kant's appeal to amphibolies, the traditional debates contained a fundamental ambiguity which renders the debate, and its opposed sides, futile or meaningless. The ambiguity belongs to two separate existence questions about numbers, namely, an internal and an external question: (1) Internal question: Within arithmetic do numbers exist? (2) External question: Do numbers (really) exist independently of any answer to (1), and "outside" arithmetic?

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Carnap held that the answer to (1) is trivially obvious and could not have been the question which generated the traditional debate, but that (2) is flawed because it was never made clear in the debates what other independent criterion for "real existence" was at issue. Within arithmetic there are clear procedures for determining whether there are numbers, but it remains unclear how that existence can be determined independently of the conventional resources of arithmetic. Negative and positive answers to particular and general internal questions are determinable within the resources of mathematics, but if those resources cannot be used in answering the external question, it is plainly necessary to explain what other resources and criteria are to be used. Carnap's view was that in the tradition no answer had been given to that prior question. That "quietist" position of Carnap, and the corresponding views of Kant and Wittgenstein, respond in part to a robust intuition that numbers, or abstract objects generally, should not be housed in a "queer," "hidden," "occult" Platonic realm outside arithmetic and beyond experience. But the opposition can appeal to a counterintuition by saying that the objection rests on a misunderstanding. It is natural and correct to deny that numbers are objects of the same kind as outer physical or inner mental things, but once that is recognized numbers can be allowed to exist in their own distinctive way. Physical objects exist in a spatiotemporal environment, accessed by the senses and with causal powers, but numbers exist in a different way, neither spatiotemporal, sensory, nor causal. The suggestion is that numbers have their own distinctive existence as "abstract" objects which lack those features of physical or of inner mental items. That recognition may motivate their location in a Fregean "third realm" of abstract objects beyond the worlds of physical objects and mental states. The motivation is not that of a dubious metaphysics but of a down-to-earth recognition of ontological variety. That counterintuition might rest on a perceived semantic distinction between the types of object designated by concepts of numbers, physical objects, and mental events. It allows a milder form of Platonism about the real existence of numbers as a counter to a quietist rejection of "rampant" Platonism. Other more subtle accounts of the issue can be illustrated from Wright's Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects (1983) and Zalta's Abstract Objects (1983). Wright appeals to syntax to claim that number words are genuine "singular, referential terms" functioning in the normal way in inferences, and to conclude with Frege that numbers are "objects." The project partly meets Wittgenstein's quietist recommendation to clarify different categories of expression by examining "intermediate cases," but the conclusion that numbers exist by virtue of their syntax is represented as an antiquietist resolution of the traditional debate.26 Wright's view may be taken to overcome Carnap's quietist claim that the traditional

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issue was meaningless by providing the required criterion with which to decide it. Zalta provides a highly developed formal apparatus with which to represent claims about a variety of abstract objects, such as numbers, senses, possible worlds, fictional characters, and impossibilities. The apparatus develops axioms for such abstract objects along lines suggested by Meinong, Mally, and Terence Parsons. It provides criteria of identity for such objects and distinguishes crucially between the exemplification, as opposed to encoding, of properties and existence. Abstract objects in the system typically encode certain properties and existence but do not actually exemplify them. Existential quantification can consequendy be applied to abstract objects so that we can say that there are numbers, but since they do not "exemplify" existence they cannot be said to exist. The claimed merit of such an account is that it allows all the conventional logical operations on abstract objects but avoids the paradoxes which arise from conflating existential quantification and actual existence.27 Since the former might be taken to be an "internal" and the latter an "external" account of existence Zalta's position has some similarity to Carnap's. His detailed differentiation between different types of abstract object similarly matches Wittgenstein's appeal to intermediate cases. If Wright's approach is taken to overcome Carnap's quietism then it faces two difficulties oudined in the earlier discussion in chapter 15.2.2. The basis for the ontological conclusion that numbers really exist lies in the discrimination of different, syntactic or semantic, types of item or expression, but it is unclear where we should draw the required lines of division, and why we should draw the ontological conclusion at all. The project follows Wittgenstein's position in part since it recommends careful discrimination between different intermediate cases. But if that program were more fully carried out we could not stop at just the three Frege an categories of physical, mental, and abstract objects. Frege's ontological conclusion might be modified or corrected not by denying a "third" realm of abstract objects, but by showing that similar explorations should lead us to postulate fourth, fifth, or nth realms to house statutes, trumps, jokes, shadows, and the innumerable other categories. Zalta's more extensive catalogue of abstract objects shows how many such distinguishable types there are, and prompts the reflection that numbers themselves are not all of exacdy the same kind.28 If the program were thoroughly carried out we should make many more discriminations among numbers, among abstract objects, and between them and objects of other quite different types. It might be replied that to distinguish different varieties of abstract object does not prohibit the question whether they exist, but that more extensive scope for the program weakens the motive for reaching an ontological answer. For one thing, we may be reluctant to draw the ontologi-

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cal conclusion in some cases. We may think that numbers exist but feel more skeptical of fictional characters, like Sherlock Holmes, or of imagined or impossible objects, like the golden mountain or the round square, even if they meet the internal syntactic requirements for existence. For another, if the aim is to understand the diversity among different categories of referent then a thorough implementation of the program already achieves that. It offers an understanding of those diverse categories by distinguishing and relating them in a Kantian transcendental topic. It replaces Frege's restricted range of three realms of objects with a more extensive exploration of many different categories, but stops short of an ontological conclusion. It is consequendy not clear what more is at stake, or achieved, in considering, over and above the carefully discriminated categories, whether they represent "real existents" in some traditional "external" sense. The enquiry may show that the relevant concepts function standardly as referential expressions within their languages, but then their existence is understood in Carnap's terms of the "internal" criteria of the languages and not in terms of "external" or independent criteria. Carnap's claim is that nothing is achieved by considering that supposed further question of "real existence," not only because we achieve an adequate, or better, understanding of the distinctive intermediate cases without it, but also because there is no agreed criterion for the traditional notion of an external and independent "real existence." We reach the trivial conclusion that numbers, as the referents of singular terms, exist precisely as items of their distinctive type. We might say that of course possibilities do not actually exist and yet that they exist as possibilities in saying "There is that possibility."29 The informative aspect of such conclusions lies only in Wittgenstein's project of cataloguing and discriminating the distinctive types. These grounds suggest the abandonment not only of rampant Platonism but also of these milder varieties.

3.1. Abstraction and Abstract Objects Throughout the Critique Kant refers to, and operates with, a method of "abstraction" and is consequently committed in an internal, anti-Platonic way to the resulting abstract objects. Kant uses the method of abstraction to identify the a priori elements in experience, and the outcome provides an a priori structure for experience which follows a Euclidean model. The pure a priori network of categories and intuitions is supplemented with an operational synthesis in schematism to show how the constitutive principles make experience possible. Commentators such as Henry Allison have rightly insisted on this aspect of Kant's project but the view

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has been criticized for making an elementary mistake. The discussion of different treatments of abstract objects in Carnap, Wright, and Zalta provides an opportunity to consider the issue. The objection is applied in Van Cleve's Problems From Kant (1999, 8) to Kant's distinction between appearances and things in themselves as different ways of conceiving or considering "objects." 30 It rests on the general principle that merely considering objects from a special point of view, abstracting from some of their features, cannot make any difference to the features they actually have. How is it possible for the properties of a thing to vary according to how it is considered? As I sit typing . . . I have shoes on my feet. But consider me apart from my shoes: so considered am I barefoot? I am inclined to say no; consider me how you will, I am not now barefoot.

Van Cleve goes on to note that if "being considered apart from some property" involves "supposing" that an object lacks that property, then Kant's claims become tautologies of the form: "If an object had no spatial characteristics, then it would not be spatial," but he thinks that Kant's claims were meant to have more substance. It may then seem as though Kant's idea that noumena or things in themselves are objects considered apart from their sensory features is mistaken, but the objection rests on a misunderstanding. It is obvious that Kant does not infer from the possibility of "abstracting" from the spatiotemporal features of appearances that appearances lack those features. It is an essential part of his empirical realism that appearances exist as such spatiotemporal objects. Kant's aim in identifying that conception of things in themselves is to note the temptation to infer from the abstracted, formal concept of a "thing in general" independent of sensory features that it designates real objects beyond any possible experience of ours. Since the abstract concept of a thing in general without sensory features cannot be exemplified in our sensory experience we may think that it represents a nonsensory, nonspatiotemporal, purely intelligible object accessible not to perception but only to reason. To note that temptation, and to diagnose and explain the consequent error, are essential to Kant's diagnostic therapy. His view is that such pure, abstract concepts can have a legitimate use only in relation to our possible experience, and that dogmatic rationalists typically but wrongly believe that in this way they gain insight into a hidden reality through reason alone. Kant is not making that faulty inference as Van Cleve describes it but agreeing that it is fallacious. In a particular example, in the Paralogisms, Kant recognizes that his own abstract concept of transcendental apperception might encourage that inference and characterizes it as fallacious. A

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transcendental appeal to a unity of consciousness might be mistaken as the designation of a transcendental subject which, because of its abstract character, cannot be identified in experience but may be thought to exist as a noumenon beyond experience. Kant recognizes the fallacy and charges the dogmatic rationalists with making it. Nor is their mistake, so understood, as absurd as Van Cleve suggests. An underlying motive for succumbing to the temptation is to think of a priori concepts and principles in formal mathematics or pure natural science as designating pure rational intrinsic properties of objects inaccessible to the senses. It is not at all absurd to suppose that Plato and Leibniz made such an error. With such an explanation Van Cleve's criticism can be seen to apply not to Kant, or directly to Allison's appeal to such misleading abstractions, but to Kant's opponents. What deserves explanation is how Van Cleve could come to ascribe the mistake to Kant when it represents Kant's own criticism of dogmatic philosophers. I suggest two reasons which have been noted and assessed earlier. First is Kant's claim that these are two ways of conceiving the "same" objects, and second is the belief that he is committed to an exhaustive idealist dualism of appearances as mental ideas and things in themselves as independent objects.31 Kant's belief that philosophers have misconstrued objects of experience as if they were Honsensory noumena implies that it is those "same" objects which are so misconstrued. He does not endorse, but rejects, two separate classes of objects or worlds of which we might have knowledge, but recognizes that some philosophers had held that view. Leibniz's view that monads are the underlying, hidden essences of perceived objects is an example of the position. Monads are supposed to be the same objects we confusedly perceive in ordinary experience, whose inner, intrinsic properties are disclosed only to an a priori reason. Nor does Kant endorse the exhaustive idealist dualism of empirical mental states and independent, intelligible things in themselves. His classification includes the allegedly neglected alternative of empirical physical objects (chapter 9.1.2). The Paralogisms, discussed in the next chapter, provide an important example of Kant's position. The passage underlines Kant's claim that an abstract "transcendental apperception" or "unity of consciousness" cannot be taken to designate a hidden, transcendent subject or self as the basis for a supposed rational psychology.

[25] The Paralogisms

T h e Paralogisms are at the center of Kant's account of the self, and that topic is plainly central to the whole argument of the Critique. In earlier discussions, especially of transcendental apperception in the Deduction, it was noted that later passages were needed to complete Kant's discussion of the self. The Paralogisms section, although important in moving towards a completed account, still does not complete the topic even in the Critique. Later sections, such as the concluding accounts of the central dialectical ideas, the Canon, and especially the third Antinomy on freedom and moral agency, are also needed (B699ff, B828ff.). Discussion of the Paralogisms provides a summary of Kant's theoretical account of the self, and makes possible an assessment of the many criticisms made of the issue, such as Cassam's discussion in his Self and World. There are other reasons for stressing the importance of this section. It was wholly rewritten in B and that indicates, as it also does for the Transcendental Deduction, how seriously Kant took the task of expressing its position as clearly as possible. More substantially, the section not only develops Kant's earlier accounts of transcendental apperception, but also seeks explicitiy to forestall misunderstandings of that concept. Kant's primary target in the section is an alleged misconception of the self due, as he says, to the doctrines of "rational psychology," associated with earlier philosophers such as Descartes, Leibniz, and Wolff. But that critique of rational psychology is given added spice by the fact that Kant's own account of transcendental apperception might be understood in those same terms. Strawson's objection to the "bogus subject of transcendental psychology," considered and rejected in chapter 7.3, construes Kant's psychology as rational and transcendent. It is consequently important for contemporary critics of Kant's account of the self that in the Paralogisms Kant rejects not only those earlier philosophers but also rationalist misinterpretations of his view. Of the earlier philosophers, Kant refers explicitly and only sparingly to Descartes, but apart from his criticisms of those 625

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predecessors the discussion clarifies his own account of apperception and the self. Kant's discussion, especially in A, follows the prescription of his introduction to the Dialectic. The topic of the Dialectic is reason and the contributions, legitimate or illegitimate, which that faculty can make to our experience. Kant's three particular Ideas of reason deal with the self, the world, and God, associated respectively with the Paralogisms, the Antinomies, and the Ideal. In each case the associated Ideas are said to be motivated by the goal of an "unconditioned totality," and in each case Kant seeks to show the limitations that must be placed on our use of those Ideas. Our conception of the self fits into this pattern in virtue of a traditional, Cartesian belief that it constitutes some kind of absolute center for the whole of our experience, and that its character and role can be properly identified only through reason. Kant accepts that a conception of the self is, somehow, at the center of our whole experience in his appeal to transcendental apperception, but he attempts to separate what is correct and what is incorrect in that view. Kant's conception of the self, unlike Descartes's, has to be compatible with the priority accorded in the Refutation of Idealism to outer experience over inner. In particular he aims to reject a rationalist belief embedded in Descartes's view that a whole science can be built on that central notion of the self purely through the use of reason. Kant consequentiy follows a further general procedure in the Dialectic, namely, that of linking reason with reasoning. Each of the claims about the self, that it is a substance, simple, identical, and related to an outer world only by causal inference, is supposed to be established in rational psychology by deductive argument from self evident premises. Kant's critique of that claimed discipline turns on his belief that each argument is fallacious. Each separate section in A and the more general discussion in B are directed at the demonstration of those fallacies. Two preliminary difficulties for Kant arise from that background. First is the problem of aligning the text with that unmasking of the fallacies of reasoning. Karl Ameriks notes in Kant's Theory of the Mind that Kant seems often to acknowledge the validity of the arguments supposed to be fallacious and even to endorse their conclusions. This may make it difficult to be sure about the nature of the fallacies, but Kant identifies the general fault (A402, B411) as that of sophisma figurae dictionis, of underlying ambiguities in the arguments. To identify that fault helps to resolve some of the problems since ambiguities in the central terms of a syllogistic argument can be regarded as "informal" rather than "formal" fallacies. The form of the arguments may conform to a valid pattern but if the key terms are ambiguous then the valid form can become an invalid inference.

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A second difficulty arises from the types of ambiguity which Kant identifies in the rationalist arguments. These typically involve his own distinction between a pure category without reference to its sensory aspects, and the realized or schematized category with such a sensory reference. More generally criticisms of the reasoning turn on Kant's distinction between the senses and understanding, and his central requirement for genuine knowledge that both sense and understanding are needed (B75-76). The primary complaint against rational psychology is that it violates that requirement by abstracting from sensibility and then taking the abstracted concepts to represent a corresponding object hidden from perception but revealed to reason. The general point was outlined in chapter 24.3.1. The detection of these ambiguities follows Kant's earlier account in the Amphiboly which turns on the misallocation of concepts and Ideas to sensibility or to understanding.1 The success of the case against rational psychology turns on the acceptance of those ambiguities in the paralogistic arguments. We might be satisfied that the given syllogisms are fallacious and for the reasons Kant offers. In 1,1 examine Kant's text and arguments in both A and B editions; in 2 , 1 consider a substantial criticism of Kant's account in Cassam's Self and World; in 3,1 consider the relevance to Kant's position of recent accounts of "immunity to error through misidentification" (IEM); and finally 4 offers a summary of Kant's speculative, nonpractical role for the self. In a later chapter on the third Antinomy I link the account, as Kant does, to a conflict between practical, moral, and theoretical accounts of the self.

1. The Arguments in the Paralogisms A and B Kant's B version of the Paralogisms is shorter and generally less detailed than that in A. Its classification of the fallacies is different (B419) because the fourth Paralogism in A is effectively relocated to the B Refutation of Idealism (B274-77). In B apart from the new discussion of Mendelssohn, which supplements the second Paralogism of simplicity in A, the discussion of each paralogistic inference is brief and summary (B405). I shall, therefore, consider the B and A versions together and include discussion of Mendelssohn in the second Paralogism A. I do not believe that the outcome in B is significantly different from that in A, but that raises the question why Kant wished to rewrite the whole section. I shall suggest that the principal reason has to do with the Fourth Paralogism in A, which has a somewhat different structure from the other arguments and has proved controversial. Kant prefaces the specific arguments on substance, simplicity, identity, and relation to outer objects, with a general account of rational psychology.

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It reinforces the points made above, and in the discussion of Ameriks in chapter 23.4, that rational psychology is a discipline purporting to establish truths about the self from pure reason alone, that is, by self-evident reasoning, and without any reference to a posteriori, or sensory, experience. The point is worth repeating not least because Kant himself makes it almost obsessively throughout the discussion. It sets the framework for the arguments and their examination but is often disregarded.2 It is a consequence of that framework that Kant's references to the self cannot be understood straightforwardly as ordinary references to ourselves as we ordinarily understand each other. This is primarily because the arguments appeal to the way rational psychologists, rather than ordinary nonphilosophers, understand the notion of the self. Nobody in ordinary life thinks, as a rational psychologist would, that truths about themselves can be established by reason alone. If we agreed at the end that Kant was entirely correct in dismissing the claims of rational psychology, then we should have a clear picture of what our conception of the self cannot be, but we might have no better a conception of what it actually is than we had before.3 One proviso to such a claim is that Kant's own notion of transcendental apperception is intended as a more positive, and more correct, philosophical account of the place of our conception of the self in experience, which, properly understood, evades the criticism of rational psychology. That criticism is intended partly to forestall a misinterpretation of Kant's own appeal to transcendental apperception in the Deduction, and that clarification in the Paralogisms adds something to the more positive account. Even so, Kant's own positive account of the self in transcendental apperception is a philosopher's account only indirectly, and problematically, related to our ordinary conception of persons. It is a transcendental, not an empirical, account of the self and is to be understood in the light of the abstract, schematic structure of fundamental concepts projected in his metaphysical inventory. Several corollaries of that initial point might be underlined. First is that although Kant aims to demonstrate the fallacy in rational psychology its central Idea of the self, understood properly in terms of "transcendental apperception," has a value and role in experience. Kant's claim at B371 that Ideas of reason "have their own reality, and are not mere fictions" is characteristic of this view. It echoes Kant's belief that the dialectical Ideas of reason have both illegitimate and legitimate roles which he aims to distinguish. The primary distinction between the legitimate and illegitimate understanding of those roles concerns the "ontological" conclusions we might draw from them. The fundamental, abstract Ideas have a place in our experience, but they do not genuinely designate objects either in that experience or beyond it in the realm of things in themselves. Kant does not believe that we are entitled to claim the actual existence or reality of tran-

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scendent things corresponding to those Ideas of reason, but the concepts have a legitimate positive role and are not "mere fictions." Kant has other ways of making the same point. Part of the understandable motive for indulging in rational psychology is that it rests on a conception of the self as an ultimate transcendental Grund of experience. What goes wrong in that motive, according to Kant, is not that the underlying project of referring to, or identifying, such ultimate grounds is spurious, but that it may lead erroneously to a material rather than a formal conclusion. It may, wrongly, lead us to think that we can identify some material object which that rational Idea designates instead of, righdy, recognizing that it expresses only a formal, a priori condition of experience. The point has been made before in the formal/material distinction at B88-89 and is now used extensively in the Dialectic (B353-54, B363, B409, B518-19, B645, B647). We may come to "hypostatize" the appeal to an underlying, and necessary, "transcendental apperception," and think of it as designating some object, when in reality the reference is not for us to any object but only to a formal requirement of our experience. The point is further reinforced by the rejection throughout the discussion of rational psychology of any appeal to "inner sense." Kant talks here, as he did in the introduction to the Dialectic, of a "subreption of a hypostatized consciousness" as the general error committed in the "pseudorational" discipline (B402). Rational psychology is defined in terms of its excluding any reference to the senses and its consequent reliance on pure reason alone. It can be added to the claimed "subreption" that the "hypostatized" object of consciousness in rational psychology cannot be any object of experience, but must be a "noumenon" or "thing in itself' distinct from any, even inner, sensory access. The characteristic mistake of "subreption," outiined in chapter 24, appeals surreptitiously to inner sense and imagination to fabricate a supposed, but "hidden," "occult" pseudoobject. The point is worth making to anticipate later discussion of some standard criticisms of Kant. In Cassam's Self and World Kant is criticized for canvassing an "exclusion" thesis which separates his conception of the self from other "objects in the world," and prevents it from being understood as "one among such objects." It is worth noticing, then, that Kant actually ascribes one version of the exclusion thesis to his opponents and rejects it. His opponents take the transcendental, rational self to be an object, but not one in the world of our sensible experience. For rational psychologists that "real" self is excluded from the ordinary phenomenal world of sense experience and inhabits a supposed world of things in themselves, but Kant's primary aim is to reject that "exclusion" thesis. In rejecting that otherworldly view Kant tacidy accepts that empirical persons are objects in the world of sensible experience. The question is whether Kant's own appeal to

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an abstract self in an a priori transcendental apperception subscribes to another exclusion thesis which denies that empirical claim. In line with the account in chapter 5 his transcendental claims about the self have to be distinguished both from the rational psychologists' transcendent conception and from an ordinary empirical understanding. I argue in 2 that there is no other version of the exclusion thesis to which Kant is committed.

1.1. The First Paralogism: The Self as Substance Kant reproduces a version of the A paralogism as a general example of the fallacious inferences at B410-411. The two versions can be expressed as: A: What is represented as the absolute subject of our judgments, and cannot be employed as a property of another thing, is a substance. I, as a thinking being, am the absolute subject of all my possible judgments, and this representation cannot be employed as a property of any other thing; so as a thinking being, I am a substance. B: What cannot be thought except as a subject does not exist except as a subject, and is therefore a substance. A thinking being, considered as such, cannot be thought except as a subject; so exists only as subject, and is a substance. The B version does not explicitly spell out the conflict between "being only a subject" and "being a property of some (other) thing," and makes no reference to " I " as the A version does. There are differences between the summary argument against the paralogism in B and the extended argument in A. B, unlike A, appeals to the idea of a "determining," as opposed to "determinable," subject in a vocabulary used in the Deduction, and renewed at B407 (B151-52; B158-59). The point was considered in chapter 16.3, and is indicated in a slightly different form at A402, where Kant insists that as an "object" the self is determinable, that is has properties accessible through (inner) sense, but that consciousness of the "determining" self is not an object for us, just because it lacks sensory access. These claims have implications for Cassam's "exclusion" thesis. Kant evidently does not exclude the "determinable" self from being "an object in the world," and does not even say that the "determining" self is so excluded. What is excluded from being an object is the bare consciousness of the determining self, that is a bare consciousness of our role as judgers separated from sensory access. Although the two versions differ the claimed fallacy is the same in both editions. In B it is succinctly expressed by saying that it is an identical, analytic truth that the " I " that thinks is only ever a subject of judging, and that

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from such a premise it does not follow that the thinking subject is a substance.4 In A the same point is made by admitting that we are, as thinking subjects, never properties of another thing, but that from this we cannot "deduce" that we are substances (A349). In A Kant does not claim that the major premise is analytic, but he does deny that the conclusion can be derived from it, and the minor premise zV patently analytic. In referring to all my possible judgments it is already indicated that I make them and am the subject. It is not clear what, if anything, the notion of an "absolute" subject adds to such a claim unless it reflects merely that incontrovertible analytic truth. The primary objection to the paralogistic argument rests on the belief that merely from the logical, or grammatical, point that a logical subject of judging cannot be a predicate we cannot infer that such a subject is a real substance. In both accounts the basic requirement is that to identify a substance intuition and permanence are required, neither of which is established in the notion of a "logical" subject of judging. Those requirements for a legitimate use of "substance" are outlined in the first Analogy and used subsequendy in the Refutation of Idealism. In A the point is underlined with the distinction between a "logical" subject in the major premise and a "real" subject in the minor, which restates the basic ambiguity. An initially puzzling feature of the discussion, which Karl Ameriks points out, is that Kant appears at one stage to move away from the demonstration of an inferential fallacy and to insist only on the lack of any further "use" for the conclusion. The point may seem more puzzling because of Kant's apparent concession that the proposition "The soul is a substance" can be "allowed to stand," so long as the limitations of its use are recognized. We should recall, however, that for Kant the meaning of some concept is distinguished from its use, and that to deny "use" to a concept is to deny it a full meaning but not to make it meaningless. For Kant even the rational "Idea" of a soul is not meaningless although its realization in experience, its objective reality and its "full" meaning, are unattainable. In this context the suggestion is that the trivial deployment of "substance" in its bare grammatical or logical use does not justify any real use in experience, but that such an Idea of reason is not a "mere, meaningless fiction." It may have another limited, and nonconstitutive, use, which is the basis for the later resolution of the third Antinomy's discussion of practical freedom and moral agency.

1.2. The Second Paralogism: The Self as Simple The Second Paralogism has the following form, which can be expressed as:

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That, whose action can never be regarded as the concurrence of several things, is simple; the soul, or thinking being, is such a being; so the soul, or thinking "I," is simple. It trades less on Kant's earlier distinctions between forms of judgment and realized categories, or between sense and understanding, and contains two additional specific arguments. They are, first, what I shall call William James's point, since it was taken up by him in A Pluralistic Universe (1909, Lecture V) (A351-354); and second, a complex argument about phenomenal and noumenal objects (A356-361). The argument in B is less satisfactory since it returns again to the issue of the self as "substance" and adds "simple" almost as an afterthought. Kant considers whether the soul's simplicity follows from the fact that in thinking some complex judgment the thinker must be unified or one, and his answer evidently is that it does not follow. The premise is correct if it is interpreted in line with the earlier claims about transcendental apperception in the Deduction. There has to be some kind of unity of thought in order to think a judgment however complex the judgment may be, but one suggestion is that this does not rule out what might be called a "committee" of thinkers. James's thought experiment imagines several individuals each of whom utters, or thinks, one of the constituents of a judgment in the right order, but where nobody would say that the judgment itself had actually been thought. All that had been thought was a succession of the judgment's constituents in the right order which did not constitute a unified thought or judgment. In this situation there is no unified thinker and no unified thought, although all the ingredients, the separate components and correct order, for that thought are present. The outcome of that thought experiment might consequently be taken to justify the conclusion that the thinker of some genuine thought cannot be a "committee" and must be simple. Kant, like James, thinks that the experiment captures an important aspect of thinking, namely, the requirement of a thinker's unity for even the most complex thought, but neither drew the conclusion that the required unity amounted to simplicity. The thinker might be a complex committee each member of which is aware of, recalls, and accepts the sequence of utterances forming a judgment, where the required unity is assured by virtue of that shared understanding. In such a case we have the required "unity" of thought but no "simplicity" of thinker. The difference between this case and the earlier one is that in the latter there is no common judgment and only the appearance of unity in the group. We have disunity, complexity, and no unified judgment, but that combination provides no ground for saying that unity entails noncomplexity or simplicity. In the alternative the committee has the required unity and achieves a common judgment, but it is not simple.

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That seems to be the central and acceptable point of Kant's discussion, but he pursues it in various ways. In one the suggestion is that if thinking were like the motion of physical objects, then a parallel argument would establish that any such object which follows a unified path must itself be simple. The fallacy in this case is evident. The resulting motion may be due to the influence of many disparate physical objects, perhaps coming together like a condensing gas to form a solid object and then pursuing a path in its resultant motion. This line shows generally that the original argument is fallacious because it has a counterexample, but it may unfortunately encourage a defense of the original argument in terms of claimed disanalogies between thinkers with resulting thoughts on one side and physical objects and resultant motion on the other. It would be better not to encourage such further argument, both because it is stricdy unnecessary, and because appeals to analogies and disanalogies are likely to be inconclusive. Kant is interested in the strict logic of the original argument and in those terms it is fallacious, however well or badly the analogy with motion stands up. The second line recalls in a more complex way Kant's suggestion in the first Paralogism that even though we may, loosely, call a soul, or indeed anything as a subject term, a "substance," we can make no use of such a description. In this new context Kant offers a similar but more precise test, for the suggestion is that the claim to simplicity will be useless unless it serves to distinguish the mental from the physical, or mind from matter. Kant may consider this because of the physical counterexample to show the fallacy in the argument about unity and simplicity in thinking. Whether that is so or not, he now embarks on the attempt to show that describing the soul as simple cannot be used to differentiate mind and matter. The argument essentially distinguishes conceptions of mind and matter as either phenomenal or noumenal, either appearances or things in themselves. One important proviso is made when he concludes with a "general remark" made under the proviso that he does not "commit himself in regard to such hypotheses" (A360). Since Kant is evidendy committed to the belief that we have no knowledge of noumena he is presumably denying any commitment to knowledge of the hypothesized character of noumena in the argument. The point is made again towards the end of the fourth Paralogism (A383-86). The text pursues the following exhaustive options: (1) Soul and matter are both noumenal. (2) One is phenomenal and the other noumenal. (3) Both soul and matter are phenomenal. Kant's objection to (2) is that such a comparison is illegitimate (A360). Mind and matter could only be compared if they have the same status,

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either as both phenomena (3) or both noumena (1), and to attempt to compare phenomena with noumena is to deal with what are incomparable. (3) is not stricdy at issue, since the framework of rational psychology entails that the soul is thought of as a noumenon, as a pure thinking being independent of sensory aspects, not as a phenomenon. Finally of (1) Kant claims that we can have no knowledge of the underlying substratum of matter, so that for all we know it may be just as simple as the soul and may even be itself a thinking being. At least those latter properties are not inconsistent with such a noumenal nature (A3 59). The resulting argument is surely correct. If the empirical, phenomenal case in (3) is not at issue, and (2) is ruled out as an incommensurable comparison, then (1) is the only case left and is of no use since we have no way of determining the relevant character of noumenal mind and matter. If appeal to a rationalist conception of the thinking self is incapable of making any "serviceable" distinction between what is mental and what is physical, then it cannot have real theoretical significance for us. Kant's text in this passage has been understood in other ways. Karl Ameriks's detailed exploration of the arguments cites the passage as a central example of Kant's commitment to noumenal immaterialism. It formed part of his complaint that I failed to acknowledge that commitment in Kant's Theory of Knowledge at A360, discussed in chapter 23.4, and it is, therefore, useful to consider the evidence in more detail. Ameriks claims to offer four references to the alleged commitment (1982/2000, pp. 45^i6 in both editions) but the references are misleading. One of them, A260, refers to the Amphiboly, says nothing about noumenal immaterialism, and seems to be a misprint for A360. The others, A358, A359, A360, are effectively references to the same context which I had claimed makes no commitment to noumenal immaterialism. In that passage Kant considers the hypothetical comparison between noumenal matter and noumenal selves. The outcome is unequivocal: If. . . we compare the thinking T' not with matter but with the intelligible that lies at the basis [Grund] of the outer appearance which we call matter, [then] we have no knowledge whatsoever of the intelligible and therefore are in no position to say that the soul is in any inward respect different from it. (A360)

The passage testifies to the phenomenal character of what we call, and know as, matter, and denies any real point of comparison for us between the intelligible noumena which, on the hypothesis, are the Grund of both matter and a thinking being in itself. It is in this context that Kant makes the caveat that he is not committing himself to these hypotheses. The point is purely hypothetical in supposing, for the sake of the argument, that we might compare noumenal matter and noumenal mind and makes no com-

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mitment to the real existence, or knowledge of, such things. The outcome of that part of the argument is that no such comparison can usefully be made. In the preceding section at A358-359 Kemp Smith's mistranslations may seem to steer the text towards Karl Ameriks's view, but once they are corrected that step is made virtually impossible. At the start Kant considers whether matter may have inner, mental characteristics. He takes it that empirically the properties of outer and inner sense exclude each other ("thoughts, feelings, desire, and resolution are never objects of outer intuition"), but the "something which underlies outer appearances . . . when viewed as a noumenon (or transcendental object) may yet be the subject of [our] thoughts." Kemp Smith's addition of [our] is unwarranted and distorts the argument. Kant is not considering whether noumena can be the topic or subject of our thoughts, but whether noumena can have thoughts, and concludes that for all we know they may. The fact that such an option is excluded in empirical, phenomenal experience is, as Kant says, irrelevant to the issue. We cannot assert that noumenal matter has what we identify as outer features, but typically we cannot deny it either, and the same is true of "inner, mental characteristics." Kant's initial claim is that we cannot ascribe our sensory outer predicates to things in themselves since the latter are understood as distinct from our sensibility, but "the predicates of inner sense are not inconsistent with its nature." The opposition is not between being able to ascribe inner but not outer properties to things in themselves, but between being unable to ascribe either set of properties to such things and their being inconsistent with them. We cannot properly assert either inner or outer properties of things in themselves, but that is not because either property is incompatible with such things. The hypothesis which the rational psychologist asks us to consider, whether noumena have mental properties, is indeterminate and not worth debating. Kant is not, in the passage, committing himself to noumenal immaterialism or materialism, and the general point is made later in the fourth Paralogism at A380. If then, as this Critical argument compels us to do, . . . (we) do not push our questions beyond the limits of possible experience . . . we shall never dream of seeking to inform ourselves about objects of the senses as they are in themselves, that is, out of all relation to the senses. . . . If the psychologist takes appearances for things in themselves . . . then whether he be a materialist . . . or spiritualist, . . . or a dualist5 . . . he will always owing to this be entangled in pseudo-rational speculations as to how what is not a thing in itself but only the appearance of a thing in general, can exist by itself.

Kant makes some additional comments about the cogito, and in B adds his criticism of Mendelssohn's argument. Descartes's rationalist appeal to

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the "cogito" is said to be a "tautology" and to be incapable of supporting any claim that the " I " is simple. Kant concedes that the " I " contains "no manifold," has nothing determinate or any sensory feature in it, and is an "absolute logical unity," but he repeats the outcome of the first argument in saying, rightly, that that minimal indeterminate unity is not the same as simplicity. That prompts some more general reflections on the rationalist error. It confuses indeterminateness with simplicity and neglects the way in which a purely "transcendental" concept of " I " is "abstracted" from our ordinary conception of a self with its manifold, sensory, determinable properties. We have the bare conception of a mere "something" as the personal subject of judgments expressed ordinarily by " I " which in its philosophical, transcendental use is empty. That was the conclusion reached of the personal unity in transcendental apperception in chapter 16, and it explains why Kant's concept of transcendental apperception properly implies no genuine science of rational psychology. Rational psychology, based on an abstract conception of transcendental apperception, has no content.6 These points are repeated throughout the Paralogisms and for the moment I note only one corollary. Kant is plainly distinguishing between this philosophical, transcendental appeal to a self, a "transcendental I," and our ordinary references to ourselves with the first person pronoun: "It is obvious that in attaching T to our thoughts we designate the subject of inherence only transcendentally" (A355). The claim cannot properly be understood as a comment on grammatical or semantic features of our ordinary ^ empirical use of the first person pronoun. The reference is not to that ordinary use but to the philosophical use in formulating the principle of transcendental apperception, namely, that it must be possible for the "I think" to accompany my representations (B132). It has commonly been understood, in Wittgenstein's Tractatus for example, that philosophers in the tradition have appealed to an underlying, essential self rather than merely reporting on the circumstances and contexts of the ordinary existence of persons. The subject does not belong to the world but is the limit of the world. Where in the world is there a metaphysical subject? The philosophical I (self) is not the man, not the human body, or the human soul with which psychology deals, but the metaphysical subject, the limit—not a part of the world. (5.632-5.641 7 )

Kant stresses the same point, but indicates also what is legitimate and what is illegitimate in such an abstract conception of the self. The primary danger is that such an abstract conception is taken to designate some identifiable object, which because of its abstract nonsensory character cannot be exemplified in experience and must refer to a thing in itself beyond experi-

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ence. The diagnosis follows the pattern noted earlier from B186-187 and more recendy at A380 in which we take appearances to be " o f " things in general and then identify these as things in themselves or noumena. To disclose and disarm such illusions is a quite general aspect of Kant's therapy in the Dialectic, applied in this case to philosophical misconceptions of the self and of transcendental apperception. Mendelssohn's argument is represented at B 4 1 3 ^ 1 5 as an attempt to prove that a "simple" consciousness could never "disappear." The ground for this claim is that its disappearance would have to take no time since it is simple, and that this would require two different times, immediately before and after it disappeared, to be the same. Kant's objection is that this treats a simple consciousness as if it were an outer object, and that if treated as an inner object it is subject to a diminution to vanishing point outlined in the account of "intensive quantity" in the Anticipations of Perception. If Kant is right, then Mendelssohn's argument proves too little since it overlooks one, salient, option which accepts the premise but falsifies the conclusion. He might also have said that if valid the argument would prove too much, since it would effectively deny the possibility of any change over time.8

1.3. The Third Paralogism. Personality and Identity Rant calls the Paralogism that of "personality" but the argument to be examined turns on a person's identity: "What is conscious of its identity at different times is a person; the soul is so conscious; and so it is a person." In the discussion Kant contrasts our normal conception of personal identity with this rationalist argument for it. Ordinarily we think of our identity in consciousness as belonging to inner sense, just as we regulate the identity of outer objects with reference to continuing, permanent existence in outer sense. But rational psychology, in excluding any reference to the senses and relying solely on reason, has to find some other basis for personal identity. Kant claims that that basis is, again, no more than the "logical" unity already noted and dismissed as inadequate (A363). He provides another thought experiment in which at any particular point in time a person's consciousness and memories have been handed on from an earlier person (A363 and note). In such a case the same logical unity of the subject at each point would hold in conjunction with the presumption that throughout those points the persons are different. The experiment can be variously understood. In one it trades on the rationalist assumption that the selves whose identity is in question are noumena and not objects of experience. Then Kant's conclusion from the experiment relies on a point he makes throughout the discussion, namely,

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that without knowledge of noumena we cannot properly identify them. With our cognitive limitations there is no way of distinguishing cases of memory transmission between different noumenal subjects and those where the same noumenal person remains throughout. Both hypotheses, either that it is the same person or that it is not, are indistinguishable for us since we have no means of deciding between them as noumena. In the alternative the experiment is related direcdy to our experience and its conclusion is that we still have no way of distinguishing the two kinds of case. That latter conclusion might be based on a position in which personal identity is no more than a continuity between an earlier and later phase of some continuing experience.9 Continuity of the required kind is ex hypothesi present even in this case so that with such a criterion there would be again no way of distinguishing two separate persons. It seems unlikely that Kant envisaged that second position. His use of the thought experiment is based on the presumption that the memories are transferred between different persons. The case points to two contrasts Kant deploys in this, and other, discussions; first between identity at a time and identity over time, and second between my experience of identity and that of an "outside observer." The first point indicates that the most the "logical" unity can establish is identity at a time, which falls short of identity over time. The premise of the Paralogism is itself ambiguous in this respect, since to be "conscious of identity at different times" might signify either identity at those different times or identity over their whole range. The second point notes that the former identity is in any case made in respect of "my time" and not in respect of "outer" time: "in the whole time in which I am conscious of myself I am conscious of this time as belonging to the unity of myself. . . but it is the outer observer who first represents me in time" (A362). In the context of the two cases it is the outer observer who represents me in an objective common time. The two points can be connected in this way: when Kant says that in my own consciousness identity of person is unfailingly met with he suggests two things. First is that the attempt to formulate this identity results in an analytic truth, but second is that as a phenomenological report on my consciousness it is generally accurate. If the former identity is expressed by "In my consciousness I am always the same" then it is an analytic truth; "my" consciousness already refers to "my" identity. This is the central point in the B discussion of the argument at B408. As a phenomenological report the claim echoes everyone's experience, namely, that that experience is framed within a familiar and generally unquestioned consciousness. The point was well described by William James in his appeal to the "warmth and intimacy" with which a subject "appropriates" its bodily feelings and neighboring representations in the stream of consciousness.10 Such a report deals only with identity at par tic-

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ular points in time and does not generalize to the identity which we attach to ourselves over periods of time with the aid of memory. Kant finally repeats his insistence that the target in the arguments is a "transcendental" and not merely an "empirical" conception of the relevant concepts, but he adds a reference to their "practical employment" (A365). Although, so far, this aspect of the account has not been prominent it clearly is important for Kant that his notion of "transcendental apperception," his notion of a self in the transcendental context, has this significant practical connection. The point is more extensively canvassed in B at B421-22 and B424-26, B431-32 and prepares the way for Kant's transition to morality in the third Antinomy, discussed in chapter 27.

1.4. The Fourth Paralogism A The final Paralogism in A has been controversial for two reasons. First, it seems less obviously related to the general issues in the other arguments about the nature of the self, as simple, substantial, and identical; second, it has seemed to some to reinforce, rather than to reject, Kant's commitment to a traditional idealism. The two points are connected for the topic of the discussion is a traditional idealist picture of the relation between the self and an outer world. The paralogistic, fallacious argument is a typically idealist skepticism about knowledge of outer objects based on a dubious causal inference from our mediate representations of them. That picture has at its center a Cartesian conception of an inner subjective self, known immediately by reason, to which those representations belong. Kant makes plain that the self in question is an "intellectual," nonempirical, rational self, and it is this Cartesian self and its relation to inferred "outer" objects which is at issue (A367). Kant's aim is to reject that Cartesian picture with its associated doubt about our knowledge of those objects, and to do so conformably with his Dialectical therapy of demonstrating a fallacy of ambiguity in the argument. That resolution of the first problem may serve to underline the second. For if Kant's aim is to reject a traditional idealist skepticism, it is puzzling that some commentators think of the passage as a Kantian commitment to that idealist view. Since Kant himself was sufficiently dissatisfied with the passage to rewrite it in B along with the other Paralogisms, and to relocate a clearer version of the argument in the B Refutation of Idealism, it may seem as if those commentators are right. Traditionalist critics typically represent the passage as a confused and inconsistent symptom of Kant's unfulfilled intention to escape from his underlying traditional idealism. I shall claim, in line with earlier discussions of the Aesthetic and Analytic, that Kant consistently rejects that idealism, and that his motive for rewriting the

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passage was not that it was inconsistent but that it was unfortunately expressed. The later version in the B Refutation of Idealism presents the same standpoint but is clearer in expression and better in argument. Kant himself evidently regarded the changes from A to B as presentational and not substantial. The paralogistic argument for an idealist skepticism about outer objects is from the "receptivity" of the senses and a consequent inference to those objects from their effects on us. Since all causal inferences are assumed to be "doubtful" the general inference from inner effect to presumed outer cause casts a doubt on our ever believing in such presumed causes and presents a classic "veil of perception" doctrine.11 Kant's resolution of the problem is to insist, in line with other paralogistic arguments, that the argument is fallacious and rests on ambiguities in such terms as "outer" and "self." The self in question is an "intellectual," not "empirical," self, and the "outer" objects may be ambiguously either objects totally independent of the senses or else merely "objects in space" (A369, 375). In the paralogism the two senses of "outer" are liable to be confused because the "veil of perception" treats ordinary spatial, physical objects as independent of the senses, linked to their intermediary representations only by the dubious causal inference. The central ambiguity is in the term "outer" which empirically means "spatial" but transcendentally signifies things in themselves totally independent of the senses. That ambiguity infects other correlative terms such as "idea" and "real" and brings out corresponding ambiguities in them. The ambiguities reflect Kant's Aesthetic distinctions between empirical and transcendental idealism (ideality) and realism (reality), empirical and transcendental ideas and objects, and empirical and transcendental selves. They form an essential part of the account of the Aesthetic given in chapters 8 and 9. The ambiguous positions and Kant's reaction to them can be brought out by distinguishing the supposed causal relations between transcendent things in themselves and a transcendent self on one side, and empirical, spatial objects and an empirical self on the other. The resulting positions conform to the parallels considered above in relation to the second Paralogism, and the argument is the same. Supposed causal relations between things in themselves are unknowable for us, but causal relations between outer spatial objects and our senses are both knowable and essential to our experience. The ambiguous idealist skepticism is perfectly correct if it is construed in terms of transcendent things in themselves, and Kant endorses its conclusion that we can have no knowledge of them. But for him that skeptical conclusion casts no doubt on our experience with its empirical causal relation between spatial objects and the senses. Kant is skeptical about "problematic" things in themselves and their causal relations, but since outer spatial objects are not things in themselves it does

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not follow that he is skeptical about those empirical objects and their causal relations. The intention of the original paralogism was to cast doubt on our actual experience, and Kant's disambiguation demonstrates how it fails. Kant claims on this basis that the argument, although fallacious, forces us to note the ambiguity and to clarify the resulting position of empirical realism and transcendental idealism (A378). Once the ambiguity is detected Kant holds that we can accept an empirical realism in which we have an immediate sense experience of outer spatial objects and a causal relation between those objects and our senses. The position Kant adopts in the Paralogism is that outlined earlier in discussion of the Aesthetic and conflicts with any real causal relation between things in themselves and ourselves. The central point in Kant's resolution of the problem is his rejection of a transcendent causal relation and the corresponding, but dubious, inference to such things in themselves. That resolution turns on the ambiguity between empirically and transcendentally "outer" objects, and on Kant's preferred view of an immediate, noninferential presentation of empirically outer objects. It relies on the earlier, much misunderstood, distinction between the empirical, the transcendental, and the transcendent outlined in chapter 5. The earlier rejections of Adickes's double affection theory and of Sebastian Gardner's argument for such a real relation and inference are strongly confirmed in this later passage.12 Kant is prepared characteristically to allow a notional conception of things in themselves as a causal, metaphysical, and ultimate Grund for our experience, but he insists that this is distinguished from the knowable empirical causal relation between spatial objects and our senses. Such an account would be vulnerable if there were an incompatibility between the immediate presentation of outer spatial objects and their causal influence on our senses, but there is no such inconsistency. The two claims belong to different approaches to perception, and respond to different questions about it. The former answers the epistemological question whether we can know empirically outer objects on the basis of perception immediately or have always to make an inference from some supposed intermediary "representation." It claims that we do not always make or need an inference, specifically a causal inference, to know them, but may in good conditions be presented with, and recognize, them immediately without inference. Kant's conclusion is a rejection of the traditional conception of our experience as resting on the mediation of "ideas" from which outer objects must be inferred. The latter answers a general question about the explanation, specifically causal explanation, of our perceptual mechanism and its interaction with those outer objects. The former is a philosophical question which rejects one traditional, "veil of perception," ground for skepticism about the existence of outer objects, and accepts our

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belief in them (A375). The latter belongs to empirical science, assumes xh&t outer objects exist, and outiines the mechanism of their interaction with our senses.13 Kant's argument in the Fourth Paralogism, like the later Refutation of Idealism, rejects traditional idealism and its confused ambiguity in identifying outer spatial objects as "things in themselves." How is it, then, that the passage has been thought to canvass a traditional idealism, or at least to offer an unstable rejection and acceptance of such an idealism? I note summarily two previously identified motives. First are the passages where Kant says, in an unqualified way, that appearances, empirical objects, just are "representations" "in us." This has been extensively discussed and it has been pointed out that Kant could not have meant by "idea" or "representation" or "in us" what is meant empirically by "mental state" or "in the mind." The ambiguities in "outer" and "inner" at the heart of the resolution of the fourth Paralogism carry over to the notion of "mind-(in)dependence." Transcendental mind-dependence is not to be identified with an empirical mind-dependence which contrasts empirically mental and physical phenomena. Even traditionalists have recognized the ambiguity between a transcendental and an empirical sense for "representation," but treat the ambiguity as involving only two options, namely, empirical ideas (mental states) and transcendent objects.14 The earlier claim in chapter 5 was that Kant's apparatus makes room for a threefold distinction between what is an empirical idea (mental state), what is a transcendent outer object (noumenon), and what can legitimately be said transcendentally and immanently of all objects of experience. The transcendental sense in which all items in experience, empirically inner and outer, are "mind-dependent" provides a formal idealism incompatible with the traditional doctrine. A second motive appeals to those passages where Kant insists on the empirical reality of outer, spatial objects but only so long as we also accept that the space in which they exist is itself only a "representation." Those passages also yield to the earlier points that such a characterization has to be understood neither empirically nor transcendendy but transcendentally, but it has encouraged a further way of misunderstanding Kant's position. If the point is taken quite literally, then Kant is claiming that although the inhabitants of space are real, physical, nonmental objects the space they inhabit is mental. Such a position is so absurd, and so opposed to the overall structure of Kant's position, that it seems evident that he could not have intended to canvass it. It construes what is for Kant a purely "formal" account of the status of space and time as a priori intuitions as a "material" account of them as mental "containers" capable of housing public physical objects. It has been rightly rejected in Paul Abela's Kant's Empirical Realism (2002) as "Berkeley with a formal scaffolding."

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1.5. Concluding Summary The errors of the rational psychologist are potentially present in Kant's own conception of transcendental apperception, and its incorporated notion of a personal unity, or unity of consciousness. That fundamental conception may be misunderstood as a reference to some hidden, occult, transcendent self or moment of consciousness, and so as a suitable topic for a rational psychology. "Transcendental apperception" is a notion which abstracts from all sense intuitions, and this may tempt us to suppose that it designates some nonsensory noumenal object, when in reality it is not designative at all. Just as Kant's version of the cogito does not describe any actual thinking, so its central notion, the transcendental " I , " does not name any experiential object. Without some reference to the senses such concepts are purely formal and empty, and can provide no information about our substantiality, simplicity, permanence, or identity. The minimal, indeterminate conception of personal unity outlined in the discussion of the Transcendental Deduction is confirmed in these provisos. The same provisos about the self and consciousness in transcendental apperception at B157-58 are repeated in the Paralogisms at B429. The general message in both passages is that the legitimate, fundamental concept of the self does not designate a noumenon or thing in itself. It is, for all its importance as an abstract prior condition for experience, no more exempt from that Kantian restriction on our genuine knowledge than any other concept. The discussion throughout the Paralogisms presupposes that the rational psychologist claims to establish truths about selves purely by reason, excluding any reference to the senses. Descartes's "cogito" argument, understood as the establishment of existence through pure reasoning, provides an example of such claims, but its conception is a philosophical gloss on our ordinary experience and not one which people ordinarily recognize. Kant's central objection to the reasoning in each of the Paralogisms is that even if they rely on formally valid syllogisms they violate an informal rule about the unambiguous sense of its key terms. That ambiguity lies in the contrasts between a "transcendental," or "transcendent," as opposed to an "empirical" account of the self, and in the references to notions such as "self," "substance," "simple," "inner" and "outer," "object" and "idea." In the negative context of Kant's therapeutic operation it is understandable that he should consider only the two options, either transcendent or empirical, since that assumption is ascribed to his opponents, the rational psychologists. His own positive account relies on a rejection of that assumption by adding the third option of a legitimately transcendental account of the self as a condition of experience which is neither transcendent nor merely empirical.

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Legitimate references to transcendental apperception are to an "abstract," "presupposed," condition of empirical knowledge which refers only indeterminately to a "something in general" and not to any specific subject, or object. "I cannot know as an object what must be presupposed in order to know any object" (A402). The illegitimate conception misconstrues that framework and concludes erroneously that truths about transcendental apperception are truths about actual but hidden occult selves neither abstract, nor merely presupposed conditions, nor indeterminate. The fundamental error, in these terms, is the "subreption of hypostatised consciousness" (A402; B422). It misuses the particularizing function of the senses and imagination to offer a pseudo-reference to some supposed object, a noumenon accessible only to reason. Kant makes some more general references to the traditional mind-body problem at the end of the fourth Paralogism and in the conclusion to the A discussion, but to contemporary philosophers these must be disappointing. Kant presupposes that the traditional discussion was conducted on the basis of a distinction and connection between minds and bodies as things in themselves, that is a "crude transcendental dualism" (A379-380; A392). Since, for Kant, we know nothing of such things we can properly be neither skeptical nor dogmatic about them, and can only admit that the issue is spurious [nichtijj und eingebildet] (A388-389). If instead the question is raised within an "empirical dualism," or empirical realism, of minds and bodies Kant's responses are bland and uninformative. We are told only that empirical minds and bodies must be connected "according to rules . . . whereby they constitute one experience" (A379), but the nature of these rules is left undetermined. He adds that the question how outer intuition is possible in a thinking subject cannot be answered because it makes a reference to a "transcendental object" which we cannot know. Some commentators take this to represent all psychological explanation as an ultimate mystery, but the mystery belongs to transcendent, not empirical, explanation.15

2. Questions and Criticisms That summary raises a number of questions both about Kant's legitimate conception of a transcendental self and his diagnosis of the rational psychologists' associated illegitimate conception. Many of those questions are raised by Quassim Cassam's Self and World (1998) and I consider them in the light of his criticisms of Kant. The criticisms are made on the assumption of a traditionalist account of Kant's transcendental idealism, in which the self or mind "makes" nature.16 The focus is on what Cassam calls twentieth-century "neo-Kantian" philosophers rather than Kant himself, and

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many of the claims consequently have only a doubtful relevance to Kant's position (11-12). Criticisms are made of McGinn's and Nagel's accounts of Kant as though they were criticisms of Kant himself (23-24; 19-21). Some central aspects of Kant's diagnostic apparatus, his contrast and connection between things in general and things in themselves, and his triple contrast between the empirical, the transcendent, and the transcendental, are disregarded or misunderstood. "Kant is not entirely consistent in characterizing the transcendental self as a 'something in general'. Elsewhere . . . he identifies the transcendental subject with the self as it exists in itself . . . and it is not clear that this comes to the same thing" (1997, 15). It has been made clear in chapter 15.1.2 that Kant regards the route from a conception of "things in general" to an erroneous belief in the existence of corresponding things in themselves as a diagnosis of rationalist illusion. It is quite clear that these are not the same thing but mark steps along the way to that illusion in line with Kant's distinctions between objects of experience, things in general, the transcendental object, and noumena. Kant's diagnostic path offers an explanation of the way in which, in Wittgenstein's terms, we are "bewitched" by language or concepts, and like savages draw the "queerest," "occult," conclusions from it about a "super-reality." At two points in his discussion Cassam's account of Kant's view of the self follows the summary in 1.5 quite closely. He rightly examines the role of Kant's method of "abstraction" and refers principally to Allison's discussion in Kant's Transcendental Idealism (14-20). Later in discussing the "independent intelligibility" thesis he also rightly distances Kant's transcendental project from a direct account of our ordinary experience of selves. Part of that thesis repeats the point that both Kant's conception of transcendental apperception and his opponents' conception of a rational self are philosophical glosses on our ordinary experience, not overtiy acknowledged by ordinary nonphilosophical experiencers but said to be implicit in their ordinary experience. Despite the evident truth in that claim, Cassam nevertheless rejects the "independent intelligibility" thesis along with Kant's other claims. He believes that the appeal to a "transcendental" approach "can scarcely be said to clarify matters" (13), that the "abstraction" account is "either incoherent or platitudinous" (20), and that the "independent intelligibility" thesis should be abandoned (161-70). The 'logical' identity of the Kantian T is an abstraction from the identity of the objective continuant, but one should not be misled by such abstractions into thinking that self-consciousness has nothing to do with a concrete sense of the presented subject of one's thoughts, experiences, and sensations as a physical object among physical objects. (1998, 170)

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I shall in the end quarrel with all three of these objections but for the moment I focus on Cassam's argument against the "independent intelligibility" thesis and the assumptions he makes in that argument about the "abstraction" account. I add that his quoted anxiety about Kant's "transcendental" approach is directed ostensibly against "repetitions of the term 'transcendental' on its own," as if no commentators had ever elaborated Kant's understanding of the term. He conforms in this way to a standard belief among traditionalist commentators that Kant's use of "transcendental," "transcendent," "empirical," and "immanent" is thoroughly confused and even inconsistent. That belief was shown to be unwarranted in chapter 5 and it leads Cassam to distort Kant's position. He assumes that for Kant "the self is neither phenomenal nor noumenal," when he should say at least that the " transcendental," but not the "empirical," self is neither phenomenal nor noumenal (1998, 10). The empirical self is as phenomenal as any other object of experience. He holds just as mistakenly that the transcendental " I " must answer to the features belonging to the empirical self and to our ordinary, empirical utterances of the first person pronoun (1998, 15). Kant's position, as it was outlined earlier, could be put in this way: Any philosopher seeking to identify the underlying structural elements in, or conditions of, experience is bound to refer to them in some general, perhaps abstract, way and this will be true of our concept of the "self and of its "thinking," "conscious," aspects. If we consider such underlying conceptual elements as "substance" or "cause," then Kant believes that we may identify them in a form theoretically isolable from their empirical, sensory, realizations. It is a fundamental aspect of the distinction between sense and understanding that these concepts can be so isolated or abstracted, and of Kant's search for these ancestral Grundbegriffe that they should belong to pure, a priori understanding, but the two requirements are different. The mere isolation of a fundamental reference to the self or to causality might be satisfied by an empiricist descriptive metaphysics, like Strawson's in Individuals, which merely records dependence relations among a posteriori concepts. Kant requires pure a priori concepts and invests them with a significance as conditions of experience which empiricists reject. If the mechanism is set aside, through which Kant discloses the listed a priori concepts in the Metaphysical Deduction, there is no more difficulty in such an abstracting operation than in regarding Euclidean points and lines in his geometry as "abstractions" from their realizations in our sensory experience. That Euclidean model for Kant's metaphysics of experience allows both some separation and some connection between the formal, abstracted system and its empirical realization. It is difficult to see initially why the same separation and connection cannot be made in Kant's

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metaphysics of the self, but in rejecting the "independent intelligibility" thesis Cassam thinks that outcome is impossible. The independent intelligibility thesis is taken to require an understanding of Kant's a priori elements incompatible with the empirical circumstances of our understanding of persons. That objection seems more appropriately directed against commitment to the rationalist, noumenal self which Kant rejects, but it remains to be seen whether his more positive views err in the same way. The "independent intelligibility" thesis is related direcdy to the central "identity" principle in Self and World, namely, that personal identity "requires the conception of oneself as an object among others in the world." Since it becomes clear that for Cassam the "world" is the physical world17 that thesis implies that the "individual subject," the person, is a "physical object," and the arguments on which I concentrate are conducted on that assumption (1998, 21). But the relations between Cassam's identity principle and Kant's supposed "independent intelligibility" thesis are complex. Cassam accepts that there is something right in the idea that Kant's account and our ordinary understanding of persons in the "identity" principle are not rivals (1998, 161). On the other hand he insists that we shouldn't exaggerate the chances of their reconciliation, and in the subsequent discussion he argues that the "independent intelligibility" thesis is mistaken, and that this points us towards accepting the identity thesis. Plainly any attempt to reconcile the divergent claims in the identity principle and the independent intelligibility thesis will rest on the interpretation of the latter, but two related points should be made from the start. First, it is at least not obvious that to view the "transcendental" self as an abstraction in the way that Euclidean points and lines are abstractions is incompatible with an ultimate empirical realization of these concepts. Just as we may happily accept that Euclidean lines are not three dimensional although their empirical realizations in paths and furniture edges are, so we may consistently accept that references to a "transcendental self' do not include physical characteristics even though their empirical realizations in Smith and Jones do. Cassam is right to imply that Kant's transcendental account does not exclude the recognition that persons ordinarily have physical characteristics, but then it is hard to see why there is a conflict between the transcendental account and that empirical recognition. One answer can be set aside. Even if it is a necessary condition for personal identity, or awareness, that persons are "physical objects among others in the world" there is no formal conflict with Kant's position. Kant claims that whatever is included in the concept of transcendental apperception, or of a transcendental self, is a necessary but not a sufficient condition of our recognition of persons in experience. Formally there is no reason why Kant's and Cassam's necessary conditions, though different, cannot cohabit as expressions ofjoint necessary conditions of that recognition, and

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later I note an obvious reason for Kant's interest in thinking rather than physical embodiment. Perhaps it is necessary for our empirical recognition of persons that they should meet the requirements of both transcendental apperception and physical realization, and the thesis in the Refutation of Idealism indicates such a view. There is a further question whether Kant would independently accept both that persons are physical objects, and Cassam's added condition that they are necessarily so, but that is not at issue in assessing his criticisms of the "independent intelligibility" thesis. Once that formal issue is set aside, the argument rests on two points: first, Cassam's explanation, in terms of "types" and "tokens" of the inevitable link between an abstract conception of the self and our ordinary conception, including the recognition of ourselves as physical objects; second, a short demonstration that Kant's requirement for consciousness of self-identity, the formal unity of transcendental apperception, is not necessary for that consciousness (1998, 164). I concentrate initially on the "type-token" point since it both gives a sense to Kant's abstracted account of the "transcendental" self and provides the primary argument against "independent intelligibility." That argument rests on the claim that in order to understand a type-conception its relativization, or indexation, to tokens must be understood. If one has no conception of the subjects of'I think' instances as objects among others in the world, one will not have a proper understanding of how such instances are indexed . . . and would scarcely be in a position to grasp the 'form' [the ctype>u] of such instances. (1998, 167)

The argument is that a grasp of tokens of some type as having the relevant properties is a necessary condition of understanding the corresponding type. In this case the specific requirement is that token selves must be understood as "physical objects among others" in order to understand any type-concept of a self or person. The argument seems to require that there should be some relevant overlap of features between types and tokens and some priority in understanding tokens in order to grasp their corresponding types. Kant's abstractions seem not to meet these requirements and this is the ground for Cassam's objection. An abstract unschematized category, such as "cause," which functions as an ancestor of the ordinary concept and dispenses with references to space and time, may not require an understanding of its schematized spatiotemporal realization. The abstract category is after all only what a hypothetical judgment form expresses, and that may be understood without grasping the ordinary concept of a cause. Kant evidentiy holds that a formal transcendental apperception, or transcendental unity of consciousness, can similarly abstract from the embodiment of persons.

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Nor does Kant accept that his abstract a priori concepts depend essentially on their empirical counterparts or can be derived from them. Kant's abstraction procedure is not merely an empiricist claim about concept learning, but pure concepts such as "transcendental apperception" are claimed to be a priori and underivable from a posteriori experience. Those pure concepts are prior conditions of empirical experience and, according to Kant, make experience and the relevant objects of experience possible. These points show how Cassam's appeal to types and tokens is intended to conflict with Kant, but two different conclusions might be drawn from them. One is that Kant's position is incoherent or unwarranted, but another is that the "type-token" terminology is inappropriate for, and does not adequately represent, his transcendental claims. I argue that the second conclusion is correct. The type-token distinction is too unclear and crude for the complexities among abstract concepts, and Cassam's use of that distinction mispresents Kant. His position is in any case compatible with some versions of Cassam's counterclaims. We might expect from the discussion in chapter 24.2-3 that varieties among abstract concepts would make it difficult to apply the type-token distinction. Kant's own examples of unschematized categories and Euclidean concepts can be supplemented with such items as fictions, impossible objects, intensions, possibilities, the average voter, bodies not acted on by external forces, and others which figure in Zalta's account in Abstract Objects. Such a wide range of abstract references indicates that they do not all fit into Cassam's "type-token" distinction, and that his use of it misrepresents Kant. For one thing the type-token distinction applies across the board both to abstract and other, nonabstract items. The abstract type "number" has tokens in particular numbers which are just as abstract, and it would surely be a mistake to think that the abstract type " 1 " has tokens \n particular empirical objects. It is not at all obvious that in order to understand such a natural number it is stricdy necessary to grasp those empirical realizations. It is also a mistake to think that Kant's appeal to an abstract transcendental apperception, or unity of consciousness, is a reference to type persons. Kant's transcendental appeal to a unity of apperception is not simply to type persons, but to one of their salient features. Empirical apperception is a capacity to attend to something, associated further with a capacity to think of, or recognize, the thing attended to, but these are not persons so much as dispositional features of persons. Kant's transcendental account is not a simple reference to that capacity, or to occasions on which it is exercised, but a claim about its necessary role in our experience. In chapter 16 the condition was recognized to be ambiguous between a unity of thinking and a reflexive unity, but in both cases the claim is for the transcendental necessity of that unity in experience.

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Cassam might say that the distinction between persons and their properties is not significant since the same point holds for the contrast between mental and physical properties of persons. His thesis could be expressed by saying that a personal property such as thinking requires an understanding of physical properties such as embodiment, but the type-token contrast is inadequate to establish that claim on its own. Tokens of the type "capacity for thinking" are presumably individuals' capacity for thought, and tokens of the types "thinking" or "attending" are particular episodes of thinking or thought. None of these types or of their tokens makes an explicit reference to physical properties of the person. Cassam might reply that he provides independent evidence of that necessary reference to physical properties throughout his book, but this is an inadequate response for two reasons. First, the issue here concerns only the criticisms of Kant, and these turn solely on the type-token distinction in the quoted passage. Second, it has been noted already, and will be underlined again, that Kant's position is compatible with the claim that some reference to physical properties is necessary for our understanding of persons. Cassam insists that we must understand the relevant types in terms of features, the indexation, of their tokens, and this seems to mean their realization as, or in, physical objects. But even if it were necessary that token persons are physical objects "among others in the world," it would not follow that the relevant types, whether persons or capacities, have to be understood in those terms. Types may be understood in abstraction from contingent and even necessary features of their tokens. A type "apperception" may focus on some personal features such as a capacity for thinking or attending to the neglect of others such as a person's physical features. The same holds for other abstract references. Type Euclidean lines lack the three dimensions necessary in their empirical realizations; token garden paths, however straight, are not tokens of the type "Euclidean straight line" but of the type "garden path." Type causes lack the spatiotemporal locations necessary to their tokens, and token, but not type, persons have some specific height and weight. Nobody expects, or requires, that the average voter casts his vote at any particular voting station, or that economic man has a certain weight or appetite. The type-token distinction by itself does not establish Cassam's conclusion. If we ask what is needed, beyond the type-token distinction, to provide that conclusion and the conflict with Kant, the answer indicates other problems in Cassam's argument. It seems to rest additionally on an empiricist assumption that what we understand by the relevant type must depend on an understanding of its empirical tokens. Kant's requirements are typically holistic, so that the most general aspects of experience and their specific realizations are for him mutually related, even though his primary interest is in the way the most general aspects of experience determine the

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most specific. That direction of interest is expressed in the identification of the general a priori conditions of the possibility of experience and is used against an exclusive empiricist interest in the other direction. It is not clear whether Cassam accepts a similar mutual dependence between types and tokens, but his insistence on the priority of tokens over their types suggests that for him it is a one-way, empiricist dependence of type on token. It would be natural for an empiricist to interpret the type-token distinction as one between abstract objects and items presented direcdy to the senses, it cannot be the basis of an adequate criticism of Kant. It was noted earlier that the distinction can be applied both to abstract and other objects; and Kant's position in insisting on the dependence of empirical tokens on a priori categories is a consciously antiempiricist view. To make that empiricist assumption in criticizing Kant is evidently to beg the question against him. 19 Two conclusions can be drawn from these difficulties. Not only is Cassam's type-token apparatus inadequate for all abstract concepts and for Kant's particular a priori cases, but also if that empiricist requirement is thought to be an essential part of any type-token distinction, then Cassam's use of that distinction begs the question against Kant. It was noted earlier that Kant's thesis, which singles out thinking or attention as a salient property for his transcendental account, is quite compatible with Cassam's appeal to other, physical properties such as embodiment. Nor is it difficult to see why Kant places such an emphasis on features such as thinking and attention rather than physical characteristics. It is that the mental characteristics of persons are what distinguish persons from inanimate objects. It is perfectly correct to accept this claim without falling into a Cartesian idealism. It is perfectly possible for Kant to insist on this, and make his transcendental appeal to a pure, abstract apperception, and to accept Cassam's different but compatible emphasis on physical properties. Both apperception and embodiment might be necessary conditions of our experience and conception of the self. Cassam's thesis might reasonably be seen as targeted at Descartes, but it is not, for the reasons given, aimed properly at Kant. Indeed it may be that Cassam makes his criticisms just because he ascribes to Kant a basic Cartesian position. What has been said so far indicates that this is a misunderstanding. Kant might think it right to abstract from, and disregard, those bodily aspects for the purpose of identifying his a priori condition of experience. He does not deny that we are embodied objects among others in the world but still thinks it important to abstract from this in identifying his claimed a priori transcendental condition. Nor is that transcendental claim a commitment to a Cartesian self of a purely and exclusively mental kind. The transcendental reference to a pure a priori apperception is not a reference to some "thing," some object identifiable either in

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experience or beyond it. 20 The whole of Kant's discussion in the Paralogisms and throughout the Dialectic is designed precisely to guard against, and avoid, such an inference. If Cassam's independent arguments establish that those references to physical features are also necessary, and are at least implicit in our understanding of thinking and attention, then there is no reason for Kant to disagree (A3 59-360, A362-362). Despite these handicaps in Cassam's central criticisms of Kant it would still be possible for him to reject Kant's claim about that necessary personal condition of possible experience, and he has a short argument to show that Kant's conception of the unity of consciousness is not necessary for our experience and recognition of our identity. The argument is based on McDowell's idea that persons are "objective continuants," and claims that recognition of this by a person is sufficient for consciousness of one's own identity (1998, 164). It is assumed that objective continuants are physical and if that recognition is sufficient then the claim is that Kant's different requirement cannot be necessary The evident fault in this argument is that on the account just given Kant's requirement of a unity of consciousness is already built into the situation. For that situation is described as one in which "one is aware of one's experiences as belonging to the career of such a continuant." It is difficult to see how that could be true without the subject's having the requisite Kantian unity of consciousness in that awareness. It is easy to see why Cassam overlooks the point. It is because he interprets Kant's requirement not merely as that of a "unity of consciousness" in such experiences, but as "being able to think the identity of the form of consciousness in an 'I think' instance." It is hard to know what this means, and Kant does not, so far as I know, ever use such an expression even in the account of transcendental apperception in the Deduction. Cassam understands that complicated formula for Kant's condition of a unity of consciousness so that it is vulnerable to the objection that it requires the ability to "do the philosophy of one's situation."21 With that understanding it is clearly unrealistic to suppose that such a condition is required for "consciousness of self-identity in the ordinary sense." Ordinary people have a consciousness of their identity but would generally deny any understanding of what it is to "do the philosophy of one's situation." There is no good reason to understand Kant in those terms. I summarize the outcome by considering three possible accounts of Kant's position and express them in terms of the grammatically misleading expression "transcendental subject." That term, like the corresponding account of "transcendental object" in chapters 15.1.2 and 24 is to be understood as a step in the progress towards an erroneous hypostatization of the purely formal, abstract, condition of possible experience marked legitimately by "transcendental apperception."

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(1) Transcendental subjects are not objects in our world, but are hidden, occult, Wittgensteinian "hocus pocus" objects in some other transcendent world of noumena or things in themselves. (2) Transcendental subjects are just general type-subjects, and abstract types are not "objects" in the world though they are necessarily dependent on their token a posteriori realizations in the world and on relevant indexed features of the latter. (3) The notion of a transcendental subject is simply an abstract, and potentially misleading, expression for a fundamental a priori condition of our experience, namely, a unity of thinking. It envisages that modally complex B132 condition of experience as an integrated, indeterminate, unity attached to thinking in general; it does not designate any presented object in experience, or any postulated object beyond it. Of these I think that Cassam rightiy rejects (1). He accepts (2), but thinks it incompatible with other Kantian claims about the a priori, antiempiricist status of "transcendental apperception." He does not consider (3) except as a version of the "abstraction" thesis in (2) which he takes to be either incoherent or platitudinous. My view, and I believe Allison's, is that Kant holds neither (1) nor (2) but (3), and that (3) is no more platitudinous or incoherent than any positive claim about what makes our experience possible, or any negative therapeutic claim which denies the concept of a transcendental subject a genuine designation. (1) misconstrues the concept as designative and transcendent and takes a full step towards the errors of rational psychology. (2) misconstrues it as a mere generalization from the a posteriori circumstances of thinking or uttering, and without some independent ground for its empiricism it begs the question against Kant. (3) endorses the third of Kant's classifications of what is legitimately transcendental instead of what is merely empirical, or immanent (2), or what is transcendent (1). (3) neither denies, nor requires the denial of, empirical persons as objects among others in the physical world. It does not express or require Cassam's exclusion thesis for empirical selves, and is even compatible with the necessity of their being physical. The point is underlined by Cassam's concluding representation of the exclusion thesis. He implies that Kant was misled into thinking that: "self consciousness has nothing to do with a concrete sense of the presented subject of one's thoughts, experiences, and sensations, as a physical object among other physical objects in the world" (1998, 170). There is no reason to think that for Kant empirical self-consciousness has "nothing to do" with that concrete sense. Transcendental self-consciousness, as a condition of our empirical experience, must also

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have something to do with that conscious experience even though its relation to that a posteriori experience is less direct. It does not designate any identifiable object in that experience, but, if Kant is right, it expresses a condition which makes that experience possible. Nor does Kant assert the "independent intelligibility" thesis. It is a requirement for him that any concepts, even pure a priori categories, have their "full" meaning only in conjunction with intuition and a possible realization in experience.

3. Immunity to Error through Misidentification In recent philosophy the doctrine of "immunity to error through misidentification" (IEM) has been widely accepted for judgments such as those involving demonstrative, especially first person singular, references. It has come to be thought that IEM explains some of Kant's claims about the self, especially those expressed with the first person pronoun in the "cogito" form, "I think." I shall claim that IEM has no more than a trivial connection with Kant's views, but also that the doctrine itself is radically unclear. Some indication of the first point can be given by noting that the doctrine typically applies to particular judgments or thoughts, that is to occasions on which a demonstrative reference is actually or tacidy made, while Kant's appeals to the transcendental subject and the "I think," are abstract and general rather than particular and occurrent.22 When Kant talks transcendentally about the "I think," or the " I " by itself, he is not referring to, or generalizing over, particular occasions in which those expressions are actually used. Nor, if the previous argument is correct, does Kant merely refer to type-uses of "I," or to persons construed as types. That IEM is a radically unclear doctrine can be indicated by considering the different ways in which it has been expressed and understood. I consider six accounts, from Shoemaker, Strawson, Evans, Hamilton, Campbell, and Rosenthal, in order to underline those divergences. (1) Shoemaker 1968: "To say that a statement 'a is F' is subject to error through misidentification relative to a term 'a' means that the following is possible: the speaker knows some particular thing to be F but makes the mistake of asserting £a is F' because, and only because, he mistakenly thinks that the thing he knows to be F is what 'a' refers to." (2) Strawson (1966a, 165-66): "When a man (a subject of experience) ascribes a current or directly remembered state of consciousness to himself, no use whatever of any criteria of personal identity is required to justify his use of the pronoun T to refer to the subject

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of the experience. It would make no sense to think or say: 'This inner experience is occurring but is it occurring to me*' . . . There is nothing that one can thus encounter or recall in the field of inner experience such that there can be any question of one's applying criteria of subject-identity to determine whether the encountered or recalled experience belongs—to oneself—or to someone else." (3) Evans 1982, 189-90, criticizes Shoemaker's account in (1) and prefers to provide his own account in terms of "identification freedom" (without inference) (IF) and "identification dependence" (with inference) (ID): A judgment is IF if it is based on a way of knowing such that it doesn't make sense for the subject to utter "Something is F but is it a that is F?" when the first component expresses knowledge which the subject doesn't think he has, or may have gained, in any other way. (4) Hamilton 1995, 332-49: "An assertion 'I am F or T F-ed' is IEM iff the justification the subject would offer for it is such that, if they subsequently come reasonably to doubt the assertion, no matter what the cause, it will be senseless for them to cite the original justification as a reason for claiming that nonetheless someone is F or F-ed." (5) John Campbell 1997, 69ff, rejects Evans's appeal to "identification dependence" as involving an inference, but gives the following example: If I judge "That (hifi) speaker is in front of me" it cannot ordinarily be the case that I say that because some speaker is in front of me but I've made a mistake about which. (6) David Rosenthal 2003, 325-52: "When I have a conscious pain I cannot erroneously think that the individual who has the pain is somebody that could be distinct from me, though I can be wrong about who it is I am. One can't be wrong about whether the individual that seems to be in pain is the same as the one for whom the pain is conscious, since the HOT (higher order thought) in virtue of which the pain is conscious in effect represents it as belonging to the individual who thinks that HOT." 2 3 Some criteria, Evans's, Campbell's and Rosenthal's, were devised in order to reject or modify other versions, such as Shoemaker's, but independently of that it would be surprising if the results of applying these criteria turned out to be the same. Even if they did produce the same result they seem to point in different directions, and respond to different motives. (1) makes no specific mention of pronouns or criteria, or a general inference to "Something is F," and relies on appeal to what is "possible or

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impossible" rather than what is meaningful or meaningless. (2) is confined to the personal pronoun, covers both current and recalled experiences, appeals to criteria of personal identity in using that pronoun, and to what "makes sense." (3) turns on the distinction between judgments based on an inference (inference-dependent, ID), and others not so based (inference-free, IF), and relies on the notions of "a way of knowing" and of "making sense." It has the distinctive feature that it requires the subject to be conscious of his "way of knowing" insofar as he doesn't think he has the knowledge in "any other way." (4) allows a subject to offer a justification for the judgment, and so perhaps to appeal to "criteria," and considers whether inference to "Something is F" "makes sense" in the light of the offered justification if the original claim is doubted. That criterion has the consequence that an IEM use of some expression depends not just on the expression, or the circumstances of its use, but on the kind of justification that a subject might offer. Other criteria, such as (2) and (3), rest their case not on any justification but on the contrary idea that justification is inappropriate. (5) rejects Evans's criteria in terms of the distinction between ID and IF judgments, and specifically appeals not to personal cases, but to immediate spatial location, and what "cannot ordinarily be the case." (6) relies on a distinction between " I " references and a "battery of contingent properties" associated with self-knowledge, and is critical of the IEM doctrine, which is described as "thin" and "wholly trivial." The doctrine may be defended by claiming that there is a common element in all or most of the accounts which can easily be identified and accepted. I briefly summarize some such versions. (I) Ordinarily we have no problem about recognizing ourselves as an integrated unity at a time and over time. This is plainly true but falls short of the claims which limit the possibility or meaningfulness of what might be called a "disintegration" of the self. Severe psychotic mental conditions, multiple personality, perception-, thought-, or memory-, transfer might all be invoked to indicate degrees of failure in that ordinary situation. It is at least not obvious that these deviant cases are really impossible or meaningless. They make it necessary to qualify the account by invoking "normality" and some discussions, such as (3) and (5), do while others, such as (1) and (2), do not. Nor does the above claim, as it stands, indicate any difference between this case of ordinarily unproblematic judgment and hosts of others, not confined to referential cases, where the circumstances are immediately and transparentiy obvious. The doctrine would presumably be less interesting if it merely insisted on such evident and transparent cases. The wider case of recognizing one's

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identity over time is evidendy more complex and more vulnerable.24 Kant at least avoids that kind of triviality by renouncing talk of particular occasions of self-knowledge and attempting instead to identify an ancestral, personal condition for all knowledge. (II) There is no possibility of reference failure if a speaker succeeds in using the first person pronoun. This version might, with a suitable account of the meaning of demonstrative expressions such as "I," claim additionally the strict meaninglessness of such demonstrative uses if they turn out to fail, but is open to the objection that it yields only analytic truth. The claim cannot, after all, guarantee that any utterance of the first person pronoun in some language is always "successful." "Success" in public contexts of utterance is not uniquely associated with, or in the control of, the speaker but involves an audience as well. A good deal of background material about what it is to be a genuine "speaker" with an appropriate knowledge of a language and its uses, and the dismissal of possible faults in the situation, would have to be built into the claim to make it acceptable at all. If a ticket machine were programmed to "say" "I can't accept that coin" we would be reluctant to invoke IEM for that use of the pronoun, but the suspicion is that there is no way of excluding the possibility without making the claim analytic. Public contexts with an audience have to be excluded and a sheaf of background assumptions about the "speaker" has to be included. Another difficulty arises from the dubious assimilation of public utterances of " I " and a subject's private thoughts. Public uses of " I " in discourse are evidendy motivated differendy from private thoughts and have to meet different standards. It is not at all clear that the conditions governing public utterance of demonstratives apply just as much to thinking. It is worth noting that while (I) is directed towards epistemology, (II) is directed towards speech acts and discourse. (III) Subjects, persons, are in the best possible position to recognize and express their identity; philosophical skepticism about this is consequently idle and misplaced. In the accounts there is some ambiguity between offering a descriptive account of self-knowledge, or uses of "I," and offering an account as a specific against skepticism. The expression IEM suggests a Cartesian certainty or incorrigibility against skeptical doubt and some criteria appeal to the notion of "justification," but most of the adherents deny Cartesian tendencies. Evans insists that the phenomenon would be better characterized

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as "identity irrelevance" rather than as immunity to error. His view is not that there is some guaranteed certainty in the phenomenon, but that neither "identification/misidentification" nor "justification" are appropriate in the context. Yet he also distinguishes identifying particulars via an identity inference in ID judgments and simply identifying them by thinking of them in IF judgments. Some accounts such as (3) and (4) involve reference to a "way of knowing," which points to an antiskeptical motive. Evans's own "regress" arguments in support of IEM have this ambiguity. They establish the primacy of IF judgments on the ground that if we could not make them, then either we could not make any demonstrative claims, or we could not genuinely know their truth, or believe, or understand them. These are all different claims with different degrees of acceptability. Even if a skeptic insists that we can only believe, but not know the truth of, IF judgments this would not prevent their being made or understood. (IV) IEM marks some truth about our recognition of our own identity, but it is trivial and without philosophical significance. Rosenthal's discussion is one of the few which expresses general skepticism about IEM. That skepticism is expressed in his belief that despite the doctrine's having some truth it is "wholly trivial." He emphasizes that a relevant higher order thought (HOT), such as "I'm in pain," conflicts with the thought that it w-not, or might not be, me, and puts the point in bothw&ys. The argument for these conclusions appeals to the fact that the HOT itself offers no other way of identifying the subject of the pain, even though there are other ways available to the thinker in what Rosenthal calls the "barrage of contingent properties." Even in this case the upshot of the claim remains unclear. Does it underline an extreme improbability of failing to recognize oneself, a pragmatic defect in both affirming something of oneself and expressing the possibility of its being false, an analytic impossibility, or the obscurity in the context of the phrase "failing to recognize oneself'? I think Rosenthal is correct to regard the appeal to IEM as "thin" and "wholly trivial," but even he leaves some ambiguity in what it expresses. The ambiguities involved in such claims are not confined merely to the formulation of the criterion, but concern also the nature of the point that is being made. Sometimes it is an antiskeptical epistemic point about genuine knowledge, sometimes a description of a thought process, sometimes a claim about a priority for certain noninferential uses of expressions, sometimes a claim about semantic or pragmatic success, sometimes a point about the self and self-knowledge or self-ascription, sometimes a general point about demonstratives, and sometimes a point about the first person pronoun. Though it is easy to see that something distinctive about one's

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immediate view of oneself is the target of the various criteria, it is difficult to see that there is any clear, acceptable core claim throughout all of them. The strongest case for some form of IEM would be made in providing a definitive semantic theory for demonstratives, such as that offered by Evans, but it is not yet established and its primary application will presumably be to public utterances rather than private thought. Descartes's appeal to the cogito was intended as a characterization of the same target and it is hard to avoid the suspicion that IEM reflects a residual commitment to a Cartesian view. Both Kant and the advocates of IEM would deny such a commitment and claim in their different ways to identify what is correct in Descartes's original claim. Kant differs from both Descartes and the advocates of IEM in one important respect. Both IEM and Descartes's view are about occasions of self-knowledge or self-reference and the semantics of demonstratives, while Kant's transcendental account is not. Kant does not attach a Cartesian certainty to occasions of utterance or thinking, but formulates the complex modal claim about personal unity at B132 as a metaphysical condition for any viable experience. The point was put earlier by emphasizing the transcendental significance of apperception or of the transcendental " I " in Kant's claim. Kant talks not of occurrent uses of "I think" but of the claim that it must be really possible for that prefix to accompany a subject's representations in a full, determinate experience. This is like saying that it is a condition for the game of chess that it must be possible to win. Such a claim is about winning, and about its significance as a condition for the playing of actual games, but it would evidently be a mistake to think that it refers to, or generalizes over, any actual wins or games. It makes no more of a reference to particular players and games than Euclidean points do to particular physical locations. To regard "transcendental apperception" or "transcendental self' as a designation of some particular object is a mistake of the same kind, which Kant's therapy aims to correct. It echoes Wittgenstein's criticism of a tendency to "find the substance behind the substantive" (1958, 1). Transcendental appeals to "I think," or to winning as a condition of playing chess, are not totally insulated from the empirical occasions on which these items are actually manifested, but there is an evident distinction between them. The "winning" condition would not be satisfied in practice without actual games and actual wins, but the condition itself does not identify any actual occurrences or report their features. In a similar way transcendental apperception is anchored in immanent experience, and can be illustrated empirically in numerous ways, but it refers to no specific occasions of self-recognition or self-reference. The required unity of consciousness and its role as a condition of experience are too abstract and indeterminate to make such a reference.

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Kant himself notes the point and implicidy draws that distinction at B422n, B428, and A117n. There he refers to empirical uses of "I think" and distinguishes them from what he elsewhere calls his "transcendental" and "problematic" account (A355). Even Cassam, who rejects Kant's view as he understands it, recognizes some of the special character of Kant's transcendental move to a general abstract condition for experience, but he takes that move to involve no more than a step from token individuals or their utterances to the corresponding types. I have argued that that model is inappropriate especially if the tokens and types refer to "persons" and are understood in a non-Kantian, empiricist way. Transcendental apperception indicates not persons as such but their essential, thinking capacity and its required unity. "Transcendental apperception," like "transcendental subject/object," properly signifies neither token nor type persons but a required unity of thought in persons. They point in two directions to a noumenal self which Kant rejects and to an immanent condition of possible experience which Kant accepts. Kant's philosophical therapy, like Wittgenstein's, is designed to correct that misunderstanding.25

[26] The Mathematical Antinomies

T h e Antinomies may be regarded as the central examples of Kant's Dialectic therapy. They were what, in a letter to Garve, awoke Kant from his "dogmatic slumbers" (Ak. 12.252, 258), a claim repeated more obliquely at B434 and B452. They were the issues which Kant later thought might usefully have introduced the work if he were rewriting it. As the central conflicts of reason with itself, their resolution forms the major stimulus to that critique of pure reason which prompts Kant's reassessment of the roles of sensibility and understanding, and the illusory "subreption" of sense and reason. That resolution promises to provide the criteria which distinguish legitimate and illegitimate transcendental principles for which Kant had asked in the prefaces, and which generated the "mock battles" and futile disputes requiring a radical reform of philosophy (B452, B492). Although the conflicts arise from other disciplines and are not purely philosophical quaestiones domesticae, they are not normally matters of common sense interest (B508; chapter 11.2). Yet the Antinomies contain much of the same material and apparatus which is found elsewhere in the Dialectic. Kant continues to insist, with some provisos, on the architectonic structure of dialectical illusion, and on the basic ambiguities which exemplify it and point to the unmasking of "subreption" (B536). The machinery of the "totality" of a series and of its "unconditioned unity" plays the most obvious role in these disagreements. There is some additional apparatus, such as the distinction between "analytic" and "dialectic" opposition (B530-32), and some initial deployment of the fundamental contrast between "constitutive" and "regulative" principles which finally resolves the issues in the Dialectic Appendix (B670ff). That apparatus goes back to the distinction between the two principles I and I I noted in chapter 24.1.3. There are the same references to skepticism and dogmatism, and the same contrast between a valuable "skeptical method" and a futile "skepticism" (B451-52, B513-14, B519, B535, B490ff). 661

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Throughout the discussion of these issues Kant reaffirms the higherorder character of his interest in the conflicts. His role is to act as impartial umpire or judge in the disputes and not to participate in them as an advocate of one or other side as a legislator (B451-452). It has been claimed that these issues refer back to an earlier eighteenth-century recognition of apparently insoluble conflicts in "la querelle des anciens et modernes."1 The suggestion is that whereas in the pre-Critical period Kant engaged in the issue with the idea of establishing the correctness of one side or the other, in the Critique the attitude has changed. Now the aim is neutrally to understand and explain the reason for the apparent insolubility, and to determine, in a higher order fashion, whether that appearance is correct (B452; B609). Kant's resolution confirms that it is correct, so that in the first two "mathematical" Antinomies both thesis and antithesis are allowed to be false, while in the "dynamic" Antinomies both thesis and antithesis are allowed to be true. It is here above all that Kant insists on the inevitability of the illusion and, like Wittgenstein, softens the criticism of those who had succumbed to it.2 It is here that Kant insists on the "transcendental idealist" resolution of the problems he faced, and represents the discussion as an "indirect" confirmation of the transcendental idealism "directiy" established in the Aesthetic. The two central issues are first that of understanding the debates and Kant's disentangling of their structure, and second the implications for Kant's overall account of transcendental idealism. I separate the discussion, first, of the two mathematical Antinomies, and in the next chapter of the "dynamic" third Antinomy. The fourth Antinomy is included in a later discussion of the Ideal. I consider in section 1 the architectonic structure, in 2 the formal proofs, in 3 Kant's resolution, and in 4 transcendental idealism.

1. The Architectonic Structure It is customary to complain that Kant's arguments are over-influenced by his demand for an architectonic system, expressed at B502 as "Human reason is by its nature architectonic." Reason for him is orderly and "transparent," not in being part of a Cartesian mind open to direct introspection, but in being linked to logic and its self evidence.3 Kant consequently associates the three major sections of the Dialectic with three forms of logical inference, categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive syllogisms, but he now modifies this guide with respect to the Antinomies, which are now said to rest on an "analogy" with hypothetical syllogisms (B432). This makes the guideline less rigid, and puts more emphasis on Kant's notion of a "condition" and the relation between "conditioned" and the "unconditioned."

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That general relation governs all four Antinomies under the heads of "composition," "division," "origination," and "dependence" (A 415-16, B443). These architectonic headings, and their subsumption under the apparatus of "series," "unity," "totality," and an "absolutely unconditioned" completeness, are not totally opaque. The two mathematical Antinomies, for example, concern "objects" conceived either on a large scale as "the world" or on the smaller scale of individual objects and their ultimate constituents, but the underlying terminology is still open to ambiguities noted in chapter 24. Although the point trades to some degree on the vagueness of the "unconditioned" all the Antinomies concern beliefs, and disputes, about some "absolute" basis (a Grund) which might be said to be "unconditioned." Appeal to such a metaphysical Grund has been considered before, especially in relation to Eberhard's views in chapter 22, and is well expressed in Leibniz's "On the Ultimate Origination of Things" (1973, 136-37; 1875-1890, 7.302-8). For the dominant unity of the universe not only rules the world but also constructs or makes it: It is higher than the world and, if I may so put it, extramundane; it is the ultimate reason of things. . . . From this it is evident that even by supposing the world to be eternal we cannot escape the ultimate, extramundane reason of things, or God. And so we must pass from physical or hypothetical necessity, which determines the subsequent things of the world by the earlier, to something which is of absolute and metaphysical necessity, for which no reason can be given.

The issue is considered again in chapter 29, but Kant's discussion in the Antinomies is opposed to Leibniz's view and should be read in conjunction with Kant's dismissal of monadology in the Amphiboly and the criticisms of Eberhard. But it is easy to see how Leibniz's "material" view of the underlying inner, monadic core of objects of experience is echoed in Kant's "formal" account. Kant replaces an extra-mundane, theological, and transcendent Grund for the world with an immanent, secular, and formal description of the governing conditions of our possible experience. He replaces Leibniz's "absolute" conceptions of "substance" and "inner properties" with his own immanent "comparative" conceptions.4 The "unconditioned" stands as a cipher for the inchoate wish on the part of reason for completeness in some final explanation of the world, but its exact specification is left deliberately vague at the start since the theses and antitheses take different views about it. It concerns some account of series, of activities or procedures under "synthesis," and of their "completeness" or "completion." Reason is said to be impelled, in virtue of its systematic and orderly aspirations, towards the Ideas of an unconditioned in the totality of certain series, and so of their "completeness." The mathematical Antinomies

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target our conceptions of the whole physical world and of its ultimate constituents as providing such complete, final explanations.5 At the start these conceptions have all the ambiguities noted earlier between different types of series and different conceptions of completeness. These might turn out to be faults in Kant's account but may in the end do no more than herald ambiguities in the key notions of a "world," "completeness," and "ultimate grounds" through which Kant resolves the conflicts. Interpretative disagreements have arisen over these uncertainties and still other disagreements have arisen over the character of the formal proofs. Sometimes they are taken to be Kant's own arguments rather than examples of dogmatic reasoning about which he has a principled doubt, and sometimes they are taken to be scientific rather than dogmatic metaphysical arguments.6 The problem is to understand the drive for completeness, and to disentangle what Kant takes to be legitimate and illegitimate interpretations of it. Identification of the four conflicts may seem understandable in terms of what it includes but arbitrary in terms of its exclusion of other conflicts. It is not clear why other apparendy unresolvable conflicts in philosophy should be excluded but Kant says that there are just four Antinomies, "no more and no less" (B490). It might be asked why traditional debates between realist and idealist, or realist and nominalist, empiricist and rationalist, and others do not yield such antinomies. One distinctive feature of the actual issues is their origin in nonphilosophical disciplines, such as physics, theology, morality, and the law, but that feature holds also for the Paralogisms and the Ideal.7 We have to take it that although the given Antinomies can be understood within the framework of Kant's architectonic of reason it remains unclear why these are included and others omitted.

2. The Formal Proofs All four "proofs" of thesis and antithesis in the mathematical Antinomies follow the indirect procedure of assuming the opposite of what is to be proved, and then showing that it yields a contradiction. This is a natural corollary of Kant's view that the proponents on each side gain their advantages only by criticizing the other.8 I first summarize them briefly and then comment on some of their features. First Antinomy. Thesis-. The world has a beginning in time and is limited in space. Proof On the assumption that the world has no beginning in time, it follows that no particular point in time, now, could have been

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attained without having passed through an infinite period of time. That is impossible, so the world must have a beginning. Similarly for the world's being spatially infinite. This can be grasped only through a successive synthesis of its spatially infinite extent, the completion of which is impossible. The assumption of spatial infinity is therefore false, and the world must be spatially bounded. Antithesis'. The world has no beginning in time, and no limit in space. Proof. If we assume that the world has a beginning, then it follows that its origin must have been preceded by an empty time. This would make it impossible for anything to happen, since an empty time provides no distinguishing feature to determine any point at which something might begin to exist. Particular series, events, in the world can begin but the world itself cannot. For the spatial issue we may assume that the world is finite but enclosed within an infinite space. Such an account takes the world to be both in space and separately related to it, but this is impossible. The world must encompass everything and cannot be separately related to a space outside it. Second Antinomy. Thesis'. Every composite substance is made up of simple parts; only what is simple exists. Proof If we assume that composite substances are not made up of simple parts, then it follows that to remove all composition in thought is to leave nothing. Either it is impossible to remove all composition in thought, or after that removal something remains which is not itself composite. In the former case the composite is not made up of substances, but this contradicts the assumption, and leaves only the claim that there must be simples. Reason, consequendy must accept simples as the primary substances out of which everything is composed. Antithesis'. No composite is made up of simple parts, and no simples exist. Proof If we assume that a composite is made up of simple parts, this mereological relation is possible only in space. In that case space must be made up of as many parts as are in the composite, but space is composed not of simple parts but of spaces. It follows that the simple must occupy space and be composite, but then simples must be composed of substances which is impossible. In addition we

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cannot establish anything "absolutely simple" through perception, inner or outer. That conception must be a mere "Idea" with no demonstrable objective reality and no explanation for appearances, in the absence of any reference to possible experience. The first point banishes the "simple" from intuition; the second from the whole of nature.

2.1. Comments on the Formal Proofs The above abbreviations give little indication of the scholastic pedantry of the full versions which rehearse ideas and arguments which would have been familiar to philosophers of the time. The reference, and standard hostility, to Leibnizian monadology in the second Antinomy provides an overt example of that background and is referred to at B470. The addendum to the antithesis of the second Antinomy assumes something of Kant's own doctrines about the limitation of objective reality to what is intuitable in possible experience, but it is not obvious that this outiines his own views rather than merely records what would be a natural resource in favor of the antithesis. Some arguments are difficult, even impossible, to sympathize with now, and may be regarded as no more than the metaphysical wordplay and mock fights which are deplored in the preface and motivate Kant's projected reform of philosophy. In some respects the proofs and their conclusions provide puzzles which can be given a contemporary sense, but neither the proofs nor the observations should be assumed to represent Kant's own views. His views are given primarily in the resolution of the conflicts which turns on the inadequacies of, and ambiguities in, the formal proofs. Kant's central point is that although the proofs may seem adequate to establish their conclusions this is only an illusion. The real issues about the origins of the physical universe and the basic particles of matter belong to empirical science and cannot be resolved by an a priori, dogmatic metaphysics.9 I note summarily the following issues arising from the proofs. (1) Kant is sometimes said to claim that the arguments for theses and antitheses are both valid, and this has raised queries about their status. In fact Kant claims that their "grounds are equally valid and necessary" (B529) but also that like the Paralogisms they suffer from a radical but informal fallacy of ambiguity (B528-29). But at B529 he says: "they failed to support their contentions by valid grounds of proof," and at B535: "the proofs are not merely baseless deceptions; if appearances were things in themselves the proofs would be well grounded." These comments are not necessarily confused and contradictory. Arguments might, with a verbal proviso,10 be said to be equally valid or well grounded without being either strictly valid or sound. Kant holds that they are equally plausible and even

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valid under one interpretation of their central terms but are, like the Paralogisms, informally invalid once their fundamental ambiguities are recognized. There is no great difficulty in locating faults or puzzles in the arguments. (2) The proof of the thesis of the first Antinomy rests on the claim that if the world had no beginning then it would be impossible to arrive at any point in its later development. The case is vulnerable at two points. First, it rests on an ambiguity between the location of a member of an infinite series and some process, notional or not, of arriving at some point from the beginning. Members of an ordered mathematically infinite series may be located at a point in it without having to suppose an infinite progress from its beginning. That location may not be identifiable as the determinately ftth member of the series but only in terms of a determinate decision for any other member whether it is smaller, or larger, than the given member. Perhaps that is the central point in the proof of the thesis, but it allows an equivocation between the mathematical and the physical contexts of which, as I note later, Kant himself is righdy critical. Second, that equivocation matches the noted ambiguity between the "completeness" and the "completion" of a sequence, if the latter is, but the former is not, construed as a process. The point underlines the claim that the proofs are not straightforwardly Kant's but arguments supposed to be typically canvassed by dogmatic philosophers.11 (3) Both Bennett and Strawson criticize the proof as "plainly invalid," but their interpretation of it is questionable. They represent it as arguing from the "completion" of the series of world-states, now reached, to a beginning state by means of a reductio. The assumption is that the series is completed at that former point, t 1? but is infinite. The aim is then to argue that with a terminus at tj it cannot be the case both that the series is infinite and has a first member. If both claims were true, then the series, impossibly, would be infinite but have both terminal start- and endpoints. The thesis then argues that some assumption must be rejected and chooses to reject "The series is infinite" to reach the conclusion that it must have a first member. That argument is formally flawed since we could instead reject other assumptions, such as "The series has a first member" or "The series is completed at t j . " The required conclusion could then not only not be derived but is actually contradicted in the first option. So understood, the thesis argument is blatandy flawed, but it might be represented differently as: 1. The PU has no determinate origin. (Assumption) 2. The physical Universe (PU) is (now) at t r (Self-evident) 3. The PU is finiteQ in the direction of its origin. (From 2)

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4. 1 & - 1 (from 1 and 3) 5. Reject 1 by reductio from 4. Although still invalid, the argument is not so absurd as the one originally suggested. It disambiguates the notion of an infinite series in the two directions of its beginning and end, and it does not arbitrarily reject assumptions in favor of the preferred option. At the crucial point, 5, the only other assumptions which could be rejected are 2, which may be taken as undeniable, and 3, which carries the weight of the argument. The step from 2 to 3 plainly rests on the ambiguity noted earlier between location of a position as the determinately ^th point in the sequence or just as a "now" between earlier and later points. It appeals to the intuitive difficulty of understanding how we could be located at our present point without a finite sequence from a starting point, but that is the problem. It cannot be solved by disregarding the ambiguity. (4) In the second part of the proof of the antithesis in the first Antinomy there is a "category" argument, importantly endorsed by Kant later at B5 30 in his defense of Zeno, which allows us to talk of beginnings or spatial bounds of items in the world, but not of the world as a whole itself. Kant's dialectical therapy certainly consists of correcting category mistakes, but such arguments are open to the objection that not all such transfers of properties between categories are illegitimate. We cannot infer from some man's being heavy that the set of men is heavy, but we can describe individuals in an economy, and the economy as a whole, as relatively rich. In general a mere difference of category is suggestive but not decisive. What is needed additionally is some ground for thinking that in this case the transfer of those temporal and spatial properties from items in the world to the world itself is illegitimate. Kant evidently recognizes the point in his own resolution, for he seeks to explain the illegitimacy in this case through the transfer from a mundus phaenomenon of appearances to a mundus intelligibilis of transcendent things in themselves. This is for Kant the central category mistake in the Dialectic but it is not quite what contemporary philosophers understand by that notion. A contemporary, Rylean insistence on such a category mistake would disallow even an empirical cosmology, but Kant's version disallows only a transcendent, rational cosmology. (5) In the proof of the antithesis Kant makes a tacit reference to an issue from the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence about God's needing a sufficient reason to act. The suggestion in the proof is that God could have no sufficient reason to institute the world from an empty time since each such time is the same as every other. That might be thought objectionable on the ground that, for all we know, God might not be so constrained or might have other motives or grounds for such action. But without that

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Leibnizian background the point could also be taken to show that there can be no physical/causal explanation for the beginning since there would be in empty time no material factor to set it off. Commentators have noted that this establishes only that we cannot explain the origin, and not that it doesn't have one, but in Kant's context that distinction is blurred (Strawson 1966a, 178). If all genuine explanations are phenomenal and the event has no phenomenal explanation this limits the character and value of the claim that it has a determinate origin. It entails an appeal to a transcendent, extra-mundane explanation of the Leibnizian kind, quoted above, which Kant rejects as spurious. (6) In the proof of the thesis of the second Antinomy Kant has a thought experiment of "removing in thought all composition" from the assumed composite substances not made up of simples. The thought experiment is not clear, but the argument is that either the removal in thought is impossible, or else there must be simples. The argument claims that in the former case the composites would not be made up of substances, and composition would then be only an accidental feature of persistent, self-subsistent things. Clearly much turns on the notion of "substance," but it is at least not obvious that being a persistent, selfsubsistent thing, even if not composed of substances, is incompatible with being a substance. A scholastic rationalism might require that genuine substances,12 if composite, be composed of simple substances, but it is hard to see why we should accept this, and if it is accepted then the proof appears to beg the question. This is evidendy one point at which the scholastic rationalist background has an influence but of a deeply unclear kind. (7) In the proof of the antithesis of the second Antinomy the argument associates composition with spatial composition, and then draws a distinction between simples which occupy a space and parts of space which compose a larger space. It is said to follow that simples, as occupiers of space, must themselves be composite substances and that this is impossible. The argument rests on the assumption that whatever occupies space must be composite since the space it occupies is composite. Strawson's objection to this is that we might take composite material bodies to be composed of unextended point particles which "occupy" a space but do not "fill" it, just as a passenger may uniquely occupy a railway carriage but not fill the carriage (Strawson 1966a, 184). Both points are dubious since, first, the notion of unextended point particles of which physical objects are composed is questionable. Even if the mathematics of some physical theories represents its objects as unextended points, this is the kind of "idealizing reason" which Kant holds responsible for the Antinomies' illusions, and part of the "mathematical trickery" complained of in the observation on the second Antinomy (B497; B467, B452-53). It is an essential part of Kant's therapy that we should clearly distinguish the formal mathematical

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appeals to series, to ordering members of series, and to their termini from their physical analogues. The second point, with the railway carriage analogy, is also dubious. In the railway analogy we may say that the passenger uniquely "occupies" the carriage, because he is the only passenger in it, but he won't normally be the only physical object in it, and the proof requires that the space he uniquely occupies is not the carriage but the space which his surface encloses. A better objection is that the inference from "having spatial parts" to "being composite" is dubious on the ground that "being composite" is ambiguous. It might mean (a) "being spatially extended," that is, "having spatial parts," or (b) "being physically divisible," or (c) "having spatial parts which are themselves distinct physical units." Neither (a) nor (c) entail (b), and neither (a) nor (b) entail (c). But if "composite" means no more than (a), that is "having spatial parts," then the assumption made at the start of the proof is analytically true for physical objects, and can't be reduced to impossibility as the proof requires. It is clear that the "proofs" are by no means watertight, but Kant evidentiy did not think that they were and was not prepared to accept them at face value. Since the basic point of his project is to resolve the apparent conflicts in the conclusions by claiming that the proofs are fundamentally flawed, it is less important to clarify them than to clarify why Kant thinks them illusory.

3. The Cosmological Issues 3.1. The Character of the Conflicts Apart from questions about the status of the arguments in the proofs, there are problems about the background in which Kant considers and resolves the conflicts. These problems have given rise to criticisms of Kant's handling of the issues and it is useful to consider them first before addressing his resolution. They concern the nature of the cosmological issues, the relevance of mathematical infinity to those issues, and the clarification of the roles of understanding and reason in them. Kant makes clear that the issues have to do with our beliefs about the "world" or "universe" in an empirical physical cosmology. The account given in the prefaces of the Antinomies is that of philosophical issues originating from science but incapable of decision within science. That view is confirmed in the Dialectic: I entitle all transcendental Ideas, in so far as they relate to absolute totality in the synthesis of appearances, cosmical concepts, partly because this uncondi-

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tioned totality also underlies the concept—itself only an Idea—of the world whole; pardy because they concern only the synthesis of appearances, and therefore only empirical synthesis. (B434) the Idea of absolute totality concerns only the exposition of appearances and does not therefore refer to the pure concept . . . of a totality of things in general. (B443)

Kant explains that this origin "gives rise" to a rational "Ideal" of a "pretended pure rational cosmology," just as the paralogistic inferences gave rise to an equally pretended rational psychology. The dialectical illusion arises because empirical physical cosmology is misconstrued as a pure rational discipline, so that its central issues can be resolved by pure reason alone in a rationalist metaphysics (B436). Kant had sometimes outlined such an ambitious role for a rationalist metaphysics in his pre-Critical period as Schonfeld shows,13 but abandoned it even in such pre-Critical works as Dreams of a Spirit-Seer. In the Critique such an ambition is regarded as an illusion of the same kind as Wittgenstein's illusion of treating metaphysics as a "super science" able to establish truths about an ultimate, hidden reality through reason alone. One consequence of that background is that to see Kant's issues as primarily mathematical, addressing issues about infinity in mathematics, is a mistake. It is not that Kant sees no connection between his cosmological issues and appeals to infinity in mathematics, but that the connection is liable to foster the illusion which Kant's therapy is designed to cure. On one side he makes it plain that the "skeptical method" used in his therapy would be absurd in mathematics (B739); on the other side he claims that his therapy targets such philosophical misconceptions as those arising from mathematical abstraction. it is only for transcendental philosophy that this sceptical method is essential. . . . In mathematics its employment would, indeed, be absurd. . . . But it is quite otherwise with transcendental assertions laying claim to insight into what is beyond the field of all possible experiences. Their abstract synthesis can never be given in any a priori intuition (as it can in mathematics), and are so constituted that what is erroneous in them can never be detected by means of any experience. (B452-53)

The claim is spelled out even more explicitly at B467-68, where Kant, speaking unequivocally for himself, talks about "playing tricks with mathematics." The trick in this case is that of conceiving "physical points as . . . simple, and yet as having the distinguishing characteristic of being able . . . to fill space through their mere aggregation," which Kant calls an "absurdity." The remedy prescribed is to remember that the issue in the Antinomy concerns physical objects in space, appearances, and not merely abstract

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Euclidean points which may formally represent them. Kant's own position against this is underlined in his claim, repeated from the Analytic, that Euclidean points are not parts, but limits, of a space. What Kant calls an "absurdity" is the position which Strawson described as an objection to a proof in the second Antinomy (Strawson 1966a, 185, 204-5). These provisos show that much of the discussion of the Antinomy which turns on post-Kantian conceptions of the infinite in mathematics is beside the point. The cosmological issue has to do with the empirical science of physical cosmology and especially with accounts of its issues which misrepresent it as a pure rational discipline. One of the major factors in such misrepresentation is that of taking literally the abstractions of a pure mathematical physics. I suggest later that such a diagnosis can apply to contemporary cosmology. The proper separation of a formal discipline like mathematics from a material physical cosmology, even expressed mathematically, explains Kant's otherwise puzzling insistence that the Antinomy concerns empirical appearances, mundus phaenomenon, and yet that its claims involve references to a mundus intelligibilis and transcendent noumena. It is characteristic of the Dialectical debates that their formal arguments rest on the ambiguities of the amphiboly and subreption, and that the primary example is that of confusing immanent phenomena with transcendent noumena. That was true generally of the Paralogisms and it remains true in the Antinomy. A similar puzzle may seem to arise over the roles of understanding and reason. It was noted in the introduction to the Dialectic in chapter 24 that Kant seems to express the relation between understanding, reason, and sensibility in the Dialectic in puzzling, perhaps conflicting, ways, and what is said in the Antinomy may seem only to confirm that view. Kant seemed to claim that dialectical illusion arose from certain Ideas of reason, but now he says that reason does not generate any concepts, and that the Antinomies arise from pure concepts of the understanding. In the first place we must recognise that pure and transcendental concepts can issue only from the understanding. Reason does not really generate any concept. The most it can do is to free a concept of understanding from the unavoidable limitations of possible experience, and so to endeavour to extend it beyond the limits of the empirical, though still, indeed, in terms of its relation to the empirical. (B435)

The passage confirms the earlier claim about the relation between the empirical discipline and its supposed transcendent, rational counterpart, and also resolves the problem of the roles of reason and understanding. WHiat reason does is to take over concepts of understanding from empirical cosmology with a legitimate role in relation to possible experience and misconstrue them illegitimately as designating supposed real things in a

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supersensible, intelligible world. It provides a further illustration of the general faults Kant noted at B88-89, B186-87, and B335-36, in which we are "bewitched" by our concepts and seek to extend their use materially from an immanent experience to a transcendent world of noumena. This gives a consistent sense to the following claim which might otherwise seem in conflict with what has been so far said: Such dialectical doctrine relates not to the unity of understanding in empirical concepts, but to the unity of reason in mere Ideas. Since this unity of reason involves a synthesis according to rules it must conform to the understanding; and yet as demanding absolute unity of synthesis it must at the same time harmonise with reason. (B450)

The illusion in these cases begins with concepts of understanding and their synthesis, but reason subverts that procedure in the way indicated in the previous quotation by extending a legitimate synthesis into illegitimate pretensions beyond experience. Reference to the "world," or the "world whole," itself reflect in the Antinomy that misconception and equivocation in a slide from what remains within possible experience to what purports to go beyond it. The "surreptitious" influence of a sensory imagination on such Ideas of reason provides us with a pseudo-reference to such a transcendent thing, or world, in itself. The transition can be understood as one which moves from unproblematic enquiries within natural science to related, more general but highly problematic, issues in metaphysics. The latter arise out of a natural scientific cosmology, overlap with science, and engage philosophically minded scientists as well as philosophers, but the transition is also an unnoticed slide, a subreption, from immanent enquiry to transcendent speculation. Scientists are no less likely to fall into that subreption than philosophers.

3.2. Kant's Resolution of the Issues: The Formal Apparatus The basic error in these antinomies, outlined at B526-29, is the same as that in the Paralogisms, namely, ambiguities in the central terms of the premises. Those central terms include "world," "nature," "totality," and "whole," but the same equivocation is located in the "subreption" of confusing "regulative" and "constitutive" principles, and in the fundamental distinction between empirical, transcendental, and transcendent enquiry. The ambiguity between the "world" construed as object of experience or as thing in itself is an essential part of Kant's required explanation for the dialectical illusions. The apparatus is designed to demonstrate that the conflicts result from an unrecognized slide from a genuine "objective reality" within possible experience to a bogus "objective reality" beyond it; from a

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genuine empirical physical cosmology to a transcendent "pseudo-rational" cosmology; from genuine science to an erroneous and undecidable metaphysics. The reference to "analytic" and "dialectical" opposites is used to support the idea that in the two mathematical antinomies both sides can be wrong since they both rest on that same erroneous, tacit ambiguity in their understanding of the "world." The path to dialectical illusion is made clear at B436. Reason seeks a totality and completion in enquiry which may divert legitimate categories from their immanent use within experience into an illegitimate use beyond it. Those concepts of the understanding are converted into Ideas such as that of the "unconditioned" and "absolute whole" which cannot be found in experience, and mark the division between legitimate immanence and illegitimate transcendence. The therapeutic diagnosis rests on a belief in endemic metaphysical tendencies to conjure up Wittgenstein's "hocus pocus," "occult," reality beyond that of our ordinary experience, and to imagine that philosophers have the authority to pronounce on its features as if they were especially far-seeing scientists investigating a hidden reality behind the surface appearances. If for Kant even scientists like Newton cannot penetrate to that metaphysical conception of reality, the prospects for a priori metaphysical argument must be even dimmer (B313-14). Kant's own "transcendental" stance is that of the higher-order "impartial umpire" adjudicating between the competing claims of thesis and antithesis in order to demonstrate their joint errors and to cure our philosophical addiction to the resulting interminable debates. Both sides, and the debate itself, can be rejected because they rest on the questionable assumption that we can decide issues about the character of the physical universe by a priori reasoning alone. Both are consequently led to make claims about the universe as a thing in itself, and both are mistaken because we can strictiy neither affirm nor deny such claims about things in themselves (A395). For Kant Ideas of reason, used in a spurious transcendent way, have no possible connection to intuition, and their associated principles are consequently undecidable and unverifiable by us. The attempt to debate or settie such disagreements violates Kant's residual empiricism, and the corresponding dogmatic claims confuse the distinction between constitutive truths and regulative injunctions. empiricism yields advantages to the speculative interest of reason, which are very attractive and far surpass those which dogmatic teaching . . . can offer. According to the principle of empiricism the understanding is always on its own proper ground, namely the field of genuinely possible experiences, investigating their laws, and by means of those laws affording infinite extension to the sure and comprehensible knowledge which it supplies. (B496-97)

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I have tried to show by this distinction (between constitutive and regulative principles) that there is no such constitutive principle, and so to prevent what otherwise, through a transcendental subreption, inevitably takes place, namely the ascribing of objective reality to an Idea that serves merely as a rule. (B537)

To confuse these different constitutive and regulative roles is to mistake an injunction to conduct enquiry with certain guiding expectations as a definitive truth about reality. Bennett complains that the contrast between constitutive and regulative principles makes Kant's own position indistinguishable from the antitheses, but this is not so (1974, 279). The antitheses, like the theses, make a constitutive claim about the nature of reality. The difference between them is that the latter assert what the former deny, namely, that the physical universe has a beginning and spatial bounds, and that substances are composed of simples. The regulative principles corresponding to the antitheses are different, namely, to proceed in enquiry as if we can always push the levels of explanation further back in a temporal or spatial cosmology or in the micro-investigation of physical composition. Such an injunction is not a constitutive truth and makes no claim about the nature of reality, and can still be respected even when it fails to provide any new explanations. We might ask how Bennett could fail to see any difference between these but we cannot seriously doubt that they are different. Kant's view of the opposition between thesis and antithesis is that both involve an unnoticed slide from immanence to transcendence into making claims about the same intelligible reality. The only difference between them is that the former asserts and the latter denies the relevant claims about that transcendent reality. Neither notices the underlying ambiguity between immanent and transcendent conceptions of reality, and neither therefore can arrive at a Critical resolution of the issues. One consequence of that failure to detect the underlying ambiguity may be a skepticism about ordinary and scientific experience. If no distinction is made between legitimate immanent claims in a scientific cosmology and their illegitimate counterparts in a rational, transcendent cosmology, then one who rejects dogmatic claims about rational cosmology is bound to reject empirical cosmology as well. The consequence illustrates Kant's belief that empiricist skepticism is a useful halfway house in dismissing rationalist dogmatism but provides no permanent resting place. The adolescence of skepticism is an advance on dogmatism but needs to be supplemented and corrected by the Critical view (B496-97; B788-89). Kant sometimes puts these points in ways which may mislead. Since the basic ambiguity is that between speaking of knowable appearances and of unknowable things in themselves, it may be assumed that the difference is one of kind. It may then seem odd that Kant also says:

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despite the objection that these Ideas are one and all transcendent, and that although they do not surpass the object, namely appearances, but are exclusively concerned with the world of sense, not with noumena, they yet carry the synthesis to a degree which transcends all possible experience. ( B 4 4 7 ^ 8 )

The oddity is easily relieved by reflecting that differences of degree and of kind are not exclusive. Kant's evident view, conforming to his belief that the problems arise out of empirical cosmology but then transcend that discipline, is that the slide may be represented both as one of degree and as one of kind. The former would parallel the Leibnizian suggestion that to move from mere appearances to real things in themselves is like moving from a distant, less clear view of a crowd to a clearer view of its individual members. The latter emerges from Kant's view that the step is properly one from what is knowable to us through the senses to what is to us unknowable even through reason. In the end the ambiguity is formally captured in the explicit inference, involving the earlier principle I, at B525: "If the conditioned is given the entire series of conditions is given; objects of the senses are given as conditions, and so the entire series of their conditions is likewise given." Kant's complaint in such a dogmatic argument is that it rests on the general ambiguity between objects of the senses, appearances or phenomena, and objects of reason or things in themselves. It is shown to be misleading and faulty because the latter objects, accessible only through reason if the inference succeeds, fail to meet the legitimate requirements of the cited principle of empiricism at B496. Neither the inference nor its concluding claim to knowledge of such transcendent objects can be accepted. Kant holds that if we cannot draw the distinction and note the ambiguity between things in themselves and appearances, then logic compels us to accept either the resulting contradictions in reason or postulate unjustifiably some unknown rational ground for choosing between the competing claims. He calls these outcomes the "death" or "euthanasia" of sound philosophy, and his own resolution is designed to avoid them and to point to certain reforming conclusions about the right method for metaphysics (B434). It is for this reason that he thinks we cannot resolve the issues merely by pleading "unavoidable ignorance" (B504). Kant does not mean by this that we cannot appeal to our cognitive limitations to explain why these questions are unanswerable. On the contrary, those cognitive limitations, on which transcendental idealism insists,14 enable us to explain why it is that in this case "no answer is itself an answer" (B507n). What he objects to is not the fact of our ignorance but the failure to explain it. The explanation rests importantly on the distinction in transcendental idealism between transcendent reality, things in themselves, and the legitimate reality of appearances and possible experience. Without that distinc-

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tion the law of excluded middle (LEM), that for all x either Fx or ^Fx, will apply to the physical universe and to its properties of being finite or infinite in time or space. If such a law holds over an unambiguous domain then we would be forced to choose for each item whether it is JFor -Fwould be as misleading as to give a definite answer to the question: Have you stopped beating your wife? The difficulty in both cases is a false presupposition lying behind the question and both possible answers to it. Such an account makes no appeal to any denial of LEM, or to logical systems like the intuitionist which do not accept that law. The claim that lying behind Kant's treatment of the Antinomies is a formal denial of LEM, or some appeal to a nonclassical nonbivalent logic, is unnecessary and anachronistic.15

3.3. Empirical and Transcendent Cosmology Such an account leaves open the possibility that an empirical cosmology may offer some a posteriori ground for decisions about the origin and character of the physical universe (PU), but it might be said that Kant's resolution of the issues has no relevance to contemporary cosmology. It may be said that a scientific cosmology can now show, from the evidence of expansion in the PU unknown in Kant's time, that the PU had an origin in the familiar "big bang." It might even be said that this provides yet another instance, along with non-Euclidean geometries, quantum physics, or relativity theory, to show that Kant's universal claims for his metaphysical principles are illusory, since these are properly no more than principles underlying the limited Newtonian science of his time. There is no good reason to think that the Antinomy arises only from Newtonian cosmology, and I claim that the same slide from empirical cosmology to transcendent, and undecidable, assertions about the PU remains a problem. The ground for such a claim arises from the character of arguments for the "big bang." What these arguments show, in empirical cosmology, is that the expansion of the PU which we now observe is the causal outcome of a vast expansion from some primordial form of material existence. Such an argument, sophisticated as it is in detail, relies on physical laws, assumptions about the space-time structure of the PU, and ingeniously complex mathematical derivations, to project backward from the currentiy observed expansion to some "origin" from which it is presumed to start. It is evident that such an "origin" is not exactly what was intended in the

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conflicting views and debates about the start of the PU in Kant's time. The modern theory assumes some primordial state of material existence, a "singularity," from which the expansion was initiated, whereas the traditional debates quarreled over the origin of that primordial existence itself. They were concerned, as the earlier passage from Leibniz indicated, not merely with a sequence of causal world states but with the question how those states and their material might have been initiated. In that issue the enquiry moves, according to Leibniz, from scientific explanation to a metaphysical, "extra-mundane," and perhaps theological Grund. It might be said that we should accept Kant's complaints against that traditional debate, and allow the modern theories to deal with a more modest, scientifically justified, and accessible, explanation. The latter provide not an explanation of the primordial matter from nothing, nor a Leibnizian supernatural explanation from outside the series of physical events or world-states, but an explanation from one basic, primordial world-state to its causally determined successors, of which our present state is one. The scientific theory, however far reaching, still stays within the limits of possible experience, and can be allowed to establish its "origin" even if, or just because, it is not of the traditional transcendent kind. Contemporary cosmology is not quite as innocent as that suggests, and it is not difficult to see how the move to a transcendent, supernatural realm may remain tempting. Two points at which evident queries can be raised concern the character of the "singularity" in which the origin of the PU is located, and in further speculation about a cyclical development in which expanding and contracting phases succeed each other in the PU. 1 6 The notion of a "singularity" indicates that it stands for no more than a terminal point in a process about which nothing more can be said, and that is the upshot of many comments about it. It is said that in singularities "all laws break down," that certain theories do not provide "much information about space-time singularities," that there is "no information on the observability of singularities," and that to investigate them we need to "find a primordial black hole" of which there are not many around.17 Despite the differences between original singularities, black holes, and collapsed stars it is claimed that similarities between them allow some comparison. It may be possible to infer properties of a primordial singularity from the observable cases of black holes and collapsed stars but it must be unclear what rules govern such inferences if the known laws "break down." The notion of a singularity is liable to function in the same way as Kant's "unconditioned" and to be just as problematic. It has also been considered whether instead of a singularity's being the definitive origin of the PU it was merely another stage in a cyclical development which moves the PU from an expanding phase into a contracting phase and then "bouncing" back to an expansion. In this kind of argument

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the temptation to move away from a strictly immanent physics, to "go transcendent," is even more powerful and may be difficult to resist. The debate seems, as one might expect, to turn not on any data which such observable "bouncing" might yield, and which might limit the scope for such an ingenious theory, but on the compatibility or incompatibility of various mathematical models with the PU's capacity to "bounce." The models of Lifshitz and Khalatnikov are said to have presumed that the PU can bounce, while the singularity theorems of Penrose and Hawking showed that bouncing is "ruled out on theoretical grounds," and that a "singularity free bounce is not realizable within the frame of general relativity."18 These are cases where "theory definitely has the lead over observation," and which are said to be "virtually unverifiable by observation." The temptation arises from a failure to distinguish what such an argument, however sophisticated, can and cannot achieve. What it can achieve is a more or less sophisticated mathematical treatment of the consistency within current physics of such a cyclical development for the PU. It may convincingly show that a cycle of expansion and contraction in the PU is consistent with current laws, or with some mathematical model which assumes certain space-time structures for the PU. To argue from the consistency of such a model to a claim about the actual character of the PU is an example of Kant's fallacy of inferring what is actual, or even really possible, from what is logically consistent. Hawking indicates a step into traditional metaphysics when he claims that Penrose is a Platonist in inferring the character of reality directly from the mathematical models, but Hawking himself says that for him "a physical theory is just a mathematical model, and that it is meaningless to ask whether it corresponds to reality." 19 This might be construed as a form of Platonism if he had not added the further proviso that to accept a model requires that its "predictions are in agreement with observation." Since the scope for observation is extremely limited and may be nonexistent, both theorists are close to Platonism. These steps tempt a move to transcendence on two grounds. First, a direct step from the consistency of a mathematical model to the character of the PU encourages a Platonist conception of the kind Hawking ascribes to Penrose. Second, to suppose on these grounds that the PU, as a "worldwhole," does develop in the suggested way is to make a claim which may really be undecidable by us. It remains unclear what further evidence might be used to reach a decision and it contains a requirement which seems unsatisfiable, namely, that the cycle did not itself begin at any stage. Not only is it difficult to see how such a requirement could be met, but it is evident that this is the kind of issue raised in the traditional debates and which Kant himself addresses and resolves in the cosmological Antinomies. Once the debate has moved in that direction Kant's resolution marks the

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step into transcendence and undecidability and rejects it, but the suggestion is that contemporary scientific cosmology faces the same temptations.

4 . Implications for Transcendental Idealism The account just offered turns on the notions of decidability or verifiability. Once the cosmological questions have made the transition from the empirical realm of appearances to the transcendent realm of things in themselves then the issues become undecidable for us. The proofs, according to Kant, already make that transition within the bogus topic of rational cosmology, but the suggestion is that the same transition is perennially tempting even in a contemporary and more sophisticated cosmology. Although the terms "thing in itself' and "noumenon" have an independent sense in relation to past philosophical doctrines of Plato and Leibniz they mark, particularly in the Antinomies, that step into undecidability. Undecidability here does not mean merely a lack of conclusive evidence but a lack of any evidence in principle either in favor of or against thesis or antithesis. The formulation, perhaps through confusion, of undecidable hypotheses as if they were decidable is not confined to the eighteenth century or to philosophers. In such cases we are left with no recourse other than pure rational argument and in the context of the mathematical Antinomies that recourse yields, according to Kant, only contradictions and the potential euthanasia of reason. But the resolution of the Antinomies has been understood in other terms and the appeal to undecidability has been thought too weak to represent Kant's real view. Three different interpretations are identified by Strawson only one of which even approximates to the present account (1966a, 188ff). (1) On the "strong" account Kant's appeal to the realm of appearances has the force of denying that there is "anything real in space or time at all," but with one proviso this is rightly dismissed as unwarranted. Strawson's proviso is that the view admits the actual existence of things in themselves, and this is said to form part of Kant's dual scheme of things in themselves and representations in the "mixed" account (3). (2) The "weak" account accepts that things in space and time exist as appearances, but insists that the Idea of a "world-whole" with its finite beginning or its infinite career is out of our cognitive range and so lacks significance, is "empty of content" and of "cognitive meaning" (1966a, 192). This view approximates to the account of

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undecidability offered above except for its claim that undecidability entails meaninglessness and violates what is called a "principle of significance." (3) The third, "mixed" account, endorsed as closest to Kant's views, requires an interpretation of the resolution which shows "affinities with the idealism of Berkeley" (1966a, 193). It insists on Kant's commitment to the traditionalist dualism of empirical ideas and things in themselves, to a reductive phenomenalism, and to a verificationist account of meaning. Since even Strawson denies that (1), the strong account, is Kant's position, I shall not consider it any further. It is patentiy incompatible with Kant's empirical realism and with his conception of a genuine immanent reality of possible experience. The account I have offered of the resolution of the mathematical Antinomies is plainly closer to (2) than to (3), but it differs from (2) in the rejection of the "principle of significance" as a criterion of meaninglessness. That rejection has been made clear and justified in earlier discussions. Three related issues remain, to consider Strawson's objections to (2), his grounds for endorsing (3), and the relation between Kant's position in resolving the Antinomies and his transcendental idealism. They are connected in this way: That part of the objection to (2) rests on the claim that it "reduces transcendental idealism to evanescence" and so involves that latter doctrine, while (3), with its "affinity" to Berkeley, offers an account of transcendental idealism which escapes that evanescence. The weak account, (2), emphasizes that the conclusions to the proofs would be impossible for us to verify, since we have access only to appearances and not to things in themselves. It is similar to the account given above in terms of undecidability, except in its additional claim that to talk of things in themselves and their properties is "empty" and "meaningless." With that added background three objections are raised to the suggestion that the weak account is Kant's view. (2a) There are two related difficulties in holding both that the conclusions to the proofs are meaningless and that they could be either true or false. Kant officially allows the conclusions to the mathematical Antinomies to be both false and the conclusions to the others to be both true. (2b) Kant may also seem to imply that if the proofs are about things in themselves then all the conclusions are true. But if those conclusions are meaningless they can scarcely be either true or false, and even if they are meaningful it is hard to understand how each pair

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(2c) Finally the weak account is said to reduce "transcendental idealism" "to the point of evanescence," and if this were true the doctrine would presumably be trivial, and there would be no value in using Kant's resolution to support transcendental idealism. One immediate answer to the objections (2a) and (2b) has been already made, namely, that Kant did not take claims about things in themselves to be meaningless. Although the term Bedeutung, used often to signify emptiness or lack of "objective reality," may be translated as "meaning" it is quite clear that Kant did not regard lack of objective reality, or genuine reference, as meaninglessness. Apart from the many places already noted where this is evident Kant confronts the point head on at B396-97. There he considers saying of empty transcendental Ideas either that we "have no concept of such a thing" or else that "we have a problematic concept but no knowledge of it." He concludes that we should be "better advised and less likely to be misunderstood" if we adopt the latter description. In general, dialectical Ideas, like the pure unschematized concepts which may generate them, have meaning even if they are empty and lack reference to any accessible object. Their principles, similarly, are not constitutive but have a legitimate regulative significance incompatible with their terms being strictly meaningless. There is no conflict in Kant between ascribing truth values to the conclusions of the proofs and calling them meaningless simply because he does not regard them as meaningless. The second objection in (2b), that Kant is committed to regarding each pair of incompatible conclusions as both true if the proofs are about things in themselves, seems to rest on an error. The argument is: If things in space and time exist "in themselves," then, Kant maintains, it follows first and immediately that all the members of each of the three sets of disjunctive propositions having in common the form "Either the series of Xs is finite or it is infinite" are true propositions, and second, by valid argument, that each of the mutually incompatible disjuncts of each disjunctive proposition is true. (Strawson 1966a, 199)

It has been noted that Kant expresses doubts about the validity of the proofs, but even if he regarded them as valid the inference fails. It says effectively that if the proofs are about things in themselves and are valid, then each of the contradictory conclusions is true. But that consequence depends also on the actual truth of the premises in each proof as well as on the validity of the argument from them. Only if those premises, about things in themselves, are true can we detach the conclusions as true, and

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regard the inferences not only as valid but also as sound. Of course Kant holds that such premises and conclusions cannot be given a truth value by us, but even if they have a truth value in some other possible world there is no good reason to think that all the premises in all the proofs are themselves true in that world. Among those premises are: "The magnitude of a quantum not given in intuition . . . can be thought only through the synthesis of its parts"; "No coming to be is possible in empty time (even for God)" (First Antinomy); "All external relation and all composition of substances is possible only in space"; and "Space is not made up of simple parts but of spaces" (Second Antinomy). What remain are the related issues about the difference between the "weak" and the "mixed" accounts, and the relation between the latter and the transcendental idealist resolution of the Antinomies. The difference is essentially that the mixed account is committed to a traditional empirical idealism while the former is not. Although I shall criticize and reject the associated claim that the weak account is "quite certainly not Kant's view" it raises the question of the relevance to Kant's resolution of his underlying "transcendental idealism" (Strawson 1966a, 193). Strawson plainly prefers the mixed interpretation because he ascribes a traditional Berkeleian idealism to Kant with its "reductive" phenomenalism and its semantic verificationism. It is evidentiy his view that only such an account can explain the character of Kant's resolution of the Antinomies and can avoid the objection that (2) reduces transcendental idealism to the point of evanescence. Kant briefly outiines the confirmation which the discussion provides for his previously established transcendental idealism at B5 34-35, and identifies transcendental idealism as the "key" to the resolution of the Antinomies at B518-19ff. If the world is a whole existing in itself, then it is either finite or infinite. But both alternatives are false (as thesis and antithesis show). It is therefore false that the world (the sum of all appearances) is a whole existing in itself. From this it then follows that appearances in general are nothing outside our representations, which is just what is meant by transcendental idealism. (B534-35) [transcendental idealism holds that] . . . everything intuited in space or time, and so all objects of any experience possible for us, are nothing but appearances, that is, mere representations, which in the manner in which they are represented, as extended beings or as series of alterations, have no independent existence outside our thoughts. (B518-19)

These passages underline some of the key terms in the issue such as "appearance" and its transcendental correlate "thing in itself." Kant describes appearances as "mere representations" which are "nothing outside

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[ausser]" or "independent o f ' our "thoughts." In all these claims he appeals tacitly to the explicit ambiguities noted throughout the Critique which turn on the background distinction between the empirical, the transcendent, and the transcendental outlined in chapter 5. Commentators sometimes rightly recognize an ambiguity in "idea" but then misrepresent Kant by understanding it only within the exhaustive contrast between an empirical "mental state" and a "transcendent thing in itself."20 Kant's position was shown to be more complex in distinguishing empirical and transcendental "ideas" as well as empirical, transcendent, and transcendental "objects." The principal terms in the Antinomies, "world," "object," "outer," and "independent," are all susceptible of empirical and transcendental interpretations which it is an essential and explicit part of Kant's doctrine to separate. The only ambiguity which Kant does not explicitly identify arises from the associated empirical and transcendental senses of "idea," but I have argued that they are implicit in Kant's distinction between "empirical" and "transcendental" idealism. Just as there is explicitly an empirical and a transcendental sense of "outer object," so there must be a parallel distinction between empirical and transcendental "ideas." Kant's distinction between "empirical" and "transcendental" idealism turns precisely on that ambiguity and distances his own idealism from a traditional empirical idealism in which the basic items in our experience belong to empirical minds contrasted with empirically outer, spatial objects. If Kant really held that those basic items were empirical mental states then he could not so readily have canvassed an empirical realism in which physical and mental objects have the same epistemic status. The attempt to read Kant as a phenomenalist who reinstates a belief in the outer world on the basis of constructions from empirical ideas, mental states or sense data, runs counter to his whole position. Inner and outer objects of experience have for him the same, immediate, noninferential status, and there is no serious indication of a phenomenalist, constructive program in the Critique. The Refutation of Idealism follows a quite different path in dissolving the idealist problem by rejecting the empirical idealist assumptions which seem to make the phenomenalist program inevitable. We should no longer be misled by Kemp Smith's misleading translations of auslaufen or zuriickfuhren as "reduce" into ascribing to Kant a reductive phenomenalist program. These are familiar points and underline the distance of Kant's doctrine from the tradition and from a traditional empirical idealism. It is tempting to overlook, or disregard, them in reading his solution from B518ff., but, with one final proviso, I do not see how they can be disregarded. Once they are properly acknowledged the temptation can be resisted and replaced with the conclusion that the modified "weak," and not the "mixed," interpretation is Kant's view. If the verificationist principle of sig-

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nificance is deleted from the weak view it is the basis for his resolution of the Antinomies. Strawson concedes, righdy, that both weak and mixed accounts contain the required contrast to support Kant's position. If there were no contrast between appearance and thing in itself, or between our possible experience and what may lie beyond it, then LEM would apply to one unique reality and we would be forced to choose between the conflicting claims. Kant's strategy does not require him to have a conception of an intuitionist, nonbivalent logic without LEM, but it does require his transcendental idealism to distinguish what is within our possible experience and what may lie beyond it. Both weak and mixed accounts make a distinction between what we have knowledge of in our experience and what lies beyond it, but they draw it in different ways. The weak account draws the distinction between what is for us a possible experience, inner and outer, and what us undecidable by us through lacking any intuitive realization, any "objective reality." The mixed account draws it between our empirical mental states, such as sense data, and other items, such as empirically outer, physical objects which, justifiably or not, go beyond the former. The mathematical Antinomies require the distinction made in the weak account but not the traditional idealist distinction drawn in the mixed account. Although the disputes rest on confusions and ambiguities about the status of the "world," they begin with a conception of the outer, physical world in a scientific cosmology and not with the traditional idealist realm of private mental states. The ambiguities which, for Kant, resolve the conflicts turn essentially on the contrast between what is decidable and what is not in the physical world; the empirical contrast between what is inner or mental and what is outer or physical has no role to play in that resolution.21 The remaining proviso asks why it is that Kant throughout these texts uses the very dualism, of "representation" and "thing in itself," which I claim his own theory supplements and rejects. The indisputable claims that Kant has a fourfold, not just a dual, classification seem at odds with that way of presenting the issue, and raise the question why Kant adopted it. The question is particularly apt since that dual presentation has led commentators to think that Kant endorses its traditional dualism. The natural response is to recognize that in these passages Kant is concerned with what he calls the "transcendental" level, and with the interpretation put on the relevant claims by his empirical idealist opponents. At the "transcendental" level at which we ask whether our experience as a whole concerns our representations or things in themselves Kant can give only one answer. Things in themselves are in principle beyond our cognitive range and the a priori elements in our experience cannot derive from what is given a posteriori. Kant draws the conclusion, at that transcendental level, that those elements must be in some way due to us, to our intuitions and our concepts; they

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are not, as he says at B518-19, independent of our "thoughts." That responsibility may be understood in terms of the traditionalists' material, causal, psychological doctrine of the "mind making nature," but Kant rejects that account and points to other, better ways of understanding it. In that transcendental context "representation" cannot mean what it means for the empirical idealists, namely, "empirical idea" (B536). Henry Allison has righdy stressed that Kant's transcendental answer shows that experience, and our reality, concern our ways of representing (Anschauungsarten, Denkungsarten) but that answer does not make an empirical, causal, psychological claim. He has elucidated this in terms of "epistemic conditions" and I agree. In particular it insists that "ways of representing," whether intuitive or discursive, do not involve any empirical idealist restriction to private mental states such as sense data. What I have done in addition is to pursue those epistemic conditions into the given account of perceptual and propositional operators and their respective contents. But although those positive points are essential for Kant's account of our cognition and experience in the Aesthetic and Analytic, they play a less prominent role in the negative therapy of the Dialectic. What they underline is the background within which Kant can draw his distinction between possible experience, including our ways of representing, and what lies beyond it. Even that distinction, although correct, does not exhaust Kant's position. It is also essential to his transcendental idealism that the nature of our cognition contains the explanation of our natural temptation to overstep the bounds of possible experience. The two faces of reason and the associated wide scope for concepts beyond intuition provide that explanation in line with Wittgenstein's "bewitchment of our intelligence by language." In such an account is Kant's transcendental idealism reduced to evanescence? In earlier discussion in chapter 15 it was noted that "idealism" is an ambiguous label, and covers a number of contrasts, such as those between private mental states and outer, physical objects, what is warrantedly assertible and what is true, what belongs to possible experience, empirically inner and outer, and what is beyond our cognitive power to determine. It is typical of traditional idealism to draw its contrast with the aim of grounding experience on some limited subsector of ordinary experience such as mental states, and to be faced with the challenge of reinstating other items, such as the outer world, on that justified basis. That attempted justification may fail if for example physical object language cannot be analyzed phenomenalistically, or if warranted assertibility is insufficient for knowledge or semantics. I f it is characteristic of idealism to separate in these ways what is "dependent on" or "independent o f " our minds, then each of the contrasts gives a different sense to the central notion of "independence."

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Independence may be that of empirically nonmental, physical items in contrast with intermediary "ideas" of sense perception, and characterized in terms of the former's continuing to exist while unperceived. Contemporary antirealism focuses on the warranted assertibility of beliefs in contrast to a different form of independence associated with bare truth. Kant's conception of "objectivity" in the Transcendental Deduction involves an appeal to the truth or falsity of beliefs, but he draws no distinction between truth and warranted assertibility, and with provisos canvasses a realist rather than antirealist position. The remaining contrast between possible experience and transcendent claims is a consequence of Kant's idealism, but it is the view which Strawson regards as "reducing his idealism to evanescence." Kant's attitude to traditional idealism has two general aspects. The aim is first to locate what is correct and what is incorrect in that doctrine, and second to show how, properly understood, idealism is compatible with a genuine ascription of truth and falsity and a knowledge of empirically outer objects. What is incorrect, or unjustified, in traditional idealism is its appeal to inner intermediary mental states, ideas, as a barrier to knowledge of an outer world, and, in Eleatic idealism, a belief in the power of reason to gain knowledge of a world of real things in themselves independent of sensibility. What Kant thinks is correct in idealism can be captured in two general claims: First, that our knowledge and experience is essentially restricted to us and does not necessarily hold for other subjects with other powers in other possible worlds, and second, that what differentiates our immanent experience depends on our cognitive powers and cannot be divorced from them. Kant's formal idealism is relative to our world, and to our cognitive, mental powers. For that reason any account of that experience has to make an ineliminable reference to those mental powers. That ineliminable reference is compatible with the empirical realism which admits the existence and reality, relative to our experience, of both inner and outer phenomena. The challenge which traditional idealism faced over our beliefs in an outer world evaporates in the light of Kant's correction. That position is further elaborated in two of Kant's more specific claims, supported in the positive inventory of our experience in the Critique. These are that our experience is governed by a priori elements, contributed by those essential, ineliminable cognitive powers; and that their role in that experience is to "constitute" or "make possible" certain "objects" of experience, to provide a framework of "objectivity" which traditional idealism was in danger of overlooking or failing to understand. Those two claims provide the cash value of Kant's idealist subjectivity. A priori elements cannot be derived from a given a posteriori experience, but must be contributed by us. That mode of contribution is elucidated, supported, and justified in the proofs of the Analytic and Aesthetic. It turns

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on the identification of the fundamental elements of our sensibility and understanding and on the way they combine to provide an a priori schematized, but not fully realized, framework for the whole of our cognitive experience. It is, of course, an open question whether Kant's arguments succeed in that inventorial outline of the fundamental elements in experience. I have indicated that many of the arguments are at least plausible. Even the Refutation of Idealism, though flawed, has value as a way of correcting a version of the traditional idealism Kant aims to supersede. But the objection here is not so much that those supporting arguments are weak, but rather that it is unclear what they are intended to support and whether it can be called any form of idealism. The suggested structure in terms of a priori elements and the arguments for their role answers the first question. If the second point rests merely on the correct claim that Kant is not a traditional idealist, then it is misconceived as an objection. Why should we not allow that the a priori structure and its explanation in terms of our cognitive powers qualifies as a form of idealism which is both informative and more acceptable than the traditional variety? Why do we have to suppose that only naive forms of (good, old-fashioned) idealism evade triviality and evanescence?

[27] The Third Antinomy: Freedom of the Will

T h e Third Antinomy makes a transition from Kant's theoretical, speculative philosophy to his practical, moral philosophy, and does so by connecting the former's transcendental apperception and the latter's moral agency and responsibility. Both apperception and agency are fundamental properties needed to provide Kant's final account of persons, and both make complex references to spontaneity and autonomy which the argument is designed to clarify. I consider the argument in the Third Antinomy and draw conclusions about that definitive account of persons, but say relatively little about Kant's subsequent account of morality in the Grundlegung and second Critique. That material is of great importance for Kant's moral philosophy, and looks back to this transitional phase of the Antinomies, but my interest here is primarily in the speculative, theoretical account of persons, including their character as moral agents. Kant himself makes plain that transcendental freedom in the Third Antinomy is a speculative, theoretical issue, and not a practical one: "The question of transcendental freedom is a matter for speculative knowledge only, and when we are dealing with the practical we can leave it aside. . ." (B831). Anyone who wishes to pursue further the connection with morality can do no better than read Henry Allison's Kant's Theory of Freedom (1990). The issue in the Third Antinomy is a potential and familiar philosophical threat to human agency and responsibility from a belief in causal determinism. The formal thesis and antithesis respectively assert and deny the existence of human freedom over and above a deterministic causality in nature. Kant's procedure is the same as in other Antinomies: first to outline the arguments for thesis and antithesis, and then to comment on the proposed proofs before outlining his own solution to the conflict. Kant treats the opposed views in the same way as in the mathematical antinomies, but now it is claimed that both can be true together instead of both being false. In 1,1 consider the conflict between thesis and antithesis and Kant's textual resolution of it; in 2, I consider the structure and significance of Kant's 689

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solution by comparing his position with that of Hume; and in 3, I summarize the consequences for Kant's general account of persons as cognizers and as moral agents.

1. The Conflict in the Third Antinomy between Freedom and Cause Two preliminaries need to be considered before outlining the formal arguments for thesis and antithesis. I outline in 1.1 the background issues in the conflict, and in 1.2 a problem about the formulation of the causal principle which produces the conflict with free will. I summarize in 1.3 the conflicting formal arguments in the Antinomy and in 1.4 Kant's textual resolution of the conflict.

1.1. Determinism and Freedom Causal determinism may express only the determinate character of causal interactions and say nothing about human freedom. It may then be confined to the claim that causal relations are such that if a cause occurs its effect is necessarily determined. Two additional factors yield a prima facie conflict with freedom, namely, a commitment through causal laws to a universal determinism and a belief that to be causally determined excludes freedom. The underlying problem can be put in terms of that claimed necessity in causal interactions and the universal scope of causal laws. If reality is restricted to experienced events, which Kant calls "phenomenal" or "natural," and causal determinism holds without exception over that domain, then the prima facie problem for freedom is that it conflicts with the determinist necessity of all such occurrences including human actions. There are two immediately evident ways of resolving the conflict. It may be claimed with Hume that the necessity of causal interactions is, contrary to appearances, compatible with human freedom. Alternatively it may be said that although causal necessity and freedom cannot both hold of the same events, some of them, such as human actions, are exempt from a universal determinism and are consequently free. The former, Humean position is called a "compatibilist" and the latter an "indeterminist" defense of freedom. It is also possible to accept the conflict and give up either causal determinism or human freedom, but Kant's resolution focuses on the two positions which in different ways admit both freedom and causality. Formally those two responses can be identified in terms of the following claims:

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I (Compatibilism): All phenomenal events, including human actions, are subject to natural causal laws, but such subjection is compatible with free will. II (Indeterminism): All phenomenal events subject to natural causal laws exclude free will, but some events, such as those involving human action, are exempt from causal laws. I defends freedom by allowing that the same event or action can be both causally determined and free. II accepts that cause and freedom cannot be ascribed to the same events but can cohabit in separate compartments of reality. Kant's position seems to be that he accepts some form of I, since he allows both freedom and cause to belong to the same events, and some form of II, since he advocates a conception of transcendental freedom which is outside the domain of natural, phenomenal causation. But that outcome needs qualification. He is evidently dissatisfied with Hume's version of compatibilism under I, and also regards his version of II as entitling us to ascribe freedom and causality to the same events. It is consequently easy to see why Kant's position has created so many problems. It is apparendy compatibilist and indeterminist, but accepts determinism for the domain of natural events including human actions. It seeks to reconcile causality and freedom by locating the latter outside the domain of natural events governed without exception by causal laws, but major problems arise from the reference to what is beyond the domain of natural events. Most contemporary philosophers think it a requirement for the resolution of the conflict that the issue is restricted to natural events and human actions. They tend to confine their resolutions either to a Humean compatibilism for that domain, or to an indeterminism which exempts some natural events from causal necessity. That difficulty is compounded for Kant because of his general internal requirement that we have no knowledge of things in themselves. If it is a central part of his resolution that freedom is properly ascribed to subjects in themselves, of which we have no genuine knowledge, the attempt at reconciliation must seem highly dubious. In the Kantian context two general issues stand out: One is to disentangle, and possibly make coherent, Kant's complex responses to the conflict, and the other is to see whether any such response succeeds in resolving the problem. I argue that Kant's position is not vulnerable to those immediate objections, that his distinction between transcendental and practical freedom is essential in his response, and that its success can best be judged in relation to Hume's compatibilism.

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1.2. The Second Analogy and the Third Antinomy The second preliminary concerns the relations between the Second Analogy and the Third Antinomy. Kant considers causal determinism in earlier sections of the Critique in the Second Analogy and the First Antinomy, and it is important to be clear how those discussions relate to his present topic. The principle of the Second Analogy, the general causal principle (GCP), may be formulated in Kant's terms as: (1) Every event has, or presupposes, a cause. It is then natural to take this already to express a universal causal determinism incompatible with free will, but there are decisive reasons not to take such a view. Kant evidentiy believes that the dialectical issues of "completing" a causal series, with their reference to an "unconditioned," arise over and above the GCP. Those issues arise out of a claim to a complete knowledge of the causes of every event in the world's history, and the constitutive or regulative status of such a claim. For Kant the GCP is a constitutive principle1 required as a necessary condition for a possible experience with an objective time order in events, and its status and possible formulations were considered in chapter 20.1.1. The dialectical principles deal with the questions whether the series of causes can be completed and known to be so, and whether they can or must make reference to an unconditioned outside the causal series. They raise inevitably questions about how we can even understand what is meant by the "completion" of such a causal series and by universal causal determinism, but these are not primarily at issue in the Second Analogy. The GCP excludes any appeal to nonnatural causes, whereas the discussion in the Third Antinomy sometimes turns on such an appeal which contrasts a natural and a nonnatural, or "intelligible," causation. These dialectical issues undoubtedly arise out of the GCP, but they raise additional problems over the conflict with freedom in relation to the Ideas of "completion" and the "unconditioned." In order to underline those differences between the GCP and a universal causal determinism in conflict with freedom I formulate the former as: (2) The concept of an event in general requires reference to, presupposes, that of a cause. For reasons given earlier in the discussion of the Second Analogy (2) is not a "conceptual" truth by virtue of being analytic, but it is, as Kant often emphasizes, a "conceptual" truth in the way that philosophical claims typically are conceptual for him2 by virtue of its being about concepts. Such

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claims express dependences between concepts which are not analytic and do not turn solely on the meaning of their constituents. In the case of (2) the required relation between the concepts of "event" and "cause" is said to be synthetic and rests on the need in our experience to presuppose a determining, causal relation in order to identify genuinely objective events. "Cause" is not part of the meaning of "event," but the latter concept requires a conception of causality to determine the temporal order of states in an event which is part of that meaning. (2) should consequently be distinguished from the claim of universal causal determinism in the Antinomies, namely, (3) All phenomenal, natural events are subject to causal laws related by necessity, and form a complete determinate causal series. Although (2) is claimed by Kant to be a necessary condition for a unique, all-embracing, objective time, the truth and interpretation of (3) are not settled in the Second Analogy. (2) does not entail any view, affirmative or negative, about (3)'s totality, and it is (3) which initiates the conflict in the Third Antinomy by claiming an unrestricted, universal scope for causality. If there is, or can be, a complete knowledge of the series of natural causes which makes no reference to anything outside that series then it may seem that human freedom is threatened. If that completion requires a reference to something "unconditioned" outside the series which "begins a causal series spontaneously," then there may be room for a notion of freedom which escapes from causal necessity.3

1.3. The Formal Arguments and Informal Observations As with all the Antinomies, Kant provides formal arguments for the thesis and antithesis, together with some informal observations on each. I take it that the observations are not necessarily Kant's own responses to the formal arguments, but informal and often rhetorical supplements which the protagonists themselves might add to their formal presentation. As in the three earlier Antinomies the arguments for thesis and antithesis are indirect.4 Thesis. Causes are not all "natural"; to explain appearances it is necessary to appeal to another kind of cause, namely, freedom. Proof. If there were no other kinds of cause, then there would be an endless regress in the series of causes, and so only "relative beginnings," and no completion. But the underlying law of nature is that

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nothing occurs without a sufficient determining cause, and this is incompatible with relative beginnings and an endless regress in explanation. We have therefore to deny the claim that there are only natural causes. Antithesis'. There is no freedom; everything occurs according to laws of nature. Proof Assume freedom in the transcendental sense as an "absolute beginning." But its causality must also have an absolute beginning, and this is inconsistent with the requirement that it follows some antecedent in accordance with laws. Transcendental freedom is thus in conflict with laws of nature, is incompatible with the unity of experience, and is not to be found in experience. It is a mere "thought-entity." Freedom as independence from laws is lawlessness, while nature is lawfulness. In explaining the thoroughgoing unity of experience it is tempting to appeal to such freedom, as an absolute stopping- or starting-point, but it abrogates any rules which make experience coherent. In both arguments it is recognized that "freedom" has a specially defined "transcendental" sense, as something outside the causal network of nature, appealed to as a means of stopping an infinite regress in the causal series. The thesis applauds this resource, and believes it necessary for the sake of rational "completion." The antithesis deplores it, recognizes the temptation, but regards it as a damaging reference to lawlessness and a disunity of experience. The two Observations underline the same points. On the thesis side, if we distinguish "practical" or "empirical" freedom from "transcendental" freedom, then the issue arises over the latter, not the former. Transcendental freedom is a conception of an absolute beginning or spontaneity in a causal series, which can be illustrated by the intentional act of rising from a chair.5 Such an act may be said to follow natural effects but not to arise out of them, and philosophers since the ancients have typically appealed to such a "prime mover." On the antithesis side, we may distinguish between what is mathematically first in time and what is dynamically first among causes. It is merely presumptuous to set limits to nature in order to "procure a resting place" for the imagination; that provides only a motive but not a reason for such a conclusion. If an infinite series without a first member is not recognized and accepted as an enigma, then a number of other fundamental synthetic claims will have to be rejected. The conception of transcendental freedom is of something outside the world, but if it were linked with substances in

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the world natural laws, criteria of empirical truth, and the distinction between dream and reality, would all disappear. Nature cannot coexist with such a lawless faculty. Some of these claims are merely rhetorical. References to the authority of the ancients, abandoning other cherished principles, and the threatened breakdown of natural law and order all have a rhetorical flavor, but the central issue remains that if we envisage a "completion55 for the causal series neither option seems satisfactory. To complete it by appealing to an absolute beginning outside the series is puzzling, since initiating a series is itself a causal relation and so seems not to be outside the series after all. To reply that the cause is outside the series but its effects are not is undoubtedly an enigma, but not one easily understood or readily endorsed. Reference to intentional acts is interesting but is limited as one of Kant's "empirical illustrations" of what is strictly a transcendental view. It achieves little without further explanation of the relation between intentionality and causality, and without some decision whether for the disputants intentions belong among phenomena or things in themselves. The alternative to postulating a cause outside phenomena may be to give up any hope of completing the causal series, and to leave us with an infinite regress, which may cast doubt on the ultimate adequacy of our explanatory, causal claims.6 What may start out in the debate as a toughminded acceptance of natural explanation and a repudiation of transcendental, nonnatural items outside the world may end up as an admission of the inadequacy of those natural explanations themselves. To put the point in this way indicates that what is threatened in the Antinomy is not only our notion of freedom but that of a complete, or adequate, explanation as well. The discussion, perhaps unexpectedly, has the aim of defending not only freedom and morality but of universal causation and natural explanation. Kant follows the earlier strategy of resisting a forced choice through LEM between the two options by insisting that if there is only one undifferentiated reality of things in themselves, then neither freedom nor causality can be rescued (B571). 7

1.4. Kant's Textual Resolution of the Antinomy In the initial outline of his resolution at B560-66, Kant insists, as do the proofs, on the distinction between "transcendental" freedom, the spontaneous beginning of some sequence, and "practical" or "empirical" freedom, the absence of coercion by sensuous impulses. He insists that the deep, "transcendental not physiological" problem lies with the former and that the central issue is for that reason speculative and not practical. But the two conceptions of freedom are connected so that if transcendental

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freedom had to be given up then practical freedom would be threatened or impossible. This presents again a central difficulty in understanding Kant's position. Transcendental freedom, which produces effects but is exempt from prior causal determination, seems to be an indeterminist concept incompatible, but able to cohabit, with determinism, while Kant's general aim seems to be to adopt some form of compatibilist position in which freedom and cause can hold of the same events. The difficulty is nominally resolved by distinguishing phenomenal and noumenal characters in one and the same person, but commentators have found this hard to understand and accept. In the preliminary accounts, and also in the more detailed discussion, Kant appeals to the contrast between the language of actual occurrence (what has happened) and that of moral prescription (what ought to have happened) (B575-76, B582-83). The suggestion is that such language in the latter case itself implies that the cause is not so determining that it excludes a causality of our will—a causality which independently of those natural causes, and even contrary to their force and influence, can produce a something that is determined in the time order in accordance with empirical laws, and can therefore begin a series of events entirely of itself. (B562)

The passage indicates that according to Kant our quite ordinary conception of obligation already contains some appeal to a spontaneous beginning of an action or event. It reinforces his own claims that practical freedom depends in some way on transcendental freedom where the primary speculative problem arises. The more detailed resolution underlines more of what Kant acknowledges as "obscurities" and "subtieties" in the discussion (B565). Kant develops a complex story about "intelligible" and "empirical" characters which is widely regarded as unacceptable or incoherent. The "intelligible" character is the repository for the spontaneous beginning marked by transcendental freedom, and has to meet the following requirements; that it is effective but not itself caused, that it is atemporal and therefore does not act in time, that the empirical character is a "sensible sign o f " and "determined in" the intelligible character, that we can infer to it but "not beyond," and can postulate it but not strictly know its features. In another contentious claim Kant implies that because the intelligible character is beyond our knowledge, we can never know the "real morality" of our actions (B579n). If this is taken quite straightforwardly, then Kant's defense of morality seems unachievable and pointless. The puzzle is somewhat relieved by noting that the expression for "real" involves not Realitat or wirklich, but only eigentlich, that is "strict" or "proper." The suggestion

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may be only that within the framework of intelligible character we evidently cannot know the ultimate noumenal morality of our actions, but that such ignorance is not a serious handicap to our conventional attributions of moral praise and blame in the context of practical or phenomenal freedom. It is therefore worth noting that Kant has a number of significant qualifications to make to that story which are now generally recognized.8 He says at one point that a reconciliation of natural causation and freedom arises "if we assume—even if it is a fiction—that there are intelligible causes" (B573). The suggestion is that the appeal to the intelligible does not require assertion of its reality, and this is consistent with his general claim that we can properly neither assert nor deny claims about a noumenal world. The same point is made in provisos at B713 about our treating causal series "as if 5 they had an absolute beginning, and is further confirmed by disclaimers about his conclusions at B585-86. There he insists that he has not, and does not claim to have, "established the reality [Re alitat] of freedom" or even the "possibility of freedom." All that has been shown is that "the antinomy rests on sheer illusion and that causality through freedom is at least not incompatible with freedom." That conclusion reads like Hume's "reconciling project" where the "whole dispute is merely verbal" (Enquiry, bk. 1, VIII), but Kant's position is different from Hume's. Kant makes clear that the freedom involved here is the philosophically contentious "transcendental freedom" rather than the ordinary "practical freedom" with which Hume is exclusively concerned, and which Kant says "is proved through experience" (B830). As in other contexts Kant's attitude is that although Hume moves in the right direction his empiricism prevents him from approaching the Critical resolution. It may be objected that even in this context Kant does not always respect these provisos. Just before B586, Kant says of the intelligible cause, in Kemp Smith's translation, that "we can know that it is free," where the German says only that "We can know that it may be free [sein konne]." That amendment resolves an apparent inconsistency and with the other provisos throws an important light on Kant's position. They indicate Kant's recognition of the need to avoid a conflict with his general prohibition on assertions about things in themselves, but they do not resolve all his problems. They leave undetermined what the role of the appeal to an intelligible cause is, even how far it is compatible with Kant's general critical view of noumena, and how we should finally understand the claimed reconciliation of causality and freedom. The appeal to an intelligible character is linked also importantly to the appeal to a "transcendental subject" as a Grund for our empirical grasp of persons in their cognitive and moral aspects. That connection is exploited in the famous passage at B574: "Man, however, who knows all the rest of

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nature solely through the senses, knows himself through pure apperception; and this, indeed, in acts and inner determinations which he cannot regard as impressions of the senses." It recalls the similar claims made in the Deduction and the Paralogisms about legitimate and illegitimate conceptions of our "intellectual" capacities embodied in "transcendental apperception" (B157-58). Something has been said of these already in chapters 16, 21, and 25, and I later relate those accounts to the present interest in practical reason. In the present context Kant uses the point to distinguish between lifeless activity and animal life where no appeal needs to be made beyond sensible conditions. Animals are said to have an arbitrium brutum, where activities result from coercion by sensuous impulses. Humans, however, to whom reason is always available, have arbitrium sensitivum and liberum, and are subject to sensuous impulses but not necessarily coerced by them (B584). Kant accepts that in the empirical realm, subject to causal laws, human actions are entirely predictable and "determined," but the example of the "malicious lie" is used to claim that moral responsibility may still attach to the subject on the general principle, expressed in our use of "ought," that the subject could have done otherwise. First . . . we try to discover the motives to which it [a malicious lie] has been due and how far the action . . . may be imputed to the offender. . . . We proceed in this enquiry just as we should in ascertaining for a given natural effect the series of its determining causes. But although we believe that the action is thus determined we none the less blame the agent . . . for we presuppose that . . . we can regard the past series of conditions as not having occurred, and the act as being completely unconditioned by any preceding state, just as if the agent in and by himself began in this action an entirely new series of consequences. (B582-83)

2. Kant's Resolution of the Antinomy Kant's resolution has been understood in many different ways, but I consider a contrast between two basic options associated with the earlier traditionalist account of Kant and its revolutionary alternative. The two accounts can be initially distinguished by the degree of commitment they ascribe to Kant's story about an atemporal intelligible character and an associated noumenal freedom. In the traditionalist version, that commitment is taken to assert the truth of a claim about noumena in which freedom and natural causation can cohabit but in different, noumenal and phenomenal, worlds ultimately united in those two aspects of human agents. Kant's resolution then claims, as in earlier Antinomies, that without the distinction between appearances and noumena there would be no

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hope of a resolution in reconciling causality and freedom, or of rescuing either. With that distinction applied to, and united in, human agents the account claims that we are entided to accept the existence and reality of such noumena, and to demonstrate the reconciliation, by cohabitation, of freedom and cause. We may consequendy be assured that persons are noumenal agents whose intelligible character, although totally hidden even from ourselves, nevertheless produces the conduct ascribed to our empirical characters. Such an account is patently open to two kinds of objection. Commitment to the actual existence and reality of noumena conflicts internally with Kant's own prohibitions, and the attempt at a reconciliation of cause and freedom is evidendy flawed. It may be objected that compatibility between two concepts cannot be demonstrated by ascribing them to different things or different worlds, and the story about atemporal agency may be regarded as incoherent.9 Even if that device, and the resulting cohabitation, had some value it is difficult to see how such diverse worlds and characters could be unified in one person or one action. It is difficult to understand how allowing cause and freedom to cohabit in the distinct realms of phenomena and noumena can justify talking of them as compatible in the same event. The conclusion may be drawn that the persistent conflicts in Kant's contrast between phenomena and noumena, and in his transcendental idealism, show his view finally to be incoherent. The earlier conflicts over Kant's commitment to the existence and reality of things in themselves in the theoretical sphere are now compounded, and made apparent, by his need to admit some form of knowledge of those things even though "only from a practical point of view" (Bxxi-xxii, Bxxx). These difficulties in such an account of the Third Antinomy, like the more general complaints in the Aesthetic and Analytic, are quite transparent and should lead readers to wonder whether this can really be Kant's considered position. Kant's provisos show that he is aware of these difficulties, and he expresses them in the second Critique as though they are not conclusive. no other path remains than to ascribe the existence of a thing so far as it is determinable in time, . . . and its causality in accordance with the law of natural necessity, only to appearance and to ascribe freedom to the same being as a thing in itself This is certainly unavoidable if one wants to maintain both these mutually repellent concepts together; but in application, when one wants to explain them as united in one and the same action, and so to explain this union itself, great difficulties come forward which seem to make such a unification unfeasible. (Ak. 5.95)

If Kant's position is of this kind then it is vulnerable to an objection which he himself recognizes.

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The alternative rejects that substantial and literal commitment to noumenal freedom, agency, and character, and makes two related claims. The first is that he can oudine a consistent story about noumenal agents, freedom, and character, and can make use of the available division between appearances and things in themselves to express it. The second is that that conception of transcendental freedom can be understood as compatible with natural causality and allows us to deploy the conception of practical freedom as we do in law and morality. The two points are intended not to assert the truth of freedom in a transcendent world but only to defend that conception against a determinist attack. But the noted difficulties are serious and not easy to resolve. It is not clear that the story of an atemporal intelligible character, even offered as an "assumption" or "fiction" is consistent, and even if it is consistent its role in defending freedom against determinism remains unclear. The point behind those anxieties raises the problem of understanding how, and why, our ordinary conception of practical freedom requires a conception of transcendental freedom, an absolute spontaneity beginning a series of events in appearances but "outside" them. Kant insists that the real issue centers on that "philosophical" conception of transcendental freedom rather than on our everyday appeal to practical, empirical freedom. But if the aim is to make freedom and cause compatible rather than merely to coexist in different worlds, it may seem better to focus on practical freedom as Hume did, and to endorse his compatibilist position. Kant's appeal to transcendental freedom as a necessary Grund, without which our empirical activities in morality and the law would be impossible, matches his general move of "going transcendental" in order to demonstrate, and remedy, some failure or omission in empiricist theory. Kant calls the problem of freedom the "stumbling block of empiricism," and the transcendental move is evidentiy designed to overcome that empiricist obstacle (Ak. 5.7-8). It is consequently useful to begin by considering Hume's empiricist and compatibilist resolution of the conflict, in order to see why Kant might have thought that it needed supplementation of the kind he offers.

2.1. Hume's Compatibilist Theory Hume's discussion makes a Kantian distinction between "questions which lie entirely beyond the reach of human capacity" and those concerning "any subject of common life and experience" (Enquiry, bk. 1, VIII). His view is that the former questions, which include issues involved in the Antinomies such as the "origin of worlds, the economy of the intellectual system, and the region of spirits," are naturally fruitless and inconclusive.

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Kant disagrees with this general dismissal because it fails to separate legitimate and illegitimate metaphysical issues and provides no diagnosis or explanation of the errors associated with the latter. For Hume questions about common life which yield persistent disagreement are more naturally associated with ambiguities in the meaning of the central terms than with issues beyond our cognitive powers. Kant's resolution of the issues in the Dialectic also turns on ambiguities in the relevant philosophical claims, but his primary target, unlike Hume's, is the failure to separate claims about phenomena and noumena, which are concerned with limits to our cognitive powers. Hume claims that the "labyrinth of obscure sophistry" in the issue over freedom and necessity rests on ambiguities in those terms. "I hope, therefore, to make it appear that all men have ever agreed in the doctrine both of necessity and of liberty, according to any reasonable sense which can be put on these terms; and that the whole controversy has hitherto turned merely upon words." Kant similarly identifies and rejects resolutions which merely "quibble over words" in the second Critique, and it may be thought that this represents a criticism of Hume (Ak. 5.95-96). I shall argue that Kant's general strategy does turn on a perceived inadequacy in Hume's compatibilist resolution, but the passage from the second Critique is not directed at Hume. It criticizes the idea that any inner, psychological antecedent of action demonstrates freedom of the will, a view Kant memorably describes as establishing no more than the "freedom of a turnspit." Hume's view is that once his ambiguities are noted and resolved there is no genuine conflict between freedom and causal necessity. The two notions can be compatibly ascribed to the same event, and the appearance of conflict between them is no more than a semantic illusion. Kant does not accept that Humean resolution as decisive or adequate, but as with other empiricist positions he is prepared to accept it as an initial response to be supplemented with a Critical turn. The relevant confusions, according to Hume, arise over each of the central terms, "free" and "necessary," and the connections between them. Hume thinks that we mistakenly identify the "necessity" of causal connections with a "coercion" incompatible with "liberty," when in reality "necessity" signifies no more than a constant regularity, and "liberty" no more than acting from choice. If we fail to notice these errors then to be free is to act without constancy or regularity, and yet nobody, apart perhaps from a dedicated existentialist, would say that erratic or random behavior is the sign of a free agent. Free will comes to be identified mistakenly with lawlessness, as in the antithesis argument, or to be thought exempt from causal connections in an indeterminist outcome. Such counterintuitive conclusions result, according to Hume, from failing to see the correct but complex oppositions in which necessity is

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contrasted with chance, not choice, and liberty or choice is contrasted with coercion, not constancy or regularity. For Hume the constant regularities in the behavior of a free agent reflect compatibly both causal connections and a noncoercive liberty. Such behavior may be chosen as a result of rational deliberation with its expected constancies, but Hume has an additional claim about the role of reason. Essentially for him "Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them" (Treatise of Human Nature 2.3, §iii). Reason does not set goals, is "inert" and "impotent" in producing actions (Treatise 3.1, §i), and merely recommends technical ways of achieving what we want. It advises us on the means to achieve our goals, but the goals themselves depend on our desires and a natural search for satisfaction. Hume's position could be put by saying that those who exercise rational, or reasonable, choices are following laws just as much as a planet orbiting the sun. He insists throughout Enquiry VIII that the uniformity of human actions, which is the sole basis for our belief in the necessity of causes, is not in principle different from that of physical events and is equally available in both contexts. But since we ascribe free will only in the former personal case and not in the latter impersonal case there must be some other feature of causes than their regularity or constancy which threatens freedom. Hume is committed to the idea that, apart from their supposed necessity, causal connections threaten freedom if they are coercive and do not allow us the unforced choice of free action. His position would be untenable if the line between "coercive" and "noncoercive" causes was that between the physical and the psychological, for there are psychological compulsions just as there are physical coercions. Kant makes the point himself and treats the denial of inner compulsions as a "wretched subterfuge" (Ak. 5.95-96). Hume is consequentiy committed to a distinction between "choiceexhibiting" and "choice-inhibiting" causes. Although freedom and cause are compatible for Hume, they are not always jointly ascribable, since coercive causes will inhibit, and to that degree conflict with, genuine choice. Choice-exhibiting causes, including rational deliberation, will typically be free in the exercise of a genuine choice but be subject to causal law and predictable. Choice-inhibiting causes are, whether physical or psychological, the result of coercive factors in conflict with freedom to various degrees. Physical restraint and psychological addiction or malfunction can provide examples of choice-inhibiting causes, but such examples need to be handled with care. We should not assume that an addict's choice to indulge in a drug is necessarily coercive, and empirical evidence may be needed in particular cases to determine whether an addict can choose to stop indulging.10 Hume's distinction between two types of cause explains the

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compatibility of freedom and causal influence and why it is sometimes denied through confusion over the use of the central terms. The question remains whether Hume succeeds in resolving the determinists' problem, and two considerations show that at least the issue can be taken further. It may be objected first that the account of choiceexhibiting action does not avoid determinism since it admits causal antecedents even for genuine choice, and second that Hume's conception of causality evades the problem only by wrongly deflating the notion of causal necessity. It is a popular objection to Hume's account that in allowing genuine choices to be effects in a causal network he concedes that they are determined and not free. The response should be that such an objection is irrelevant, since it either misunderstands Hume's point or begs the question against him. It is an essential aspect of Hume's compatibilism that choices and causes are ascribable to the same event, that choices are causal factors in action, and that they are in turn effects of other causes such as rational deliberation and desires. It is a misunderstanding to charge Hume with overlooking this by objecting that genuine choices have their causes, for his doctrine insists on that very claim. It is not a serious objection because, in his view, to fit action or choice into a causal network is not necessarily to invoke a coercive cause or to deny freedom. A determinist objector who assumes that anything subject to prior causal connections is coercive and cannot be free begs the question against Hume. The objector would have additionally to argue that the prior causes of genuine choices are always themselves coercive, but there is no more reason to accept that than there was to accept the initial claim that all causes are coercive. In the second difficulty, Hume's compatibilism is often thought to be wholly inadequate in playing down the significance of the necessity in causal connections, and it has come to be called for this reason, and derisively, "soft determinism." Hume presumably thinks it unnecessary to answer this beyond insisting on the a posteriori workings of custom or habit and its confusion with necessity, but a determinist may regard that response as inadequate.11 The claim might be that the confusion Hume alleges is avoided by basing the determinist case on the global causal determinism in (3). (3) claims a necessity for the occurrence of every event, every change, in experience and represents everything that happens as fixed, determined, by earlier events and natural laws. That is a potential threat to human freedom because it represents all events and actions as occurring necessarily at their point in the development of the world. According to (3) every event and action has to occur at its specific time and place, and this may seem to challenge freedom. It presents a sense in which we could not have done, or chosen, otherwise than we did. This is to insist on the "necessity" of

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causal relations and not their "coercion," and it offers to raise an issue that Hume's ambiguity fails to address. Both Hume and Kant insist on the freedom of having alternative options, of being able to do otherwise, but their attitudes to this are significantly different. Hume's response would be to say that an agent could have acted otherwise if a choice had intervened in that alternative direction. This could be expressed on Hume's behalf as "could have done otherwise if she had wanted to," or "could have done otherwise if she had chosen to," but the position of free will is no different from that of any physical or psychological causal sequence. In those cases if some other cause had intervened then the outcome might have been different, and the same holds for the intervention of choice as just another causal factor. That counterfactual possibility may never be realized if all events are determined by natural laws and prior conditions, and for the determinist that represents a threat to freedom which goes beyond Hume's compatibilism. It could not be objected to Hume merely that the causal network just is incompatible with free will, for the reasons already given, but a determinist can offer this other objection. If the causal sequence of events is fixed once a starting point and complete causal laws are given, then there is no room for alternative possibilities.

2.2. Kant's Response Kant differs from Hume in two principal ways at this point. On one side, he takes more seriously than Hume a difference between causal explanation and moral reasons; on the other, he insists that the philosophical problem lies with a "transcendental freedom" which Hume's exclusive interest in practical freedom fails to mention. Both differences are important and complementary but the determinist argument involves the second more directly. Since Hume does not take seriously that additional determinist objection he has no reason to take Kant's further step towards transcendental freedom, and focuses exclusively on practical freedom. Kant's appeal to transcendental freedom takes seriously the determinist belief that the problem is not completely resolved by accepting free choices as causal factors in empirical experience. That insistence on a transcendental dimension in the issue is Kant's distinctively non-Humean recognition of the apparentiy unresolved determinist problem, but it is not yet obvious what it amounts to, whether Kant's strategy is preferable to Hume's, or if it succeeds. Practical, or empirical, freedom is accessible to us in ordinary life, in moral and legal contexts where we ascribe praise, blame, and responsibility. It is the immanent, a posteriori manifestation in ordinary life of our choices and actions, and it is the center of Hume's empirical discussion but

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evidently not of Kant's transcendental enquiry For Kant the philosophical issue concerns not practical but transcendental freedom's capacity to act spontaneously in initiating some course of action. It corresponds to the notion in the Antinomy proofs of an "absolute beginning" which may have effects but is itself exempt from prior causes, and it points to an intelligible character, a noumenal will or reason, outside the series of phenomenal causes. It is that transcendent reference which encourages traditionalists to ascribe to Kant an inconsistent commitment to the actual existence of noumena, and to support a view that even in the Deduction Kant's references to selves as "spontaneous intelligences" commits him to the actual existence of things, or selves, in themselves. The traditionalist account depends on the role envisaged for Kant's appeal to noumena in the Third Antinomy, and that has two central, related aspects. I consider first the reasons for Kant's appeal to transcendental freedom, and second the relations between transcendental and practical freedom. The pressure from the speculative argument has the following structure: In the argument between Hume and the determinist, the position has been reached that within phenomena everything is subject to causal, natural laws. Hume claims that this subjection is compatible with the ascription, in the noncoercive, causal cases of a free choice. The determinist view is that Hume has not made this out merely by noting a possible confusion between "necessity" and "coercion," and is potentially wrong in thinking that causal laws have no necessity at all. For the determinist, whether we are coerced or not, if all events are the necessary result of natural, causal laws and some initial position, then it is really not possible for us to have chosen otherwise than we did. The claimed alternative possibilities are an illusion, whether we are "coerced" or not, and whether within that causal network we exercise a "choice" or not. For a determinist like Van Inwagen, exercising what we call a "choice" does not establish freedom if its exercise is determined by prior causes in that fixed sequence.12 Kant agrees with the determinist and Hume that no phenomenon is exempt from causal, natural laws, and acknowledges that Hume's compatibilism is not yet sufficient to resolve the dilemma (B570-71). 1 3 On the other hand he disagrees with the former's view that no room can be found for freedom, and instead draws the conclusion that if freedom is to be validated against the determinists' view, then some other, non-Humean defense is needed. Something must be done to show that even with a phenomenal subjection to natural laws it is possible to defend an indeterminist freedom. Since everyone, including the determinist, accepts that indeterminism must involve a realm outside phenomena, outside the sphere of causation and causal laws, the only way in which the determinist can be answered in his own terms is by appealing beyond phenomena to noumena. The determinist's pressure effectively requires that to validate

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freedom in his position is to validate an indeterminist and noumenal freedom exempt from causal laws and beyond phenomena. Kant's strategy against this position begins to explain why he talks of taking a step up to hut not beyond intelligible characters and noumenal agency (B585). He does so in response to a determinist pressure which requires a comprehensible freedom which has to be transcendent because exempt from causal laws. I argue later that Kant appeals to the intelligible realm primarily for the sake of the argument and not because he has an independent belief in it, but first consider what kind of validation or defense this provides. It may seem useless to appeal to a realm about which we know nothing in order to defend transcendental freedom. It may seem independendy to provide no serious answer to the determinist and also to contravene Kant's own prohibitions on endorsing the existence and character of intelligible objects. Those objections are answered by Kant's own account of his strategy, which insists on the following three points. First, he claims that the apparatus required to withstand that determinist pressure has already been independendy provided in his formal contrast between phenomena and noumena. permit me to call attention to one thing, namely that every step one takes with pure reason, even in the practical field . . . nevertheless fits with all the moments of the Critique of theoretical reason . . . as if each step had been thought out with deliberate foresight merely to provide this confirmation. . . . Frequent observation has convinced me that that when such an undertaking has been carried through to its end what halfway through . . . seemed to me at times very dubious . . . was at the end found to harmonize perfectiy, in an unexpected way, with what had been discovered independendy. . . . (second Critique, Ak.

5.106)

The suggestion is that the independent apparatus consisted in the Critique's essential distinction between phenomena and noumena in his transcendental idealism. In chapter 26.3, idealism was represented as a doctrine which draws a variety of distinctions between a dependent and an independent reality. Different versions of idealism—traditional, antirealist, and transcendental—draw that distinction differendy, but Kant's contrast between phenomena, knowable through sensibility and understanding, and noumena, not for us knowable through reason alone, defines his version. It is essential to that version that we can meaningfully distinguish what we can and what we cannot know in that way, but neither of the other disputants has such a distinction available. Kant's point is not merely that he has such a distinction, but that it plays a necessary role in our experience. The realm of noumena is a necessary, unavoidable, conceptual shadow of our immanent experience. It

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explains the status for everything we identify as a metaphysical Grund or condition of experience, not as a transcendent material item but only as a formal, conceptual shadow. The central error associated with the recognition of such appeals to ultimate grounds of experience is that of misconstruing the concepts as designations of real things. In virtue of their formal character such referents can be only noumenal, since they abstract from any reference to sensibility, but for Kant this prevents us from having the required knowledge to validate their actual existence. The kind of validation on offer against the determinist argument cannot be a commitment to their actual, material existence, for this conflicts not only with the official denial of that knowledge but with the whole diagnostic therapy of the Dialectic. "Transcendental freedom" and its intelligible, noumenal reference are designed to act as such a conceptual Grund for our practical experience of empirical freedom. The third point underlines the consequence that the existence of intelligible freedom and character cannot be positively established or asserted, and that the associated principles of reason have only a regulative, not a constitutive, role. In reason itself nothing begins; as unconditioned condition of every voluntary act it admits of no conditions antecedent to itself in time. Its effect has, indeed, a beginning in the series of appearances, but never in this series an absolutely first beginning. . . . In order to illustrate this regulative principle of reason, let us take a voluntary action. (B582) When on the other hand reason is itself regarded as the determining cause, as in freedom, . . . we have to proceed as if we had before us an object not of the senses but of the pure understanding. In this practical sphere the conditions are no longer in the series of appearances; they can be posited outside the series . . . (which) . . . can therefore be regarded as if it had an absolute beginning, through an intelligible cause. All this shows that the cosmological Ideas are nothing but regulative principles, and are very far from positing, like constitutive principles, an actual totality of such series. (B713)

Claims about an intelligible character are to be understood not as established constitutive truths but only as regulative guides, organizing our immanent experience in investigating causes theoretically and imputing responsibility practically. Kant's general distinction between constitutive and regulative principles of reason is examined in chapter 28.2, but these passages already indicate the limitations Kant standardly accepts for reference to noumena, that it provides no truth or actual existents and licenses no assertion. Viewed in this way, the primary difficulty for Kant is not the extravagance and inconsistency of his appeal to noumena, but the opposite one of understanding what such a modest claim can achieve in the argument. How can freedom and cause be reconciled by treating

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the former as a conceptual shadow of our ascription of practical, empirical freedom? Kant does not admit actual noumena in the Third Antinomy any more than he does elsewhere; all such references can be only regulative and not constitutive. That disclaimer indicates the formal strategy of justification in the arguments of Kant against the determinist. Just as Kant renounces any ability to know transcendental freedom and intelligible character, so he expects the determinist to admit a parallel ignorance about an indeterminist freedom. Kant admits he has no ground to assert that there are intelligible characters or noumenal agents, but the determinist equally cannot deny those claims. By using that pressure initially to make his case the determinist has, according to Kant, effectively given the game away. Far from establishing that there can be no freedom at all, since all phenomena are subject to causal laws, the determinist pressure has ensured that the possible existence of an indeterminist freedom exempt from causal laws in the realm of noumena cannot be denied. Kant does not aim to establish that noumena are sometimes free, but he takes the determinist to have to establish that they cannot be, and that is not possible. Kant, by contrast, claims to have already to hand just the needed distinction between phenomena and noumena to allow the contested notion. The strategy outlined may seem unconvincing, but it is plainly expressed in the Grundlegung and at B804: Now where determination by laws of nature ceases, there all explanation ceases as well, and nothing is left [to us] but defence, that is, to repel the objections of those who pretend to have seen deeper into the essence of things and therefore boldly declare that freedom is impossible. (Grundlegung, Ak. 4.459)

The claim is that those who pretend to see deeper are the determinists who resist Hume's reconciliation of free will and causality. Kant's objection to those pretensions is that on one side they require a notional reference to a nonnatural freedom among things in themselves, but on the other side they refuse to distinguish a world of sense from a world of understanding. [Their 'contradiction'] would come to nothing if they were willing to . . . acknowledge, as is equitable, that things in themselves (though hidden) must lie behind appearances as their Grund and that one cannot insist that [their] laws of operation . . . should be the same as those under which appearances stand. (Ak. 4.459)

For such determinists this entails a forced choice between the two options of cause and freedom and they characteristically reject the latter. Kant claims that he has what is necessary in transcendental idealism to evade that forced choice (Ak. 5.106).

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In the summary passage at B804 Kant reviews the general strategy of the arguments in what he calls the "discipline of pure reason." Of the contentious propositions he says: But, although, in dealing with the merely speculative questions of pure reason, hypotheses are not available for the purpose of basing propositions on them, they are entirely permissible for the purpose of defending propositions; that is, they cannot be employed dogmatically but only in [a] polemical fashion. By the defence of propositions I do not mean the addition of fresh grounds for their assertion but merely the nullifying of sophistical arguments by which our opponent professes to invalidate this assertion. Now all synthetic propositions of pure reason have this peculiarity that while in asserting the reality of this or that Idea we can never have knowledge sufficient to give certainty to our proposition our opponent is just as litde able to assert the opposite.

The appeal to transcendental freedom and to an intelligible character is part of that oblique defense. Kant is not adding grounds for asserting their reality but merely showing, in that nondogmatic, polemical fashion that his determinist opponents have just as litde ground to deny it. The reference to a polemical response suggests that Kant makes these points against the determinist primarily for the sake of the argument and this is supported by the First Antinomy's resolution. Kant could not accept without qualification the constitutive Idea of a complete explanation of every event which is the basis for the determinist objection to Hume. Even apart from its implications for freedom and morality that speculative Idea is regarded as problematic and only regulative. The determinists' case for such a complete explanation is just as flawed according to Kant as their case against freedom. It was noted earlier that Kant's primary problem in this strategy is that of explaining how anything substantial can emerge from the minimal character of a notional transcendental freedom. The issue is evident in the question whether transcendental freedom has any substantial relationship to empirical, practical freedom; whether the latter has any real need for the former. The formal relation between transcendental and practical freedom contains an initial problem, and the conception of an atemporal transcendental freedom has also been thought to be incoherent. The relation is expressed at B562: "The denial of transcendental freedom must, therefore, involve the elimination of all practical freedom." The suggestion is that transcendental freedom, the focus of Kant's philosophical problem, is required as a condition of the possibility of practical freedom, as its metaphysical Grund, but this is capable of different interpretations. It might be taken to require the assertion of transcendental freedom, and of ourselves as intelligible characters but that has been set aside since it conflicts with Kant's specific provisos at B585-586.

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A more serious formal difficulty arises if the relation is taken to be, as in (4), a straightforward entailment or implication. (4) If we have practical freedom, then we (must) have transcendental freedom. Since Kant says that practical freedom can be proved through experience our transcendental freedom can be direcdy derived from that relation together with (4), but this would be an absurd result which succeeds in making transcendental freedom unmysterious at the cost of also making it redundant (B830). It makes Kant's transcendental appeal indistinguishable from Hume's empirical account and conflicts both with Kant's strategy and his denials that he has established the reality or the possibility of transcendental freedom. That formal relation has the consequence that Kant's case for pursuing the issue beyond Hume's compatibilism for practical freedom is unmotivated. A more coherent view would be that the argument and acceptance of transcendental freedom do not establish that our practically free choices are exempt from causal influences but only that those causal influences can be practically disregarded. Commentators have sometimes expressed this by talking of "prescinding from" the causal aspect of actions in attending to their moral or prudential dimensions.14 The point is complex, since in ascribing responsibility we identify, and do not disregard, a causal origin for acts and their consequences. In some contexts, where the causes may be "choice-inhibiting" and potentially excusing or mitigating, we may choose not to disregard more detailed causal connections. In other cases, where there is no blame but we wish to note and avoid certain consequences in the future, we may be more interested in causal relations than in moral evaluation. Committees of enquiry are designed to establish causes in order to ensure as far as possible that damaging consequences do not occur in that way in the future. Moral and prudential dimensions of choice allow us to focus on a different aspect of behavior and to ask not "What caused this to happen?" but "Was it (morally, prudentially, or otherwise) right, wise, or desirable that it did?"15 It is in these terms that Kant speaks repeatedly of imputing responsibility for actions, of the relevant moral reasoning and intention, of an atemporal order of reasons, and of acting "as if" we really were exempt from causal influences (Ak. 5.95ff., B700). The transcendental concept of freedom would be impossible if the determinist position were accepted, and its impossibility would prevent us even from "prescinding from" or "disregarding" causes as we do in forensic contexts. It is in this sense a Grund for those legitimate operations in the moral or legal sphere which does not license the belief that human actions are exempt from causation,

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but provides a defense against determinism, and enables us to disregard causal explanation in favor of moral evaluation. It is possible to understand an atemporal aspect of reason by appealing to the general connection in the Dialectic with reasoning and noting Kant's references to a unique order which reason involves. Reason does not here follow the order of things as they present themselves in appearance, but frames for itself with perfect spontaneity an order of its own according to ideas, to which it adapts the empirical conditions, and according to which it declares actions to be necessary, even though they have never taken place, and perhaps never will take place. (B576)

The formulation and evaluation of such arguments and conclusions presents an order of reason quite different from the order of events presented to the senses and explained causally. It reflects Kant's contrast between the way things are and the way they ought to be, and the earlier distinction between the analytic or synthetic status of judgments and the administration of tests to determine that status. Any occurrent reasoning can be regarded as an action with a temporal order, but its understanding and evaluation belong to a different and atemporal order of thought. If it were really impossible to ascribe both freedom and cause to the same events then we could have no legitimate ground for our practical disregard of phenomenal causality. Kant's account has two central aspects: practical freedom is ascribed to the same phenomenal actions which are universally subject to causality, and transcendental freedom stands for a metaphysical condition of the ascription of practical freedom. As such a Grund it must be beyond phenomena, but this marks only the status of that Idea and not the assertion of a known character. Kant's resolution ingeniously and importantiy turns the determinists' case against itself, in a characteristic strategy throughout the Critique}6 It says in effect that if you insist, against Hume, that universal causation is incompatible with phenomenal freedom, then there is a resource available formally in transcendental idealism which meets that demand. Hume did not see any need for a further step, but Kant supplements Hume's compatibilism with that response to determinist pressure. "Going transcendental" is again typically represented as a mark of a weakness, an omission, in the empiricist view, and it confirms transcendental idealism indirectly. Kant is not rejecting compatibilism, but accepting its empiricist weakness in order to find that supplementary way of rejecting determinism. He is in that way both a compatibilist and an indeterminist, but only with qualifications. Transcendental freedom is licensed in Kant's resolution not as an established truth about a supersensible reality but as a consistent speculation which cannot be rationally denied by a determinist; not as a constitutive truth, since it is undecidable, but as a guide regulating partic-

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ularly our moral thinking and evaluation. Practical freedom is safeguarded not by establishing that one of its conditions, a spontaneous initiation of events, actually occurs in the practical exercise of freedom, but by demonstrating that that condition cannot be shown by the determinist argument to be inconsistent or incompatible with causation. Practical freedom requires transcendental freedom not because it entails its truth, or because contrapositively the falsity of the latter entails the former's falsity, but because if the latter could be shown to be untenable, inconsistent, or meaningless by the determinist, then the former could not be accepted even as a regulative guide.

3. Persons, Morality, and Transcendental Idealism Kant's resolution of the Third Antinomy concludes the theoretical, speculative account of persons which begins in the Analytic, is clarified in the Paralogisms and the Appendix to the Dialectic, and whose moral dimension is further developed in the Grundlegung and second Critique. I have argued that in all these passages Kant's appeal to a noumenal self is not an exception to his standard restrictions on such references. They outline a role for such a conception but prohibit the inference to any actual, immanent or transcendent, existent. Kant recognizes the attraction of such inferences throughout the Dialectic but treats them in Wittgenstein's way as a sign of the "bewitchment of our intelligence by language." In this final section I make two final comments on that conclusion. One has to do with Henry Allison's account of the third Antinomy in his Kant's Theory of Freedom, and the other concerns an implication in Kant's moral philosophy. My account of the third Antinomy is close to that of Henry Allison in Kant's Theory of Freedom but differs in one definite and a second possible respect. He focuses in detail on the moral dimension of Kant's resolution which I have consciously set aside. Where I have emphasized the speculative side in the argument between Hume and the determinist, he rightly stresses the way in which that resolution responds to pressure from the moral theory. The primary reason for my neglect of the latter is Kant's own conviction that the central issue in the Third Antinomy is speculative and not practical, even though he acknowledges a greater interest in the practical then in the speculative issue (B826 1 7 ). The speculative resolution is required for the moral theory, but the two pressures are complementary and do not conflict. Kant is motivated both by the purely speculative argument and by his moral theory, and in that respect the difference between Allison's account and mine is only that his is more comprehensive. The second apparent difference between the two accounts is not wholly clear but concerns the relation between transcendental and practical free-

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dom. I have stressed that the relation between the two concepts is not a straightforward implication, and that the former functions in the determinist argument as a conceptual Grund for the latter. The concept of transcendental freedom is defended against the determinist argument as a condition for our legitimate use of practical freedom in experience, but it is not part of the latter's meaning. Henry Allison's central view is that practical freedom contains as an "ingredient" or "component" a reference to the subject's acting spontaneously to initiate a course of action. For him transcendental freedom, as a spontaneous beginning, is an ingredient already contained in the meaning of practical freedom. Although mainly empirical it [practical freedom] also contains as an essential ingredient, the transcendental idea . . . characterised as the thought of the 'absolute spontaneity of an action as the ground of its imputability.' (1990, 25) The other model, which pertains to an agent's 'intelligible character', appeals to the spontaneity of the agent as rational deliberator. . . . According to this model. . . the intentional actions of a rational agent are never merely the causal consequences of the agent's antecedent psychological state . . . but require, as a necessary condition, an act of spontaneity. The claim that this spontaneity is an ineliminable component in rational agency is what . . . I call Kant's 'Incorporation Thesis.' (1990, 5) the transcendental idea of freedom, which provides the content to the otherwise empty thought of an intelligible character, has a merely regulative, nonexplanatory function. It does so by providing the conceptual basis for a model of deliberative rationality, which includes, as an ineliminable component, the thought of practical spontaneity. . . . [S]ince this spontaneity is merely intelligible, its attribution requires the attribution of an intelligible character. (1990, 45) Since there is a parallel between the spontaneity of free action and that of judging, both empirical judging and choosing are not themselves actually realized in sensory experience. these activities [choosing, taking, framing, positing] as expressions of spontaneity are themselves merely intelligible (they can be thought but not experienced) (1990,38) The missing ingredient is the spontaneity of the agent, the act of 'taking as' or self-determination. Since this can be conceived but not experienced, it is once again something merely intelligible. (1990, 39) Finally, and most significantiy for the understanding of Kant's conception of intelligible character the 'I take', like the 'I think', can be conceived but not experienced. In other words I can no more observe myself deciding than I can observe myself judging, although in both cases I must be conscious of what I am doing. (1990,40)

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This leads to the conclusion, against Irwin,18 that Kant's position goes beyond our merely "disregarding," or "prescinding from," causal explanations of action: we do not merely prescind or abstract from the causal conditions of our actions, considered as occurrences in the phenomenal world; rather we regard those conditions as nonsufficient, that is 'not so determining' as to exclude a 'causality of the will', since we think of ourselves as initiating causal series through actions conceived as first beginnings. (1990, 45)

These passages have a great deal in common with, but may at some points differ from, what I have said. The similarity between maxims for action and choosing on one side and judging on the other, which is an illuminating part of Allison's "incorporation" thesis, and a recognition of practical freedom's need for a defense of transcendental freedom, appear in both accounts. But to talk of intelligible transcendental freedom as an "ingredient" in practical freedom, and to conclude that judging is an intelligible action which cannot be observed or appear to the senses, are not part of my account and are open to difficulties. If "absolute spontaneity" is purely intelligible, and can be only conceived but not experienced, then it is not obvious how such a notion can be an "ingredient" or "component" in practical freedom which is experienced and is indeed "proved through experience" (B830). To say that the transcendental notion is only conceptually contained in its empirical counterpart does not remove the difficulties. If the intelligible component is part of the meaning of "practical freedom," then it seems that we should allow that it is experienced along with the ascribed practical freedom which contains it. The unwelcome consequence, noted above, is that even transcendental freedom is provable through experience. One reason for thinking that Henry Allison's position requires that close connection between transcendental and practical freedom arises from his contrast between merely "prescinding from" causes and taking the causal factors to be insufficient. The suggestion may seem to be that the intelligible spontaneity of the will in transcendental freedom, a "component" in practical choosing, can be invoked to complete an insufficient account of natural causes. In other passages a limit is placed on that appeal by noting that "the explanatory buck stops" where such intelligible spontaneity is invoked (1990, 14). It is consequendy uncertain whether the account is that natural causal factors are "sufficient" to explain action, or whether nonnatural factors are needed to supplement such explanations, and whether those natural causal factors include reference to both practical choices and intelligible freedom. There are apparent conflicts between denying that transcendental freedom has any explanatory role and claim-

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ing that natural causal explanations are insufficient; between treating intelligible character as unobservable and yet as a "component" in practical choosing; and between intelligible freedom's transcendence and its inclusion in what we mean by immanent practical freedom. It is a symptom of these apparent difficulties that Allison's position may seem to commit him to the parallel counterintuitive view that at the phenomenal level our actions in judging are "conceived but not experienced" (1990, 39-40). That is the reason for his saying that we can no more observe ourselves judging than we can observe ourselves deciding. On one side he is willing to say that even acting empirically on our heteronomous desires involves a "moment of spontaneity," and yet that with respect to the empirical, phenomenal self there is no spontaneity (1990, 37, 39). If judging and deciding are for Kant empirical, phenomenal, events then they are observable, presentable to inner sense, subject to causal laws, and to a sufficient causal explanation. Appropriate causal accounts of action may include reference to empirical deliberation, to the will, and to choice, but they cannot make reference to intelligible character or transcendental freedom. Contemporary rejection of any notion of inner sense might encourage the view that such phenomena as deliberating are inexperienceable, but that conflicts with Kant's account of inner sense, and is independently counterintuitive. Although judgments and decisions may be made without conscious observation, it is difficult to see why conscious deliberation cannot be observed and monitored by subjects. Chess players sometimes make immediate, intuitive choices of a move with no overt process of deliberation, but they are also able to deliberate at length in thinking about the next move, and to monitor tiiat deliberation with the aim of correcting or improving the original choice. Henry Allison allows that although judging cannot be experienced, we can be conscious of it, but this seems to imply that such consciousness is not a presentation to inner sense (1990, 40). 1 9 His position is a response to the differences between phenomena and noumena in Kant rather than to a contemporary skepticism about inner sense. It is not open to intuitive counterexamples like that of the chess player, but it seems vulnerable to the requirements that phenomena, but not noumena, are presented to sensibility and open to causal explanation, and yet that phenomena contain as ingredients essential, but contrary, characteristics of noumena. Even if Kant's view of inner sense is rejected there is no doubt that he takes such events as judging, choosing, or deliberating to be presented in inner sense. The consequence is that we have to distinguish an "absolute," "transcendental" and "intelligible" spontaneity, which is only conceived and not experienced, from its empirical counterpart which is both conceived and e x p e r i e n c e d . The issue goes back to the Transcendental Deduction's

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account of the epistemology and metaphysics of the self in B §§25-27, and is involved in the discussion of legitimate and illegitimate roles for "transcendental apperception" in the Paralogisms (chapters 16, 3, and 25). The pure concepts of "transcendental apperception" and "intelligible character" are abstractions not presented to inner sense, and we are conscious of them appropriately for an abstraction as "conscious2" but not "conscious in the terminology of chapter 16. In their abstract form they stand for the essential functions of understanding in judging and choosing as metaphysical conditions for experience. They are theoretically and artificially isolated from inner sense, and do not designate actual occurrences. We are conscious of apperception and an intelligible character in that abstract way in recognizing the pure roles of thinking and deciding catalogued in Kant's inventory and transcendental topic. Empirical, occurrent thinking is neither pure nor abstract. The consequence is the view, expressed above, that transcendental freedom stands as a purely intelligible transcendental Grund or condition for practical freedom, but is not contained conceptually or analytically in the latter. The two notions of freedom are related as the category of "cause" is related to our discrimination of events. The concept of an event does not analytically contain as an ingredient a reference to causality, but the latter is required if the former is to be possible. The relation between the ancestral concept and its a posteriori successor was earlier called a "nonanalytic conceptual dependence," and is connected to Kant's commitment to synthetic a priori judgements.20 For that reason I have stressed the consequence of our legitimately disregarding, or "prescinding from," the causal network in the case of some actions rather than their being exempted from that network. It is a consequence of that view that natural causal factors are sufficient in explaining action and may include a reference to practical freedom, that is, to a subject's deliberate choosing or intending presented to inner sense. Spontaneity in apperception and judging, choosing an action in accordance with a maxim or formulating a thought, have for Kant a notionally separable empirical and transcendental significance. Apperception is for Kant the essential function of the understanding exemplified empirically, and presented to inner sense, in occurrent acts of attending to some presented item as of a determinate kind (B156n). Acts of judging and choosing similarly are empirically datable exercises of understanding necessarily involving concepts, but their transcendental significance requires that pure apperception and pure understanding are conceived in abstraction from the sensory presentation of those empirical counterparts. Particular acts of judging, attention, deliberating, or choosing are empirically datable but pure apperception, like intelligible character, is atemporal. It would be only a misunderstanding to ask when, or whether, an act of pure apperceiving

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or an act of the intelligible character had taken place.21 It would be just as absurd to deny that someone's moral reasoning is subject to an acausal assessment. Just as the concept of pure apperception lacks the sensible features required for inclusion in experience, so transcendental freedom lacks the reference to sensibility and to natural causality required for that same inclusion. What can be exemplified in experience are practical freedom and practical reason, which have the required features which the abstract transcendental conception of freedom lacks. The negative sense of practical freedom is exemplified when we act without being compelled by purely sensuous impulses, and its positive counterpart is exemplified when we recognize a nonsensuous, rational appeal to what "ought to happen" and a resulting causality of reason. In that empirical, practical context what "ought to happen" is not restricted to moral obligation but covers the selection and achievement of long-term goals and such factors as prudence, foresight, and planning. The phenomena in that latter context are subject to causal explanation but also to a quite different appraisal of the wisdom and suitability of any underlying reasoning. The resolution of the Antinomy enables us to make the distinction between asking about the natural causes of some action in order to explain it, and asking about the value, the tightness, wisdom, or desirability of its being carried out. Practical freedom, with empirical deliberation and choice, is included among natural causes, but transcendental freedom is not.

3.1. Implications for Noumena in Transcendental Idealism That summary follows Kant's argument up to the point of his account of the moral law as an a priori Ideal and as a fact, but I deal finally with one issue, namely, whether Kant retracts his prohibition on knowledge of noumena in the later moral philosophy. I draw attention to passages from the second Critique which summarize that further issue. But because no intuition, which can only be sensible, can be put under this application, causa noumenon with respect to the theoretical use of reason is, though a possible, thinkable concept nevertheless an empty one. But I do not now claim to know theoretically by this concept the constitution of it as a being insofar as it has a pure will. . . . the concept of an empirically unconditioned causality is indeed theoretically empty . . . but it is nevertheless possible and refers to an undetermined object; in place of that, however, the concept is given significance in the moral law and . . . its practical reference. . . . these are to be counted without exception, not as knowledge but only as a warrant . . . to admit and presuppose them, even where supersensible beings (such as God) are assumed by analogy that is by a purely rational relation of which we make

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a practical use with respect to what is sensible; and so by this application to the supersensible . . . pure theoretical reason is not given the least encouragement to fly into the transcendent. (Ak. 5.55-57; cf. Ak. 5.105) The two central claims are that the analysis of morality, and the claim for a pure moral law, add significance to our practical use of freedom and defend it against determinism, but that the required presupposition of transcendental freedom still allows no theoretical knowledge of an intelligible, supersensible world. It gives no reason to "fly into the transcendent." There is no retraction here of the prohibition on knowledge of the transcendent, but there is a clear recognition of the importance, which Henry Allison rightly stresses, of the pressure from morality in giving substance to the speculative defense of freedom. The speculative defense is an intellectual move made for the purpose of defending the distinction between human subjects as mere natural objects of causal forces and as rational, moral agents responding to reasons for acting. The defense of transcendental freedom in the Third Antinomy is designed to underpin that natural distinction by setting aside the determinist objection to compatibilism, but not by asserting the truth of a noumenal description of our empirical experience, or using it to explain that experience. Kant is not denying the propriety of saying that I know something is obligatory, or morally wrong, or that Jones has behaved unwisely or imprudendy. What is denied is a legitimate ascription of knowledge to those presuppositions of such discourse which have to be assigned to the supersensible for the polemical purpose of answering determinism.22

[28] The Fourth Antinomy, Ideal, and Appendix to the Dialectic

nt's discussion and resolution of the conflict in the Fourth Antinomy is less extensive than that of the other Antinomies. This is evidendy not because its topic, that of an "absolutely necessary being," has less interest for Kant but because the issue is pursued in the Ideal, the third major subsection of the Dialectic. In both contexts Kant's account, although concentrated on the theological ideas of "God" or a "supreme being," has implications that go beyond theology. Even that discipline's patendy transcendent Ideas naturally call for criticism and explanation, and one of Kant's central claims is that we are liable to illusions when we attempt to "hypostatise and personify" such concepts as "God" or "a necessary being" (B610-611and n 1 ). Kant has sympathy with some of the motivations in our "common understanding" for such attempts, but thinks that they do not stand up to Critical scrutiny His proposed role for a "transcendental theology" is not to develop these transcendent tendencies but to criticize and correct them. These passages consequently contain, as might be expected, some of the most trenchant expressions of Kant's diagnostic therapy. A formal condition of thought does not allow of being hypostatised as a material condition of existence. (B648) Through concepts alone it is quite impossible to advance to the discovery of new objects and supernatural beings. (B667)

The first passage recalls Kant's point at B88-89, and in a more extended passage at B608-10 Kant elaborates, and refers back to, his earlier diagnosis of illusion in the Analytic at B186-87. A general expression of these illusions and errors characterizes them as taking certain metaphysically interesting concepts to be exempt from what Kant calls the "empiricist principle," namely, that we can have no genuine knowledge without reference to the senses (B496). In such a "detached" 719

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misuse they are taken wrongly to designate objects which inevitably exist beyond our experience in the transcendent realm of things in themselves. In Wittgenstein's phrases their misuse embodies a belief in a "queer," "hidden" "super-reality" lying behind our experience and accessible through reason alone. It is worth underlining at this point that with such a criticism of previous metaphysics it is not conceivable that Kant's own metaphysics should make the same mistake. The Prolegomena preface and the appendix reply to Garve provide the same vehement rejection of previous philosophy, and these essays in the Dialectic make clear exactly what Kant's objections are. It is inconceivable that he should have committed the same type of mistake as those outlined in Strawson's "The Metaphysics of Transcendental Idealism" (1966a, part 4) without realizing it.2 Kant's account of these theological Ideas, like that of all the Dialectical Ideas, is not purely destructive and critical. Kant believes that they fulfill a genuine function, and his more positive aim in the passage is to outline what that can legitimately be, and to find the correct place for such Ideas in the map of our experience, his transcendental topic (B642). Their legitimate function is not that of genuinely designating objects, since for us they can designate objects neither in experience nor in any transcendent realm beyond it. That legitimate role is all the more important in this context since the relevant Ideas either are, or are related to, the most elevated and transcendent we recognize. The Idea of "God" itself is related in the traditional arguments to a host of other elevated phrases, such as "highest being," " ens realissimum" "supreme intelligence," " ens entia" "necessary being," not all of which have the same sense.3 Many of Kant's criticisms of the traditional proofs of God's existence turn on these ambiguities, in which the argument slips without explanation from one such concept to another. This cluster of phrases is related to others with a more secular flavor but which nevertheless have for Kant an important role in his account. Among these are the Ideas of "systematic unity" or "purposive unity," as well as the pervasive Idea of a metaphysical Grund or Urgrund for all experience. Kant notes, with some sympathy, the natural belief that without an adequate Grund for the whole of our experience we would face what he calls "the abyss" (B641, B650). Such a motive for believing in God as the Urgrund is the "clearest" view of common human reason, but Kant demythologizes and qualifies it in rejecting its basic claims (B651-52). 4 The passage reflects not Kant's own motive for appealing to an "ultimate Grund" but his recognition of a powerful, natural incentive whose legitimate, and unrecognized, character it is part of the Dialectic's goal to disclose. The three sections to be considered, the fourth Antinomy, Ideal, and appendix, all contribute to that goal. In 1, I outline the arguments of the Fourth Antinomy and Ideal and consider their salient features; and in 2

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consider Kant's summary of these, and other Dialectical issues in the appendix.

1. Arguments about the Supreme Being 1.1. The Fourth Antinomy The format is the same as in the other Antinomies, with formal proofs of thesis and antithesis, followed by Kant's observations of the proofs and his resolution of the dispute. I note the thesis and antithesis, the arguments given for them, and the observations on each. Thesis'. An absolutely necessary being belongs to the world either as a part or as its cause. Proof. The series of conditioned alterations given to us in the sensible, temporal world presupposes a completion in an unconditioned, which is then absolutely necessary. Such an unconditioned causality cannot be thought apart from the sum of all appearances which constitute that world and so must belong to the world, either as a part or a cause of it. Antithesis'. No absolutely necessary being exists either in the world or beyond it as its cause. Proof. If we assume either that a necessary being exists in the world, or else that the world itself is necessary, then it follows that either there is an absolutely necessary beginning to the series of alterations in the world, or else that the series has no beginning. The former conflicts with the requirement that every conditioned in the series has a condition. The latter is inconsistent since it takes the series as a whole to be both contingent and yet absolutely necessary and unconditioned. To suppose, further, that a necessary being might be outside the world as its cause is impossible, since it would have to act in the world and so to belong to the series. Consequently there cannot be an absolutely necessary being either in the world or outside it. The observations on each argument are scholastic and unclear. They offer the following comments: On the thesis'. The argument should be cosmological, that is, from the worldly causal series rather than from the concept of a "supreme being."

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The proof is ambiguous in its location of a necessary being either in the world or beyond it, but the latter claim is transcendent and cannot be settied. In the cosmological argument, failure to find a "highest member" of the causal series tells us nothing about a "necessary intelligible being." That would involve a fallacy of inferring from empirical contingency to intelligible contingency, and would be like inferring from the conditional necessity of an effect given its cause to the absolute necessity of the cause or effect itself. On the antithesis'. This argument too should be cosmological and not ontological. What needs to be shown is that the series of contingent causes can never terminate in an empirically unconditioned member, and so cannot support a first and absolutely original cause. But the Antinomy presents a curious feature, namely, that different conclusions may be correcdy drawn from the same data. It is like the arguments over the moon's rotation about its axis on the basis of the agreed data that it always presents the same face to observers on earth. Kant's comment notes the same feature that William James reported in a dispute over a man following a squirrel as it moved round a tree trunk in Pragmatism.5 We might say that the moon does not rotate with respect to the earth, but that from another point in the solar system it does turn, just as we might say that the man goes round the squirrel or the squirrel goes round the man. As in other Antinomies the issue turns on ambiguities in the terms used and the different points of view they represent. These observations are clear neither in detail nor in their general attitude towards the proofs. The thesis observation might be regarded as questioning the inference from a contingent series to a necessary being, but it might be read as an attempt to forestall objections to that conclusion. The antithesis observation may be regarded as neutral in allowing that both conclusions can be correcdy drawn from different points of view, even though the detection of such ambiguities and their points of view is a basic resource in Kant's own resolution. Salient factors in these passages, such as the general argument from the "contingency of the world," differences in point of view or ambiguities in the Idea of an "absolute totality," and diverse conceptions of an absolutely necessary arise also in discussion of the Ideal. Kant has also some relatively brief comments on the resolution of this Antinomy along with the more extensive resolutions of the others. (1) The evident difference of category between a "necessary being," or "God," and "appearances in the world" makes it difficult to infer the former from the latter. There are restrictions to be placed on

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inferences from features of items in the universe to those of the universe itself.6 Kant recognizes these category differences and the need for a "category discipline." (2) The notion of a necessary being is not merely that of an unconditioned cause but of an unconditioned, existing substance. (3) Among appearances there are no unconditioned members of causal series which might be regarded as absolutely necessary. (4) Even if we rightly restrict knowledge to appearances we can still admit a necessary being free from empirical conditions as a Grund of those appearances, but this can be neither proved nor disproved. Such an Idea can have no genuine explanatory role, but that does not entail its rejection. We have no justification for assuming it, for it is then a mere thought-entity, but we are impelled to recognize it and may use "analogies" to fill it out. Kant repeats points already made in the third Antinomy and the Prolegomena.7 Those final comments on the Antinomy herald the necessary further discussion of the Ideal and traditional proofs of the existence of God, which has the form of a test to see how far such steps towards the transcendent can be taken (B592-94). In the end those steps remain extremely limited, not only by our lack of genuine knowledge in the area, but even in the context of practice and morality which provides the primary motive for taking them. At the end of that summary section Kant makes some general comments which deserve closer attention. Kant distinguishes the topic of the Fourth Antinomy from those in the earlier cosmological conflicts. The latter were supposed to be about the world we experience, even though the arguments moved, ambiguously and erroneously, to its characterization as a transcendent thing in itself. But in the Fourth Antinomy the Idea of a necessary being is undisguisedly about a supersensible world. Kant makes clear that we can admit such an Idea but only if we also concede that it is beyond our knowledge. He adds that we cannot even think it as a determinate object with "distinctive inner predicates," that we have no justification for assuming it, and that it is a mere "thought-entity." Nevertheless we are, he says, "impelled" to take this step by detaching the Idea completely from experience as something to be contrasted with, or a "correlate of," 8 the world of appearances. In explaining how this is possible he adds: "once we have allowed ourselves to assume a self-subsistent reality entirely outside the field of sensibility, appearances can only be viewed as contingent modes whereby beings that are intelligences represent intelligible objects" (B594; cf. B807-8, 836, 844, 855-S7 9 ). Kant concedes, as he does in the noted "abyss" passages, that

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we have a natural motive for thinking of our experience as "contingent" with a consequent wish to found it on some necessity. That contingency evidently underlines the relativity of our experience in contrast to an "absolute conception of reality," noted in chapter 15.2.1, which holds independently of any subjects. The passage is important because it might be understood to support Kant's supposed acceptance of the supersensible, transcendent realm as some foundation for our contingent experience. It might even be used to ascribe to Kant a Leibnizian view of such an ultimate reality of things in themselves, monads, whose intrinsic properties we cannot know but whose relational, causal properties are apparent to us. That these would be misreadings of the passage can be seen from the acknowledged weakness of Kant's commitments to the transcendent realm. The claims represent "natural" steps but not ones which Kant himself endorses. There is no suggestion that we know the relational properties of things in themselves, accept that such things exist, but lack knowledge of their intrinsic properties. On the contrary there is no justification even for assuming their existence since they are for us mere "thought-entities." Our commitment to them remains firmly within the scope of our "Ideas" and the problematic necessity with which they arise from our "contingent" and relative experience. We have conceptions of the transcendent, popularly expressed in the argument from design and necessary for a philosophical resolution of the Antinomies, but we have no knowledge of corresponding transcendent objects.

1.2. The Ideal Of all the concepts which encourage us to stray into the transcendent, the Ideal, according to Kant, is the most removed from objective reality. Pure concepts of the understanding are closest since, although their pure form encourages such straying, they have a legitimate immanent use by virtue of constituting key elements of our experienced reality. Other Dialectical Ideas such as the rationalist conception of the self may seem to have a constitutive use even though they are only regulative, but the transcendental Ideal is undisguisedly transcendent. Its legitimate regulative use concerns the practical, moral sphere rather than the speculative, theoretical sphere, but even in the former its use has to be heavily qualified. Kant supports his earlier architectonic appeal to disjunctive syllogisms in this context by associating the idea of God or of an ens realissimum with that of a complete characterization which selects one property from every pair of incompatible predicates. The traditional Idea of a perfect being with such a complete characterization points directly to the ontological proof, one of the only three possible proofs Kant recognizes. The others, the

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"cosmological" and "physico-theological" proofs, depend respectively on the argument from contingency and the argument from design. Kant's considered view is that none of the proofs is successful, and that in the order of priorities the latter two both depend on the ontological. Kant outiines both general faults in all the arguments and faults specific to each. I summarize the general inadequacies and then some particular difficulties in each of the three arguments. The general inadequacies, (5)-(8), might all be classified as uncontroversial category mistakes. (5) That of inferring from what is contingent and phenomenal to what is necessary and noumenal. (6) That of inferring from what is secular (a necessary being) to what is nonsecular (a personal God). (7) That of inferring from what is a purely formal condition (a correlate of sensibility) to what is a material existent (a necessary being in itself; a personal God). (8) That of inferring real possibility from logical possibility. The specific errors Kant claims to find in the arguments individually are very numerous. The faults in the ontological argument turn on his famous claim that existence is not a real predicate, and on the various informal ways in which that central error is illustrated or supported. The cosmological proof is charged with four mistakes apart from its claimed reliance on the independently faulty ontological argument. The physicotheological argument from design commits the general mistakes (5) and (7), and relies on a weak and dubiously comprehensible appeal to "analogy-" 10 Philosophers nowadays are unlikely to defend the given arguments against Kant's attacks, although they might, like Alvin Plantinga,11 exercise considerable subtlety in rewriting them. Many of Kant's criticisms will consequently seem entirely correct, but there is some point in looking more closely at their detail, and I consider briefly each of the three "proofs." Kant's criticisms of the ontological proof, with its underlying view that existence is not a "real predicate," have been generally approved. He correctly notes that a judgmental necessity, linking a subject term and a predicate, does not establish an unconditional existence for the subject. In such cases it would be contradictory to accept the subject description and deny the predicate, but not to deny the existence of the subject or to reject the whole judgment. Yet the ontological proof requires that it is impossible not to ascribe existence to such a subject term as God in the judgment "God exists." Kant repeats the familiar point that existence claims, how-

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ever carefully formulated, are synthetic and not analytic truths, and this stops one kind of necessity attaching to that judgment. These points are generally expressed in Kant's famous images of the real and imagined one hundred thalers, and the adding of noughts to a merchant's cash balance. Our concept of one hundred thalers contains just as much, has just as much content, whether we are talking of a real or only an imagined hoard. Kant's way of putting the point throws light on his contrast at B157 between representing myself as I appear, and as I am in myself, as opposed to representing merely that I am. The suggestion is that in the context of the transcendental unity of apperception such a thought, detached from any intuition, stands barely for my existence without any sensory predicates through which I can be known in experience even to myself. Such an " I " contains, as he says "no manifold of intuition" in talking barely of a "determining" but not "determinable" self. This is one of the peculiar features of bare existence claims, namely, that they stand for an existent, say nothing about it but do not establish real existence. If the question is raised whether such an existent is really there then the judgment itself, and its subject reference, are insufficient, and ordinarily experience and empirical laws are needed to decide whether the reference is empty. That option is excluded in the ontological argument which works with concepts alone and purports to identify a transcendent object. 12 Kant's view is that even in the special case of "God" concepts alone cannot establish a synthetic truth, and that transcendent existence is beyond our cognitive range. Kant's complaints against the cosmological Leibnizian proof a contingentia mundi are more numerous. The premise "If anything exists, then a necessary being exists" is said to rest dubiously on the cosmological antinomies, while its minor premise that I exist plays no genuine role, according to Kant, except to disguise the proof's real reliance on the ontological argument. Even so the gap between a "highest reality" and a "necessary being" does not allow us a clear conclusion either about what such a necessary being is or whether it is unique. Kant suggests that there is some sort of necessity attaching to the claim "There must be a highest reality" but that it does not establish the required conclusion. The point might be illustrated in the simpler context of chess players and their grades. We might be tempted to think that there must be a highest-graded, or best, chess player, but immediate reflection shows that this is unwarranted. With or without a grading system there may not be just one highest-graded player, but without such a system there may be no way of deciding. In the Ideal the inference has to go beyond anything experienceable, and this makes the conclusion quite inaccessible and more problematic. It is in this proof that Kant underlines particularly the failures to separate logical possibility and real possibility and

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to limit the scope of legitimate transcendental principles to possible experience. The physico-theological proof from design was criticized more powerfully by Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,13 and Kant's comments are more sympathetic. He resists the temptation to make too much of the distinction between a human artifact and the creation of the natural world, but insists on the difference between inferring to a creator and to a mere architect. The principal objections are first, that it is hopeless to infer directly from features of the empirical world to features of a transcendent world beyond, and second, that the use of an "analogy" is at best weak and at worst incomprehensible. He rightly asks whether we can strictly grasp a step from the finite magnitude of the world to an unlimited omnipotence beyond it. In the Prolegomena §§57-59 Kant allows a minimal appeal to such analogies but only with a number of qualifications (chapter 23.2.2). It is difficult to feel confident that this concession overcomes all the difficulties, and Kant probably did not think it did. It reflects Kant's sympathetic recognition of a common endorsement of transcendent claims in religion as opposed to his own hostility to institutionalized religion and the academic scholasticism of rational theology. For him a transcendental theology has the primary task not of elaborating such proofs but of criticizing them and appealing instead to that more common understanding (B664, 769-70, 781, 807-8, 836, 844, 854-57). It was pointed out in chapter 24 that Kant's account of philosophical therapy in the Dialectic echoes Wittgenstein's later work. Kant would have been sympathetic to an examination of the distinctive features of religious belief within the perspective of its language game.14 He was not sympathetic to the belief that theological truths about transcendent beings could be established through logic or reason alone.

2. Summary of the Dialectical Therapy: The Appendix and the Constitutive/Regulative Distinction The Appendix to the Dialectic summarizes Kant's therapeutic lessons. It captures both his negative criticisms of the misuses of pure reason and the positive but limited roles for its transcendental Ideas. Much of the same apparatus used in the detailed discussions is repeated, but there is some new terminology. The two principles I and II, considered in chapter 24.1.3, which connect our recognition of a conditioned respectively to an unconditioned or to a search for it, are tacitiy deployed in underlining the constitutive/regulative distinction. Principle I, which claims that the u n c o n d i t i o n e d is thereby "given," represents Ideas as constitutive; principle

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II, which allows only a heuristic search, represents them as regulative. References to "subreption" and to the "analogon of a sensible schema" recall the earlier account of the new, post-Dissertation way that imagination, sensibility, and reason contrive to deceive (chapter 24.1.4; B692-93). The central error throughout is that of conceiving Ideas, such as the dominant "unconditioned" and associates such as "necessary being" or "systematic unity," as genuinely designative and inevitably as designating what lies beyond any possible experience. Kant remains true to his conviction that for all the inevitable temptations, Ideas of pure reason cannot be exemplified in experience and for us cannot be exemplified outside it. Their role is wholly misconceived if they are taken to designate objects within possible experience, such as the immanent physical world in the cosmo logical Antinomies or the empirical self in the Paralogisms, or objects beyond experience, such as the noumenal self in the Antinomies and Paralogisms or the supreme being in the Ideal. The reasoning which inspires this misunderstanding rests on fallacies of equivocation in failing to distinguish objects of possible experience, phenomena, and supposed objects beyond it, noumena. Nevertheless, and especially in the practical sphere, Ideas of reason may have a genuine, and even necessary, role as "heuristic" but not "ostensive" guides. The downright rejection of a Platonist view of mathematics in the speculative context is balanced by an endorsement of Plato's account of practical Ideas (B370-72). 1 5 Plato very well realised that our faculty of knowledge feels a higher need than merely to spell out appearances . . . in order to be able to read them as experience. He knew that our reason naturally exalts itself to modes of knowledge which so far transcend the bounds of experience that no given empirical object can ever coincide with them, but which must be recognised as having their own reality, and which are by no means mere fictions of the brain. (B371-72; cf. B836)

Even in the speculative realm the Ideas function by guiding us in enquiry with underlying presuppositions in which we treat items as if they had certain features. Kant believes not only that by treating investigated topics as if they had those features we may advance enquiry, but also that we are "constrained" to "hypostatize" or "objectify" those features: "For it is in the light of this idea of a creative reason that we so guide the empirical employment of our reason as to secure its greatest possible extension—that is, by viewing all objects as if they drew their origin from such an archetype" (B701). That claimed advance in enquiry from creative reason is modified in two ways. First, because these are background working assumptions they do not figure in the detailed enquiry which they guide; to misunderstand this is to succumb to the dialectical illusion Kant calls

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ignava ratio. This is Kant's expression for obscurantist attitudes which imply that some enquiry is completed and effectively block any further investigation. If rational metaphysics can establish that persons are simple immortal substances, or that God dictates our moral laws, then there may seem to be no need for further immanent investigation of either persons or moral laws. Second, even if they may understandably incline us to hypostatize their Ideas, it is another typical dialectical illusion to take this to represent an objective reality. In other words we ought not to derive the inner appearances of the soul from a simple thinking substance but from one another. . . . (B701) I shall not only be entitled, but shall also be constrained, to realise this Idea (systematically complete unity), that is, to posit for it a real object. But I may posit it only as a something which I do not at all know in itself, and to which, . . . I ascribe . . . such properties as are analogous to the concepts employed by the understanding in the empirical sphere. (B705-6)

Kant makes clear that "positing" is not the establishment of any objective reality.16 For to allow that we posit [setzen] a thing, a something, a real being corresponding to the Idea, is not to say that we profess to extend our knowledge of things by means of transcendental) concepts. For this being is posited only in the Idea and not in itself. . . . (B702, cf. B625-27, B709-10)

These claims, with their denials and modifications, show why the summary of Kant's philosophical therapy has sometimes been thought even less coherent than the detailed arguments in the Paralogisms, Antinomy, and Ideal which effect that treatment. They have understandably led commentators to highlight the apparent conflicts in the text and to doubt or deny that there is any overall or serviceable therapy in Kant's account. Kant denies that the Ideas can be given a transcendental deduction and yet proceeds to offer one for them (B690-91, 697-98); he denies that the Ideas are genuinely designative and yet insists that we must, explicably if not justifiably, hypostatize them; he denies that we can assert or assume that they correspond to a "real thing" (B709), and yet allows that we can assume or "posit" such things (B700-02); he resists the claim that they have an "objective" or constitutive use but allows some such use so long as it is "indeterminate," "problematic" and "analogical" (B708-9). It is not surprising that commentators, such as Jonathan Bennett ( in Kant*s Dialectic, 1974), show exasperation at such apparent carelessness, but I argue that Kant's position is not merely careless or incoherent.

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2.1. Bennett's Criticisms These apparently conflicting views have led commentators to think that in the Dialectic Kant finally retracts the general prohibition on any claim to know transcendent things in themselves through reason, although the discussion has shown that Kant maintains the prohibition in his criticisms of Plato's forms, the associated account of mathematics at B371, and in the moral philosophy. Even Plato's account of practical Ideas is accepted only with the qualification that it provides no knowledge of the transcendent, and the same qualifications were noted in the resolution of the Third Antinomy and the second Critique (B585-86; Ak. 5.56-57). Bennett thinks that Kant retracts that view in the Dialectic and contradicts himself. he remarks of one [regulative Idea] that if we are to be assured that it will not cause us 'to follow a path which is perhaps quite contrary to that prescribed by nature itself', then we must know that it is 'in accordance . . . with nature' when construed as constitutive. This deserts the view that a regulative principle embodies good, safe, advice, and it abolishes the doctrine about the source of dialectical error. (1974, 276)

If Kant's text at B688-89 did say what Bennett claims, namely, that we "must know that the Idea is in accordance with nature," then he would be entided to draw his conclusion, but it says no such thing. The relevant sentence says of such "laws" as "parsimony" that "we can see clearly [deutlich] that they judge17 [urtheilen] parsimony" as "according with reason and nature," but it makes no commitment to our knowing that this is so. The passage goes on to characterize the principles as "mere Ideas" and to deny that they provide any knowledge of objects. Thus the idea of reason is an analogon of a schema of sensibility; but with this difference, that the application of concepts of the understanding to the schema of reason does not yield knowledge of the object itself (as is the case in the application of categories to their sensible schemata). . . . (B693)

The charge of inconsistency is unwarranted. The further claim that "the principles carry their recommendations direcdy in themselves and not merely as methodological devices" is sometimes taken as a commitment to knowledge of transcendent objects through Ideas of reason, but this is also unwarranted. Kant is committed to the view that the recommendations are not merely optional but he retains the belief that they are only heuristic injunctions and not ostensive or constitutive assertions. What Kant endorses is the view that these principles are more than optional methodological advice, and have a certain

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kind of necessity in experience, but they are less than genuine knowledge of nature. These criticisms rest on an inadequate attention to the text but they leave the substantive question, considered in 2.2, whether the transcendental argument for their necessary place in the map of experience is correct. Bennett takes Kant's position to be incoherent for several other detailed reasons, but they turn on two general objections which show similar misunderstandings of the text. Those criticisms are that Kant provides an unrecognizable account of science and provides no "believable tale about what goes wrong when a regulative principle is used constitutively"; and that he confuses (dis)confirmation with (dis)proof in the claim that the principles have the form Vx (Fx —> (3y Gxy)). The suggestion is that regulative principles with that form differ from constitutive principles because the former "transcend possible experience only quantitatively" and not qualitatively. It is only because of their open-ended or infinite "size" that regulative principles cannot be disproved. Bennett nevertheless concedes at one point that Kant's primary aim is to identify the epistemological error of thinking that a regulative principle about a subjective "interest of reason" gives us some "insight" into objective reality (1974, 278). The first of Bennett's criticisms assumes that Kant's interest in the context is primarily, or exclusively, in science, and that principles and claims of reason express scientific hypotheses. The more plausible contrary view is that principles of reason are primarily metaphysical, and generate philosophical errors in which they are mistaken as constitutive truths. The characteristic errors are made by disputants in the Antinomy, by Leibniz in the monadology, and by rational psychologists and theologians in the Paralogisms and Ideal. In these cases, according to Kant, a regulative principle is "used" as constitutive, asserted as a categorical truth and taken to provide an "insight into reality." These rational claims and debates in the Antinomy, Paralogism, and Ideal may arise from scientific contexts but they are not exclusively scientific and arise also from moral, legal, or theological interests. The associated errors are typical philosophical misconstructions of those claims which turn on the ambiguity between immanent phenomena and transcendent noumena. Bennett claims not to understand how to "use" such rational principles constitutively because he cannot find a scientific use for them, but the metaphysical contexts demonstrate such uses, or misuses, and their associated errors in a commitment to transcendent objects. Kant's therapy in exposing and correcting these errors corresponds to Wittgenstein's and other philosophers' attempts to avoid being misled or confused by surface grammatical form. The claims are naturally expressed in a categorical form, but the therapy involves coming to see that they are not assertions constitutive of some inevitably transcendent reality but

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imperative injunctions about investigating the immanent world.18 Kant's diagnosis and resolution of the issues turns characteristically on an ambiguity in which references to experienceable phenomena are confused with references to inexperienceable noumena. The characteristic error is to fail to detect that ambiguity and so to treat an injunction as if it were a constitutive truth, and to fail to recognize that principles of reason are never constitutive (B692). To emphasize the typically philosophical character of these issues and their associated errors is not to exclude science from the discussion. Some of the errors arise directiy and naturally from scientific theories such as those in cosmology where the data are elusive and tempt the mistake. Nor is there any reason why scientists themselves may not be just as involved in the philosophical issues. It is as natural for a cosmologist to speculate about the origin of the physical universe, and to misunderstand the character of such a reference, as it is for a dogmatic or skeptical philosopher debating the Antinomy. The background to the conflicts includes science as well as law, morality, and theology, but Kant's primary interest lies in identifying and correcting the misunderstandings which arise out of science in the step towards undecidable claims in metaphysics. In Kant's picture there is no impassable barrier between science and philosophy. The regressive moves towards more general principles are typically philosophical and the progressive details typically scientific, but both directions occur within the same general structure of enquiry. The heuristic injunctions apply to all types of enquiry, science and the law, psychology, and chemistry, and at all levels of generality, so it is unsurprising that illustrations of unifying theories come from physics, chemistry, and psychology (B673-681). A similar one-sided misunderstanding characterizes the other general criticism, that Kant's principles of reason have a logical form, Vx (Fx —» (3y Gxy)), which separates regulative and constitutive principles only in terms of their "size" or their (dis)provability. That form is identified primarily because it has an obvious application in the Antinomy, but it is equally obvious that it does not apply to all the Dialectical Ideas. Bennett notices that it does not apply to Paralogism principles such as "The soul is a simple substance," or to comparable claims in the Ideal and Third or Fourth Antinomies. He concludes that in these cases there are no regulative principles despite Kant's contrary claims, but the correct conclusion is that that logical form is not the basis for the constitutive/regulative distinction. That distinction rests not on a logical form but on the epistemic misconstruction, noted above, of immanent claims as transcendent. That conclusion is further supported by Bennett's division between (dis)provability and (dis)confirmability in science. Claims about openended or infinite domains with that logical form can be neither proved nor disproved since both involve establishing truths about all members of the

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domain. Bennett holds consequendy that the distinction between regulative and constitutive principles is only a matter of their quantity and size, but this is open to objections already made. The alternative view which marks the slide from immanent experience to a supposed transcendent domain shows that to deny that the principles are constitutive is to deny their testability. To be untestable is to be unprovable, but to be unprovable is not necessarily to be untestable or unconfirmable. (Dis)confirmability belongs to genuine, constitutive scientific principles, but the erroneous Dialectical principles cannot be confirmed, disconfirmed, or even tested by us. Principles of reason are outside our cognitive range and are not susceptible to our tests. (B692) 1 9 Bennett's position consequently needs to be corrected in the following ways. His logical formula is not generally suitable for principles of reason; Kant insists on the inability to test or (dis) confirm rather than on the inability to (dis)prove the principles; the principles are not primarily scientific rather than philosophical; the emphasis is primarily on the diagnosis and correction of a misconstruction in which transcendent metaphysics arises out of immanent science through a failure to distinguish the immanent, the transcendent, and the transcendental; and that diagnosis and therapy rest not on logical form or on mere size, but on the epistemological contrast between knowable phenomena and unknowable noumena, and on the unnoticed slide in the debates from one to the other.

2.2. The Idea of "Systematic Unity"; Holism and Induction Bennett recognizes that principles of reason are intended to be neither legitimately constitutive truths nor mere contingent advice in conducting enquiry, but he expresses doubt whether there are any principles other than these (1974, 275). It is difficult to believe that the two options are exhaustive, and Kant provides examples of the third category in the Antinomies, Paralogisms, and Ideal, which Bennett is prevented from recognizing because he wrongly assumes that the third category includes only scientific and not metaphysical principles. Kant provides other examples more direcdy related to scientific enquiry in the three principles of homogeneity, variety, and affinity which together capture the Idea of a "systematic unity." He also provides a more general argument in passages at B679, B682, and B685 which concludes that such principles are necessary. Such an argument would establish that the principles belong to a third category, and are neither constitutive truths nor mere contingent advice. Essentially the argument is that a principle of systematic unity is in some way necessary if we are to have, and use, any concepts at all. At B679-80 Kant defends the initial claim that a logical, or methodological,

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principle of parsimony such as "Don't multiply entities unnecessarily," presupposes a "transcendental" principle which ascribes the relevant character of simplicity, or nonredundancy, to nature.20 Kant considers whether we could dispense with such a principle and provides two grounds for denying that possibility. Reason would then run counter to its own vocation, proposing as its aim an Idea quite inconsistent with the constitution of nature. Nor can we say that reason, while proceeding in accordance with its own principles, has arrived at knowledge of this unity through observation of the accidental constitution of nature. The law of reason which requires us to seek for this unity is a necessary law since without it we should have no reason at all, and without reason no coherent employment of the understanding, and in the absence of this no sufficient criterion of empirical truth. In order, therefore, to secure an empirical criterion we have no option save to presuppose the systematic unity of nature as objectively valid and necessary. (B679-80) 21

Kant maintains consistentiy that such a principle does not provide any knowledge or objective truth, is not properly based merely on induction from observed instances in nature, but is more than mere helpful advice. this unity of reason is purely hypothetical. We do not assert that such a (fundamental) power must necessarily be met with, but that we must seek it in the interests of reason. . . . We must endeavour, wherever possible, to bring systematic unity into our knowledge in this way. (B677-78) That such unity is to be found in nature is presupposed by philosophers in the well known scholastic maxim that principles must not be unnecessarily multiplied. This unity, although it is a mere Idea, has been at all times so eagerly sought that there has been need to moderate the desire for it, not to encourage it. (B680)

Kant goes on to deny that the principle is "merely an economic contrivance" or one which can be given a probability value, or confirmation, but insists that in enquiry everyone presupposes that "the unity accords with nature itself' (B681). The basic transcendental argument is intended to explain the motivational necessity of such a presupposition, not to demonstrate its truth, and that is why such principles cannot be given a strict "transcendental deduction" (B690-91; B697). The argument proceeds in two stages. Initially Kant claims that there would be an incoherence in carrying out an enquiry without presupposing that the principle holds in nature, and subsequently he claims that its necessity can be shown from the chaotic consequences of giving it up. Those consequences involve, in order, the abandonment of reason, the loss of a coherent use of understanding, and of a sufficient criterion of empiri-

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cal truth. The argument is highly compressed and leaves the reader to spell out its detailed steps especially at the second stage. What needs to be made clear is why we cannot just give up the presupposition that nature is in accord with the principles, and why the successive dire consequences follow from its abandonment. I reconstruct the details in the following way. The first stage seems to rest on the claim that implicit in any investigation is a direction which the enquiry is to take. That direction may be a progressive enquiry into further detail in implementing a theory, or it may be a regressive enquiry into more general principles which might unify theories. The initial claim is that enquiry must have some such direction, and must be motivated in some such way, if it is to be conducted at all. If we seek for a more general, regressive unification in some theory, then at the next stage Kant's claim is that we have to presuppose that nature is in accord with such unification. On the negative side one ground for this might be that there is an absurdity in conducting such an enquiry and at the same time denying that a successful outcome will be in accord with nature. The enquiry has that particular aim and if it is successful, how could we draw any other conclusion, provisionally, than that it tells us something about nature, about the way things are? More positively it may be said that implicit in the enquiry is just that motivation of unlocking the secrets of nature, providing an insight into its character, establishing a better theory that is, according to our criteria, "true." The truth or success of such an outcome does not establish the truth of the underlying motivation, and Kant's point is to distinguish the truth of a testable hypothesis within that motivational frame from the motivational principle itself. Even if we achieve success in the enquiry we have no ground to claim that the underlying motivational principle is true, or that nature really is a systematic unity. There is no serious evidential measure of support for, or against, that claim which shows that the motivational principles are not genuine hypotheses at all. They express, as Kant later says, a subjective interest of reason and not a constitutive truth. They are motivational, heuristic guides, and not genuine scientific hypotheses even in the scientific context, but their role is wider than science. At this stage Kant can conclude that enquiry cannot be conducted without a motivating appeal to systematic unity which cannot be taken to conflict with nature but is not established as true even with a successful outcome. If that first stage seems plausible the second may seem extravagant. Kant assigns the function of organizing understanding in enquiry through those motivational principles to reason. This confirms Kant's view of the "transitive" relation between reason and objects of experience, for the motivation guides understanding in formulating and testing hypotheses about those objects. But the gulf between reason and understanding is still marked by the subjective motivation of the former in contrast to the

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potential constitutive truth of the latter. Reason provides the framework for "regress" and "progress" in enquiry which provide its direction in the formulation of specific hypotheses. If reason's role in providing such guiding principles is given up then the enquiries will inevitably be directionless, aimless, and unmotivated. It is not necessary to use Kant's faculty psychology to make these points. Once we identify the different functions of motivating the formulation and testing of hypotheses and the latter operations and outcomes themselves, then we have already a functional differentiation between factors in enquiry A higher-order, motivational, and subjective interest, aim, and direction are assigned to reason, and the overlapping formulation and testing of specific hypotheses under it are assigned to understanding. The point echoes Popper's claim that enquiry is never aimless or undirected, and that it is absurd to carry out an enquiry without some goal. It is not merely that undirected observation is unlikely to meet with theoretical success, but that it cannot be seriously regarded as enquiry at all. The activity is properly no more than that "groping around" with which Kant characterizes prescientific thinking in philosophy as well as science (Bvii): "systematic unity is what first raises ordinary knowledge to the rank of science, that is makes a system out of a mere aggregate" (B860). Kant expresses this in his second stage by linking that abandonment of reason and its organizational principles with our lacking concepts and a "sufficient criterion" of truth, but the threat is unclear. One answer depends on the conception of a holistic system, whether expressive or doctrinal, and on different levels of "truth." To be a system, for Kant, is to be properly organized as a unity and to be holistic in the mutual dependence between its most general categories and the most specific items under them. The suggestion is that without that requisite stability and order, which reason provides, our concepts and the conceptual unity claimed in the Deduction to be a requirement for objective experience will be threatened. Part of what that objective experience means lies in the possible agreement, and ascription of truth, in judgments. Given that background Kant's claim is that without the organization of concepts and understanding under reason, that is, without an orderly system, we would lack that conceptual unity and a proper basis for the ascription of truth. The notions of language, of meaning, and of truth would be objectively unworkable. If it is objected that it is not necessary to be so self-conscious about the systematic structure of our experience or language or theories, Kant's reply would probably be that whether we are conscious of this or not it is implicit in the working of experience. The point remains very general and has implications which I pursue later. These include a division between two conceptions of truth as ascribed and as an ideal; the connection between a holistic system and Kant's con-

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ception of a nonanalytic conceptual dependence; and the distinctively Kantian transcendental notion of necessity in or for experience. But it should be asked whether Kant's account of systematic unity addresses or resolves a traditional skepticism about induction. The connection is easily made out. Kant's principles of reason are shown to be not genuine hypotheses which might be supported, confirmed, or established in scientific enquiry, and they patendy share that property with a principle of the uniformity of nature which is sometimes supposed to answer Hume's problem. If the skeptical problem of induction requires for its solution the establishment of such a constitutive principle of systematic unity it may seem as though this is Kant's solution, but this cannot be right. Kant makes plain that his principles of reason are not constitutive truths and cannot therefore provide such an answer to Hume. They are motivational, subjective necessities which express our interests but not constitutive truths. They are conditions for our establishment of truth in science and elsewhere, but they are not establishable truths themselves. Kant's argument links their role to our ascription of truth in a holistic system, but it neither establishes their truth, which Kant denies, nor guarantees the continued success of current theories. For Kant a principle of reason such as that of seeking unity in nature is proposed not as constitutive of nature but only as an "Idea" (B699, B725). Maxims of reason which guide our thinking are finally described as "subjective principles derived not from the constitution of an object, but from an interest of reason" (B694). Kant agrees with Hume that they cannot function as constitutive antiskeptical guarantees of our inductive policies.22

[29 ] The Doctrine of Method

e Doctrine of Method is the disproportionately short second part of the Critique, which summarizes the work and refers back to the earliest questions raised in the prefaces. Given that the work is an enquiry into the status of philosophy the section comments finally on the condition of the discipline after the hearings at the tribunal of reason in the preceding sections (B730-32). The governing characteristics of the section are consistency and modesty. It is consistent in its summary presentation of the nature and limits of philosophy in which the central themes from the prefaces at the start are underlined at the end. Kant revisits the need for reform in the traditional "bloodless" pseudodebates, the descriptive inventory of experience, the need to distinguish immanent and transcendent principles, and the modest policing role for philosophy (B756-56, B810, B874). The "abstraction" or "isolation" procedure and the revolutionary technique of reversing a traditional order of priorities are underlined again (B813, B870). Kant illustrates the latter policy in summarizing his reversal of Hume's priority for a posteriori causal laws over an a priori GCP, and now reverses the utilitarian priority for happiness over morality (B841, B796, B839-42). He demonstrates again that Austinian interest in detailed classification of items in experience, particularly in cataloguing, and comparing, such disciplines as mathematics and metaphysics, or psychology and metaphysics (B870, B874, B876-77). Commentators who appeal to a "patchwork" thesis as an explanation for perceived inconsistencies in Kant's text might note how clearly the final section identifies those primary themes and concludes the discussion. A modest role for philosophy in the "fruitful bathos" of immanent experience is emphasized throughout (B763, B855, B868). The overambitious claims of dogmatism and skepticism are illustrated and again rejected, and philosophers are warned not to expect to "transcend common understanding" as if they alone had insight into a deeper, hidden reality: "in regard to the essential ends of human nature the highest philosophy can 739

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advance no further than is possible under the guidance which nature has bestowed on even the most ordinary understanding" (B859). The context is that of a complaint that what philosophy offers under Kant's guidance is so modest that the results could have been obtained without it. Kant is less modest in his comparison between the Critical philosophy and the tradition. In his account of the history of philosophy the "revolutions" which generated conflicts between empiricism and rationalism, idealism and realism, science and common sense, are subordinated to his own revolution in mapping out the "Critical path" (B880-84). If his work is modest with respect to common understanding it repeats the Prolegomena Preface's vehement rejection of past philosophy. Modesty in the content and goals of a reformed philosophy is for Kant part of a less modest revolutionary departure from the tradition. It is not surprising that the principal subsection in the Doctrine has to do with the discipline of pure reason. At B797 Kant applauds the "disciplinarian" skeptic (Zuchtmeister) for stimulating a "sound critique of understanding and reason," but the conclusion is the same as before. Empiricism is useful in stimulating that critique of dogmatism, but its ensuing skepticism has to be superseded by a revolutionary reform in a more fruitful direction for a future metaphysics. Kant succumbs to the overoptimistic thought that the correct procedure in philosophy may be finally established by the end of the eighteenth century.1 Given the link between reason and philosophy, and their higher-order, organizational roles, it is unsurprising that the section includes an account of the "architectonic" system of reason. Reason organizes the systematic framework of experience and its nonphilosophical disciplines, but it has also a responsibility to systematize and regulate its own modes of operation in metaphysics. If there is a final court of intellectual appeal it is conducted by reason, and Kant thinks that its undogmatic operation will bring renewed confidence in the subject's reformed project (B823). Kant's view of the final court of appeal is not a Platonic insistence on an elite corps of philosopher kings but insists on a need for some democratic check on its deliverances (B859, B767). He freely admits that the ultimate resort is to the good sense of a well informed citizenry not subject to authoritarian censorship. Kant accepts an appeal to Rorty's "solidarity,"2 but unlike some postmodern philosophers he reserves an essential place in that appeal for rational discussion. Though he does not say so he would reject the belief that the two alternatives are exhaustive, as he does in other philosophical oppositions. The section includes a Canon for pure practical, but not speculative, reason. Pure speculative reason can provide no knowledge, as the preceding discussion has claimed, and the only remaining scope for a priori principles of the "correct use o f " reason lies with the practical. Kant does not deny that there are canons governing the use of understanding, in formal

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logic and in the principles of the Analytic, but reason's role in that speculative context is shown in the Dialectic to be only critical and disciplinary. It offers guidance in enquiries of the understanding but it cannot provide any constitutive truth or knowledge of its own. Its maxims are motivational and respond to the "subjective interest" in science and in metaphysics oudined in chapter 28. Kant notes briefly our "inextinguishable desire to find a firm footing beyond the limits of experience," but this is the central, misguided aspiration criticized throughout the Dialectic (B824). The motive to avoid what in the Ideal is called "the abyss of nothingness in the chain of contingencies" is natural but rests on no more than misunderstanding (B641, 650). The search for Eberhard's "ultimate Grund" in experience reflects our ability to conceive such a terminus, but it expresses only a misleading conceptual shadow of our experience and not an attainable goal.3 In 1,1 outline and comment on the concluding account of philosophy, in 2 the resulting notions of a systematic holism, and nonanalytic conceptual dependence (NACD), and in 3 Kant's Idea of a metaphysical Grund.

1. The Concluding Account of Philosophy Kant recognizes a wider scope for philosophy than the more purely rational articulation of a systematic unity in the theoretical domain. The latter is supplemented with such Ideas as that of the highest good, a purposive unity, and the essential ends of humanity which are considered again in the later second and third Critiques. In the narrower context of speculative philosophy the emphasis is on the discipline required for the change from the tradition's entanglement with transcendent, inconclusive issues to their reformed immanent and determinate successors. The discussion has at its center an outiine of the required discipline in a comparison with mathematics, in its argumentative or polemical uses, and in relation to dogmatism and skepticism. Kant's leading thought in the comparison with mathematics is the mistaken idea that metaphysics and mathematics might be conducted in the same way. the fundamental idea of metaphysics was obscured . . . owing to its exhibiting, as a priori knowledge, a certain similarity to mathematics. (B872) The great success which attends reason in its mathematical employment naturally gives rise to the expectation that it, or at any rate its method, will have the same success in other fields. . . . It therefore becomes necessary to cut away the last anchor of these fantastic hopes . . . to show that the pursuit of the mathematical method cannot be of the least advantage in this (philosophical) kind of

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knowledge . . . and that mathematics and philosophy, which, in natural science, go hand in hand, are nonetheless so completely different that the procedure of one can never be imitated by the other. (B752-54) in philosophy the geometrician can by his method build only so many houses of cards, just as in mathematics the employment of philosophical method results only in mere talk. (B754-55)

In its most general form, the claim is that while mathematics can establish truths dogmatically this is not possible in philosophy. From all this it follows that it is not in keeping with the nature of philosophy . . . to take pride in a dogmatic procedure and to deck itself out with the tide and insignia of mathematics, to whose ranks it does not belong. . . . (B763)

The crucial difference between mathematics and philosophy is that the former can construct concepts, that is, exhibit them a priori in intuition, while the latter cannot. If philosophy attempts to derive synthetic claims from concepts alone, then the result is the assertion of merely dogmatic claims which go beyond any possible experience and are untestable. That pretentious and mistaken aspiration is the basis for transcendent illusions which it is the true purpose of philosophy to expose (B763). 4 It is made plain that philosophy is essentially concerned with concepts. Throughout the passage Kant defines philosophy as "knowledge gained by reason from concepts": Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts. (B741) . . . the philosopher . . . [who] makes his way by means of concepts. (B746) Transcendental propositions can be given . . . only in accordance with concepts which are a priori. (B748) A transcendental proposition is, therefore, synthetic knowledge through reason in accordance with mere concepts. (B750) The former method is called the employment of reason in accordance with concepts. (B751) [These] belong all together to knowledge obtained by reason from concepts, such knowledge being called 'philosophical.' (B752) Philosophy is simply what reason knows by means of concepts. (B760)

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In his concluding account of mathematics, natural science, and empirical knowledge as means to the essential ends of humanity, he makes a plea for a modest critical philosophy which curbs the pretensions of a lawless speculative reason in pursuing those ends: "This latter service, however, they can discharge only as they are aided by a knowledge through reason from pure concepts which . . . is really nothing but metaphysics" (B878). In an illustration from the Second Analogy, Kant explains that the argument "proceeds in accordance with concepts." With the concept of cause I do really go beyond the empirical concept of an event. . . yet I do not pass to the intuition which exhibits the concept of cause in concreto but to . . . time-conditions in general. . . . (B750n) The passage confirms the account given in chapters 2 and 19-20. The preface had already represented philosophy as "conceptual" in Kant's sense, and the Second Analogy illustrates this with a synthetic conceptual connection between "event" and "cause." It reaffirms Kant's wider belief in the existence of synthetic a priori judgments, and raises the question, considered in 2.1, how we should understand a nonanalytic dependence between concepts. That latter question arises particularly for contemporary philosophers who assume that conceptual relations can be only analytic, and cannot come to terms with Kant's evidentiy different understanding of metaphysics as "conceptual." The contrary views quoted from the Doctrine of Method may then be explained away by saying that Kant is not endorsing the view that philosophy deals with concepts but identifying and criticizing dogmatic philosophers who held it. This characteristic interpretative failure conflicts radically not only with the quoted passages but also with Kant's frequendy repeated claims that dogmatic philosophers go wrong not in dealing with concepts but in misusing them. What is objectionable is not the appeal to concepts in formulating dependences between them, which is what philosophers inevitably do, but their misuse of that appeal and the inferences they draw from those relations. The passage is generally concerned with the different, dogmatic, polemical, hypothetical, speculative, and practical uses of philosophical claims, and the primary target is that dogmatic misuse. Kant's belief in synthetic a priori judgments and nonanalytic dependences between concepts as an essential aspect of legitimate philosophy is different from the contemporary view and may be mistaken, but there can be no doubt that he holds it. The primary misuse is the attempt to derive synthetic truths directiy from concepts alone, which generates transcendent claims going beyond any possible experience. The remedy is to admit, as Kant insists throughout the Critique, that philosophy can establish such synthetic truths in

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accordance with concepts only by connecting them to "possible experience." This is not to deny that philosophy trades in concepts but only that such trading can properly be dogmatic. The required appeal to possible experience enables him to reject what he calls "universal empiricism" while retaining a residual belief in the "empiricist principle" (B496). in the whole domain of pure reason, in its merely speculative use, there is not to be found one single synthetic judgement derived directiy from concepts. . . . Through concepts of understanding pure reason does, indeed, establish secure principles, not however directiy from concepts alone, but always only indirectiy through relation of these concepts to something altogether contingent,5 namely possible experience. (B764-65) For Kant it is that relation to possible experience which replaces the mathematical ability to "construct concepts in intuition," and provides a necessary antidote to the dogmatic misuse of philosophical claims. If all this were not quite apparent from the text, Kant effectively makes the point explicitly at B671. We are entitied . . . to suppose that transcendental Ideas have their own good, proper, and therefore immanent use, although, when their meaning is misunderstood, and they are taken for concepts of real things, they become transcendent in their use and for that reason can be delusive. For it is not the Idea in itself but only its use that can be either transcendent or immanent (that is, either range beyond all possible experience or find a use within its limits), (my emphasis)

2. The Ideas of System, Holism, and Nonanalytic Conceptual Dependence Kant's final descriptive account of the system of experience and its structure reaffirms the picture already presented throughout this commentary. The preface's conception of the formal inventory of a priori elements in experience and the Amphiboly's "transcendental topic" are matched in the Doctrine of Method by the image of a plan for a modest structure of pure speculative reason (B735). It endorses Kant's account in Prolegomena §33 of a modest attention to our contingent immanent experience in opposition to the construction of a house next door full of pure thought-entities. Much has been made earlier of Kant's model for this structure from Euclid and of its dangers. Kant's reformed metaphysics, his transcendental topic, aims to outline the a priori structure of our experience just as Euclid provided the abstract a priori structure of our spatial experience. But whereas mathematics can be dogmatic about its constructed intuitions,

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metaphysical attempts to infer truths about existents directly from its investigation of concepts can yield only the untestable pseudo-disputes of the tradition. The necessary appeal to possible experience and its fruitful bathos enables Kant to maintain an empiricist restraint on rationalist pretensions and at the same time to reserve a role for the essential antiempiricist appeal to a priori structural concepts in experience. The rationalist material belief in a real world of supersensible objects is replaced with a recognition of the limited formal role for the a priori concepts which encourage that erroneous belief. Kant's antiempiricism is reflected in his conception of a holistic system in which the elements are mutually dependent. Kant rejects an empiricist one-sided dependence of the general, abstract elements in experience on the particular, concrete atoms of sensory experience. He rejects that priority not by denying but by supplementing the empiricist dependence with another in the reverse direction.6 Because he accepts a residual empiricism, his discussion focuses primarily on a substantive role for a priori concepts and a dependence of particular elements on the abstract concepts. The final criticism of the empiricist Hume in the Doctrine of Method is that he failed to see how particular a posteriori, causal laws could depend not only on concrete sense experience but also on the abstract GCP. Hume was consequently unable to distinguish legitimate constitutive principles of understanding from their illegitimate pseudo-rational counterparts. For reasons given in the Antinomies in chapter 26 he could not distinguish a spurious rational cosmology from its legitimate scientific counterpart, and the consequence is a general skepticism even about science (Ak. 5.51-53). Without that distinction all general principles depend for their status and provenance solely on particular a posteriori experiences, and that gives rise to familiar empiricist doubts about them. It raises a question about our ability to establish universal claims, and generates a search for a foundation for experience which might guarantee its continued character. For Kant the mutual dependences in a holistic system of experience correct the underlying assumption of "universal empiricism" but he accepts that there is no philosophical guarantee to overcome the contingency of experience or the noted anxiety about the "abyss" (B641, B650). Empiricist skepticism is avoided not by reinstating a pretentious account of principles as material transcendent truths, but by explaining their formal a priori status and their necessary role in experience. They do not make particular causal laws a priori or necessary or guarantee their future, but they make empiricist doubt unnecessary. That holistic picture points directly to Kant's notions of the synthetic a priori and what I have called "nonanalytic conceptual dependence." Kant's inventorial interest is in depicting accurately the dependence relations between concepts in the system of our experience, and for him some of

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these conceptual relations are not analytic. Not all synthetic a priori propositions belong to metaphysics or are what Kant calls "transcendental" propositions, but metaphysics itself contains a record of fundamental synthetic dependences between the a priori structural concepts of our experience and the lower-level discriminations they constitute. Kant's standard model for this is the relation between the discrimination of objective events and the a priori concept of a cause.

2.1. Nonanalytic Concept Dependence

(NACD)

Kant's conceptions of the synthetic a priori conflict with contemporary views which regard all conceptual relations as analytic or reject the synthetic a priori classification. I sketch an argument which suggests that NACD is a natural consequence of Kant's conception of a holistic system. The point can be made informally by using the game image from chapter 4 which offered a partial and potentially misleading illustration of the synthetic a priori classification. Kant's primary interest is in experience as a whole and its a priori features rather than in the limited a posteriori features of a game, but that divergence is not significant if such relations of mutual dependence have examples in any holistic system. The general point can be illustrated in the requirements for setting up a game such as chess. A formal account of the game of chess would start with such general concepts as that of the playing surface, the pieces operating on it, moves and captures, the starting position, and the outcome in wins, losses, and draws. These can be formulated in the strictiy abstract terms of Kant's metaphysics as in a dedicated computer chess-playing program, but may also be illustrated informally. The suggestion is that the understanding of the lower-level practice of playing chess with its concepts depends on a higher-level understanding of the game's fundamental concepts and associated principles. If Kant's holistic account supports his view of NACD then some of these relations will not be analytic. Consider such concepts as "forced move," "stalemate," or "positional advantage," which can be introduced with reference to the basic concepts. We might distinguish two kinds of forced move such as those legally required to relieve a check on the king, and others which are necessary only to avoid a substantial disadvantage. To make the distinction evidently requires connections with other concepts such as "check," "checkmate," "win," "compensation," and "advantage." "Stalemate" may be introduced as a derivative form of "forced draw," and added to the specification of ways of winning or drawing in the Grund concepts. "Positional advantage" (PA) has to be introduced in terms of descriptive positions of pieces on the

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board and the concept of an "advantage," and these require in turn an understanding of the role of pieces, particularly pawns and pawn movement, of positional structure together with such conceptions as those of a "closed" or "open" position, and of "promotion" and its benefits. White's having a PA can be trivially defined by White's having an advantage solely in virtue of the position of the pieces on the board, but one who knew only this could not be said to understand the concept of a PA. The basic notion of a "position" in a game can be uniquely described by locating pieces on the board with some appreciation of their structural features, but this offers no distinction between advantageous or disadvantageous positions. For that further discrimination some reference is needed to the general concept of an advantage and its relation to basic concepts such as those of a win, draw, or loss. The question is whether these relations can be characterized as either synthetic and a posteriori, or analytic and a priori. It is not analytic to claim that an advantage for one player results in a win for that side. Quite apart from the vagaries of future play, even substantial advantages such as a material plus may result from a correct sacrifice which leads not to a loss but to a win. The difficulties are more evident for positional advantages which are characteristically elusive and less easy to evaluate and realize. It would be natural to weaken the claim by saying that an advantage gives the possessor a better chance of winning or not losing, than the opponent, or than otherwise might be the case, but these claims are also too strong. A positional advantage might be present so early in a game that it is bound to be revised in later play and confers no measurable improvement in the chance of winning or even not losing. Two additional clauses might be added by saying that a PA will result in a win "other things being equal" or "with best play on both sides," but these do not resolve the issue. Such additions provide no information about what the "other things" might be or what "best play" consists of. It is tempting consequently to understand them so that they arbitrarily turn the original claim into a trivial analytic truth but the relation cannot be thought analytic on this ground. This suggests that the required relation is always falsifiable until it is trivially ruled out by such added clauses, and this gives a prima facie reason for denying that it is analytic. If the point is accepted, what results is an apparently nonanalytic dependence between concepts in a system as a result of its holistic character. The concept of a PA depends in some way on the Grund concept of a win, and it is a quite specific connection, not a general link between one concept in a system and all the others. But the dependence is not obviously analytic. The identification of a PA along with the consequential ability to strengthen and realize it in actual play depends partly on facts about the game. To understand the concept of a PA seems

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to require evidence from other games, a theoretical grasp of the type of PA, and the way it can be realized to yield a win. A fuller understanding of such a concept is achieved through its consequences in "possible play" just as a full grasp of the schematized concept of a cause is achieved through its realization in possible experience. The dependence connects concepts required to understand other concepts and so has something to do with their meaning, but the connection is not a direct reflection, or a deductive consequence, of the strict meanings of the terms. There is no obvious way of linking the two concepts analytically, and if that is accepted there is reason to suppose that such relations hold generally in holistic systems whatever their subject matter. The argument is evidently not conclusive, but there is reason to think that understanding the concept of a PA requires additional knowledge about chess theory which cannot itself be analytic. Nor is the relation merely an expression of a psychological claim about learning. There is no reason to think that these concepts can be learned only in one specific way by starting from one and moving on to the other. For Kant such concepts are mutually related in their holistic system, and it might be expected that to learn them will involve a joint interaction between them. The suggestion is that these mutual dependence relations hold between concepts in the system however they come to be learned. Kant's position, so understood, is clearly opposed to Quine's holistic view that "the unit of significance is the whole of science."7 If Quine took the view that "meaning" has application only to whole systems and not to its individual propositional, or conceptual, elements, then his view is strongly opposed to Kant's. But even if Quine's claim is only that the meaning of those elements requires a reference to the whole system of concepts in which they occur, it is different in two ways from Kant's conception of a mutual dependence. Kant, unlike Quine, is prepared to endorse the analytic/synthetic distinction for individual judgments and relates that to strict conceptions of "meaning" and "definition" for them. Both Kant and Quine emphasize the relations of mutual dependence between concepts in some language or theory, but Quine's holism is an unspecific relation between a particular concept and all the others in the system. Kant's account consequently differs from Quine's in its identification of quite specific relations between two particular concepts. The dependence of the concept of a PA on that of a win is not of the same kind as its dependence on the concepts of a move or a capture. Similarly, the concept of an event is dependent on many other concepts in our language but Kant's interest is in the specific connection between "event" and "cause." There are evidently many different ways of responding to these considerations. It might be said that the whole case rests on an ambiguity in

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the notion of "understanding" in which it covers not only the strict meaning of some expression but also a wide range of salient facts about the phenomenon it designates. Quine's response is to abandon a sharp contrast between "meaning" and "fact," and consequently to emphasize an unspecific holistic relation between all the concepts in a language or theory. Quine's view of that derivative character is partly determined by his suspicion of intensions and his objections to the "analytic/synthetic" distinction. Kant's response is quite different, since he accepts the "analytic/synthetic" distinction and has no qualms about ascribing meanings to individual concepts or judgments even within a holistic system. He also emphasizes not merely the unspecific holism of Quine but the more specific nonanalytic relations between specific concepts in the system. Those factors suggest another way of characterizing the phenomena in which the two conceptions of "understanding" are recognized but separated. One kind of understanding attaches standardly to individual propositions, judgments, or sentences, and can be provided through formal definitions or a semantic theory such as those which appeal to truth conditions. The other involves a grasp of such expressions which cannot be captured in straightforward definitions or their analytic consequences. Nominally it could be marked by a contrast between a strict truth-conditional and analytic concept of "meaning" and a broader notion of "significance." In that case the "significance" of the subsidiary concepts in some holistic system depends on the Grund concepts, in the way that the concept of an "event" depends on that of a "cause" or the concept of a "PA" depends on that of a "win." Even though there is no analytic connection between the two latter concepts one who fails to grasp the idea of a win, and who has not connected winning with pawn structure and promotion, cannot be said to understand the concept of a PA. The distinction between an atomistic "meaning" and a holistic "significance" might in this way supplement a Fregean contrast between Sinn and Bedeutung, and an Austinian contrast between "locutionary" meaning and "illocutionary" force. It extends a concept of significance to that wider holistic system within which the subsidiary concepts have their use. Kant's position could be put by saying that he accepts a strict "meaning" associated with formal definition, a contrast between analytic and synthetic truth, and truth conditions for individual judgments, but adds that wider conception of "significance" to these factors. That wider notion involves Kant's other requirement that in some cases those dependences in the mutual relations of a holistic system arise between the concepts that are a priori, not merely a posteriori, and other concepts in the system. Kant's proposal, understood in this way, does not force a choice between the two conceptions of understanding but allows them both to exist as salient features of a holistic system.

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2.3. Necessity Kant's accounts of NACD and synthetic a priori judgments are linked to his notion of "necessity," and suggest that that notion shares the same ambiguity as the two conceptions of "understanding." Kant evidendy has at least two uses of "necessity," since both analytic and synthetic a priori judgments have some kind of necessity for Kant. In chapter 4 it was claimed that only the necessity of analytic truths amounts to truth in all possible worlds, while synthetic a priori truths hold only in some but not all possible worlds and can be known without appeal to empirical evidence. Kant's claims about the necessity of those judgments rest on the latter characterization, but those appeals to necessity have been much criticized, and in Van Cleve's Problems from Kant there is discussion, and endorsement, of a basic objection voiced by Russell and Moore. The objection is that Kant commits an inconsistency in claiming both that a priori judgments are necessary and that they depend on contingent features of our minds or cognitive powers. Some geometrical, arithmetical, and metaphysical judgments are necessary, but it is only contingent that our minds have their current cognitive apparatus. The objection is that if that apparatus changed then the a priori truths might change and would no longer be necessary.8 Russell's position is open to two immediate queries. First, it assumes, as he says, that "our nature is as much of a fact of the existing world as anything else," but Kant would evidendy deny this. Just as, for him, certain features of the world of our experience are not merely contingent, a posteriori facts, so the same is true of the relation between our fundamental cognitive powers and the structure of that world. Just as it is not merely an a posteriori truth of our world that in it the concepts "cause" and "event" are related, so it is not an a posteriori truth that that connection is made through the cognitive power of our understanding. Just as we can know a priori that the former connection holds, so we can also know a priori that it is made through our cognitive powers. Certain fundamental aspects of our nature are not, for Kant, as they evidendy are for Russell, mere facts of the existing world. If they were to change then we might have no experience at all, or might no longer be able to know those connections a priori. Second, Kant frequendy acknowledges the contingency of our experience, but it is unclear why this should be thought incompatible with the a priority of the relevant judgments in mathematics or metaphysics (B123, A110, B145-46, B651, B764-65). That incompatibility may appear so long as contingency and necessity are univocal, or absolute rather than relative properties, but it is unclear why something cannot be contingent in one respect and necessary in another. Our experience as a whole might be contingent, as Kant insists, and yet contain, or be governed by, judgments

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which from inside that experience can be known a priori without empirical evidence. That contingency and necessity are susceptible of such diversity is evident. It is contingent that I am a British national, but it is not contingent that I am subject to the laws of that country given that I am a British subject. Nor is it obvious that the hypothetical "If I am a British national I am subject to British laws" is an analytic truth, or holds in all possible worlds. I might be a British national granted exemption from those laws. A more germane objection would be that the illustration is different from Kant's use of these modalities, but that is not at all obvious. That we have experience is contingent, but within that experience, according to Kant, there are necessities parallel to national laws. Kant's claim might be mysterious or trivial if he did not spell out what is meant by that latter kind of necessity, but he does this in two ways. He claims first that certain aspects of our experience, such as objective time relations, are essential to it, and second that those aspects require, are constituted by, uses of the basic a priori concepts.9 The first type of claim might always be questioned, and there are uncertainties about what such deficits involve, but there is no conflict in that case in saying that our experience as a whole is contingent but certain of its features are necessary. The second set of claims might also be questioned, but they are supported in Kant's proofs in the Analytic that his principles exemplify the NACD relation considered above. Those claims, whether correct or not, do not conflict with the basic contingency of the experience in which they occur. That experience might not have arisen, or might have arisen in a different form, but what has arisen for us has that essential form disclosed in the dependence relations between specific concepts such as "event" or "objective succession" and "cause/effect." Van Cleve explores the possibility of using formal modal logic to explain these Kantian uses of "contingent" and "necessary," but those resources are unhelpful because Kant makes no such reference, and also because Van Cleve thinks they fail. He explores the option of denying on Kant's behalf an axiom of Lewis's S4 which says that if a proposition is necessary then it is necessarily necessary. This might be one complex and unclear way of capturing the simpler claims that experience is contingent but that within it there are necessary conceptual, nonanalytic connections, but it is in any case a needless detour. It does not, as he admits, resolve his own qualms about the relevant modalities,10 and it conflicts with Kant's insistence on the contingency of experience and with the fact that Kant makes no appeal to such a principle. What remains of Russell's basic objection that Kant is committed both to the a priori necessity and to the mere contingency of some mathematical and metaphysical claims? It should be recalled that the objection targets

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a general inconsistency in Kant's synthetic a priori classification. It does not turn on specific judgments such as "2 + 2 = 4," since Kant did not think that all mathematical claims were synthetic a priori, and may be mistaken in any particular case. Kant's view, understood as I have suggested, is that it is contingent that we have a developed mathematics and a viable experience at all, but that within it the contents of its propositions express necessary, but not always analytic, truth. That does not commit Kant to the contradiction of saying that such truths both hold and do not hold in all possible worlds, since only the analytic truths hold in all possible worlds but the synthetic a priori truths do not. Russell's objections seem consequently to rest either on misunderstandings of Kant's position or on substantive disagreements with it. Russell is entitled to the view that all mathematical, or metaphysical, judgments are if true analytically true, but Kant evidently did not accept it, and it would be question-begging to use thatview to support his criticism. If there are Kantian synthetic a priori judgments, then they will be contingent in that they do not hold in all possible worlds but can be known in our world without appealing to empirical evidence. The objection points to a substantial disagreement between Russell and Kant over mathematics, but not to a simple inconsistency between "contingent" and "necessary."

3. The Idea of a Metaphysical Grund for Experience These considerations reflect on Kant's notion of a metaphysical Grund, whose complex and two-faced character has been outlined already. Its central features can be expressed in the following claims. Fundamental Grund concepts are the necessary, most general elements in our experience. In their abstract, pure form they cannot be directiy realized in a posteriori (sensory) experience, but require some combination or synthesis to enable them to be realized in that experience. They are not conventional justifying grounds, or foundations, for our experience but outline the governing features of experience and point to its structure of a mutual dependence between understanding and the senses, between its general and particular elements. They are shown to be necessary and a priori in the claim that they constitute certain "objects," such as the discrimination of "events" and of an "objective time" without which experience would be impossible for us. They come not at the start of metaphysics as justifying premises in a demonstration of the certainty of our beliefs, but at the end, after an extensive discussion of the role of such abstract pure forms (B880). In their most general, abstract form they are radically misleading and potentially illusory. If they are taken to be genuinely designative of objects in that

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abstract form, they point to a world of intelligible objects and an "absolute conception of reality," when these are properly no more than a shadow cast by our concepts. They encourage us to construct a house next door to experience filled with thought-entities, the final illusory horizon of a completed rational science. Kant's version of the bewitchment of our intelligence by concepts forms an essential aspect of his diagnostic therapy in which such concepts have no legitimate constitutive use but only a regulative, heuristic value. They are necessary as unavoidable ingredients of the conceptual resources without which experience would be impossible. They find a positive, but problematic, place in experience and in the transcendental topic, but they carry that persistent threat of dialectical illusion. It is those ultimate concepts of reason, and associated principles, which form what Kant calls an ultimate metaphysical Grund for our experience. These are the principles which he thought Eberhard and Leibniz had mistaken as material truths about a hidden reality, when they are at most formal truths regulating our enquiries. The account is confirmed and clarified by Kant's discussion and criticism of Eberhard and by his references to the "abyss" at B640 and B651-52. In chapter 23.2, two references were made to Eberhard's criticisms of Kant and the latter's reply. I suggested that Kant had no disagreement with Eberhard's view that if we are to talk de re of an ultimate metaphysical Grund for experience then it will have to be of noumena. For Kant, and apparently for Eberhard, such a Grund could not be located as a part of experience, but must stand outside it in order to provide the intended support for experience against skepticism, and to mitigate the anxiety over the "abyss." But this apparent agreement conceals a more fundamental disagreement between Kant and Eberhard. Kant's complaint is that once Eberhard had accepted this correct point he then failed to respect the difference between knowable phenomena and unknowable noumena. For Eberhard the ultimate Grund beyond experience has to be different only in degree from the phenomenal objects we perceive. Reason's dogmatic insight into that ultimate reality, hidden behind our sense perception, makes it more decisively knowable than our confused access to it through sense perception. The only difference is that sensory appearances are confused while reason's insight into their hidden reality is clear. Kant's objection to this is that Eberhard cannot have it both ways: either the ultimate Grund is beyond experience and distinct from our immanent experience through the senses, or else it is the same reality presented to our senses and then is knowable only through that sensory access. It is inconsistent to postulate a Grund outside experience and then to suppose that it provides an insight into immanent reality. Kant may seem to be subject to the same problem since he also believes that there is, for us, only one genuine, immanent reality, and yet

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he is prepared to license appeal to an ultimate Grund beyond it in the realm of noumena. But Kant's position is qualified in the ways oudined in the initial summary Properly such a Grund is purely formal, conceptual, and not genuinely designative of an object we can know. The concept of a noumenon is the material expression of that transcendent reality, but it is properly only a misleading shadow cast by the immanent reality accessed through the senses in combination with the understanding. For Kant these problematic concepts are necessary, and play the nominal role of an ultimate Grund in reason's task of organizing the structure of immanent experience, but the concepts themselves, in their pure, abstract form designate no objects that we can know. The concept of a noumenon arises as a conceptual correlate for what we are presented with through the senses in our immanent experience, but it is a philosophical distortion to think it refers to a realm of reality known through reason alone. Eberhard righdy acknowledged the necessity of such concepts but mistook the conceptual shadow for reality. Kant's comments on "the abyss" at B641 and B650-52 make the same points. At B641 Kant compares the "veritable abyss" of our inability to find an unconditioned necessity with Haller's depiction of eternity. He underlines the tension in such a notion, designed as an ultimate support for experience; on one side we cannot give up the idea but on the other recognize its inscrutability. Kant's own attitude is that speculative reason treats the notion as "unsubstantial and baseless," denies that it is an inscrutable "object," but allows that reason can and must locate the Idea, though not the supposed object, in its proper place in the inventory of reason. Kant recognizes a metaphysical urge to find a necessary being as a culmination and guarantor of a continuing viable experience but regards it as seriously misleading. Kant does not endorse, but rejects, its intended material role. At B651 the same points are made initially for the common appreciation of the wonders of the world, its beauty, variety, order, and purpose as a basis for belief in God. the whole Universe must sink into the abyss of nothingness unless, over and above this infinite chain of contingencies, we assume something to support it— something which is original, a self-subsistent cause of the origin of the Universe, and which secures its continuance. (Cf. B764-65)

The passage acknowledges the earlier points about Kant's acceptance of the contingency of our experience (B764-65). Kant notes that we cannot dispense with such Ideas, but that they are no more than what he explicidy calls "abstract concepts" and have no corresponding objective reality. The associated proof of God's existence is regarded as the strongest and most

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natural resource of the common understanding, but reason's verdict is that its claims cannot be approved. This proof always deserves to be mentioned with respect. It is the oldest, clearest, and the most accordant with the common reason of mankind. It would, therefore, not only be uncomforting but utterly vain . . . to diminish in any way [its] authority. . . . But we still cannot approve its claims. . . . (B651-52)

Once again Kant does not endorse the natural response to the threatened abyss but firmly denies its cognitive value in overcoming the acknowledged contingencies of our experience. The passage confirms an outcome of the discussion of Stroud in chapter 15.2.1 that Kant is not attempting to overcome the abyss of skepticism by providing an ultimate guarantee of continued stability in our experience. He recognizes its appeal in motivating a transcendent belief in God, but denies its success in relieving the anxiety. What we inevitably have, and what misleads us, is only an abstract concept as a nominal indicator of, but not a real terminus to, our enquiries and metaphysical anxieties. The metaphysical notion of an ultimate Grund enables reason to provide a completed system governing our experience but it is merely expressive and has no corresponding object. It might be thought that the situation changes if the systematic unity of experience is regarded as a set of doctrinal principles, which can be proved to govern our experience, but such a claim has to be qualified in a number of ways. Even if we talk of the unified system as one of principles rather than concepts, Kant argues that its topmost examples, whether principles of understanding or of reason, cannot be proved straightforwardly. Principles of understanding are not susceptible of normal a priori or a posteriori proof, and principles of reason cannot be given even a transcendental deduction (chapters 17 and 24). The principles make immanent a posteriori truth and falsity possiblebut for that reason are not provable by ordinary standards either deductively as analytic truths or empirically as a posteriori truths. They cannot be said straightforwardly to be true or false of an experience they make possible, and to consider their truth or falsity beyond experience is for us pointless and empty. The validity of the rules of understanding is established transcendentally in their constitutive role of combining with a priori intuitions to realize objects of experience in a contingentiy hospitable a posteriori context. They can be shown to have that role, according to Kant, in the procedures through which they are realized in a fall a posteriori use, which the nonconstitutive principles of reason lack. Once constitutive principles of understanding are distinguished from nonconstitutive principles of reason it is claimed in the Dialectic that the latter are only regulative and have no truth value. Though they may have a categorical verbal form, they are not

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genuine assertions but regulative injunctions whose role is to guide our enquiries "as if" the soul were a simple substance, "as if" the series of causes never comes to an end, or "as if" we had an intelligible character of an indeterminist kind. In their pure, abstract form all these a priori Grund principles have no more of a truth value than the corresponding pure, abstract concepts which they contain.

[30] A Concluding Summary of Transcendental Idealism

detailed commentary style may make it difficult to see the general oudines of Kant's position, and in this concluding chapter I provide an overall summary of its central points without extensive references to the text. The first section offers a final summary of what transcendental idealism is and what it definitely is not. The second contrasts two different accounts of Kant's real merits. In 1,1 review the general reasons for rejecting the traditionalist account of transcendental idealism and, more constructively, outline the central pillars of the alternative revolutionary account. I identify and criticize a motive for the traditionalist position which has not been noted so far, and consider the extent to which Kant modifies rather than just rejects the earlier doctrines. He is evidently anti-Platonist, antirationalist, antiempiricist, anti-idealist, antiskeptic and antidogmatist, and this may suggest that his positive views are quite uninfluenced by the tradition he rejected. But throughout his discussion Kant recognizes some underlying truth in virtually all the theories he rejects and offers reconstructed versions of them. Platonism is an absurd account of mathematics but a more promising practical theory; empiricism is mistaken in its "universal," and skeptical, form but correct in its empiricist principle and consequent rejection of dogmatic rationalism; even rationalism and idealism, unacceptable in their misleading Cartesian, Leibnizian, and Berkeleian traditional forms, are echoed in Kant's reformed, formal, and transcendental theory. Kant's own philosophy is regarded by him as the "true apology" for Leibniz, but it is not a monadology.1 In 2, I note some strikingly different accounts of the merits of Kant's discussion. Among some commentators Kant is described as totally failing to provide arguments, as subscribing to a "perverse phantasmagoria" in his metaphysics, and generally as contradicting himself in all his major claims.2 Some recognize that he made a remarkable attempt to escape from his tradition and even that he got "within a whisker" of correctly responding to 757

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the endless oscillation of opposed philosophical theories.3 Others credit Kant with an unintended responsibility for the "linguistic" turn in philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century as a reaction to the "semantic swamp" of his own account.4 These are puzzling views of a philosopher thought to be among the greatest historical figures, and I offer a different verdict.

1. What is Transcendental Idealism? Throughout the commentary I have questioned and generally rejected what I have called a "traditionalist" view of transcendental idealism. In its crude basic form, it rests on the doctrine of the "mind making nature," but even more subtie variants in phenomenalism or an appeal to "intentional" or "virtual objects" are open to the same objections. The tradition conceived Kant's project as committed to the general principles of idealism and directed towards resolving its central problem of skepticism about the external world. According to this view Kant accepted an exhaustive dualism of mental states or ideas on one side and of represented outer and independent objects on the other, and faced the challenge of doubt about our justified knowledge of the latter. He overlooked, or deliberately rejected, a third option of supposing that the identified features might be ascribed both to the mind and to the "objects themselves." Alternatively, he accepted a third option but only as a phenomenalist construction, by a noumenal mind, of the external world from subjective inner experiences. His response to the idealist challenge was either to insist on the reality of things in themselves, independent of our representations, or to propose a logical construction of outer objects from those inner experiences. These alternatives were outlined from the start in chapter 1 and already present in Garve's interpretation. I have insisted that these diverse traditionalist views conflict with Kant's text. For Kant genuine reality is that of an immanent experience tied to sensibility, and the reality of things in themselves is a problematic and potentially illusory consequence of our concepts. Concepts are necessary for experience, but their formal capacity to go beyond sensibility casts the illusory shadow of a real transcendent world. According to Kant a central error in the tradition, whose recognition is a required therapy for philosophy, was the subreption of that formal consequence as a material reality. The concept of a reality wholly independent of our knowledge, an "absolute conception," in the shape of transcendent things in themselves, is a necessary corollary of our concepts and their notional separability from sense perception, but it is a basic fallacy, a "bewitchment," to infer from that formal necessity to a corresponding supersensible reality. This is the mistake

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of amphiboly Kant ascribes to Leibniz, and more generally the subreption he diagnoses throughout the Dialectic. In the Critique Kant defends a belief in empirically outer, that is, "spatial," objects represented in our inner perceptual states, but the outer objects he defends are appearances or phenomena, not noumena or things in themselves. He defends that belief in two ways: First, he shows how a corrected idealism is compatible with belief in outer objects in the Aesthetic (B44, B52) and elsewhere: The transcendental idealist, on the other hand, may be an empirical realist, or as he is called a dualist; that is, he may admit the existence of matter without going outside his mere self-consciousness or assuming anything more than the certainty of his representations, that is, the cogito ergo sum.5 (A370)

Second, he provides a formal proof of the incoherence of traditional idealism in the Refutation of Idealism. That defense of empirical realism against empirical idealism is not a constructive phenomenalism. The Refutation of Idealism has no trace of such a strategy which is in any case a naturally empiricist program at odds with Kant's essential anti-empiricism. What seems to have happened in recent times is that Kant's appeals to "possible experience" and to verifiability, the unfortunate appeal to the "subjective/objective" distinction,6 Kemp Smith's mistranslations of "reduce," and a failure to understand the "transcendental/empirical" contrast have encouraged a phenomenalist commitment on quite inadequate textual grounds. These points have been made throughout the commentary, but I discuss, with one proviso, a final illustration and motive in Van Cleve's account of "virtual objects." The proviso is that the traditional idealist challenge is not the primary goal of the project in the Critique, and I focus on that issue now only because commentators like Van Cleve have made it so central. Kant's primary aim is to provide a metaphysical inventory of our experience, with its unnoticed a priori elements, in order to correct the assumptions of the tradition. The doctrines that are corrected include traditional idealism but they cover empiricism, rationalism, skepticism, and dogmatism as well.

1.1. Van Cleve's Account ofccVirtual Objects" In the beginning sections of Problems from Kant, Van Cleve supports his view of Kant as an "honest-to-goodness [old-fashioned] idealist" by considering the status of appearances as "ideas." (1999, 4) He ascribes a phenomenalist theory to Kant, recognizes that phenomenalism has various forms, and endorses the claim that appearances are "virtual objects" (1999, 14).

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I recommend an interpretation of Kantian appearances . . . according to which appearances (or phenomena) are not the same objects as noumena considered from a specially human point of view; nor are they a second variety of objects existing alongside noumena.7 Instead, they are virtual objects. . . . If Kantian appearances are virtual objects, then to say that someone is aware of an appearance of a certain sort is only to say he is sensing or intuiting in a certain way. (1999,8-9) If all objects in space and time are appearances and if appearances are virtual objects . . . it follows that all objects in space and time are logical constructions out of perceivers and their states. (1999, 11)

One corollary of this view is that Kant is not only a phenomenalist but also a noumenalist. Kant is also a noumenalist [who] believes that there are some objects, things in themselves, which resist phenomenalist reduction. If nothing else there are the cognitive acts and agents on which phenomena depend for these can hardly be said to exist only as the virtual objects of further acts.8 (1999, 11)

So the self and mind are noumenal. For all its apparent complexity, this is a standard traditionalist account of the Garvean kind oudined in chapter 1. I leave aside any immediate comment on the reference to the "two aspect/two world" in the first quotation, and a doubt whether the intended phenomenalist doctrine is adequately defined in the first two quotations.9 Van Cleve's picture of Kant presents an exhaustive dualism of things in themselves as the real things with subjective appearances as virtual objects, in which the central aim is to answer an idealist skepticism about the existence of the outer world. He thinks that the account of appearances as virtual objects throws light on Kant's use of "object" in the Deduction, Second Analogy, and Antinomies and accepts that "object" in the Deduction means "weighty" or "spatial, outer" object for which a phenomenalist reduction would be appropriate. I argued in chapter 14.3.3 that there is no textual evidence for that latter view, but Van Cleve supports his general position in this context on one textual and one philosophical ground. One advantage of construing Kantian appearances as virtual objects is that it enables us to explain how their being can depend on their being perceived. How after all are we to understand the relation between an object O whose esse is percipi and the corresponding act of perception? (1999, 9) For a philosophical reason I submit that it is inexplicable why objects should depend on us for being the way they are if they do not also depend on us for their being, period. (1999, 37)

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A further advantage of construing Kantian appearances as virtual objects is that it lets us explain how objects can conform to our cognition of them, as required by the Copernican Revolution. (1999, 11; cf. 1999, 3 8 ^ 2 )

The philosophical ground claims essentially that only a phenomenalist reduction can make sense of Kant's position, and the textual ground claims that such a phenomenalism is made clear in the Copernican Revolution. Each of these grounds is open to decisive objections; one is a difficulty about thinking that appearances' esse is percipi, and a second arises from the appeal to the Copernican Revolution. The philosophical ground for supposing that appearances' esse is percipi is that if an object is dependent on us for the way it is then it must also be dependent on us for its existence, but there are evident counterexamples to this principle. It is true that this piece of carved wood depends on us for its representing a knight in the game of chess, but it does not depend on us for its existence. If I am the sole gardener of a plot owned by someone else, then it may be true that the way the garden is, the characteristics of the garden, are due to me, and yet that the existence of the garden does not depend on me. It is not difficult to imagine a range of similar cases where the general principle is falsified. Such cases might be questioned either independently of Kant or because they do not match Kant's account, but it is pointless to pursue the former point for two related reasons. The argument in chapter 7 offered an alternative account in which appearances, as the "objects" of intuition, include physical objects of which it is not true that their esse is percipi. The primary textual evidence for that alternative in the Aesthetic is that appearances are the "objects" (Gegenstdnde) of intuition, inner as well as outer, and cover such items as chairs and tables, thoughts and headaches. There is no good reason to restrict appearances exclusively either to outer or to inner sense. The alternative account represented appearances as the abstracted contents of both inner and outer sense perception. They are the ordinary inner and outer objects of perception in abstraction from the descriptive, conceptual resources of the understanding. Such an account faces the "blindness" problem, but this was resolved in chapter 7.2. There it was claimed that a vicarious, notional reference to the character of such contents can be provided by using descriptive resources but treating them as unavailable to the relevant subject. Beyond that the conception of a purely sensory appearance without resources from the understanding is no more problematic than a conception of the semantic properties of an utterance in abstraction from its acoustic or morphological features. The contents or objects of such perception just are what are presented immediately to the senses in that vicarious, notional, abstract way.

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Those considerations indicate alternatives to Van Cleve's account which are important in assessing the second appeal to textual evidence from Kant's hypothesis in the Copernican Experiment that "objects must conform to our knowledge" (Bxvi). It is difficult to see how that expression points, even initially, to a specifically phenomenalist program, and two general considerations reinforce the difficulty. First, Kant's conception of an "object" in the context is not confined to, and not even especially directed towards, outer objects, and second, it concerns specifically the role of a priori elements, intuitions and concepts rather than whole judgments, in our experience. Kant's conception of an object is subject to the noted parity between the objects, the appearances, of both inner and outer sense. His subsequent examination and acceptance of the Copernican hypothesis make clear that those a priori elements are claimed to be responsible for a wider range of discriminations than merely external objects, including crucially objective time relations. They are responsible for objective temporal sequences, events, duration, and simultaneity, for quantitative and qualitative features of sensations as well as objects of inner and outer sense, and modal properties generally. The Copernican hypothesis concerns first the identification of those a priori elements, and second the claim that they can be given a viable role in an a posteriori experience. Neither makes any commitment to phenomenalism. Reference to what is a priori in our experience comes from the a priori status of those elements, not from any a priori, and presumably analytic, relation in phenomenalism between judgments. That latter relation is between judgments about a subject's sense data or virtual objects, and judgments about objects in the external world. All that links that program with Kant's project in Van Cleve's discussion is a common use of "a priori," but even that must be qualified in two ways. Kant's concluding appeal in the Copernican project is to synthetic a priori, not analytic, judgments, and his immediate appeal is not to judgments at all but to specific intuitions and concepts. If the common use of "a priori" in the two, Kantian and phenomenalist, projects provides any ground at all for identifying them, it is hopelessly weak. It should be remembered too that phenomenalism is typically an empiricist reductive program, whether analytic or supervenient, quite at odds with Kant's nonreductive anti-empiricism. If the Copernican experiment succeeds, as Kant claims, those a priori elements enable us to "constitute" a formal nature, a structural frame for inner and outer experience, rather than merely the material nature of physical, outer objects. Kant requires that a priori concepts are realized in sense experience but there is no good reason to think that this can be understood only in phenomenalist terms. There are alternative accounts of the experiment, and these reflect more accurately Kant's procedure and arguments.

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There are related difficulties about Van Cleve's account of Kant's commitment to things in themselves. The traditionalist assumption that Kant works with an exhaustive alternative of either mental state (empirical idea) or thing in itself (transcendent object) has been considered and rejected earlier in chapter 9.1.2. I recall the many indications throughout Kant's text that reality for him is the immanent reality, the fruitful bathos, of our experience (B195). According to Kant we know nothing of transcendent things in themselves, and this prohibition forms a central diagnostic tool in Kant's criticisms of previous philosophy. That diagnosis is Kant's version of the "bewitchment of our intelligence by means of concepts" which is to disclose and explain Dialectical illusion. It rests on Kant's belief that dogmatic philosophers had wrongly taken pure abstract concepts as designators of a pure, nonsensory, intelligible world of things in themselves. They mistook a conceptual shadow for a transcendent reality. The general point was made in the discussion in chapter 24.3.1 of Van Cleve's complaints about Kant's abstraction method, and it indicates another background misunderstanding.

1.2. A Positive Account of Transcendental Idealism I have claimed that it is a mistake to see Kant's project in the Critique as directed centrally at the idealist challenge of the external world. Kant is concerned with that challenge in the Refutation of Idealism, but only as a part of his general attempt to construct a wider metaphysical inventory, a transcendental topic, of the basic a priori elements in experience. The aim is to construct more generally an accurate map of experience with which to correct the misconceptions of empiricists and rationalists, dogmatists and skeptics, as well as those of traditional idealists. Nevertheless Kant's own theory attempts to find some residual truth in almost all of these theories, and I therefore outiine the way in which he offers to correct traditional idealism and what he replaces it with. Traditional idealism rests on the undeniable truth that our experience is ultimately dependent on personal responses such as sensory effects and the development in learning processes of a full adult human experience. Such a claim is uncontroversial but it belongs to empirical developmental psychology and not to philosophy. The contrast can be brought out by noticing that it assumes an experience including both outer and inner objects. It accepts a causal relation between outer objects and the senses, and begins with the recognition that the sensory effects are primarily physiological rather than psychological. Those assumptions are necessary in the empirical account, but traditional idealism draws conclusions which subvert them. It supposes that the initial personal response is psychological

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and marks a purely private world of immediate sense experiences from which it seeks to construct, or infer, the outer world, one's own identity, and other minds. Its interpretation of the developmental project already canvasses the philosophical skepticism traditionally associated with idealism. The basic developmental project is understood originally as descriptive and explanatory rather than normative or justificatory; it takes the mental/physical distinction for granted and may neither attach a privilege to the former nor cast any doubt on the latter. But in Descartes an added motive is that the inner experiences are supposed to have an immediate and indubitable certainty which does not belong to an outer experience inferred from them. In that philosophical account the effects in the personal response are psychological sense experiences, sense data, which act as intermediaries between us and the external world. Their indubitable certainty is the only resource with which to ground any inferred belief in the existence or character of outer objects, and it adds even greater urgency to the rehabilitation of such beliefs. The theory is already questionable for these reasons. It begins with assumptions about an outer world but then constructs a barrier which makes those assumptions prima facie unjustifiable. It begins with an essentially physical doctrine of personal responses but turns this into a psychological account of intermediary sensations whose properties remain radically unclear. It trades on the conception of the mind as an internal observation of those intermediary sensations and represents the latter as copies of the "real" objects which have now become "hidden" behind the veil of perception. It is vulnerable to the charge of incoherentiy subverting the basis of the theory which prompted it. 10 There is no agreement about how to characterize the sense data intermediaries, or the reductive relation between outer objects and sense data, and the theory incorporates a discredited Cartesian division between mind and outer world. These handicaps in the background of the theory should encourage us to question and reject it as Kant did. Kant makes plain that he rejects that traditional idealist theory in denying that his project belongs to empirical psychology, in denying the need for a causal inference to outer objects, and in denying both empiricism and Cartesianism. For Kant our cognitive relation to outer objects in sense perception is immediate and needs no inference. His anti-empiricist claim at B l - 2 that although all knowledge begins with experience it does not follow that it all arises out of experience might equally have been expressed as: Although all our knowledge begins with personal, subjective responses it does not follow that it can all be derived from them. Beyond that Kant resists a Cartesian theory generally in the Paralogisms, and provides a formal argument against such a theory in the Refutation of Idealism.

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As a consequence Kant represents his argument in the Aesthetic for transcendental idealism as compatible with empirical realism. The reformed version teaches (B44), asserts (B52), or allows us to accept (A370), empirical realism and presents no challenge to our beliefs about the external world in the way that traditional idealism does. That compatibility arises for transcendental but not empirical idealism because the latter, unlike the former, insists on treating "mind-dependence" as equivalent to "being purely mental." It makes a reference to "the mind" in a straightforwardly empirical way in which it is contrasted with outer, spatial objects. The skeptical challenge arises for empirical idealism precisely because its conception of mind-dependence regards our personal responses as purely private. Those supposed private responses in the traditional theory present a problematic barrier which needs to be overcome in order to recover the outer world. Kant's idealism is intended to talk neither empirically nor transcendently of a mind contrasted with, and formally separate from, the outer world but transcendentally of mind-dependence. It reflects the ineliminability of an appeal to mental, intentional features of our cognitive powers in giving an adequate account of the whole of our experience. That transcendental conception of mind-dependence, unlike the empirical and transcendent alternatives, is compatible with recognition of an experience which includes both inner and outer objects, both inner and outer experience. Kant's project has the following branching structure: The diagnostic therapy of the Dialectic rejects the transcendent "windy metaphysics" of the tradition and focuses philosophical attention on the "fruitful bathos" of immanent experience. Within the latter immanent and transcendental project, the primary aim is to identify the existence of a priori elements and to demonstrate their constitutive role in making possible certain fundamental discriminations. Once the a priori elements in our experience are established Kant holds that at the transcendental level we have a forced choice. Either these elements are independent of us or they are dependent on us in some way, but at that level Kant's answer in the Copernican hypothesis is inevitable. The belief in such a priori elements allows only the possibility that they must be in some way dependent on us. If they were wholly independent of us, they would be not a priori but a posteriori. If Kant's theory rested solely on the incompatibility between being a priori and being wholly independent of human cognizers it would be relatively uninformative, but it is supplemented with two resources. First, the proofs of a priority for specific intuitions and concepts clarify their dependence on human subjects. Second, the appeal to those cognitive powers in demonstrating the constitutive role of the a priori elements in experience entails the ineliminability of a reference to the mind. The first

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factor, if successful, shows that those elements in experience cannot be derived from an independent reality. The second factor brings in Kant's complex account of the way in which sensibility, imagination, and understanding combine in judgment to implement the use of those a priori elements in experience and to make possible objectively true/false judgments. The account cannot dispense with those references to our cognitive powers and minds. It would be natural to object that such an account is no different from an empiricist survey of the working of the senses and understanding to yield our experience. It may be claimed that there is no need to posit a priori elements in experience or to consider them to be in any way minddependent. Such objections rest either on misunderstandings or on a substantive disagreement with Kant's anti-empiricist attitude. The proofs of a priority, if they are successful, overcome the first obstacle, and the cognitive apparatus required to realize the a priori principles in their constitutive role overcomes the second. In that second operation Kant adds the important notion of nonanalytic conceptual dependence. It is designed to demonstrate the non-analytic relation of "constituting" which holds between the ancestral a priori categories and the essential discriminations in experience, such as objective time relations, which they make possible. Nothing in this structure assures the success of the arguments, but if the objection is to the structure of the argument, then it is answered in this way. It is still open to an empiricist to make the substantive point that the arguments are unsuccessful, or more positively to show how an alternative empiricist account succeeds. Understood in this way Kant's project does not belong either to empirical or to transcendent psychology. It is not an empiricist phenomenalism and aims to supplement the typical empiricist construction of experience from a posteriori elements with a reference to those a priori elements and their constitutive principles. It is primarily descriptive and not prescriptive, and both rejects and reverses the Eleatic exhaustive dualism of empirical ideas, mental states, and independent "things in themselves."11 It particularly highlights ambiguities in the philosophical concept of "independence." There is the independence of physical objects which continue to exist unperceived, which Kant takes for granted as a datum in his enquiry into experience. There is the independence of truths from our beliefs and judgments which represents Kant's conception of "objectivity" in the Deduction. There is the essential claim of transcendental idealism that some reference to cognitive powers cannot be eliminated in a descriptive metaphysics of experience. That latter conception rejects the further concept of "independence" in an "absolute conception of reality." Kant's view is that if our intentional cognitive contribution to experience is taken away then for us there is no reality. We cannot literally subtract that distinctive

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contribution from experience and be left with "what is there anyway." The "absolute conception" of "what is there anyway," and its associated conception of an absolute independence, are incoherent, but that is compatible with the empirically independent existence of outer spatial objects and with the independent truth or falsity of our beliefs. The "absolute conception" is a philosophical fabrication which distorts rather than describes our experience. Kant wants also to draw certain conclusions from his constructed, and more accurate, map of experience, in relation to philosophical theories. He thinks that the map corrects an empiricist skepticism and sets it aside not by accepting the challenge to guarantee the continuity of experience against the "abyss" of contingency, but by denying its basic premise. A similar transformation is made to rationalist theory in which its conclusions about the world of reason are reconstructed but only as "formal" and not "material" claims. Leibniz's appeal to monadic things in themselves is represented as a reflection of the formal necessity of such a concept, but as a mistaken inference from that Idea to material existents of a supersensible, transcendent kind. Kant similarly concedes that at the transcendental level idealism had a correct insight into the limited, relative character of our experience, but had misrepresented that insight. Immanent experience and reality are relative to, and dependent on, our cognitive powers, but that is not a restriction to a private world of individual, empirical minds. Properly understood, it casts no real doubt on our experience of an external world but only reveals the extent and nature of the mind's involvement in the constitution of that experience. It points also to the more fruitful, positive, philosophical project of further clarifying that involvement.

2. What are Kant's Real Merits? Just as there is a divergence between traditionalist and revolutionary accounts of Kant's Critique so there are different, traditionalist and revolutionary, responses to the identification of his merits. In some commentators transcendental idealism represents a heroic, but disastrous, failure explained by Kant's inevitable problems in trying to break away from the tradition while committing himself to its principles and problems. According to this view Kant accepts, as empirical idealism does, that the whole of experience derives from individual, private, mental representations, and his principal goal is to justify belief in an external, independent, world of objects on that basis. Inevitable contradictions arise if those objects are taken to be things in themselves, since Kant denies any legitimate knowledge of them.

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The only apparent alternative is to suppose that he canvasses a form of phenomenalist reduction of outer, independent objects from those private ideas, despite the fact that there is no serious textual evidence of such a program. Even when, in the Refutation of Idealism, Kant faces that idealist challenge, as a somewhat peripheral aspect of his own descriptive metaphysics, he offers an argument about a misplaced traditional priority of inner over outer experiences which makes no appeal to phenomenalism. The more natural consequence of that argument, which claims a priority for outer over inner experience, is to reject xht idealist's reverse priority and with it any attempt to treat the former as a logical construction out of the latter. In all these responses Kant is represented as one held back by the commitment to a tradition he tried but failed to supersede. It is a picture of Kant committed to Strawson's "perverse" and "phantasmagoric" "metaphysics of transcendental idealism" (1966a, part 4) in which the noumenal mind works unconsciously on the given a posteriori data of experience to construct the reality of our ordinary immanent experience. This view has become so deeply rooted among some commentators that the expression "transcendental idealism" is often used as an unacknowledged shorthand for that doctrine. Yet the account given of Kant's diagnostic therapy in the Dialectic makes it inconceivable that Kant could have held such phantasmagoric views. Two background assumptions are held throughout these variants, both of which I have challenged. First is the belief that Kant's primary project is that of a normative epistemology directed centrally at traditional skepticism about our knowledge of the world. Second is the belief that Kant attempts to find a solution to that problem within the standard repertoire of the idealist tradition. Construed in the traditional way Kant's arguments inevitably fail and lead to the familiar contradictions, but these blatant conflicts might lead instead to a different conclusion. It might be inferred that the idealist premises are not Kant's starting point, and that his arguments are not primarily directed at that traditional idealist challenge. The alternative, revolutionary view is that Kant's primary aim is to reform metaphysics in a far more radical way, and to give up, as he says in the Prolegomena preface, all previous assumptions in that discipline. His metaphysical inventory and transcendental topic are designed not to embark on the routine challenges of a school metaphysics which has led only to pseudo-conflicts and irresolvable issues, but to point in a wholly new direction. That new direction is effectively an examination of the structure of our experience with the aim of checking it against, and if necessary correcting, the assumptions of idealism, empiricism, rationalism, skepticism and dogmatism. Kant's claim is that the experiment succeeds in diagnosing and correcting those evident failures in the tradition.

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Support for that account of Kant's project has been given throughout the comments on his text, but that account has sometimes been rejected as injudicious and "anodyne." The belief is not merely that such a revolutionary account is mistaken, but that it is so mistaken as not to need, or to deserve, a detailed refutation. Revolutionary accounts have been described as "anodyne," "heroic but misplaced," and said not to "answer steadily to Kant's intentions," or to survive the "impact of the work as a whole." They have been called "deviant interpretations . . . seemingly momentarily attractive or at least worth consideration . . . but which cannot for long be held to represent Kant's views."12 Such verdicts, expressed without specific reference to the text, testify to the strength of the traditionalist view of Kant, but they do not adequately support it. They affirm the view but provide no justification for it. The response to such general claims must be to ask for the needed support from Kant's text. If it is held that the Deduction is about "weighty, or outer, objects," then the challenge is to show where in the text Kant makes that clear. If it is thought that Kant's use of "transcendental" and "transcendent" is inconsistent, or that his contrast between "empirical" and "transcendental" is incomprehensible, then the texts which explain those uses should be demonstrated to be so. If Kant's project is essentially a transcendent psychology then it should be explained how this is compatible with his explicit denial of such a view. If Kant is held to take noumena as the genuine reality for us, then it must be shown where his text makes that commitment in the face of his many denials of such a claim.13 If it is insisted that Kant's central aim is to guarantee the continued stability of our experience, or to demonstrate its strict necessity, against the skeptical "abyss" of the Fourth Antinomy, then it must be explained why his text so firmly takes the opposite view. Nor is it adequate merely to suggest that the text is, in these and other contexts, riddled with inconsistency. There is an interpretative obligation to consider whether an alternative nontraditional account might show the problems to be merely apparent. The alternative account offered in this commentary presents a quite different view which claims that many of these problems are merely apparent and resolvable. It rests on the general branching structure outlined in 1.2 which appeals first to the diagnosis of dialectical illusion and second to the recommended new direction for philosophy. The two are plainly linked, since the new direction for philosophy points away from the temptations and illusions exposed in the Dialectic. They tend to be disconnected because contemporary philosophers find more interest in the Analytic than in the Dialectic, and because the latter's diagnosis and therapy, like Wittgenstein's, are not always appreciated. Yet if Kant's new direction is to be adequately understood that diagnosis and therapy have to be

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properly recognized. The new direction precisely points away from the temptations of a windy metaphysics towards the more fruitful examination of immanent experience. Kant's real merits should be measured against his negative diagnosis of what to avoid and the consequent recommendation of what positively to pursue in philosophy. On the negative side the central point in the diagnosis is to identify a dividing line between genuine and spurious philosophical problems. The dividing line is effectively that between issues which can be decided and those which are beyond our cognitive powers, indeterminate or unclear; between issues which relate to determinable immanent experience and those which involve transcendent claims. Kant's view is that metaphysics in the Eberhard tradition had thought of itself immodestly as a super science able to disclose ultimate truths about a reality hidden behind ordinary experience and perception. It stands as a paradigm of what Wittgenstein had in mind in talking of the queer, hidden, occult distortions of ordinary belief which mislead philosophers into behaving like savages.14 For Kant even the superior science of Newtonian physics had no authority to disclose hidden transcendent truths and metaphysics has even less of a claim. Kant's primary antidote to such arrogant rationalist dogmatism is to employ what he calls the "empiricist principle" to undermine it. More positively, whether the Copernican experiment succeeds or not it points valuably to a new direction for philosophy away from the transcendent "windy metaphysics" Kant deplored and towards the "fruitful bathos" of immanent experience. In these terms Kant's lasting merit is that he stood back from the traditional issues to ask whether they were genuine or spurious, and offered a method for identifying genuine philosophical issues which had the possibility of a determinate resolution. If that position is ascribed to Kant it is inconceivable that the phantasmagoria of the transcendent "mind making nature," or what Garve called the "higher idealism," could also be attributed to him. The alternative revolutionary account represents him as rejecting the traditional principles which encouraged indeterminate debate in favor of a determinate investigation of immanent experience and its structure. Kant's investigation of that structure in the Critique, which is only a propaedeutic to a future substantive metaphysics, has been oudined above. It consists in the identification of a priori elements in experience and in a demonstration of their ability to make possible and constitute fundamental discriminations without which that experience would be impossible. All the demonstrations in that project are open to question, but the structure points to a future philosophy which has more in common with the twentieth century than the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. It goes hand in hand with the more specific exploration of other disciplines and discourses pursued in the later Critiques and the subsidiary works in such

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areas as morals, science, politics, aesthetics, and biology. The project of exploring those topics with their diverse discourses is an essential part of Kant's positive recommendations but it is throughout guided by the more general structure for experience outiined in the first Critique. That structure assumes that each area is governed by a priori concepts and principles and contains synthetic a priori judgments. With that revolutionary account Kant's merits are not those of "getting within a whisker" of being right but held back by the phantasmagoric doctrine of the mind making nature. They are, on the contrary a clear recognition of the errors endemic in the tradition and the perennial temptations in philosophy to debate issues for which there is no determinate resolution and so effectively to overstep the bounds of possible experience. The recommendation is to find appropriate criteria for making a decision in philosophical issues, and if no such criteria are to be found to abandon them as spurious and move on to more fruitful topics. In this discipline Kant anticipated the twentieth century and its characteristic turn away from the nineteenth. The nineteenth century for the most part neither heeded nor understood Kant's rejection of traditional philosophical issues as spurious. Nineteenth-century philosophers generally failed to understand his forceful rejection of traditional idealism, continued to ascribe it to Kant and pursued the issues themselves as if they were genuine. Kant's hope that the proper method for a progressive philosophy would be established by the end of the eighteenth century was grossly overoptimistic, but it began finally to be realized a hundred years later at the end of the nineteenth. To understand transcendental idealism in these terms is neither charitable nor anodyne. If it seems unexpected to rest Kant's doctrine on these disciplinary recommendations it may be because they have not been adequately noticed or appreciated in his work, or because of the dead weight of a tradition which disregards them. Transcendental idealism in this account is not a well-meaning but thoroughly confused attempt to resolve traditional idealist or skeptical problems within a traditional framework. It is instead a vehement rejection of that tradition, and a proposal to follow a different and more valuable path in metaphysics. That direction acknowledges the residual truth in idealism, empiricism, rationalism, and a skeptical method but it points in a new direction away from previous metaphysics and towards a more modest and sober exploration of the structure of immanent experience.

Notes

Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION 1. I give an example of an excessive deference to historical enquiry in chapter 23 in a discussion of Adickes's Kant und das Ding an sich (Berlin: Pan Verlag, Rolf Heise, 1924). Adickes complains about the intrusion of contemporary philosophy into the historical examination of Kant's philosophy: "The temptation to provide a current assessment is a curse for the historical project . . . an historical enquiry can, and indeed must, be indifferent to the question whether the earlier background might have some significance and value for contemporary issues" (48). I claim in that discussion of Adickes that his appeal to a "scientific, historical" approach is flawed. 2. Prolegomena, preface (Ak. 4.255): "My aim is to convince all those who have thought it worth while to engage in metaphysics that it is absolutely necessary to set aside all previous work, to regard what has occurred in the past as never having happened, and before anything else to put the question: Is anything like metaphysics possible at all?" It is hard to imagine a more vehement expression of Kant's wish to change philosophy radically. 3. Garve published two versions of his review, the first in the Gottingischer Anzeige (with amendments from its editor J. G. Feder) and the second in the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek (without those amendments and in relation to his apology to Kant). Both versions are reprinted in Albert Landau, ed., Rezensionen zur Kantischen Philosophic, vol. 1, 1781-1787 (Bebra: Albert Landau Verlag, 1991), 10-17, 34-35. Karl Vorlander has usefully summarized the affair in the Introduction to his edition of the Prolegomena (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1965), vii-xli. That edition also reproduces the original Gottingen review (Beilage II, 167-74) and the correspondence between Garve and Kant (Beilage III, 175-88). Quoted sentences in square brackets are from the second review. Vorlander also reports a subsequent response of Kant's to the reviews (in a letter from Hamann to Herder) in which Kant complains that they have treated him (Kant) "as if he were an imbecile" (introduction, xiii, n. 2). That unbuttoned response offers a clear indication of how Kant would have responded to later traditionalist interpretations. 4. Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London, Macmillan, 1918), 83. The verdict is not uncommon; see, for example, Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge: "Kant's ambivalence about the metaphysics of reality, in the end, is part and parcel of his ambivalence about the proper method for the Critical philosophy" (6). 773

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5. Kant distinguishes between the generic term "idea" (Vorstellung) and the terms "Idea" (Idee) and "Notion" used particularly for the conceptions of reason in the Dialectic. Kant provides a typically detailed, Austinian catalogue of these and related terms at B376-77. 6. Kant's preference will be surprising to those, like William James, who regard Kant as trading in windy metaphysics. In James's Principles of Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1918), Kant's "transcendental unity of apperception" is referred to as a "transcendent arch-ego" and described as a "windy and ineffectual abortion" (vol. 1, 365). James, like Garve, identifies the transcendent and the transcendental, and presumably did not recognize Kant's own preference for the fruitful bathos of experience. In chapters 16 and 25, I offer a more accurate picture of Kant's accounts of the unity of apperception and the self. 7. In chapter 8 on the Aesthetic I note the assumption in Guyer's Kant and the Claims of Knowledge of a Kantian exhaustive dualism between subjective ideas and transcendent things in themselves. I note also that the nineteenth-century debate between Kuno Fischer and Adolph Trendelenburg turned on that same point. Fischer takes what I would call a revolutionary position against Trendelenburg's traditionalism. Strawson's The Bounds of Sense generally assumes the same exhaustive dualism noted in chapter 7. I argue in chapter 5 that the assumption is due primarily to a failure to understand Kant's distinction between the empirical, the transcendent, and the transcendental. 8. The term "phenomenalism" has come to be used for a wider range of doctrines than the classical analytic reductive translation of statements about physical objects into statements about classes of sense data. At one extreme it may amount to litde more than that the former are based somehow on the latter even if they are not translatable or equivalent. Richard Aquila provides a detailed account of some more recent varieties in his Representational Mind: A Study of Kant's Theory of Knowledge (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983). A particular version of the view that Kant was a phenomenalist in Van Cleve's Problems from Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) is discussed and rejected in chapter 30. 9. There are differences between Kant's terms "thing in itself," "noumenon," and "transcendental object," but for present purposes I disregard them. See chapters 14, 22, and 23. 10. The double affection involves causal interactions at two levels between empirical objects and selves on one side and noumenal objects and selves on the other. Adickes's theory is considered in chapter 23, where I argue that it misconstrues Kant's formal distinction between the two levels as a material contrast between two sets of interacting things. Kant himself warns against just such a mistake at B88-89 and elsewhere throughout the Dialectic. 11. In The Bounds of Sense Strawson claims that in the prefaces Kant commits himself to the "reality of the supersensible realm" of things in themselves (22-23). Since the prefaces repeatedly emphasize that we can never transcend possible experience to gain knowledge of things in themselves (Axix, Bxxix-xx, Bxxix) the claim seems to rest mainly on a passage at Bxx: "such knowledge has to do only with appearances, and must leave the thing in itself as indeed real per se but not known by us." It is not clear what "real per se" means, but in the light of Kant's provisos and his anthropocentric modesty that we cannot exclude the possibility of the existence of things unknown to us, it would naturally be taken to say only that if such things exist at all then they are real in their own

Notes to Pages126-133791 fashion. There is a complex story to be considered later (chapters 22, 23, 25-29) about Kant's commitment to the concept and "thinkability" of things in themselves, but this cannot be said to be an unqualified commitment to their existence or reality. That one passage from the preface is consequently a meager and insecure ground for Strawson's claim. 12. B270: "As regards reality we obviously cannot think it in concreto without calling experience to our aid. For reality is bound up with sensation, the matter of experience, not with that form of relation in regard to which we can, if we choose, resort to a playful inventiveness" (in Erdichtungen spielen). The inventiveness, here characterized as "fictitious," is that of conjuring up concepts of things beyond our experience with no "objective reality," that is, of things in themselves. B517: "Possible experience is that which alone can give reality to our concepts; in its absence a concept is a mere Idea without truth, that is, without relation to any object." 13. Explicit criticisms of Leibniz are given in the Aesthetic at B60-62, throughout the Amphiboly of Concepts of Reflection, and in the Ideal. They are all directed at Leibniz's conception of a monadology and complain that he has made the rationalist error of inferring real existents from mere concepts. They are considered in chapters 10.2.3, and 22.2.2. 14. Descartes provides an idealism outiined in the following three claims, but clearly there are other forms of that doctrine which Kant recognizes. What he calls "Eleatic" idealism in the Prolegomena appendix focuses more on the rationalist commitment to Ideas of reason and their supposed reference to a supersensible reality. Kant draws the distinction explicitiy at B881 in contrasting "sensualists" and "intellectualists": "Those in the former school (sensualists) maintained that reality is to be found solely in the objects of the senses and that all else is fiction; those of the latter school (intellectualists) declared that in the senses there is nothing but illusion, and that only the understanding knows what is true." Kant's own commitment in the Prolegomena passage is evidendy to the first part of the former and reflects his acceptance of what he calls the "principle of empiricism" at B496. But Kant rejects what he calls "universal empiricism" (see chapter 11). 15. Debates about Kant's alleged transcendental arguments against the skeptic have produced a vast literature revolving mainly around Stroud's initial rejection of Strawson's appeal to them and his later attempts to provide a better formulation for them. The issue is discussed in chapter 11 in relation to Kant's attitude to philosophical scepticism. See Barry Stroud, "Transcendental Arguments," Journal of Philosophy 1968; The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); "Kantian Arguments, Conceptual Capacities, and Invulnerability," in Kant and Contemporary Epistemology, ed. P. Parrini (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994); "The Goal of Transcendental Arguments," in Transcendental Arguments; Problems and Prospects, ed. R. Stern (Oxford: Clarendon, 1999); and The Quest for Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Relevant works by Strawson are: Individuals (London: Routiedge, 1959); The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966); Skepticism and Naturalism (London: Methuen, 1985); and "The Problem of Realism and the A Priori," in Parrini, Kant and Contemporary Epistemology. 16. Moral philosophers seem to have found it easier than metaphysicians to recognize Kant's flexibility and to modify his supposed "rigorism." See H. J. Paton's foreword and Mary Gregor's introduction to her translation of The Doctrine of Virtue (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), xii, xviii-xix, xxviii;

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Notes to Pages126-133791 Philip Stratton-Lake, Kant, Duty and Moral Worth (London: Routledge, 2000); and J. Reid, "Morality and Sensibility in Kant: Toward a Theory of Virtue," Kantian Review 8 (2004).

17. Quassim Cassam says in his Self and World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 14: "On its own, however, the repetition of qualifications like 'transcendental' and 'metaphysical' can scarcely be said to clarify matters." The claim may be literally true, but the implication is that Kant's own use of 'transcendental' is no more than an empty repetition. 18. H. J. Paton, Kant's Metaphysic of Experience, 2 vols. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1936); T. D. Weldon, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, 2nd. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958); W. H. Walsh, Kant's Criticism of Metaphysics (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1975); H. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983); G. Prauss, Erscheinung bei Kant (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1971) and Kant und das Problem der Dinge an Sich (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1974); R. Pippin, Kant's Theory of Form, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1982, and Gordon Nagel, The Structure of Experience, (Chicago, Chicago University Press, 1983). Most recently A. W. Collins, in Possible Experience: Understanding Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), has adopted a revolutionary position apparently after many years of resisting, and Paul Abela also adopts a revolutionary view in Kant's Empirical Realism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002). 19. The term "anodyne" was first used by Strawson in The Bounds of Sense, p. 38, to refer to "deviant interpretations" of Kant (235-36) which may be "tempting" (22) and "momentarily attractive" but "cannot for long be held to represent Kant's views" (235-36). These are revolutionary views which deny the ascription to Kant of what Strawson calls the "metaphysics of transcendental idealism," a doctrine of the mind literally "making nature" (22, 86). Since then it has become a standard way of rhetorically dismissing such revolutionary accounts of Kant. See Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1987), 336, 338; D. Guevara, "The Two Standpoints on the Will," Kantian Review 1 (1998), 82ff.; and Rae Langton, Kantian Humility (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 9. In his entry on Kant in the Oxford Companion to Psychology (ed. R. Gregory; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), Strawson wrote of "anodyne" interpretations: "Such a radically reinterpreted, such a domesticated, Kant would perhaps be more intellectuily acceptable to us, but he would not be the great and difficult philosopher that he is in himself' (408). It is hard to understand how a more intellectually acceptable doctrine might diminish Kant's status. 20. In The Bounds of Sense (p. 112) Strawson notes correctly that Kant uses the term "idea" in different senses but then considers only its empirical use in relation to phenomena and its transcendent use in relation to noumena. As I indicate in chapter 5, Kant has a threefold distinction between the empirical, the transcendent, and the transcendental, of which only the third corresponds to his philosophical account. 21. Both Strawson in The Bounds of Sense and Bennett in Kant's Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966) ascribed some form of semantic verificationism to Kant. 22. Philosophers have sometimes recently identified contemporary "anurealism" and "idealism." This is quite misleading, but I note in chapters 15 and 26 that

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if it has some point it marks a range of ambiguities in the term "idealism." Some account of the "realist/antirealist" debate can be found in M. Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth, 1973) and Truth and Other Enigmas (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); H. Putnam, Reason, Truth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), and Realism and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Crispin Wright, Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1983), and Truth and Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). Van Cleve rightly rejects the idea that Kant can be represented as a contemporary antirealist but wrongly regards him as an "honest to goodness, old fashioned, idealist" in Problems from Kant (4, 14). Chapter 2 THE TWO PREFACES 1. The B Refutation of Idealism is an important part of Kant's thesis in the Critique, but neither its new location in the Postulates of the Analytic of Principles nor its advance notice in a footnote of the B preface suggest that it is his major interest or goal. Commentators who move the issue to the forefront of Kant's interest, like Stroud in The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984; chapt. 4) may be motivated more by their own traditional interest in an idealist skepticism about the external world than in Kant. In later comments I argue that neither traditional idealism nor general skepticism constitute Kant's primary interest. 2. It is commonly claimed that the changes in B in the new Refutation of Idealism and the associated emphasis on spatial applications of the principles in the General Note (B288), and from a psychological to a judgmental focus in the Transcendental Deduction, mark substantial differences from A. In comments on those passages I support Kant's official denial that these are changes of substance. 3. A collection of such reviews can be found in Albert Landau, ed., Rezensionen zur Kantischen Philosophic, vol. 1, 1781-1787, (Bebra: Albert Landau Verlag, 1991). They are not, like the Garve-Feder reviews, preponderantly hostile, but around half of them express strong criticism. 4. The imagery, natural for those like Kant who canvass a paradigm shift in their discipline, was used in Ryle's The Concept of Mind (London: Penguin, 2000) and John McDowell's Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) to mark apparently endless rivalry between philosophical views about, respectively, mind and matter and correspondence and coherence accounts of truth. 5. Kant marks the distinction elsewhere in the Critique at B118-20 and B876-77. The disciplines are closely connected but it is important to distinguish, as Kant does, between empirical, transcendent, and transcendental psychology. Kant's transcendental psychology is neither empirical psychology nor a transcendent pseudo-psychology. Recent commentators who have wanted to elucidate Kant's transcendental psychology include Patricia Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), Andrew Brook, Kant and the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), and Lome Falkenstein, Kant's Intuitionism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995).

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6. Leibniz's text is translated in G. H. R. Parkinson, ed., Leibniz: Philosophical Writings (London: Everyman, 1973), 16. 7. A survey of these and other Kantian metaphors is given in Tarbert, Journal of the History of Philosophy 6 (1968): 257-80. 8. Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences, Ak. 4.468-69: Pure rational cognition from mere concepts is called pure philosophy or metaphysics; by contrast that which grounds its cognition only on the construction of concepts by means of the presentation of the object in an a priori intuition, is called mathematics. Also B697: The Ideas of pure reason can never be dialectical in themselves; any deceptive illusion to which they give occasion must be due solely to their misemployment. See also chapter 29. 9. In the Aesthetic, Kant constandy refers to the "concepts" of space and time at the same time as he insists that space and time are "intuitions." It is often thought that this is just a mistake on Kant's part, but that is denied in chapters 6-8. Other passages reinforce the more general point: "The Ideas of pure reason can never be dialectical in themselves; any deceptive illusion to which they give rise must be due solely to their misuse" (B697); "With the concept of cause I really do go beyond the concept of an event... I therefore proceed merely in accordance with concepts" (B750n). The issue is explored fully in chapter 29 on the Doctrine of Method. 10. Traditional empiricists' tendency to view knowledge as passive, even in science, has been apdy called a "paralytic's-eye view" in Flew, Hume's Philosophy of Belief (New York: Humanities Press, 1961). 11. Kant importandy distinguishes two kinds of "limits" in the Critique and Prolegomena §§56-59, namely, Grenzen and Schranken. Mathematics and the sciences have no Grenzen since their progress can continue indefinitely within their proper bounds. It is the job of philosophy, not mathematics, to recognize and draw the latter "proper bounds" (Schranken) which for Kant separate what is a possible experience for us from what is beyond any such possible experience. The distinction is considered later in chapter 23. 12. These labels have been widely used. See Henry Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism and "Transcendental Idealism: The Two-Aspect View," in New Essays on Kant, ed. B. den Ouden and M. Moen (New York, Peter Lang, 1987); Hoke Robinson, "Two Perspectives on Kant's Appearances and Things in Themselves," Journal of the History of Philosophy 32, no. 3 (July 1994); Ken Westphal, "Noumenal Causality Reconsidered: Affection, Agency and Meaning in Kant," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 27, no. 2 (June 1997); and Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. 13. See Russell's "Logical Atomism,' in Logic and Knowledge: Essays 1901-1950, ed. R.C. Marsh (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1956), and A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Gollancz, 1936). 14. See, e.g., G. Ryle, "Technical and Untechnical Concepts," in Dilemmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954) and W. V. O. Quine, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1960). 15. See Susan Haack, Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Alan D. Sokal, Intellectual Impostures: Postmodern Philosophers' Abuse of Science (New York: Picador,

Notes to Pages126-1337 91 1998); J. Searle, "Reiterating the Differences: A Reply to Derrida," in Glyph (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 198-208. 16. Kant uses these terms, subsequently associated with Frege's semantics, without anything like Frege's formal background. Kant associates Bedeutung with the relation between a concept and its object and with objective reality, and this has some connection with the notion of "reference." The issue is considered in the chapter 22 on "Phenomena and Noumena." The new translations of the Critique by Pluhar and Guyer/Wood translate Sinn and Bedeutung respectively as "sense" and "significance," or "meaning" and "significance." See P. Nolan, "Kant on Meaning: Two Studies," Kant-Studien 70, no. 2 (1979). 17. See Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, and my "Kant and Contemporary Epistemology" in Kantian Review 1 (1996). For Austin, see his Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961) and my entry on J. L. Austin in A Companion to Epistemology, ed. J. Dancy and E. Sosa (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 18. J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, ed. G. Warnock, and J. O. Urmson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961); L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953). 19. Eckart Forster, ed., introduction to Opus Postumum (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 20. The passage testifies to a political, even democratic, strand in Kant's thought in which beliefs are ultimately evaluated by our fellow men and in which authoritarian censorship, from which Kant suffered, has no place. The passage goes on: "The greatest and perhaps the sole use of all philosophy of pure reason is . . . only negative; since it serves not as an organon for the extension, but as a discipline for the limitation, of pure reason, and instead of discovering truth has only the modest merit of guarding against error." A similar point is made in the preface at Bxxv-xxvi. Kant's modesty in this respect echoes Wittgenstein's belief that philosophy provides no genuine "explanations" but merely "assembles reminders." Comparison of Kant's and Wittgenstein's therapeutic treatment of philosophical illusions is given in chapter 24. 21. Most commentators now recognize that Kant was not a classical phenomenalist. Despite his appeal to "possible" experience, sometimes unwarrarantedly taken to commit him to a phenomenalist view, the empiricist background to such a doctrine is quite foreign to Kant's antiempiricism. When he comes formally to consider how to justify a belief in outer objects in the B Refutation of Idealism there is no suggestion of a phenomenalist reduction. The main points were put in my Kant's Theory of Knowledge (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1962), chapter 1. I do not rehearse the points in this commentary but consider one mistaken ground, given by Van Cleve in Problems from Kant, for ascribing phenomenalism to Kant in chapter 30. 22. It has been suggested by Karl Ameriks {Kant's Theory of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) and Rae Langton (Kantian Humility) that Kant's "phenomena" should be understood as "properties" of "true," noumenal substances, but that is plainly not how Rant applies his category of "substance/attribute." They may have been influenced by the notion of a "two aspect" view. The issue is considered in chapters 22.2 and 23.4.

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23. The point is made forcibly in the General Observations on the Transcendental Aesthetic (B69-70) and elsewhere in the Anthropologie and the essay on "Progress in Philosophy." Its importance is stressed in chapter 10. 24. These images, in the Prolegomena preface and at B294-95, are as widely used as the "legal/tribunal" metaphors. 25. Such a "descriptive" approach, representing experience as a system and the task of philosophy as that of mapping it accurately, was common throughout the period from the beginning of the twentieth century up to its end. The Positivists' "rational reconstruction" program included that aim with some "normative" clarification, and later appeals to "frameworks" (in Carnap), "language games" (in Wittgenstein), "category disciplines" (in Ryle),and the "web of belief' (in Quine), took the view more explicitly. What came to be called "ordinary language philosophy" was a version of a descriptive metaphysics directed towards our ordinary, rather than a scientific, conception of reality. Another development deployed formal languages for a similar purpose and can be found in David Lewis's essays and E. Zalta, Abstract Objects (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983). Strawson's explicit "descriptive metaphysics" in Individuals followed the "ordinary language" approach, and his application of this to Kant in The Bounds of Sense followed earlier accounts such as that of Paton in Kant's Metaphysic of Experience. Strawson, like McDowell, believes that although Kant has a project of a descriptive metaphysics, it is spoiled by the intrusion of the transcendent "metaphysics of transcendental idealism." In various papers, and in this Commentary, I claim that that criticism is misplaced. 26. Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences, Ak. 4.475: The latter problem (how experience is possible by means, and only by means, of the categories) has great importance . . . and as I now think, can be solved with ease, since it can almost be accomplished through a single inference from the precisely determined definition of a judgment in general. Chapter 3 THE INTRODUCTION 1. Wittgenstein speaks of an absurd wish for lack of friction in connection with a belief in the "crystalline purity" of logic, and makes the same point as Kant about the illusory nature of the wish. Philosophical Investigations §107: "We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk, so we need friction. Back to the rough ground." This echoes not only Kant's metaphor but also his central anti-Platonist thought in the basic fallacy. More extensive parallels between Kant and Wittgenstein in their diagnosis of, and therapy for, philosophical errors are given in chapter 24.2, and in the following chapters 25-28 on the Dialectic. 2. At B61-62 and elsewhere, Kant speaks of his enquiry as one into the origin and content of our knowledge. He says of Leibniz and Wolff that they had "given a completely wrong direction to all investigations into the nature and origins of our knowledge," and that his enquiry into sensibility and understanding is not merely logical but transcendental, and concerns the contrast between origins and contents of knowledge. The passage contains the important point: "It is not that by our sensibility we cannot know the nature of things in themselves in any save a confused fashion; we do not apprehend them in any way whatsoever." This is strikingly at odds with views which liken Kant to Leibniz.

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3. A classic expression of this view is A. J. Ayer's, Language, Truth and Logic, (London: Gollancz, 1936), 11, 31, 42, and chapter 4, "The A Priori," 89-118. The early references indicate Ayer's assumption that "a priori" = "analytic," or "tautology"; the later passages, especially chapter 4, identify some obstacles to that assumption which Ayer removes, but it is hard to find any positive argument in favor of the claim. He shows that analytic truths are a priori, but he does not show that only analytic truths are a priori. 4. Strawson (Bounds of Sense) and Bennett [Kant's Analytic), in different ways, accept the basic classifications but reject the hybrid form. ("It must be concluded that Kant really has no clear and general conception of the synthetic a priori at all," [Strawson 1966a, 43]). Bennett's account of Kant's classification is criticized in chapter 3.2.2. Quine and those who follow him reject even the basic classifications for reasons considered later in chapter 3.2.3. 5. Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. A. S. PringlePattison. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), book 4.7; Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge, ed. A. C. Fraser (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1901), introduction. The debate between those empiricists and Kant's response in the Schematism (B177-87) are discussed in chapter 17. 6. Kant underlines the "higher-order" character of his transcendental, philosophical, project in later passages, especially B80-81: "Not every kind of knowledge a priori should be called transcendental, but that only by which we know that—and how—certain representations (intuitions or concepts) can be employed or are possible purely a priori." I emphasized the importance of Kant's distinction between empirical and transcendental enquiries in Kant's Theory of Knowledge, chapter 3, and do so again in chapter 5. 7. "Naturalism" has become a fashionable label, and is typically ambiguous. See my "Kant and Naturalism," British Journal for the History of Philosophy 3, no. 2 (September 1995): 399-408, and "Kantian Themes in Contemporary Philosophy," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol, 72 (1998): 131-53. Kant uses "naturalism" in a different way at B883 to mark an appeal to common sense against science. 8. Kant's term Anschauung ("intuition") is introduced only later in the Aesthetic. For present purposes it represents a blanket term for what is immediately presented to sensibility and is contrasted with the discursive, general concepts belonging to understanding, but it is important later to distinguish "intuition" from "sensation" (Empfindung) and "impression" (Eindruck) and "appearance" (Erscheinung). Eindruck, literally a translation of "impression," is rarely found in the Critique, but see A120n. 9. Leibniz gives a proof of an arithmetical formula from given axioms in his New Essays (book 4, chapter 7). James Van Cleve in Problems from Kant argues that Kant held "7 + 5 = 12" to be synthetic because 12 is not contained in the subject terms "7" and "5," whether it is contained in "7 + 5" or not. If Kant really held such a view, then his claim is even more inadequate than is usually thought. 10. The "explicative/ampliative" distinction is inadequate since it relies on the notion of a judgment's "providing new information" when even analytic truths provide information about the meaning or logic of some concept. That requires a distinction between "synthetic" and "analytic" information which makes the attempt circular.

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11. L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§37-47. §40: "That is to confound the meaning of a name with the bearer of the name." 12. Quine's position could be put more strongly by saying that only extensional relations are appropriate, or acceptable, for logic or science. It is not clear why we should accept this restriction. 13. Word and Object addresses analyticity and "stimulus analyticity on pp. 61-67, indeterminacy of translation on pp. 68-72, and the limitations of radical indeterminacy on p. 72 and pp. 73-79. Consider, e.g., p. 75: Complete radical translation goes on, and analytical hypotheses are indispensable. Nor are they capricious; we have seen in outline how they are supported. [But] We could claim [that this gives a sense to "sameness of meaning"] only if no two sets of analytical hypotheses could be tied for first place on all theoretically accessible evidence. The indefinability of synonymy by reference to . . analytical hypotheses is formally the same as the indefinability of truth by reference to scientific method.

Quine's assumption, that we cannot license synonymy unless there is ultimately only one set of analytical hypotheses which survives all possible evidence, sets a typically demanding skeptical standard which the pragmatic translator cannot meet. 14. On limitations in defining truth, see Word and Object, 22-25. Consider, e.g., p. 23: "It seems likelier . . . that countiess alternative theories would be tied for first place. Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords even in principle no unique definition of truth." And pp. 24-25: Have we now so far lowered our sights as to settle for a relativistic doctrine of truth— rating the statements of each theory as true for that theory, and brooking no higher criticism? Not so. The saving consideration is that we continue to take seriously our own particular aggregate science, our own particular world-theory. . . . Within our own total evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnestly and absolutely as can be; subject to correction, but that goes without saying.

Evidendy for Quine truth, synonymy, and translation can be adequately achieved within their practical—scientific or linguistic—contexts. What cannot be achieved is some philosophically motivated conception of truth and translation which can be shown to be unique and definitive over against all other possible rivals. We might then simply settle for that "practical" level of truth and translation, which Quine not only accepts but also describes as "absolute." Settling in that way would be even more strongly motivated if it was thought that the alternative philosophical motivation was itself an error motivated by an "idle" skepticism. Skepticism is discussed in chapter 11, and the conception of truth as an ideal in chapter 29. 15. Kripke's "Naming and Necessity," in Semantics of Natural Language, ed. D. Davidson and G. Harman (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972), emphasized these differences between epistemological, logical, semantic, and metaphysical classifications. For Kripke the "a priori/a posteriori" distinction was epistemological but the "contingent/necessary" distinction was metaphysical. 16. I had queried Ayer's and Quine's assimilation of the "analytic/synthetic" and "a priori/a posteriori" distinctions in "Analytic-Synthetic," Philosophical Quarterly (1958).

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Chapter 4 SYNTHETIC A PRIORI JUDGMENTS 1. These are represented primarily by the principles of the understanding which Kant undertakes to prove in the Analytic of Principles. In the preliminary discussion of that section in chapter 17, I emphasize the importance of Kant's distinction between metaphysical a priori principles and scientific a priori principles. The former provide a higher order explanation of how other synthetic a priori judgments are possible and are "transcendental" but the latter are not. 2. C. Peacocke, "The Origins of the A Priori," in Parrini, Kant and Contemporary Epistemology, and Paul K. Moser, ed., introduction to A Priori Knowledge, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 2^4-, both endorse this view, as do some contributors to the Philosophical Studies issue, ed. J. O'LearyHawthorne (vol. 92, nos. 1-2, October 1998) on "The A Priori." 3. Kant's requirement that all concepts, even a priori concepts, are ultimately usable only in relation to "possible experience" is a measure of his support for empiricism and what he calls the "empiricist principle" at B496. It marks his central criticism of dogmatic rationalists that they claim to establish truths from concepts alone about things in themselves beyond possible experience, and his own task in the Transcendental Deduction. There Kant has to explain how it is possible for a priori concepts, not derivable from experience, nevertheless to have a use in relation to experience. 4. Kant's phrase "given a priori" is, consequendy, not an error, but a recognition of this point, which is related to what has been called an empiricist "myth of the given," discussed in chapter 10. For the claim that Kant thinks a priori intuitions such as space and time are not "given to the senses," see A. Quinton, "The Trouble with Kant," Philosophy 72 (January 1997), and my reply in Philosophy 74 (October 1999). 5. C. Peacocke also makes this point in his "The Origin of the A Priori, " in Parrini, Kant and Contemporary Epistemology. 6. See, e.g., Swartz and Bradley, Possible Worlds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1979). 7. This was the phrase used by Quine to characterize the two "dogmas of empiricism," namely, belief in a distinction between analytic and synthetic truth and "reductionism." Since that time, other dogmas of empiricism have been reported, for example, by Davidson, "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme," in Inquiries into Truth and Meaning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984): "This second dualism of scheme and content. . . cannot be made intelligible. . . . It is itself a dogma of empiricism, a third dogma" (189). Despite the doubts about empiricism, there is still a presumption among Western analytic philosophers that it must be true, and perhaps that is the ultimate dogma of empiricism. Kant's arguments in the Critique provide an alternative which rejects dogmatic rationalism and what he calls "universal empiricism." See chapter 11. 8. Michael Friedman has oudined this conception in "Geometry, Convention, and the Relativized A Priori," in Logic, Language, and the Structure of Scientific Theories, ed. Wesley Salmon and G. Wolters (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1994), and "Epistemology in the Aufbau," Synthese 93 (1992), 15-57.

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9. See Gordon Brittan Jr., Kant's Theory of Science (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1971) and Kripke, "Naming and Necessity." 10. Leibniz's account of necessity and contingency is notoriously unclear, and dubiously coherent. Leibniz wrestles throughout his writing with the distinction and its attendant problems, especially the apparent conflict between free will and the "weak" necessity that everything that happens to a person is included in his individual notion (Discourse on Metaphysics §13, in Philosophical Writings, 23-25). In that section Leibniz writes: I assert that connexion or sequence is of two kinds. One is absolutely necessary, whose contrary implies a contradiction; this kind of deduction holds in the case of eternal truths such as those of geometry. The other is only necessary by hypothesis and, so to speak, by accident; it is contingent in itself, since its contrary does not imply a contradiction . . . all contingent propositions have reasons for being thus . . . they have a priori proofs of their truth which make them certain and show that the connexion between subject and predicate . . . has its basis in the nature of one or the other.

However, in "On Freedom" (Philosophical Writings, 109) Leibniz says: "But in the case of contingent truths even though the predicate is contained in the subject this can never be demonstrated of it, nor can the proposition ever be reduced to an equation or identity." In the Monadology Leibniz explains his classification summarily at §§31-36 (Philosophical Writings, 184-85), and at §53 says: "As there is an infinite number of possible universes in the ideas of God and as only one can exist, there must be a sufficient reason for God's choice, determining him to one rather than to another." Leibniz's position is that strict necessity is the opposite of contradiction and associated with strict proofs in mathematics, while weak necessity, or contingency, although provable a priori in principle, depends on certain antecedent conditions such as the sufficient reasons which incline God to choose one possibility among others. Strict necessary truths, such as the eternal truths of mathematics, hold in all possible worlds, but contingent truths, although weakly necessary, certain and provable a priori, do not hold in all possible worlds. Kant's demythologized and secular classification avoids many of the difficulties in Leibniz's account. 11. Kant uses the term "necessity" to characterize the "a priori" in the Introduction, but the term "contingent" is used sparingly throughout the Introduction and Analytic, and even in the Postulates. It is used more in the Dialectic and Doctrine of Method (e.g., B793-94) where Kant admits that experience is contingent (see chapter 15.2.1). Kripke's conception of necessity is defined in terms of truth holding in all possible worlds, but, as I suggest later, this conception is more appropriate for Kant's idea of analytic truth. There is an important difference here between Kripke and Kant. Kripke claims: "The terms "necessary" and "a priori" are not obvious synonyms . . . not even co-extensive" (263), but Kant does not claim that they are synonyms, although the latter entails the former. Criticism of Kant for his use of these terms is discussed in chapter 29. 12. Although I set these differences between Kant and Kripke aside, they are of some importance. Kripke's conception of necessity as truth holding in all possible worlds allows him to claim that not all such necessities are "logical" or "analytic"; for him some are "metaphysical" necessities. This may make it look as if Kripke's a posteriori necessities are closer to Kant's synthetic a priori than the former's contingent a priori truths. But this is, I believe, an error resulting from confusion about the differences in the two conceptions of necessity, and for that reason I concentrate, as Bradley and Swartz do, on the parallel between Kant's synthetic a priori and Kripke's contingent a priori. But, as I point out, there are differences in both cases: Kripke's taxonomy shares a lib-

Notes to Pages126-133791 erating tendency with Kant, but his conception of its structure is not the same as Kant's. 13. Among such commentators are Bennett, Kant's Analytic, and Strawson, The Bounds of Sense. The former's effort to explain Kant's conception of the synthetic a priori at pp. 12-32 is discussed in chapter 3.2.2. Strawson (pp. 4 2 ^ 3 ) , after a more cursory exploration of Kant's classification, concludes that "Kant really has no clear and general conception of the synthetic a priori." Strawson's primary objection to Kant's account of the classification is that it requires the traditionalist conception of the "mind making nature," that is, of minds in themselves literally creating reality. This is vulnerable to the objections that Kant offers a formally neutral account of his analytic apparatus, and that the traditionalist conception of the "mind making nature" is arguably not Kant's. Dummett, in Frege: Philosophy of Language, says of Kripke's conclusion: "Counter-intuitive it undoubtedly is, but it appears to follow from Kripke's arguments: something must, therefore, be amiss with those arguments" (21).

Chapter 5 THE TRANSCENDENTAL/EMPIRICAL DISTINCTION 1. The issue is discussed in the following chapters 2.3.2.2; 7.1; 9.3; 10.2.2; 21.2; 22.1; 23.2.1.1-3; and 26.4. 2. Quassim Cassam in Self and World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 13-14, notes Kant's distinction between an "empirical" and "transcendental" self but dismisses it with the comment: "On its own . . . the repetition of qualifications like 'transcendental' and 'metaphysical' can scarcely be said to clarify matters." Barry Stroud in The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) repeats the familiar charge that "Kant sometimes slips and uses 'transcendental' where he should use 'transcendent'" (153n), and explains his difficulty in understanding Kant's transcendental enquiry by citing his "lack of facility in the transcendental mode" (167). 3. Kant makes similar comments about the correct place of psychology at B876-77. It is clear from these passages and from his attempts to distance his own enquiry from Locke's psychology in the preface and Transcendental Deduction, that the issue was important to him and that he recognized differences between his own "transcendental topic" and both empirical and transcendent psychology. The issue is discussed in chapter 14 in relation to Patricia Kitcher's Kant's Transcendental Psychology, and Andrew Brook's Kant and the Mind in which differing accounts are given of "transcendental psychology." Although I disagree with some of their views, they are both right in finding a legitimate role for transcendental psychology. 4. At B88-89 and later in the Dialectic (B353-55, B648, B518-19, B665 and elsewhere) Kant refers to an illegitimate "material" use of "formal" principles. With the passages at B186-87, B335-36, B345^6, they form a central part of Kant's diagnosis of philosophical illusion and error which is the principal topic in the Dialectic, discussed in chapter 24. 5. I had outlined part of the distinction between the empirical and transcendental in Kant's Theory of Knowledge, chapter 3, pp. 36-43, but I had not made the comparison with Carnap's account of internal and external questions.

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6. Commentators differ about the sense of such claims. It might be said that a priori axioms in some deductive system, in mathematics, "explain" the a priori truths which follow from them, but Kant would disagree. His point is that to prove Q from axioms P^Pj, may support the truth of Q but does nothing to explain its a priori status. This underlines the additional requirement that the explanation should be a "higher-order" philosophical account of that status which is not provided merely in doing mathematics. It clarifies the distinction between mathematics and philosophy outlined in the quotation from B75 3-54, and underlines the contrast between mathematical principles and metaphysical principles of mathematics in the Analytic of Principles (B199). 7. Kant's contrasts between the psychological faculties of sensibility, understanding, and reason can be understood in terms of the functions each faculty represents. Sensibility particularizes items in experience, understanding generalizes or conceptualizes what is presented to sense, and reason draws inferences and represents our reasoning in enquiries. The point is made in chapter 24 and throughout the discussion of the Dialectic. 8. Because "empirical" is conventionally used to mean "a posteriori" it might be better not to use the former term in opposition to "transcendental," but the alternative of opposing "transcendental" and "nontranscendental" is ugly. 9. Kant then faces the unpalatable, exhaustive alternatives of dealing either in empirical or in transcendent psychology, both of which he denies. Contemporary philosophers who sharply distinguish their own discipline from empirical psychology will then be encouraged to regard Kant's claims as part of an unacceptable transcendent psychology. I argue in chapter 7.3 that this is the origin of Strawson's complaints about Kant's "imaginary subject of transcendental psychology" (Bounds of Sense, 32). 10. Much has been written about Carnap's paper, and I indicate a few criticisms, especially those of Quine and Stroud, and defenses of the paper. Extensive references and further contributions to the literature can be found in Language, Truth and ICnowledge, ed. Thomas Bonk, Vienna Circle Institute Library (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003). Among the central criticisms are W. V. O. Quine, "On Carnap's Views on Ontology," in Ways of Paradox and Other Essays (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), and B. Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism. Among the defenses are Susan Haack's "Some Preliminaries to Ontology," Journal of Philosophical Logic 5 (1976), and my "Carnap's Internal and External Questions" in Bonk, Language> Truth and Knowledge. 11. I argued in "Carnap's Internal and External Questions" that external theoretical questions are not, for Carnap, irredeemably meaningless, and that the "challenge" he makes to those who wish to debate the traditional ontological issue is to develop a suitable framework within which such questions can be answered. Without such a framework to provide criteria for "external existence" the questions are for the present "meaningless" in that we have no idea how to answer them. Discussion of the issue in relation to Wright's Truth and Objectivity and Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects is given in chapters 15.2.2 and 24.3. 12. In "Carnap's Internal and External Questions" I argue that Carnap did not rely on a simple argument from verifiability to establish his conclusion that external theoretical questions are presently unanswerable.

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13. Further discussion of "nonanalytic conceptual dependence" is given in chapters 20.2 and 29. 14. Martin Schonfeld's The Philosophy of the Young Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) oudines brilliandy the changes in Kant's attitude to rationalism and empiricism in the pre-Critical period. 15. Even if we think of language as the primary vehicle for expressing our beliefs in philosophy, and elsewhere, it does not follow that language has sole responsibility for those beliefs. Kant evidently thinks of philosophy as "conceptual," that is, as dealing in concepts, but he assigns responsibility for our beliefs and their a priori structure to our mental, cognitive powers. I discuss misunderstandings about Kant's view of philosophy as "conceptual" in chapter 29, and made the general point in "Kant's and Strawson's Descriptive Metaphysics," in Strawson and Kant, ed. H.-J. Glock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003). 16. Kant's hostility to Plato's metaphysics and sympathy towards Plato's moral philosophy are discussed in chapter 24.2. A key passage in the Critique is at B371-72 (and note). Kant's reference to the "keys to possible experience" has been unjustifiably interpreted as a commitment to phenomenalism. Chapter 6 THE TRANSCENDENTAL AESTHETIC 1. Kant's 1770 Dissertation (Ak. 2.387) drew a sharp distinction between a "world of sense" and a "world of understanding," and faced the problem of integrating them which became his central concern during the decade up to 1781. The famous letter to Herz of 1772 expresses the problem and testifies to its fundamental importance for the development of the first Critique. Dissertation II, §3-4: The object of sensibility is the sensible; that which contains nothing save what must be known through intelligence is the intelligible. The former was called, in the ancient schools, phenomenon; the latter noumenon. . . . Thus on one hand all sensitive cognition depends on the special nature of the subject . . . on the other, whatever is exempt from this subjective condition refers only to the objects. It is clear, therefore, that representations of things as they appear are sensitively thought, while intellectual concepts represent things as they are.

The association of the "intellect" with intelligible objects, noumena, things as they are (in themselves), and their separation from "subjective conditions of sense" and things as they appear, indicate an earlier, and more Leibnizian, account of the two faculties and their objects than is found in the Critique, especially in the famous connection between sense and understanding at B75-76. There is also considerable overlap between what Kant says of space and time in the two works. In particular much of the argument supporting the Critique's account of space and time as a priori and intuitive is already in the Dissertation. The main differences are first in the conceptions of the objects of sense and understanding or reason; and in the extensive appeal to "innate ideas" in the Dissertation which is rejected in the Critique. Dissertation II, §4: "there is required an internal principle of the mind through which these representations may take on a certain configuration according to stable and innate laws." A further comment on the way these differences affect Kant's diagnostic therapy in the Dialectic is made in chapter 24.1.4.

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2. The catalogue or inventory at B376-77 offers definitions of Vorstellung (representation), Perception (perception), Empfindung (sensation), Erkenntnis (cognition), Anschauung (intuition), Begriff (concept), Notio (notion), and Idee (idea). The term Eindruck (impression) does not appear much in the Critique but is used at A120n. 3. The options are unclear. "Real existence" for space and time might involve a belief in their genuine or necessary role in physics, or their metaphysical classification as substances or individuals, or a denial that they can be analyzed without remainder into relations between physical objects. It is not obvious which of these Newton would accept. The "Leibnizian" option involves a criterion about the analysis of space and time as relations, but also an epistemological or metaphysical claim about their independence of the senses. Kant undoubtedly holds the third option but the notions of a "form of intuition" and of a dependence on "the constitution of our minds" are initially unclear. More is said of this in chapter 8. 4. Kant does not say only that " intrinsic properties of things in themselves cannot be given through the senses," and it is natural to take him to claim that no such properties, intrinsic or relational, are given to the senses. The suggestion that phenomena just are relational properties of things in themselves is inconsistent with such a view. The point is considered in relation to Rae Langton's Kantian Humility in chapter 10.2.3, and 22.2.2. 5. If both passages give the impression that a proof of the empirical reality of space and time is given, then it is puzzling that what is presented is only an assertion of that empirical reality rather than a proof. The German text does not talk of a proof, but only of what Kant's view is, teaches, or asserts, and this is remedied in the newer translations of Guyer/Wood and Pluhar. There is a distinction between proving the transcendental ideality of space, time, and their inhabitants and proving their empirical reality. It is not obvious that Kant anywhere offers a proof of the empirical reality of inner appearances, and the only proof of the empirical reality of outer objects is that provided in the Refutation of Idealism (B274-77). 6. There is no serious doubt that Kant allows appearances, objects of the senses, to be both inner and outer, and it is consequently a mistake to treat appearances as if they were confined either to inner, mental states or to outer, spatial objects. Bennett, in Kant's Analytic, seems to disregard Kant's use of inner appearances and inner perceptions in the claim: "Kant applies 'phenomenon' and 'appearance' to all those objective things, processes, and events which we can know about by means of our senses—but not to our sensory states themselves" (22). Kant's procedure in his transcendental topic is to assume that our experience includes both inner and outer appearances in order to disentangle the factors, a posteriori and a priori, sensible and intellectual, which make that experience possible. This is not the traditional idealist attempt to prove the existence of outer objects, and Kant seems to say as much at B876: "we take nothing more from experience than is required to give us an object of outer or of inner sense." 7. I had explored these passages in Kant's Theory of Knowledge, chapter 3, and believe that they are still inadequately appreciated. They incorporate Kant's contrast between ordinary empirical as opposed to philosophical and transcendental conceptions of experience. (See chapter 5, n. 2.) 8. Kemp Smith, for understandable reasons, follows other commentators in reading "ideality of space and time" in place of "reality of space and time." The

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preceding sentences emphasize ideality rather than reality, but the point of the passage is common to both readings. What Kant seems to say is that the philosophical issue about reality or ideality has no significance for the certainty of our empirical knowledge. So understood it reinforces the distinction between a higher order philosophical justification for our beliefs and their ordinary robust legitimacy. Kant's dismissive attitude to philosophical skepticism is discussed in chapter 11. 9. Kant is still widely interpreted as a phenomenalist even though many accounts, such as Ralph Walker's Kant (London: Routledge, 1976) and my Kant's theory of Knowledge, have denied this. But there are various forms of phenomenalism, many of which have been explored in Richard Aquila's Representational Mind. Some such accounts rest on a conception of "intentionality" applied to sense experience, or on what have been called "virtual objects," but I remain doubtful if these represent Kant's position. "Intentionality" seems to me to attach primarily to concepts and the understanding, while Kant's "appearance" is intended strictly to designate what is presented to sensibility independently of conceptual resources. More is said of the resulting "blindness" issue in chapter 7.2. Van Cleve's account of "virtual objects" is criticized in chapter 30. Chapter 7 SPACE, TIME AND PERCEPTION 1. William James discussed such fusing mechanisms and their importance for the traditional philosophical mind-body problem in his Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 157-60. James did not confine his discussion to physical or physiological causal connections but considered the coherence of fusions which connected brain and mind. He thought that some of the latter attempts committed an error he called "fusing without a medium." There is no indication in the Critique that Kant envisaged a similar problem. 2. Kant's initial catalogue of perceptual elements at B33-36 raises two issues: One about the characterization of sensibility in terms of immediacy, particularity and passivity, and another about the role for such descriptions. The former issue is discussed extensively in Manley Thompson, "Singular Terms and Intuitions in Kant's Epistemology," Review of Metaphysics 26 (1972-1973): 314-43; Charles Parsons, "Kant's Philosophy of Arithmetic" in Kant's Philosophy of Mathematics, ed. Carl J. Posy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992); Kirk Dallas Wilson, "Kant on Intuition," Philosophical Quarterly 25 (1975): 247-65; Lome Falkenstein, Kant's Intuitionism. The latter issue raises the question how far the characterization of "immediacy" is an argument against traditional idealism. Some commentators take Kant's claim that we are sometimes immediately presented with outer objects as an argument against idealism, but the passage at B33-36 seems to be only a descriptive survey of the character of sensibility. This will seem inadequate, or question-begging, if Kant's aim is primarily to rebut an idealist skepticism about outer objects, but it is not objectionable as part of a descriptive metaphysics of experience. Kant evidently denies the need for intermediary representations from which claims about outer objects may be inferred, but this is not an argument like that in the Refutation of Idealism. The issue and its outcome are summarized in chapter 30. 3. The opposition between "subjective" and "objective," and Kant's misguided loyalty to the terms, cause endless difficulties. The remedy is to recognize the ambiguities and I attempt to do so here by distinguishing a "subjective"

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Notes to Pages126-133791 personal activity (of intuiting or sensing) from the content of such activity, which may be inner or outer. It is important to distinguish these from actual objects and to distinguish the modes and contents in such activities.

4. J. Bennett in Kant's Analytic says: "'Noumenon' is best understood through the opposed term 'phenomenon.' Kant applies this, and the word 'appearance,' to all those objective things, processes, and events which we can know about by means of our senses—but not to our sensory states themselves" (22). This conflicts with the fact that Kant uses "appearance" to cover everything presented to the senses, including inner sense and its sensory states. Bennett overlooks the parity Kant claims for both inner and outer sense in which appearances are presented to both inner and outer sense, and the consequent use Kant makes of the expression "inner appearance." These points are clearly made at B50-52, culminating in the claims: "It [time] is the immediate condition of inner appearances . . . " and: "All appearances whatsoever, that is all objects of the senses . . . are in time." Other such passages can be found at B53, B55, B56, B66-67, B68, B150-51, B152-53, B153-54, B155-56, B876, and at Ak. 3.331; 3.349; 3.454; 3.503; 7.180; 8.154. Kant also talks of both inner and outer perception (Wahrnehmung). Bennett's view has unfortunate implications for his understanding both of the First Analogy and the Refutation of Idealism, considered in chapters 19 and 21. 5. Kant notes both parities and disparities between inner and outer sense, but in the Aesthetic and Analytic of Concepts they are effectively treated on a par. In the Aesthetic Kant is as much concerned with inner sense and its temporal form as with outer sense and its spatial form, and this demonstrates none of the unique focus on the relation between inner sense and outer objects which might be expected from a traditional idealist. I argue that Kant maintains that parity in his general argument clearly up to the end of the Transcendental Deduction at B161-62, but there is controversy about his emphasis on spatial objects in the principles. In chapter 17.4, I summarize Kant's claims about parity and disparity. 6. Richard Aquila has oudined the claim that appearances and phenomena for Kant should be regarded as "intentional objects," and holds that even sensory states have a corresponding "intentionality" (in his Representational Mind). Some notion of intentionality is implicit in Kant's account of the understanding in the Analytic, but it is, as Aquila recognizes, more questionable whether we can use the notion in relation to nonconceptual sensory states. There is also a need to clarify how "intentional" is understood and what status "intentional objects," or "virtual objects" have, and I consider intentionality in the context of the Analytic. I do not pursue the issue in the Aesthetic partly for that latter reason but also because I believe that Aquila's claim for the intentionality of nonconceptual sensory states is designed to resolve the "blindness" problem, which I have attempted to resolve without that claim. 7. Gary Hatfield's The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990) outlines this aspect of neurophysiology in the eighteenth century. 8. Sebastian Gardner has told me that the criticism is fairly directed at the quoted passage and that one of his own postgraduates had also rightly queried it, but that he still accepted the conclusion on other grounds. 9. An almost universal motive for this assumption is the belief that there is no such thing as "inner sense." Kant faces difficulties in explaining how he understands inner sense and I attempt to clarify these in chapter 8.3.2. Since I am

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primarily concerned with Kant, I do not consider the grounds for that assumption. Many of the arguments establish not that there is no such thing as inner sense but only that if there is an inner sense it has a different character from outer sense. David Rosenthal summarizes such an argument in his "Unity of Consciousness and the Self," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, part 3 (2003): 326. 10. Consequently Kant has no philosophical theory about the relation between empirically inner and empirically outer objects though he talks of associated laws at A386. He has no conception of an "identity" or a "functionalist" theory for what he calls "empirical dualism" in contrast to "transcendental dualism" (A379, A389). His primary concern is to reject what he calls "transcendental dualism" in favor of an unelucidated "empirical dualism." I consider two commentators, Kitcher and Brook, who ascribe such theories to Kant in chapter 14.2. 11. Kant's understanding of these causal relations between objects and our senses has to do with phenomena and not things in themselves, and they raise no problems about supposed causal relations among things in themselves or between things in themselves and phenomena. Kant is prepared to allow such transcendent relations to be conceivable but not to form part of any constitutive knowledge. His immanent account of causal relations among phenomena between inner objects, such as thoughts, and inner sense raises different problems, which contemporary philosophers find it hard to resolve. This is partly because they generally reject inner sense but also because the idea of a causal relation between a thought and inner sense is at best puzzling. I consider this issue in chapters 8-9. 12. The issue as it arises both in Sellars's paper and in McDowell's book is considered in chapter 10.1. The central passage in Mind and World is at p. 51. 13. Kant refers to many cases of animal cognition throughout the texts on Logic, such as Logik Politz, Ak. 24.2.510. A similar, briefer, point is made in the Anthropologic, Ak.7.196-97: "Animals that lack understanding make do with sensibility, following the instincts implanted in them: Sensibility is like a nation without a sovereign. But a sovereign without a nation (understanding without sensibility) can do nothing at all." 14. That there are different degrees of intelligibility attached to deviant experiences explains some of the difficulties Kant has in talking of them. His account of an "intuitive intelligence" in the Deduction (B135, B138-39) is variable in this way, as is his hesitation over whether he should say in such cases either that we have no concept at all, or that we have a problematic concept but no knowledge (B396-97). There he thinks it better to choose the latter rather than the former and this is consistent with his other views. 15. Some philosophers accept Davidson's rejection of animal belief (in "Thought and Talk," Inquiries into Truth and Meaning [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984]), and take the view that a subject with no language, or perhaps no concepts, can have no sense contents at all, but this is dubious and controversial. The issue is considered in relation to Sellars and McDowell in chapter 10.1. 16. Kant's attitude to empirical psychology and its relation to metaphysics is brought out in the Critique^s denials that he is involved in it, in the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences account of psychology as not a strict (eigentlich) science, in the Anthropologic and the lectures on Metaphysics. Although he assumes in the Fourth Paralogism that there are

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Notes to Pages126-1337 91 laws of empirical psychology he generally suggests that there are underlying metaphysical a priori principles governing it (Prolegomena §15 (Ak. 4.295) Chapter 8 SPACE AND TIME IN EXPERIENCE AND IN MATHEMATICS: THE METAPHYSICAL AND TRANSCENDENTAL EXPOSITIONS

1. These issues appear in H. G. Alexander, ed., The Leibniz-Clarke Correspondence (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1956). Leibniz's fourth paper in the correspondence concerns particularly issues about absolute space, quantity of matter, Newton's account of space, and the concept of a vacuum. It contains the memorable claim: "To say that God can cause the whole universe to move forward in a right line, or in any other line, without making otherwise any alteration in it is another chimerical supposition." Leibniz argues for the claim on the ground that the two supposed states would be indistinguishable and could not therefore constitute a change. 2. According to Leibniz, "space is the order of coexistent phenomena and time the order of successive phenomena." This is usually taken to imply a "relational" theory of space and time, in which these are analyzable into those relations among phenomena. 3. The specific target is an empiricist account of space and time. See Locke, Essay, 2.13-15, and Hume, Treatise, book 1, part 2. It is a specific part of Kant's general campaign against empiricism throughout the Critique, in which although that doctrine is valuable in deflating the pretensions of dogmatic rationalism it overlooks a priori aspects of our experience and leads to an unstable skepticism. 4. Henry Allison rightiy makes this point in Kant's Transcendental Idealism. Kant uses ausser to mean "outer, spatial," and "other than, apart from." In the latter use he distinguishes the "transcendental" sense of "apart from any reference to sensibility" to identify things in themselves, and also sometimes thinks of it as "apart from" some subject's perception. A difficulty in that latter use is that if it is understood to have no spatial references, then it encourages a Cartesian account of a mind as something which has spatial relations to other (spatial) things, but is not itself spatial. Since Kant clearly rejects such a Cartesian account this use has to be treated carefully, and is noted later. 5. It has become common to oppose "mind" and "world" as if the latter is exclusively physical. This makes too many concessions to a traditional Cartesian idealism in suggesting that "mind" is something of a mystery "outside" the "world." 6. This view conflicts with a traditionalist account of Kant in which he views "mind," "persons," and "consciousness" as disembodied in a Cartesian manner. Quassim Cassam's Self and World represents such a view of Kant and is discussed in chapter 25.2. In the Paralogisms, as even traditionalist commentators have noted, Kant is explicit about the embodied, outer aspect of persons (A359-60, A362-63). 7. Part of Kant's ground for that view is his belief in the Doctrine of Method that mathematics is able to "construct" its a priori concepts, that is, to "exhibit them a priori in intuition." It is able to do this by virtue of its abstract intuitive representation of shapes and sizes in geometry and arithmetic. But this account of mathematical "construction" does not appear in the B Aesthetic.

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8. Berkeley criticizes the calculus notion of infinitesimals in Principles of Human Knowledge and Mill outlines an extreme empiricist view of arithmetic in his System of Logic. 9. A. M. Quinton discusses and endorses the claim in "Spaces and Times," Philosophy 37 (1962). It represents space in our experience as a unique, connected envelope and takes it to entail that we know that there can be no other spaces or times. Falkenstein rightly rejects the ascription of this view to Kant in Kant's Intuitionism (217-22). 10. One proviso is that if the criteria for the application of "X" contain an infinite conjunction then although we could never determinately satisfy them we could determinately withhold the concept from some things. By the same token if the criteria contain an infinite disjunction then a determinate application, but not a determinate withholding, could be achieved. The use of concepts under such conditions would not be strictly impossible but it would be severely restricted. 11. For accounts of "denseness" and "continuity," see Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 60-66, 71-80. 12. Alberto Coffa provides such an account of Kant's view of mathematics in The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To the Vienna Station (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) in which he pays Kant the backhanded compliment of stimulating the development of a twentieth-century view of semantics in philosophy by providing an obviously inadequate alternative. According to Coffa Kant argues that the ground of synthetic judgments does not lie in semantics and must therefore lie in intuition. This inference is "built on a semantic swamp" and an adequate account of semantics was "born in the effort to avoid Kant's theory of the a priori" (21). But in the next chapter he qualifies his view: "It would be grossly unfair to Kant to say that the main reasons he had for thinking that mathematics involves pure intuition were the semantic considerations examined in the previous chapter" (23). I dispute Coffa's view in chapter 30. 13. B. Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1903); Evert Beth, "Uber Locke's 'Allgemeiner Dreieck,'" KantStudien 49 (1956-1957); J. Hintikka, Logic, Language-games, and Information (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973). 14. G. Brittan, Kant's Theory of Science (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978); C. Parsons, "Kant's Philosophy of Arithmetic" and "Arithmetic and the Categories," in Posy, Kant's Philosophy of Mathematics; Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences. The issue is considered again in chapter 18. 15. Kant had underlined this division between the sensory and the rational contribution to geometry in the Dissertation, §5: "those principles of sensitive form . . . found in geometry, however much the intellect concerns itself with them in arguing according to logical rules from what is given. . . . " §15E: "all primary properties of these concepts are beyond the jurisdiction of reason. . . but are nonetheless presuppositions upon which the intellect rests when, with the greatest possible certainty and in accordance with logical laws, it draws consequences from the primary data of intuition." §23: "In the case of all sciences whose primary concepts and axioms are given by sensitive intuition, the use of the intellect is only logical, i.e., only applied to subordinating cognitions . . . conformably to the principle of contradiction. . . . " Such passages make a

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16. B371n restates in more sober language the anti-Platonist point made at B9: "[Plato] extended his concept even to mathematics, although the object of that science is to be found nowhere save in possible experience. In this I cannot follow him any more than in his mystical deduction of these ideas, or in the extravagances whereby he . . . hypostatised them." Kant's anti-Platonism and an associated "quietism" are discussed in chapters 15.2.2 and 24.3. 17. Abstract formulations of such systems are exemplified in dedicated computer programs for games such as chess, as well as in the formal representations of mathematics. 18. These distinctions suffer from the usual ambiguities in the terms "subjective" and "objective." The suggestion is that a subject may recognize a temporal sequence in experience without determining whether it marks a genuine temporal order or only an order in the subject's experiencing. The issue is considered in chapter 18 on the mathematical principles. 19. The metaphors of "tracking" and "constituting" are used in the contemporary realist/antirealist debate, and are considered in chapter 15.2.2. Kant's belief that a priori concepts and principles cannot be derived from, but can be used in, a posteriori experience is an essential part of his account of "constitution" and of transcendental idealism. 20. Henry Allison is surely right to regard Kant as establishing certain a priori elements as "conditions of a possible experience." He has been criticized for turning them into analytic, and even trivial, truths, but whether that is a fair criticism or not at least Kant does not regard them as either analytic or trivial. For him that we have experience at all is a "contingent" brute fact. This is denied by some commentators, such as Stroud, but made clear by Kant at A100, B123, B145-£6, and B764-65. The issue is discussed in chapter 15.2.1. 21. This is to treat them as adverbial modifications of that relation between a perceiver and some content. Such a syntactic account need have no implications of a traditional idealist kind. 22. Kant uses the notion of an "empirical illustration" of a transcendental claim often in the Critique (B123, B126, B582, B686). At B582 he says: "In order to illustrate this regulative principle of reason by an example of its empirical employment—not however to confirm it for it is useless to try to prove transcendental propositions by examples—let us take a voluntary action." The point is that pure a priori concepts and principles, abstracted from any sensory features, cannot be directiy exemplified in examples in experience, although they can be realized in experience once the necessary sensory features are provided. Consequendy illustrations of the pure forms, or the distinctions they embody, are never quite adequate. A prime example of this arises from Kant's Prolegomena distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience. Strictly the former lack any reference to categories and yet they have a judgment form which expresses some category or other. I had outlined the point in Kant's Theory of Knowledge, 140^:8, 166-68, and won't repeat it here. 23. Evidently we can make a threefold distinction, if we wish, between the act, the object, and the content of some psychological attitude, but provisos need to

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be made about Kant's view of this. My claim is that Kant is not primarily concerned with the idealistic problematic relation between content and object. His primary interest is in forging an adequate apparatus to describe our experience in these terms by identifying and distinguishing a psychological operator, a content, and an object. The notion of an appearance as an object includes inner and outer appearances, but the notion of an "object" has importance later in the Transcendental Deduction's notion of "objectivity," which concerns judgments and their truth or falsity. Chapter 9 KANT'S THEORY OF THE SENSORY CONTRIBUTION TO EXPERIENCE 1. Guyer may have thought that by allowing the basic alternatives to be inclusive he had accommodated the possibility of a third option, but this is not so. His third option, that space is a property of both things in themselves and the constitution of the subject, is constructed out of the two basic and disputed alternatives, namely, either subjective mental state (representation) or thing in itself. A similar position arises from those accounts in which Kant allows a third option in a phenomenalist construction of the outer world from private sense data. The objection is to that exhaustive basic restriction to the two alternatives. The alternative view is to recognize that Kant has explicidy two ways of understanding "thing in itself," either empirically (legitimate) or transcendentally (illegitimate), and two parallel ways of understanding "representation." This allows a third option of a different kind, namely that space (or time) makes a transcendental (legitimate) reference to subjects and their cognitive powers and is a legitimate property of empirical objects. The issue is considered later in a discussion of the neo-Kantian disputes about a "third" option in 1.2. 2. Kant's "third" option as I represent it can be put by saying that space and time, as a priori, are not derivable from empirical objects, but can belong to them. Kant's central problem in the Aesthetic and the Analytic is to explain how it is possible for what is a priori, and underivable from a posteriori experience, nevertheless to hold of, to be true of, that experience. 3. Vaihinger's considered view is: "In der Behauptung der Liickenhaftigkeit der Kantischen Beweis-fuhrung hat Trendelenburg entscheiden Recht" (1892, 310). His main proviso is that Trendelenburg's consequential account of the cosmological Antinomy is erratic. Trendelenburg thought that Kant's argument had the form: Assumption of the reality of the spatiotemporal world leads to the Antinomy's contradictions, and so the world of space and time must be "ideal" and not "real." Vaihinger does not make clear why this is mistaken, but my account claims that the premise and conclusion in the argument are ambiguous. Kant accepts that the spatiotemporal world is empirically real and leads to contradictions only because the thesis and antithesis arguments slide from talking of that world to talking of a transcendentally real world of things in themselves. A central difference between the two conceptions of "reality" is that the former is essentially accessible to sensibility and its spatiotemporal forms, while the latter is not. I say more of this issue, and of the original documents in the debate, in "Adolf Trendelenburg, Kuno Fischer, and Kant," forthcoming in A Companion to Kant (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006) Some of those original documents are: Trendelenburg, Logical Investigations (1865), Kuno Fischer and His Kant (Leipzig, 1867); Kuno Fischer, System of Logic and Metaphysics (1865), History of Modern

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Notes to Pages126-133791 Philosophy, (4 vols., 1860-1867), Anti-Trendelenburg (1870); K. Bratuschek, "Kuno Fischer and Adolf Trendelenburg," Philosophische Monatsheft, May 1870; Herman Cohen, On the Contoversy between Adolf Trendelenburg and Kuno Fischer (1871).

4. I argue in chapter 11 that one of Kant's reversals of the philosophical tradition is his dismissal of traditional skepticism in favor of a nonnormative, descriptive metaphysics. Kant addresses skepticism primarily in specific forms such as Descartes's idealism (Refutation of Idealism) and Hume's empiricism (Transcendental Deduction and Second Analogy). The projects of an "inventory" of a priori elements in experience, and the "transcendental topic" outlined in the Amphiboly are indicators of the same descriptive survey. 5. The point is made in chapter 10.2.3 in relation to Rae Langton's claim, in Kantian Humility, that Kant thinks of appearances and things in themselves as "equivalent" or "identical." 6. Although the example makes the point adequately it is also misleading. Plainly frowns and smiles are subsections of experience contrasted empirically with other purely bodily facial involuntary phenomena such as winces or grimaces. They consequendy provide only an "empirical illustration" (B123, B126) of Kant's intended transcendental account of "ineliminability of the mental." The same holds of other ways of distinguishing "mind-dependence" and "mindindependence," such as "response-dependence" or "secondary" properties. All have the handicap of being at most such empirical illustrations of Kant's transcendental point. (See note 22 to chapter 8 above.) 7. These passages were extensively discussed in Kant's Theory of Knowledge chapter 3, and claimed to be essential in understanding Kant's position. Commentators even now disregard them, and consequendy fail to grasp Kant's distinction between empirical and transcendental senses of his key terms, especially "object," "outer object," and "idea." 8. The point is discussed in chapter 7.2, and considered in relation to Sellars and McDowell in chapter 10.1.4-5. 9. See Henry Allison, "Kant's Critique of Berkeley," Journal of the History of Philosophy 11 (1973): 43-64. I had made the point in Kant's Theory of Knowledge p. 46: "Because of this important difference between what empirical and transcendental idealism deny, Kant's claims that space, time, and appearances are transcendentally ideal, or ideas in a transcendental sense, cannot be understood in terms of our ordinary use of 'idea' or 'appearance"' (46). Strawson in The Bounds of Sense notices the ambiguity, but considers only the two options of construing "in us" and "representation," either empirically, as ordinary mental states, or transcendendy, as belonging to minds in themselves (112). The third alternative that Kant's account requires them to be construed transcendentally, that is, neither empirically nor transcendendy, is overlooked. Chapter 10 TWO RESIDUAL ISSUES FROM THE AESTHETIC: SELLARS'S AND MCDOWELL'S "MYTH OF THE GIVEN": PROLEGOMENA §13 1. A recent discussion of Sellars's wider views is in M. Williams and E. Sosa "Are There Two Grades of Knowledge?" Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 77 (2003).

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2. See Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), and J. McDowell, Mind and World, lecture II, and my "Beck's Account of Kant's Strategy" in Kant's Legacy, ed. Predrag Cicovacki (Rochester: Rochester University Press, 2001. 3. Sellars focuses on ." . . looks . . . " and consequendy places undue emphasis on visual appearances, though this does not seriously affect the issues. A more serious problem is that his interest on the ordinary use of these modifiers is at odds with Kant's transcendental use of "appearance" which is explicidy distinguished from its ordinary use. 4. Barry Stroud in The Quest for Reality makes a similar disclaimer which testifies to the complexity of our colloquial language. It suggests a Kantian conclusion that despite the complexity we should perhaps first become clearer about that colloquial use before embarking on philosophical theories about it. 5. Sellars's reference to the supposed "self authenticating" character of certain minimal claims is a reference to a traditional Cartesian background in which certain claims were thought of as "incorrigible." Sellars's principal claim is that other claims of the ". . . is . . ." form were prior to minimal, self-authenticating claims of the " . . . looks . . ." form. He does not consider in the paper whether those latter claims really are incorrigible or self-authenticating, and my inclination is to doubt this, and additionally to doubt whether such incorrigible claims exist. 6. The point is important because Kant's dependences are typically mutual, not one way. For that reason it would be better to say that Kant supplements the empiricist one-way, bottom-up scheme for describing our experience, rather than that he rejects it. He rejects it as adequate, but accepts it as a partial truth. The mutual, two-way dependences are not always symmetrical. Kant undoubtedly believes that inner experience is dependent on outer in the Refutation of Idealism, and also that outer experience depends on inner sense, but these are not quite symmetrical. The point is made in later references to conclusions V and VI. 7. See Andrew Whiten, ed., Natural Theories of Mind (Blackwell: Oxford, 1991), and Marion Dawkins, Through Our Eyes Only? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). 8. McDowell, Mind and World, 13: "The aim here is not to answer skeptical questions but to begin to see how it might be intellectually respectable to ignore them, to treat them as unreal in the way that common sense has always wanted to." Kant shares the same view. See my "Beck's Account of Kant's Strategy" in Kant's Legacy. 9. Jill Buroker's Space and Incongruence (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1981) provides a careful and extensive survey of the history of incongruent counterparts in Kant's thought. 10. There are important differences between these terms but for present purposes they do not matter. The differences are discussed extensively in chapter 22.1. 11. The diagnostic and therapeutic role of philosophy and its use of this terminology are exemplified throughout the Dialectic and discussed in chapters 24-30. Other commentators, such as Van Cleve in Problems from Kant, understand Kant's commitments in using these terms in a different and opposed way. The issue is discussed in chapter 24.2.

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12. I take it that the consequence really is absurd. There is no doubt that Kant envisages, recognizes, a philosophical position in which empirical ideas (mental states) are contrasted with transcendent things in themselves, though this is recognized as an exhaustive classification belonging to his opponents, Descartes and Leibniz, perhaps Locke and Hume. Kant has other options, outlined in chapter 9.1.2, which make the difference between his transcendental idealism and its traditional empirical counterpart. 13. The "of" relation can be understood in different ways. It can be understood as a relation of copy to original or of an effect to its cause, as intentional, or in other ways. Kant's understanding of the relation between appearances and phenomena, or objects of experience, is that they are the same things either with their conventional conceptual resources or abstracted from those resources. The notion of a strict appearance has to be understood as a content of some perception but abstracted from its conventional description. Some philosophers reject this conception and then see the "blindness" problem as insuperable, but I argue that it is in principle no different from our ability to abstract features of utterance which cannot be literally separated. Semantic aspects of utterance may be disregarded in order to give a syntactic or acoustic account of utterance. 14. The distinction is plainly not extensional and this encourages the view that it is intensional, but there is a difficulty. Ordinarily differences in intension are characterized as differences in considering the same extensional domain, but for Kant there is no common unproblematic domain which appearances and things in themselves both inhabit. One of Leibniz's central errors, according to Kant in the Amphiboly, was to identify phenomena and their underlying monadic aspects in the same object. 15. Kant had held such a view at the time of the 1770 Dissertation but changed his view in the first Critique. The point is discussed in the wider context of the Dialectic in chapter 24.1. 16. More is said of this in chapter 22 on the Amphiboly, and chapter 23 in the discussion of Eberhard. 17. "The question is whether in addition to the empirical employment of the understanding—to its employment even in the Newtonian account of the structure of the universe—there is likewise possible a transcendental employment, which has to do with the noumenon as an object. This question we have answered in the negative." B313-14. Chapter 11 KANT AND SKEPTICISM 1. Skepticism is not a single issue but involves diverse arguments and targets. Kant is skeptical about traditional philosophers but not skeptical about science, and his inventory and transcendental topic are descnptive of experience rather than normative or justificatory. The principal targets of Kant's criticism in the theoretical context are (i) idle general skepticism, (ii) Cartesian idealist skepticism about the outer world in the Refutation of Idealism, and (iii) Humean "universal empiricism" and the skepticism it encourages about the character of experience. Stroud's extensive discussion of skepticism and Kant focuses on (ii). 2. At B858-59 Kant considers the complaint that his philosophical outcome is so modest that it could have been achieved without philosophy. He counterat-

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tacks by implying that philosophers have no special insight into ultimate truths: "Do you really require that a mode of knowledge which concerns all men should transcend the common understanding and should only be revealed to you by philosophers? For we have revealed . . . what could not at the start have been foreseen that in regard to the essential ends of human nature philosophy can advance no further than is possible under the guidance which nature has bestowed on even the most ordinary understanding." This is not an appeal to common sense against skepticism but acceptance of experience as a datum for his metaphysical inventory. 3. The debate is poindess, but a skeptic might say that in casting doubt on truth he is not assuming a dubious truth for his own claims but merely raising the question and implying that without an answer our beliefs remain unjustified. 4. Kant insists throughout the Dialectic, but especially in his distinction between analytical and dialectical opposites at B5 30-32, that strictly we can neither assert nor deny transcendent claims. Kant's resolution of the mathematical Antinomies and the free will-determinism debate turn essentially on this claim. 5. Kant represents ordinary believers as responding differendy to practical and speculative (theoretical) skepticism. Ordinary believers sometimes engage with moral skepticism but hardly at all with speculative skepticism. They recognize that there are difficulties about establishing moral conclusions which they do not take seriously in many matters of fact. 6. Kant's distinction separates two kinds of contemporary philosophers. Some, like Barry Stroud, reject the general claim that skepticism is just an idle philosophical game and regard it, in some forms, as a fundamental philosophical issue. Others, like Austin, regard a distinctively philosophical skepticism as "idle," as a "family of diseases." 7. Stroud's central arguments in The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, as I indicate in 3.2, reject justifications for claimed knowledge on the ground that the possibility of error has not been eliminated. 8. Stroud in "Scepticism, Externalism, and the Goal of Epistemology," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol 68, (1994), said of the skeptical issue: "In that tough competition . . . scepticism will always win going away." It is difficult not to feel suspicious of such a guaranteed success. 9. Kant refers to the mock batdes and pseudo-disputes of school metaphysics throughout the Critique, e.g., Bxv, B492, B775. The futility of disputes in a routine "school metaphysics" evidendy alerted him to the need for reform in philosophy. 10. In the Prolegomena preface (Ak. 4.258-62), the commonsense theorists who criticized Hume are firmly put in their place. "One cannot notice without some pain how Hume's opponents, Reid, Oswald, Beattie, and even Priestiey, missed the point of his project, assumed what he doubted and sought to prove what he had never doubted." 11. Ordinary people nowadays question the uses of science in many areas from warfare to farming, but these are moral or utilitarian queries about the application of science and not about its establishment of truths. Anyone with postmodern tendencies might query science's achievement of objective truth, but at that stage the question has moved into philosophy of an unclear kind.

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12. Paul Guyer's immediate target in outlining Kant's attitude to skepticism is Karl Ameriks's book Kant and the Fate of Autonomy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Ameriks's view interprets Kant's relation to skepticism as one of trying to balance what Sellars called "manifest" and "scientific" images. The account offered here differs from that of both Guyer and Ameriks. It rests on Kant's project as a descriptive metaphysics of experience which broadly accepts ordinary and scientific beliefs as a datum for investigating the structure, and especially a priori factors, in experience. It does not distinguish the manifest and scientific images, at least for these skeptical purposes. 13. Kant does not think ordinary beliefs dogmatic in designating supposed transcendent objects. His objection is to untestable speculative arguments which ordinary folk indulge in, where they are at no disadvantage against the better educated, since no progress can be made in the issues. These are likely to be most evident in cases where speculative and moral issues overlap as in beliefs in the existence of God. 14. B883: "The naturalist of pure reason adopts as his principle that through common reason, without science, what he calls 'sound reason', he is able in the most sublime questions which form the problem of metaphysics, to achieve more than is possible through speculation. Thus he is virtually asserting that we can determine the size and distance of the moon with greater certainty by the naked eye than by mathematical devices." Kant's conception of a commonsense "naturalist" is different from contemporary naturalism, but he evidently regards appeals to the best available science as indispensable. 15. Kant encourages the idea that his objection to transcendent claims rests on a theory of meaning by characterizing the claims as without Sinn (sense) and Bedeutung (reference). But he also distances his view from that appeal to meaning in preferring to say in such cases that we have a concept which is "empty" rather than that we have "no concept" at all (B396-97). To characterize transcendent claims and debates is nichtig (futile) and leer (empty), is to identify an empty reference rather than stricdy meaninglessness. 16. Kant identifies deviants from the human case in his references to intellectual intuition and to animal experience in the Deduction (B123, B135), and other cases are outlined in chapter 15. 17. The account of an "absolute conception" of "what is there anyway" is given originally in Bernard Williams's Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (London: Penguin, 1978). It is considered again in chapter 15.2.1. 18. Austin spoke of "unreal" as a "trouser" word as part of his view that questions about what is real require an indicaUon of the context for the contrast between "real/unreal." The "real/toy" distinction is not the same as the "real/fake" distinction. Austin thought that philosophers had raised questions about (ultimate) reality without making clear what the context or the contrast was. "The wile of the metaphysician consists of asking 'Is it a real table?' (a kind of object which has no obvious way of being phony) and not specifying or limiting what may be wrong with it." "Other Minds, " in Philosophical Papers, 55. 19. Carnap's "Empiricism, Semantics and Ontology" is reprinted in his Meaning and Necessity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956). A recent collection of papers on Carnap is provided in Thomas Bonk, ed., Language, Truth and Knowledge (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003).

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20. Austin makes further references to the claimed faults in skepticism in Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 4-5, 76-77. 21. The notion of a "transcendental object" or "something in general = X" is introduced as a means of clarifying the notion of "objectivity" in the Deduction. In later discussion in chapters 15 and 23 it is made clear that the notion points in two directions; erroneously towards a transcendent reality and correctly towards the immanent reality in which we ascribe truth or falsity to judgments. 22. Some commentators have taken passages in the Transcendental Deduction to establish sufficient and not merely necessary conditions of experience. Derk Pereboom discusses this view in "Assessing Kant's Master Argument," review of Kant's Transcendental Deduction, by Robert Howell, Kantian Review 5 (2001): 96-98, and comes to what I believe to be the correct view that the categories and transcendental apperception, are only necessary not sufficient conditions of experience. 23. It might be thought that the passage conflicts with Kant's claim that science and mathematics have no need of a justification in philosophy against skepticism. But his claim is that once universal empiricism has been shown to be mistaken the resulting skeptical arguments, whether directed against ordinary or scientific belief, have no force. 24. Idealism is not the only way of mounting a skeptical argument about the external world. Arguments from science and time lag arguments in perception have also been used for this purpose. Kant's discussion seems to have no relevance to these views. Chapter 12 THE TRANSCENDENTAL ANALYTIC AND METAPHYSICAL DEDUCTION 1. I assume here that the primary permitted causal relation for Kant is between objects of experience, for example, between external objects and our senses. The issue was discussed and resolved in chapter 7.1.1. 2. John McDowell, Mind and World, 51; W. Sellars, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," in Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1963). See my "McDowell's Kant: Mind and World," Philosophy 71 (1996); and "Beck's Account of Kant's Strategy" in the memorial volume for Lewis White Beck, Kant's Legacy, edited by Predrag Cicovacki (Rochester, NY: Rochester University Press, 2001). The issue is further discussed in chapter 10.1. 3. Kant's conception of "formal logic" is different from ours. Although he separates logic from psychology at B77 he often expresses logical points in psychological terms and discusses taxonomic relations as part of general logic. Logic at that time typically dealt with three areas, viz. concepts, judgments, and inferences. See Patricia Easton, ed., Logic and the Workings of the Mind (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1997), and Reinhard Brandt, The Table ofJudgments-. Critique of Pure Reason A 67-76; B 92-101, vol. 4, North American Kant Society Studies in Philosophy (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1995), and M. Wolff, Die Vollstandigkeit der kantischen Urteilstafel (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995). The link between

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logic and psychology is developed in Beatrice Longuenesse's account of the historical background in the Port-Royal logic in Kant and the Capacity to Judge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 4. If there is any justification for his classification it rests on the legitimate idea that logic has an "informal" as well as a formal aspect, and that Kant conceives of metaphysics as a conceptual enterprise. Later in the Canon of the doctrine of Method Kant describes both formal and transcendental logic as repositories of the correct rules of the understanding. The difference is that formal logic abstracts from all content but transcendental logic does not. The transcendental project oudines a network of interrelated a priori concepts which provide a basic content for the whole of experience. 5. Christian Wolff, Philosophia Prima sive Ontologia (Frankfurt, 1729), 70. Leibniz, in "A Letter on Freedom" (1689) calls the principle of sufficient reason a "principle of contingency" (Parkinson 1973, 112-13) and in the Discourse on Metaphysics says of such contingent propositions that "they have a priori proofs of their truth which make them certain" (Parkinson 1973, 25). 6. The passage from Logic, Ak. 9.83-84, was quoted in chapter 11.1. The same points are made more briefly at B452 and in the Doctrine of Method B738-39. Kant goes on to talk of the probability of empirical hypotheses, whose provisional certainty can be accepted so long as their consequences continue to be unfalsified. In that case, and under certain presuppositions, we can treat them, though only inductive, as "fully certain" (vollig gewiss). Kant's conception of "certainty" throughout the passage is decidedly not that of "absolute (philosophical) skepticism," which is regarded as pathological and inconsistent. Kant himself is appropriately sensitive to different standards of certainty in mathematics, physics, and philosophy and his treatment of inductive hypotheses anticipates Popper's "hypothetico-deductive" account. 7. Davidson's view that the concept of truth is primitive is expressed in "A Coherence Theory of Truth," in Truth and Interpretation Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, ed. E. LePore (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Kant's dismissal of philosophical debates about criteria for truth at B8 2-8 3 expresses a similar view. The issue is well discussed in Paul Abela's Kant's Empirical Realism, 73-80. 8. Nor does Kant show any interest in the debate between realist and antirealist about truth and warranted assertibility. If antirealism is a test for idealism then Kant is a realist rather than an idealist. The issue is discussed in relation to Wright's Truth and Objectivity in chapter 15.2.2. 9. J. Bennett in Kant's Analytic, 83: "We shall still have to attend to Kant's list of judgment-features—but not as a list which, like the Social Register, purports by its mere existence to prove something about the status of its contents." P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, 83: "What in general must be true of a world of objects, so conceived, of which we make such judgments? In answering these questions we shall simultaneously find our a priori concepts or categories and the guarantee of their application." Both passages indicate that the Metaphysical Deduction establishes the a priori character of the listed categories. 10. Reinhard Brandt, or his translator, Eric Watkins, use this rendering of the sentence in his The Table of Judgements: Critique of Pure Reason A67-76;

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B92-101. Brandt, or his translator, have a legitimate authority in the translation, not least because, unlike Kemp Smith, they also translate zuruckfuhren at B94 correcdy. In articles on recent translations of the Critique in KantStudien 92.1 (2001), by J. Fehr and Hoke Robinson, these and other variant translations are usefully discussed. 11. I had suggested this in Kant's Theory of Knowledge, 83-85 and 91. Bennett in Kant's Analytic, 93, objected to this, but I argue in 2 that his objection rests on misunderstandings. 12. I discuss, and reject, that thesis in chapter 14.3.3. The argument in the Transcendental Deduction does not use "object" to mean "outer object," and Kant's conception of "objectivity" has more to do with the ascription of truth and falsity than with the traditional idealist problem of the external world. For the same reason I believe that to interpret the Deduction as a phenomenalist exercise seeking to establish the relation between sense data or virtual objects and outer things is also a mistake. Van Cleve's account of Kant's claimed commitment to "virtual objects" is criticized in chapter 30, cf. chapter 8.7's notes. 13. "Thus a difficulty arises which we did not meet in the field of sensibility, namely, how subjective conditions of thought can have objective validity, that is, can furnish conditions of the possibility of all knowledge of objects. For appearances can certainly be given in intuition independendy of functions of the understanding. . . . Appearances might very well be so constituted that the understanding should not find them to be in accordance with the conditions of its unity. . . . Since intuition stands in no need of the functions of thought appearances would nonetheless present objects to our intuition" (B122-23). One example of what was called earlier a "deviant" experience. 14. It should be noted even at this early stage that the "objects" which categories are to be shown to make possible in the Analytic of Principles are not just external objects but items such as "magnitudes," "events," quantitative and qualitative aspects of sensation, and objective time relations. 15. The more serious consequences of Kemp Smith's mistranslation of A101 are that it has been a major ground for treating the Deduction as a phenomenalistic or traditional idealist treatment of the problem of the external world. See note 12 above. It has misled many commentators into thinking that Kant is committed to a reductionist account of external objects. See Strawson Bounds of Sense, 173. 16. See W. V. O. Quine, "Five Milestones in Empiricism," in Theories and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). Kant is not always given credit for this improvement. Crispin Wright says, "Frege grasped what virtually all philosophers before him, and a surprising number (in the early 20th century) after him, failed to grasp, that a satisfactory account of the meaning of any sub-sentential expression must make plain its contribution to the sentences (judgments) in which it figures." Frege's Conception of Numbers as Objects (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1983), 50. Kant, unlike Frege, does not present a detailed theory of the relation between sub-sentential constituents and sentences. He gestures towards this in the section on "Phenomena and Noumena" (chapter 22), but the general account points in Frege's direction and corrects a traditional assumption.

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17. B. Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism (in Logic and Knowledge); L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974); K Carnap, The Logical Structure of the World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), and A. Richardson, Carnap's Construction of the World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); W. V. O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 2nd ed., 1980), and Word and Object, and C. Hookway, Quine (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1988). For references to categorial grammars, which provide a syntactic structure for natural languages, see David Lewis, "General Semantics" in Semantics of Natural Language, ed. D. Davidson and G. Harman (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1972). I do not mean to imply that these claims about logic and the structure of reality are properly clear; but Kant's parallel claim is no more obscure. 18. W. V. O. Quine, "Two Dogmas of Empiricism," in From a Logical Point of View. "The unit of empirical significance is the whole of science" (42); "our statements about the external world face the tribunal of sense experience not individually but only as a corporate body" (41). The point has some significance later in relation to Kant's and Quine's "holism" and is discussed in chapter 29. The issue is discussed in J. Fodor and E. Lepore, Holism, A Shopper's Guide (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 19. Klaus Reich, Die Vollstandigkeit der Kantischen Urteilstafel (Berlin, 1932; Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1986). Since then, and more recently, other commentators have addressed the issue. Contributions in Patricia Easton's Logic and the Workings of the Mind, review early modern conceptions of logic and some address issues from Kant. Reinhard Brandt's The Table of Judgments reviews German authors' attempts to explain Kant's conception of the completeness of his table of judgment forms and offers his own account; it throws light on Kant's grounds for claiming completeness, but does not consider whether those grounds are acceptable. See also Peter Schulthess, Relation und Funktion (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1981), and M. Wolff, Die Vollstandigkeit. 20. J. Bennett, Kant's Analytic, p. 93: "this is natural in one who assumes that there is something ineluctably right about the structure of the Indo-European languages. . . . " Similar charges have been made against Strawson's reliance on the subject-predicate form of such languages in Susan Haack, "Descriptive and Revisionary Metaphysics," Philosophical Studies 35 (1979). It is not obvious that Kant is open to this objection. If the Metaphysical Deduction is taken as no more than a "clue" to the categories, and not as a proof of the categories' a priori status (see note 9 above), then his position would be that our logic and our forms of judgment are the ways we encode the essential categories, but are not absolutely necessary ways of doing so in other possible worlds. H. J. de Vleeschauwer's, La Deduction Transcendentale dans I'Oeuvre de Kant, 3 vols., (Antwerp, 1934-1937), relates the historical background to Kant's selection of logical forms. 21. It should be noted that in the Second Analogy Kant has a discussion of cases where spatial adjacency and temporal priority do not seem to attach to a cause, which leads him to distinguish time order and time lapse (B247^9). Kant evidently recognizes in this passage, as in others, an account of the phenomena which conforms to the model of "core and deviance" which I emphasize in chapter 15.1. 22. Beatrice Longuenesse, Kant and The Capacity to Judge, and Michael Wolff, Die Vollstandigkeit.

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23. A point I made in the paper "Kant's and Strawson's Descriptive Metaphysics" in Glock, Kant and Strawson. 24. J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers. 25. See my "Kant's and Strawson's Descriptive Metaphysics" in Glock, Kant and Strawson. Kant's rationalist background and his opposition to a piecemeal empiricism are evident in his emphasis on "system,""completeness," and "principled guides," but he is also very critical of these notions. The point is discussed in chapter 24 and the following chapters on the Dialectic. 26. Bennett also criticizes Kant's argument on the ground that in the Analytic of Principles the proofs do not extend specifically to each of the categories listed in the Metaphysical Deduction (Kant's Analytic, 94-95). He claims that Kant, by providing specific proofs only for the relational categories, recognized at some level the "total failure" of the Metaphysical Deduction. It is difficult to understand this in the light of the fact that the quantitative principle relates naturally to such expressions as "all," "some," and "one." 27. "It wasn't a question whether the concept of cause was correct, usable, or indispensable [unentbehrlich] with respect to our knowledge of nature, but whether it can be thought a priori through reason and so have an inner truth independent of all experience and an extended use beyond objects of experience" Prolegomena preface (Ak. 4.258-59). The passage illustrates Kant's central themes that categories are, contrary to empiricists like Hume, a priori concepts, but do not have any legitimate use beyond experience. 28. See, for example, Searle, Intentionality: an Essay in the Philosophy of Mind, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) where this weak account of "intentionality" is used. Other criteria for the notion are outlined and discussed in S. Mumford's "Intentionality and the Physical," and U. T. Place's "Reply to Mumford," both in Philosophical Quarterly 49, no. 195 (April, 1999). The following criteria are listed: (1) Inexistence (Brentano), (2) permissible falsity of embedded sentence, (3) indirect reference, opacity, (4) directedness (Searle) and (5) indeterminacy (Anscombe). Kant's links with these are most evident in (3) and (4), and there is even some conflict with (5), since Kant associates concepts with determinacy. These points show that Kant's and current appeals to intentionality are not wholly clear. Richard Aquila, in books and articles (especially his Representational Mind), has rightly stressed more than other commentators the importance of "intentionality" in Kant. Chapter 13 THE TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION (1) 1. Among those who take Kantian ideas beyond his conception I include many articles of Barry Stroud's, especially "The Goal of Transcendental Arguments" in Transcendental Arguments: Problems and Prospects, ed. Robert Stern (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999). Throughout the numerous articles he has published on so-called transcendental arguments since his paper in the Journal of Philosophy, 1968, his target has been primarily Strawson's rather than Kant's conception of such arguments. Brueckner's extended series of papers on semantic externalism and Kant also belongs in the category of ideas which go beyond Kant's conception. See "Transcendental Arguments I," Nous 17 (1983), "Transcendental Arguments II," Nous 18 (1984), and "Semantic Answers to Skepticism," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 73 (1992). See also

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Notes to Pages 214-229 Carl Posy, "Dancing to the Antinomy: A Proposal for Transcendental Idealism," American Philosophical Quarterly 20 (1983), and "Kant's Mathematical Realism" Monist 67 (1984), cited and discussed in Van Cleve, Problems from Kant.

2. Dieter Henrich, "The Proof Structure of the Transcendental Deduction," Review of Metaphysics (1969); Manfred Baum, Deduktion und Beweis in Kant's Transzendental-Philosophie (Konigstein: Athenaum Verlag, 1986); B. Tuschling, ed., Die B-Struktur der Transzendentalen Deduktion der Reine Verstandesbegriffe; Eine Diskussion mit Dieter Henrich (Berlin, 1984). See also Henry Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, chap. 7; Manfred Kiihn, "The Wolffian Background to Kant's Transcendental Deduction," in Easton, Logic and the Workings of the Mind; Robert Howell, Kant's Transcendental Deduction, chap. 4 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992); Markku Leppakoski, "The Two Steps of the B-Deduction," Kantian Review 2 (1998). 3. Manfred Kiihn's article "The Wolffian Background to Kant's Transcendental Deduction" in Easton, Logic and the Working of the Mind, makes some trenchant points about misconceptions of the Deduction. Among these are Strawson's conception of the passage as a refutation of skepticism about external objects, and Henrich's conception of it as modeled on a Deduktionsschrifft. It will be clear that I agree strongly with Kiihn's reservations about the former point, and have great sympathy with his views about the latter. I had made the former point in Kant's Theory of Knowledge, but without reference to Strawson since he had not then published The Bounds of Sense. 4. The role of intuition and sensibility in providing instantiation for concepts, especially a priori concepts, is expressed formally at B174-75, but is evident throughout the Analytic. It is linked with Kant's diagnosis of dialectical illusion in which we are tempted mistakenly to think of certain "ideas" (Ideen) as having "objective reality" although they cannot be instantiated by our senses in experience. Later I distinguish, as Kant does, between unschematized categories which contain no reference to intuition, schematized categories which provide an abstract description which includes intuition, and a full instantiation of categories in specific sensory experiences. The requirement is a residual empiricism which Kant is prepared to accept and outiines at B496. 5. The psychological references in §§24-25 do not have quite the same character as the threefold synthesis in A and yet the same apparatus is evident. Kant distinguishes sensibility, understanding, and imagination and insists on empirical and transcendental conceptions of each faculty in both passages. 6. It is not difficult to make informal sense of this interrelation between such psychological powers, or of the philosophical means of abstracting the various elements in their exercise. Austin, in How To Do Things With Words (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), made exactly the same point about his abstraction of the elements in uttering comprehensible remarks in discourse. The acoustic, phonetic, syntactic, semantic, and illocutionary features of utterances are not presented to auditors separately or successively. In grasping the sense and force of what is said auditors do not first hear acoustic and then phonetic noises. Some commentators still read Kant's catalogue as a temporally discrete, successive series. 7. Henry Allison distinguishes what he calls empirical and transcendental chaos in his paper "The Critique of Judgment as a 'True Apology' for Leibniz," in Kant und die Berliner Aufklarung, Akten des IX Internationalen KantKongresses (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2001), 286-99. Kant's passage under-

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lines part of what he accepts as a basic "contingency" in experience which is discussed in chapter 15 and 29. 8. The recent translations of Guyer/Wood and Pluhar respond in these ways: B94: G/W: . . . trace all actions of the understanding back to . . . P: . . . all acts of the understanding can be reduced to judgements. A101: G/W: . . . which in the end come down to determinations of inner sense . . . P: . . . which in the end amount to determinations of inner sense. It will be evident that I think the Guyer/Wood translations of both passages are the more accurate. Pluhar's translation of B94 makes the same error as Kemp Smith's, and his version of A101 is, though not incorrect, less satisfactory than that of Guyer/Wood. The point is underlined in discussion of the mathematical Antinomies in chapter 26. 9. B. Stroud takes Kant to reject such contingencies in "The Synthetic A Priori in Strawson's Kantianism," in Glock, Strawson and Kant, 120. The point is discussed in chapters 11.3.2 and 15.2.1. 10. In "A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge" in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), Davidson talks of the possibility of "confronting the totality of beliefs with the tribunal of experience, and says: 'No such confrontation makes sense, for of course we can't get outside our skins to find out what is causing the internal happenings of which we are aware'" (137). See also essays in Davidson's Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). 11. I have not explained in detail why Kant cannot be a standard phenomenalist, because such explanations have been given before (e.g., in Kant's Theory of Knowledge, chap. 2), and have even been accepted by commentators, such as Ralph Walker (Kant) and Rae Langton (Kant's Humility), who are otherwise firmly traditionalist. I add here only that standard, classical phenomenalism, as Bennett and Strawson understood it, is essentially an empiricist doctrine. It canvasses a construction of material object language from a posteriori sense experiences and a priori logic. It has no room for synthetic a priori principles, and could not therefore meet Kant's requirements for a construction of experience, or of that part of it to do with material objects. Richard Aquila's Representational Mind provides other ways of understanding phenomenalism, and the point is discussed in relation to "virtual objects" in chapter 30. 12. Stroud makes this point in The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, and it is considered in chapter 11.3.2. Kant's account of naturaformaliter and natura materialiter is at B164-65. 13. The issue was discussed in an exchange between Susan Hurley and me in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 1994-1996. Her original paper was "Kant on Spontaneity and the Myth of the Giving" Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 94 (1994) and my comment with her further rejoinder is in vol. 96 (1996), pt. 2. 14. Prolegomena §13, note 2, explains why Kant's use of such expressions as "in us" and "representation" may seem, mistakenly, to commit him to a standard

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Notes to Pages 2 1 4 - 2 2 9 idealism: (Ak. 4.288) "Since the senses . . . never provide knowledge of things in themselves but only of their appearances and the latter are (said to be) ideas of sensibility is this not a transparent idealism in which bodies and the space in which they exist are nothing but ideas in us, and exist only in our thoughts?" Kant's response is to say (4.289): "Things outside us in space are given to our senses, but we know nothing of what these things may be in themselves and know only their appearances, i.e., the ideas with which they affect us. Consequentiy I cheerfully accept that there are outer bodies, that is, things which though unknown as they are in themselves, we know through those ideas." The passage is discussed in chapter 10.2, but the main point is to note Kant's recognition of the evident ambiguities involved in his claims (1) that appearances are "ideas in us" and yet (2) that they provide us with genuine knowledge of bodies in space, which causally affect us, and are not things in themselves, but phenomenal objects.

15. The exhaustive dichotomy between ideas as mental states and objects as things in themselves is at the heart of the traditionalist view of Kant. I have argued extensively, and especially in the account of the "neglected alternative" (chapter 9.1.2), that Kant has a more complex classification incompatible with the traditionalist account. 16. This is discussed in chapter 14.1. 17. The B Deduction undoubtedly marks a move from a more psychological account of experience to a more logical or linguistic account. In A more emphasis is placed on the threefold synthesis and in B more is placed on the notion of judgment and its objectivity. Kant notes this step in the preface to the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences (Ak. 4.475-76). 18. The claim goes back to the priority of judgment over concepts in the Metaphysical Deduction. Longuenesse throws light on the claim in Kant and the Capacity to Judge. 19. See Derk Pereboom's review of David Howell's Kant's Transcendental Deduction (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1992), in Kantian Review 4 (2001). 20. A summary of issues about the parity between inner and outer senses is given in chapter 17.4. 21. A useful summary of views about Kant's distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience is given in T. Uehling "Judgements of Perception and Judgements of Experience," in Beryl Logan, ed., Kant's Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (London: Routledge, 1989). 22. Kant accepts that experience is, in some sense, "conungent" but at the same time thinks that it contains some necessities. Some commentators such as Van Cleve follow Russell in thinking this inconsistent. The issue is discussed in chapter 15.2.1 and chapter 29. 23. The traditionalist view is that Kant is generally committed to the existence of things in themselves and especially to the "self in itself," since it is the self which supposedly legislates for, and makes, nature. Van Cleve has an argument for this view which depends on the ascription of a constructive phenomenalism to Kant. The argument is that the self cannot be itself a phenomenalist construction since it has to carry that construction out. Van Cleve's account of "virtual objects" is criticized later in chapter 29.

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24. Kant expresses clearly the restriction of our contribution to experience as a priori and purely formal. It requires a posteriori material for its discovery of specific causal laws. 25. The well-known and important letter to Herz of 21 February, 1772 (Ak. 12.12935) contains an early, vigorous repudiation of the doctrines of innate ideas and preestablished harmony. Kant says of these doctrines that they are the "most absurd that one could canvass," and that they "licence every whim and fantasy [Hirngespinnst]." In that letter Kant also makes clear his early postDissertation view that the relation of a priori concepts to experience is not a causal relation in either direction. Experience cannot bring about a priori concepts; and a priori concepts cannot causally produce their objects. That early denial survives in the passage at B124-25. The problem of characterizing that noncausal relation in a more positive way was what drove his enquiries in the post-Dissertation period. Lewis White Beck in his "Two Ways of Reading Kant's Letter to Herz" in Kant's Transcendental Deductions, ed. E. Forster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989) took the view, in discussing Wolfgang Carl's paper, that Kant's problem about categories at that stage was how to relate them to noumena. The suggestion was that in the Dissertation, and in the later letter, Kant accepted that categories must relate to noumena but remained puzzled about how this might be possible. The alternative reading would be to understand the problem as that of relating categories to objects in general, whether noumena or not. The text is indecisive, but plainly the ultimate resolution of the problem in the Critique is to deny their legitimate cognitive application to noumena, but to explain how it is possible for them to apply to appearances in constituting objects of experience. It is made clear that although concepts of noumena, or things in themselves, are unavoidable those concepts are the cause of Dialectical illusions. In the Critique the concepts are denied "objective reality" but their character is used to explain and diagnose those illusions. 26. It is useful to recognize that the application or realization of categories does not involve only science but quite ordinary experience of houses and water. Chapter 14 THE TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION (2): THREE PROCEDURAL ISSUES 1. Dieter Henrich, "The Proof Structure of the Transcendental Deduction," Review of Metaphysics (1969): 640-59; and "Kant's Notion of a Deduction and the Methodological Background of the first Critique," in Forster, Kant's Transcendental Deductions. Manfred Baum, Deduktion und Beweis\ B. Tuschling, ed., Die B-Struktur. 2. Henrich's account of step two shows that he takes Kant's argument to provide an antiskeptical guarantee for our experience within a traditional normative epistemology. I have denied that this is Kant's position, and believe that a better way of characterizing step two is to regard it as an initial anticipation of the Analytic of Principles. In the Deduction Kant indicates how a priori concepts have to be linked to a priori intuitions in applying to a posteriori experience, and prepares the way for the later Schematism. The Principles then go on to detail the schematization of the categories without providing their full realization in experience. That this general reference to the needed schematization is made initially in the Deduction seems to me to have littie significance. Patricia Kitcher makes this point in Kant's Transcendental Psychology.

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3. Manfred Baum, Deduktion und Beweis, 11-17. 4. Both passages suffer from the radical obscurity of the "subjective/objective" distinction, and the B text brings all the problems of Kant's Prolegomena distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience. 5. The most vigorous denial of the doctrine of innate ideas is in the 1772 letter to Marcus Herz, but it is also repudiated in the Eberhard polemic and in the Critique. 6. It would be natural to conclude from this that Kant's project is linguistic rather than psychological, but this is only partiy correct, for his transcendental topic is not restricted to language. For Kant even though philosophy always makes a reference to concepts and to language they sometimes point to an underlying psychological or cognitive function, and to underlying synthetic, rather than analytic, connections. Kant's descriptive metaphysics is in that way primarily about human cognitive powers rather than about their manifestations in language, but it involves both. See my "Two Kinds of Descriptive Metaphysics: Kant and Strawson" in Glock, Kant and Strawson. 7. Andrew Brook's general view echoes Michael Friedman's belief that in the Critique Kant is focusing exclusively on the science of his time. That seems to me a more appropriate description of the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences, but there is no explicit reference to science in the Transcendental Deduction. In "Kantian Themes in Contemporary Philosophy," I claimed that Kant's descriptive metaphysics is a survey of both ordinary developed human experience and science. It was suggested in the discussion that naturalism implies that there can be no principles which covered both, because of actual and potential conflicts between them, but I cannot accept this. Such conflicts do not always require us to choose between the two systems, and where we do choose it is not obvious that we should always choose science. 8. The whole Critical philosophy can be regarded as an exploration of the structure of experience as a whole and of its subsystems in science, morality, the law, aesthetics and elsewhere. It is at least an attempt to map the relations between the governing concepts of those domains, and so to characterize the languages used in those contexts. The point is underlined in a comparison with Wright's Truth and Objectivity in chapter 15, 2.2. There are political references even in the Critique of Pure Reason; see chapters 24 and 29. 9. The reference is to the preface of the Metaphysical Foundations (Ak. 4.46973). 10. The notion of an "absolute" conception of reality, due initially to Williams and developed in Stroud, is considered in chapter 11.3.2, and chapter 15.2.1. 11. B. Williams in Descartes denies that Descartes's project was conceived as a deductive exercise, and yet in the Discourse there is a clear endorsement of the procedure: "These long chains of reasoning, each step simple and easy, which geometers are wont to employ in arriving at the most difficult of their demonstrations, have led me to surmise that all the things we human beings are competent to know are interconnected in the same manner, and that none are so remote as to be beyond our reach." Discourse II, in Descartes' Philosophical Writings, edited by Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1952), 30.

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12. Paul Guyer notes, and partly endorses, this claim in his Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, 83. Strawson in The Bounds of Sense identifies separately three different premises on which the argument is said to rest: We shall find that its fundamental premise is that experience contains a diversity of elements (intuitions) which in the case of each subject of expenence must somehow be united in a single consciousness capable of judgment, capable, that is, of conceptualizing the elements so united. (87) We begin by taking as provisionally premised the thesis that expenence necessarily includes awareness of objects conceived as distinct from particular subjective states of awareness of them. . . . (89) we shall come to perceive that the thesis of the necessary unity of consciousness can itself be represented as resting on a yet more fundamental premise—on nothing more than the necessity, for any experience at all to be possible, of the original duality of intuition and concept. (97)

The second of these (p. 89) is the closest to a Cartesian account of the cogito as the premise of the argument, but Strawson is careful to note the modal complexities of Kant's use of the cogito. But the three premises are plainly not the same. 13. Tuschling, Die B-Struktur , 87-91. Baum, Deduktion und Beweis, 10-17. 14. The references are to Henry Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism, chap. 7, 133-35, and Manfred Kiihn, "The Wolffian Background." 15. Examples of the cited passages: A104: "For in so far as they relate to an object they must necessarily agree with one another, that is must possess that unity which constitutes the concept of an object." The claim holds for such objects as headaches as well as chairs, and the required unity is not explicitly restricted (I would say explicitly not restricted) to physical objects. B130: "of all representations combination is the only one which cannot be given through objects." Kant surely does not mean here that that representation is not given through physical objects, but that it is not given through any presented object, inner or outer. A108: "determine an object for their intuition, that is, the concept of something wherein they are necessarily connected." Again there is no explicit restriction to physical objects, and one of Kant's standard examples is that of a triangle as a figure in mathematics. Kant evidently does not think triangles are just spatial objects in nature, but he makes the point explicit in Metaphysik (Ak. 28.1, 211): "A triangle has no nature; it is not a reality but only a figure, and consequently the whole of geometry is not nature." The passage is designed to distinguish between bodies, with a nature, and geometrical figures which lack this aspect. 16. In The Bounds of Sense, Strawson talks of "impressions which neither require, nor permit of, being 'united in the concept of an object', in the sense in which Kant understands the phrase" (99). But that sense seems to rest more on the argument than on Kant's text. 17. The point is that the "seems/is" contrast applies across the board both to "inner" and "outer" experiences. It is difficult not to think that the dubious

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Notes to Pages 214-229 connection is a residue from a Cartesianism which classifies any "seeming" as mental and any "being" as outer. Both claims are misleading. An example of the background view is given by Van Cleve in his discussion of virtual objects as items whose esse is percipi and discussed in chapter 30. Chapter 15 TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION (3): CONCEPTUAL UNITY

1. The list at B346^i9 is of different kinds of "impossibility," and it reflects a Kantian interest in detail and classification which I associate later in chapter 24 with Wittgenstein's insistence on what he calls "intermediate" cases. The idea is that philosophy works better, and is less liable to be confused, if it sticks to concrete cases rather than attempting to construct general theories. It is an aspect of Kant's method which justifies the claim that he has more in common with Wittgenstein and Austin than with Russell or Quine. 2. B88-89: "Since it is very tempting to use these pure modes of knowledge of the understanding even beyond the limits of experience, which alone can yield the matter to which these pure concepts can be applied, the understanding is led to incur the risk of making with a mere show of rationality, a material use of its pure and merely formal principles and of passing judgement on objects without distinction—on objects which are not given to us . . . and perhaps cannot be in any way given." The device is used in the Dialectic to express Kant's view that the pure, abstract concepts designate nothing in experience, since they lack any reference to sensibility, and so mislead us into thinking that they must designate objects beyond experience, that is noumena or things in themselves. 3. A395: "Thus all controversy in regard to the nature of the thinking being and its connection with the corporeal world is merely a result of filling a gap where knowledge is wholly lacking . . . treating our thoughts as things and hypostatising them. Hence originates an imaginary science, both in the case of him who affirms and him who denies. . . ." The issue was discussed in chapter 7.3. 4. Kant's transcendental enquiry is not satisfied with empirical cases and their use of empirically applicable criteria. It operates at a level of abstraction which distinguishes the three cases of pure unschematized, schematized categories and their full realization in a posteriori experience. To understand Kant throughout as referring to empirical cases is to subvert his antiempiricist aims. 5. There are difficulties about using the extension/intension distinction in this context which were discussed in chapter 22.2.2. There are three different cases: where objects of experience (appearances/phenomena) are at issue there is no problem, but where transcendent "objects" (noumena/things in themselves) are involved either on their own or with objects of experience there are difficulties. 6. I say "is or contains" because Kant indicates in the passage at B130 that "combination" is complex, and that it is the "unity" which it includes which deserves the label "a priori." This is atypicalexample of Kant's "going transcendental" in finding a reference in experience to items required for understanding and for expressing propositional assertions, but which are not a posteriori. 7. The classic location of such an argument is in Bradley's Appearance and Reality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897), chap. 3. There are ways of inter-

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preting Bradley which are more subtle than the following simple regress argument, and yet it is hard to think that Bradley did not have it in mind. The argument essentially notes that in a subject-predicate proposition a relation "is" is asserted to hold between the subject and the predicate, but that if we suppose that this signifies a further term in the relational proposition it will then seem appropriate to ask how the subject and predicate terms are related to this new item. Once that question is raised there is no obvious way of avoiding further questions about the relation between, say, the subject term and the new relational item which relates the former to "is," and so on. What appeared as a simple subject-predicate relation in the proposition now develops into an endless series of nested relations interposed between the subject and the copula and the predicate. Bradley drew monistic conclusions from this about the ultimately elusive character of reality. 8. Frege's conception of a subject-predicate proposition formalized in the expression "Fx" does not allow Bradley's initial question to arise, and so stops the regress. Wittgenstein was not referring to this riposte to traditional logic when he coined the phrase about condensing clouds of metaphysics into a drop of grammar in Philosophical Investigations. 9. Frege discussed the epistemological issues but the formal proposals can be detached from them. See Charles Travis, "The Twilight of Empiricism," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 104 (2004), pt. 3. 10. See chapter 11.3.2 and this chapter 2.1 for discussion of the "absolute" conception. 11. Quine's holistic criticisms of the notion of "meaning" may seem to imply that language has no such stable semantics at the level of particular words or sentences. That meaning attaches exclusively to the language as a whole and not to individual constituents, or that reference is indeterminate in "radical interpretation" may seem to point in that direction. It is likely that Quine did not intend his doctrine to allow such consequences, but his claims are not totally clear. See my paper "Carnap and Quine: Internal and External Questions," Erkenntnis 42 (January 1995). 12. B194-95: "If knowledge is to have objective reality . . . the object must be capable of being given. Otherwise the concepts are empty; through them we have indeed thought, but in this thinking we have really known nothing, but have merely played with representations." The same phrase is used at B298-99: "Apart from this relation [to empirical intuitions] they [concepts] have no objective validity . . . and are a mere play of imagination or of understanding"; and the same general message is given at B150-51. Such passages focus not on the subjective nature of representation but on failures to achieve genuine knowledge whether of inner or outer experience. They may suggest an "externalist" account of meaning, but not its ascription to Kant. 13. The notion of "independence" in this context presumably can be understood as "holding in all possible worlds," but evidently Kant did not believe his a priori principles hold in all possible worlds. 14. Austin makes critical comments on skepticism and the quest for reality in Sense and Sensibilia, 62, 68-77, 77, and 84; and in "Other Minds" Philosophical papers, 54-57. 15. Both Abela's Kant's Empirical Realism and Van Cleve's Problems from Kant discuss Kant's supposed "antirealism," and both rightly reject it.

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16. Wright in Truth and Objectivity presents his project as a clarification of the debate. On p. 1 he talks of a "fragmented" consensus of understanding of "realism," and adds: "So something preliminary needs to be said by way of intuitive anchorage for the term." 17. Wittgenstein's account of intermediate cases is designed to discourage philosophers from offering general theories and to encourage them to examine particular cases. The point and relevance to Kant are discussed in chapter 24.2. 18. Van Cleve's Problems from Kant, 220-23, examines the issue and rightiy rejects Kant's commitment to nonclassical logic. 19. The terms "independence" and "mind-(independence" are radically ambiguous. The discussion of Kant discloses at least four different notions; the independence of external objects which continue to exist unperceived; the independence of truths from beliefs; and the (alleged) independence of transcendent things in themselves. Kant's transcendental mind-dependence is another conception which denies any objective reality to transcendent objects and shows the ineliminable reference to our cognitive powers in any account of our experience. 20. William James held an apparendy different view when he says in The Varieties of Religious Experience (London: Longmans Green, 1902), 518: "the world interpreted religiously is not the material world over again with an altered expression . . . it must have a natural constitution different from that which a materialist world would have." In this respect James the pragmatist appeals to a transcendent, supernatural, world which Kant renounces. I discuss the issue in "Pragmatism and Religious Belief in William James," in William James and the Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. Jeremy Carette (London: Roudedge, 2005). 21. Kant is a quietist about Wright' realist metaphysics, but he is not quietist about the need for reform in philosophy in the preface at Ax. 22. The arguments reveal unclarity about the criteria for realism, but Wright's attempt to establish agreed criteria through the investigation of different discourses is also questionable. It might be thought worth while to investigate discourses and demonstrate their distinctive features but not to compare them with respect to their realistic commitments. The semantic issues might be worth pursuing but the metaphysical issues are doubtful. Different forms of commitment to realism, and their relation to Platonism are considered in chapter 24.2-3. Chapter 16 TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION (4): PERSONAL UNITY 1. Previous chapters show that Kant's target in the Deduction is not a traditional idealist skepticism about external objects, but an empiricist skepticism about the existence and role of a priori concepts. Similarly the appeal to transcendental apperception, or a personal unity in it, is not an attempt, like Descartes's, to establish an indubitable certainty in one's self knowledge, from which to derive other knowledge. Williams in Descartes, 60-61, denies that Descartes was a foundationalist of that kind, but his denial turns on an acknowledged inability to deduce particular matters of fact such as "I can (now) see a table." But just as Descartes doubts whole classes of proposition,

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rather than particular propositions, so his procedure up to Meditations V is to establish knowledge of such a class of propositions as those about external, physical objects. It seems undeniable that Descartes is a deductive foundationalist in that sense. 2. It is a paradox that traditionalists, such as Van Cleve, take Kant to adopt the exhaustive dichotomy of empirical ideas and transcendent objects for our knowledge when he is rejecting it. Kant importantly has a threefold division between what is empirical or a posteriori, what is transcendent and goes beyond any possible experience of ours, and what is transcendental, that is what makes experience possible according to a higher-order philosophical enquiry. Traditionalist interpretations overlook this and produce a dual division between what is a posteriori and what is transcendent. Strawson, in The Bounds of Sense, 112, recognizes an ambiguity in Kant's terms "representation" and "in us," but considers only the two possibilities that these refer either to a posteriori mental states or transcendent minds in themselves. 3. Some recent comments on this topic, for example by Strawson in The Bounds of Sense and in Andrew Brook's Kant and the Mind, miss the point of Kant's project. They miss the point by focusing on recent discussions of "criterionless self ascription" or "non-ascriptive self reference" which reflect interesting aspects of our empirical view of the self but not its transcendental significance. See my "The Paralogisms and Kant's Account of Psychology" Kant-Studien, 2001. These issues are discussed in chapter 25.2-3. 4. Kant emphasizes his distance from Descartes in the Paralogisms because he realized that his own account of transcendental apperception and references to the "cogito" in the Deduction might be mistaken as a Cartesian doctrine. One role for the Paralogisms is to warn readers for that reason not to attribute to Kant the erroneous views he criticizes. It is an irony that one form of those views, namely Strawson's dismissal of "transcendental psychology" as an "imaginary subject," should be one of those misunderstandings. 5. It may be objected to this claim that Kant speaks of self consciousness as "a priori certain" at A l l 3 , but there is no reason to identify a priori certainty with Descartes's indubitability. 6. There are a few passages where Kant's expression dispenses with the complex modality of B132, and says that transcendental apperception must, or always does, accompany all my representations. A 398: "Further since the one condition which accompanies all thought is the T in the universal proposition T think'. . . . " These few passages may have concealed the basic complex modality of Kant's appeal. See also A362 and discussion in my Kant's Theory of Knowledge, 177. Even Evans, Varieties of Reference, 228. makes the mistake of confusing "always accompanies" with "must be able to accompany" in citing B131-32. 7. Kant's a priori certainties belong to a very wide range of propositions in mathematics, science and metaphysics; it is not confined to the cogito and does not pick out some uniquely privileged status for it. The phrase "a priori certainty" does not occur in the B references to the cogito. 8. Strawson identifies the basic premise o f the Deduction in The Bounds of Sense, 83, 87, and 89. 9. McDowell in Mind and World ( 1 0 2 - 4 ) correctly likens Kant's conception o f the self in transcendental apperception to a Euclidean dimensionless point.

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Notes to Pages 214-229 This is a familiar part of Kant's understanding of his descriptive inventory, which identifies and abstracts pure, a priori elements from experience which are not available in that abstract form in experience. The abstract, nonsensory items in the inventory are like the corresponding abstract elements of geometry, viz., points, lines, planes which are also not available in that pure form in experience. McDowell treats the point as an objection because he attributes to Kant the traditional project of constructing a full, embodied person out of this meager material. This is not Kant's project, and he is consequently not open to that objection. See Bird, "McDowell's Kant."

10. It is important to keep in mind Kant's distinctions between pure, a priori, unschematized categories, their formal a priori schematized successors, and their full realization in a posteriori experience. 11. Immunity to error through misidentification is related to what Strawson called "criterionless self-ascription." It has a long history in recent philosophy from Castaneda, Shoemaker, and Anscombe to Evans, Parfit, Andy Hamilton, and John Campbell in the following: W. Castaneda, "Indicators and Quasi-indicators," American Philosophical Quarterly 4 (1967); E. Anscombe, "The First Person," in Mind and Language, ed. S. Guttenplan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975); S. Shoemaker, "Self-reference and Self-awareness," Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968); Evans, Varieties of Reference; A. Hamilton, "A New Look at Personal Identity," Philosophical Quarterly 45 (1995); John Campbell, "Sense, Reference and Selective Attention," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 71 (1997). See my "The Paralogisms and Kant's Account of Psychology." The issue is discussed in relation to the later Paralogisms in chapter 25.3. For the present I note only that since virtually all of these commentators who accept IEM nevertheless understand it differentiy it is hard to feel total confidence in the doctrine. 12. To treat self-consciousness as consciousness of a "self' is bound to be ambiguous in Kant's terms between a consciousness of one's empirical self and of a transcendental consciousness of the self which is not to be understood as a reference to an object either in experience or beyond it. 13. William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 1, 330. See my William James (London: Roudedge, 1986), chap. 5, 77-92. 14. The "first person/third person" distinction is often used, misleadingly, to reflect epistemic differences between one person's self-knowledge and one person's knowledge of another. These may have nothing to do with such linguistic devices as pronouns which are standardly used to mark differences of reference in discourse. In a language without a distinction between first and third person pronouns the same epistemic differences in knowledge of oneself and others might still arise. The pronouns mark different conventions of referring rather than different types of cognitive access. 15. I do not mean necessarily "to respond" in some explicit way, but only to demonstrate that the stimulus has been registered and has produced some effect. 16. The expression "unified consciousness" is ambiguous and is used differentiy by different philosophers. I use it here only to stand for that minimal form of self-consciousness which may not extend as far as an explicit, reflexive, recognition of a unified self. The capacity to function in the relevant ways may be realized behaviorally or only in thought.

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17. In some recent discussions a Kantian notion of "unity of consciousness" has been taken over, for example in Carruthers, Phenomenal Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and Rosenthal "Unity of Consciousness and the Self," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Vol. 103, pt. 3 (2003). These authors appeal to a HOT (higher-order thought) theory, but they disagree about the form of such a theory. Carruthers appeals to a "dispositional" HOT theory which Rosenthal rejects in preferring an "actualist" theory. Both offer to explain a "deep" problem of consciousness outlined in Chalmers's The Conscious Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). Although both trade on Kantian terminology it is clear that their problems and disputed solutions have almost nothing to do with Kant. Both recognize that the "deep" problem has to do with "occurrent" mental states which Kant is not concerned with. Both offer to "explain" some aspect of consciousness while Kant's interest is in highlighting an abstract conception of consciousness and its unity as a transcendental precondition of any experience possible for us. I am indebted to Alan Thomas for a discussion of the issue following his (unpublished) paper "Kant, Actualist HOT Theory, and the Unity of Consciousness" at the Welsh Philosophy Society in 2004. 18. I noted this residual Cartesianism in Kant's Theory of Knowledge p. 135 but the point deserves more elaboration. Now I would say that it amounts to no more than a recognition that the whole of our personal experience does rest, in some way, on our subjective responses, sense impressions, and thoughts. Kant endorses this in his B1 claim that all knowledge begins with experience, but does not all derive from it. Such a position is quite different from a Cartesian idealism which places a special epistemic privilege, a basic priority, on those subjective responses, which misinterprets that chronological priority as epistemic certainty. Kant's project of a descriptive metaphysics of experience, and his persistent references to "our" experience, and to the way "we" respond, make clear that, unlike Descartes, Kant does not begin with this privileged idealist fragment of personal experience, but with experience as we have it in a public, communal, form. This is an essential feature of his inventorial project. 19. It is in these terms that Kant separates his own transcendental project of representing in abstract form the fundamental a priori features of our experience from empirical accounts of the self. It will not do to dismiss the distinction as simply mysterious as some commentators have (see chapters 5 and 25). It is no more mysterious than any other philosophical, as opposed to empirical or scientific, account of some phenomenon in experience. 20. The self may be contrasted with what is not the self with regard to its properties, or other selves, or outer objects, and other things as well. 21. Philosophers such as Evans have wanted to revive philosophical interest in "thought" independently of "language," even though they recognize that our primary access to specific thoughts must be through the language we use to express those thoughts. Others, such as Dummett in his "The Relative Priority of Thought and Language" (in Frege and Other Philosophers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), have regarded this as a retrograde step. I think Evans is right, but whether he is or not at least his position matches that of Kant. 22. Recent literature on animal "intelligence" has amply borne out my earlier skepticism, in Kant's Theory of Knowledge, 128n, that philosophers who deny higher mental activities to animals are mistaken. There has been a long-running battle about this issue, but see for example Andrew Whiten, ed., Natural Theories of Mind (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), and Marion Dawkins, Through

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Notes to Pages 214-229 Our Eyes Only? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). In the light of the experimental material and the poverty of most philosophical arguments which restrict animal abilities, it is hard to see the philosophical position as anything other than a final desperate belief that humans are fundamentally different in kind from other animals. Compare also McDowell's view that animals are "perceptually sensitive" to the environment, but do not properly "experience" it in chapter 10.1.

23. An image to be found in William James's A Pluralistic Universe (London: Longmans Green, 1909). The point is discussed in relation to the Second Paralogism in chapter 25.1.1. 24. The claim is too unspecific to function in that way against any form of skepticism. See Susan Hurley "Kant on Spontaneity and the Myth of the Giving," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 94 (1994), and my reply in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 96, pt. 2 (1996). 25. It might be claimed that conceptual ability is required for memory, but I would deny that claim. It seems to me to be another example of contemporary overemphasis on language. See Bennett, Rationality (London: Roudedge, Kegan Paul, 1964). 26. The point has some relevance to the HOT theories mentioned in note 17. There is a similar unclarity in those theories about the reflexive reference in HOTs, whether dispositional or occurrent. 27. This is the central misunderstanding of which Kant warns in the Paralogisms. There the suggestion is that a pseudo-science of "rational psychology" might be thought to rest purely on the Cartesian cogito, and to provide a theory of minds in themselves without any reference to sensibility. Kant is anxious, for obvious reasons, to forestall the same misunderstanding arising from his references to transcendental apperception. He repeatedly claims, in opposition, that references to such apperception do not by themselves provide any knowledge at all, and could not form the basis for any science. Van Cleve provides an argument to claim that Kant must conceive the "determining" self as noumenal; but the argument rests on ascribing a phenomenalist theory to Kant which has been rejected, (see chapter 30.1.1). 28. Donald Davidson in an influential paper "Mental Events," in Experience and Theory, ed. L. Foster and J. W. Swanson (London: Duckworth, 1970) elaborated such an identity between mental states and brain states in his account of "anomalous monism," and claimed to find the basis for such an account in Kant. This seems to me to be anachronistic, but it also runs against Kant's evident belief that there are causal laws relating mental events, and presumably relating mental and physical events. (A385-86). Identity theories of mind may be the most satisfactory way of developing Kant's position, but there is no good reason to think that Kant envisaged such a development. Other philosophers, e.g., Hud Hudson in Kant's Compatibilism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994) have used a similar conception of identity to explain Kant's twofold, empirical and intelligible, account of persons in the Third Antinomy What these claims righdy, and interestingly, achieve is a way of elaborating Kant's claims which makes them consistent with functionalist and materialist theories, but they provide no good reason to ascribe either theory to him. 29. Kemp Smith translates this as: "Now in order to know ourselves there is required in addition to the act of thought, which brings the manifold of every

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possible intuition to the unity of apperception, a determinate mode of intuition, whereby this manifold is given." 30. Famously in the Ideal (B620-31) Kant criticizes the ontological argument for the existence of God on the ground that it wrongly treats existence as a predicate. This passage in the Deduction trades on that general position, so that to claim existence for anything is to be distinguished from the ascription of properties to it. Epistemologically Kant also distinguishes recognition of my own existence from knowledge of any thing in itself Even in this case I turn out to be merely an appearance, but Kant evidently attaches significance to the fact that as an appearance I nevertheless have a capacity for spontaneous thought, and for the use of concepts, which marks the place of an understanding contrasted with sense. It remains true that although such a conception of understanding is of something contrasted with inner sense, I can, according to Kant, know my understanding, its acts and features, only through their presentation to inner sense. Kant's distinction between a "determining" and a "determinable" self is not a contrast between a noumenon and a phenomenon. The issue is reconsidered in the light of the Third Antinomy in chapter 27.3. 31. A proviso should be made for the difficulty of rejecting an inner sense. If inner sense is not accepted then Kant's idea of causal relations between phenomena in inner sense, between perception and thought, is abandoned as well. Chapter 17 THE ANALYTIC OF PRINCIPLES 1. That guidance can be seen as the upshot of the "two step" argument in the Deduction in which the general necessity of a connection between a priori concepts and a priori intuitions is canvassed. In the Analytic of Principles the focus shifts to specific categories and specific connections with the a priori intuitions of space and time. It thus complements the general account of categories in the Deduction. 2. Rudolf Carnap's "Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology" was discussed in chapter 15. J. S. Mill, Utilitarianism, chap. 4 (London: Dent and Sons, 1910): "It has already been remarked that questions of ultimate ends do not admit of proof, in the ordinary acceptation of the term. To be incapable of proof by reasoning is common to all first principles; to the first principles of our knowledge as well as to those of conduct." L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. Anscombe and von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1974), §494: "I cannot doubt this proposition without giving up all judgment. But what sort of proposition is that? It is certainly no empirical proposition. It does not belong to psychology. It has rather the character of a rule," and §144: "what stands fast does so not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it." These claims, like many in the later Wittgenstein, suggest that ordinary truth and falsity, and standard types of truth or falsity, cannot characterize what he calls "fundamental propositions" which make possible the ascription of truth and falsity. 3. These points indicate that for Rant the role of the principles is not confined to the constitution of external, physical objects. It ranges over other categories, such as the structure of material sensations, and events as well as outer objects within the noted parity between inner and outer sense, and it covers both ordinary and scientific experience. See my "Kant and Strawson: Two Types of Descriptive Metaphysics."

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4. David Bell, "The Art of Judgement," Mind 96 (1987). See S. Kripke, Wittgenstein: On Rules and Private Language (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982). Kripke takes the view that Wittgenstein was addressing a standard skeptical issue, but others reject this account of Wittgenstein. See, for example, P. M. S. Hacker and G. P. Baker, Wittgenstein: Understanding and Meaning, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), and Wittgenstein; Rules, Grammar, and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). 5. Wayne Waxman, "Kant's Psychologism, Parts I and II," Kantian Review 3 and 4 (1999/2000), and Beatrice Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, discuss the way in which this exercise belongs to psychology. 6. I say more of the distinction between analytic and synthetic method in "Kant's Analytic Apparatus" forthcoming in A Companion to Kant (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 7. The alleged difference between "reality" and "actuality" might be questioned. The modal categories are schematized as if they applied only to actual, possible, or necessary objects rather than, for example, truths or states of affairs. 8. Locke, Essay, 4.7.9, expresses the puzzling claim about the abstract idea of a triangle. What Locke says is so palpably absurd that one must suppose that he did not say what he meant, or that he located a problem rather than a solution. Berkeley in the introduction to the Principles of Human Knowledge rightly criticizes Locke's claim and offers his own preferable, but still dubious, account. Berkeley's general claim that "abstraction" is a thoroughly misleading notion which generates Locke-type errors in philosophy is in marked contrast to Kant's belief that the Grundbegriffe of our experience have to be identified and understood in an abstract form. It marks a contrast between Berkeley's empiricist nominalism and Kant's antiempiricism. Both empiricist accounts are circular in the sense that they try to explain a "meaning" relation between words and objects by appealing to a similar, or even the same, relation between words and representational images. 9. Just as Kant does not accept a semantic verificationism, so he does not accept or canvass a semantic externalism. Semantic externalism might be a way of extending and developing the Kantian claim that the relation between sensory intuitions and their objects, appearances, is "immediate," just as identity theories of mind might be a way of developing Kant's account of "empirical dualism." Strawson in The Bounds of Sense speaks of Kant's "principle of significance" as if this were a verificationist semantics, and Bennett's Kant's Analytic explicitly ascribes such a doctrine to Kant along with an associated phenomenalism about external objects. These ascriptions are based on inadequate textual evidence, such as Bennett's (p. 24) citation of B507n, where Kant's terms nichtig und leer have to be construed as "meaningless" to draw his conclusion. I have suggested that they are better translated as "futile and empty," and taken to mark a cognitive rather than semantic deficit. 10. To put the point in that way echoes antirealist views, but it was shown in chapter 15.3 that Kant did not hold antirealist views. 11. In this respect I disagree with Michael Friedman on the relauve importance of science and nonscientific experience in Kant's account. The issue arose in "Kantian Themes in Contemporary Philosophy," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol., 2000. Anyone who accepts a strong naturalism will disagree with my view, but I can see no good reason to accept it except in some weak form.

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12. Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences, chaps. 1 and 2, provides an illuminating account of the differences Kant notes between various branches of mathematics, geometry, arithmetic, algebra, and calculus. 13. The phrase "what is presented to the senses" is radically ambiguous. The claim is that Kant considers the application of categories both to inner and outer appearances, as part of a descriptive inventory which covers both aspects of his empirical realism. 14. This objection, that Kant's enterprise gets off on the wrong foot because all the items he regards as a priori are available and given in ordinary a posteriori experience, has formed a persistent empiricist complaint from Prichard's Kant's Theory of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1909) to Quinton's "The Trouble with Kant." Kant believes that a priori concepts are used, and usable, only in a posteriori experience but are not derivable from it. Given that we have such experience the central task of his metaphysics of experience is to disentangle the a priori and a posteriori elements in that experience. His conclusions may be queried, but not by assuming an underlying empiricism which it is his aim to reject. It is easier to teach Kant's philosophy by encouraging students to find examples in experience which seem to falsify Kant's conclusions rather than to explain the antiempiricist nature of the project. 15. The relevance of Hume's claim that time is not perceived is explained in chapters 19 and 20 on the Analogies. 16. Kant's argument seems to turn on a distinction between a "representative" and a "representation" although he does not mark it explicitly. The idea of a representative to stand for objective time has the merit of avoiding direct commitment to an idealist construction of the outer world from inner experiences. 17. N. Kemp Smith, Commentary, (London: Macmillan, 1918), 363f, claims that the Second Analogy contains several different proofs; H. J. Paton, Kant's Metaphysic of Experience (London: Allen and Unwin, 1936) claims to identify six proofs. In chapter 19, I consider and criticize Paul Guyer's belief in Kant and the Claims of Knowledge that Kant provides three separate proofs of the First Analogy. These claims reflect a serious attention to Kant's text, but they are subject to a characteristic danger of failing to see the central points by an excessive attention to detail. 18. See, for example, Henry Allison, "Causality and Causal Laws in Kant: A Critique of Michael Friedman," in Kant and Contemporary Epistemology, ed. P. Parrini (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994); Michael Friedman, "Causal Laws and the Foundations of Natural Science," in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, ed. P. Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). But other commentators, including Guyer himself, have thought that Kant attributed "necessity" to specific causal laws in a way which did not depend on their subsumption under the general causal principle. 19. Kant's vocabulary is more extensive than the popular emphasis on appearances and things in themselves or noumena. He speaks also of phenomena, objects of experience, transcendental objects and subjects, objects in general. These terms are considered in chapter 15.1.2, chapter 22.1.2 and chapter 23. 2 0 . F o r Kant there are inner and outer appearances, and only the latter are identified as external, physical objects or phenomena.

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21. More is said of the relation between the Dissertation and the Critique in chapter 24, which oudines the strategy for Kant's philosophical therapy in the Dialectic. The claim is that although Kant uses the same term "subreption" for the typical philosophical error which calls for therapy the account of subreption is markedly different in the two works. It marks a change from thinking of objects of reason, or understanding, as constituting reality in the Dissertation to thinking of objects of experience and phenomena as constituting reality in the Critique. In the Dissertation Kant accepts and endorses the existence, and knowledge, of such a noumenal realm of objects, while in the Critique he regards that belief as illusory as he explicitly does in the Prolegomena appendix. The Critical position is that there may be such a realm of noumena for all we know. We can neither assert nor deny claims about such noumena without contravening a restriction of knowledge to our experience with its necessary reference to the senses. 22. Kant talks in the Prolegomena of providing a pilot with compass and maps to steer Hume's ship to safety away from the danger of being beached by skepticism. Hume has a comparable metaphor at the end of book 1 of the Treatise. 23. The suggestion is that in the Aesthetic Kant shows how empirical realism, which includes acceptance of outer objects, is compatible with transcendental idealism; in both the Aesthetic and Fourth Paralogism the immediacy of inner and outer sense is asserted as a denial of traditional idealism, but that only in the Refutation of Idealism does Kant provide a proof that empirical idealism is incoherent. Chapter 18 THE MATHEMATICAL PRINCIPLES 1. Kant indicates a recognition of different types of certainty in the earlier quotation from the Logic (Ak. 9.84). Although that recognition does not totally exclude a concern with traditional skepticism it shows a more sophisticated approach than those which nominate a single standard for certainty such as "indubitability" or "incorrigibility" which claims to knowledge have to meet if they are to be successful. This reinforces the caution expressed throughout my account at responding to any mention of certainty in Kant's text as a decisive reference to traditional skepticism. 2. Kemp Smith added the bracketed expression, but the ground for it is clear. 3. It may seem surprising that Kant talks of appearances all being subject to space and time. It might be expected that he would say that all are subject to time, through inner sense, but only a subclass are subject to space, through outer sense. But if we distinguish between the mode of representing and the content of representation, as in the Aesthetic, then there is a case, noted in the discussion for saying that all appearances are subject to spatial and temporal modes of representing, even though not all the contents represented are both spatial and temporal. 4. This provides, according to Kant, the network of pure concepts and intuitions for the abstract framework to be realized in a full a posteriori experience. 5. The passage expresses the project of a descriptive metaphysics in which ordinary spatiotemporal experience is given as a datum for the philosophical discrimination within it of its sensory and intellectual, a posteriori and a priori, elements. It resolves some of the problems noted in Henrich's account of the two steps of the Deduction discussed in chapter 14.

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6. To put the point in this way is to underline the strategy of locating core examples of some phenomenon with the surrounding deviations from it. The image helps to explain the hesitations which Kant shows in determining whether we find such conceptions unintelligible, or barely intelligible; whether we should say that we have no such concept or a concept which has no object. 7. Kant makes the point that analysis presupposes synthesis at B102-3. 8. Kant is not interested in specific operations, or learning processes, but in the general conditions which enable us both to have such a combination and to implement it in experience. It is descriptive not normative; but it is not a posteriori. 9. Kant makes clear at several points that he is not talking of literal constructions. Some particular literal construction can exemplify the relations involved but the basic notion is that of an imaginative combination of pure concepts and pure intuitions. 10. This is characteristic of Kant's method, that experience as it is available contains both a priori and a posteriori elements which cannot be literally separated but can be abstracted in a notional way. 11. Michael Friedman, in Kant and the Exact Sciences, 71-82, provides an excellent account of these notions and of Kant's attitude to them. 12. The so-called Weber-Fechner law introduced the notion of a "just noticeable difference" in a subject's sensations, and the associated notion of a threshold. The law can be expressed as: "Sensation increases arithmetically while stimulus magnitudes increase geometrically, so that equal stimulus ratios produce equal intervals of sensation." The hypothesis, which treats sensations not as continuous, or dense, magnitudes but as stochastic, has been extensively tested and modified since Weber and Fechner devised it. A common sense illustration of the general difference would be between an "on/off' switch and a "dimmer" switch, but the latter may not be strictiy "dense," since differences of degree within its range may be limited by the mechanical and electrical apparatus of the switch. 13. The passage does not explicidy say that such sense modalities must have degrees, but it implies such a claim. E. Stenius discussed this in his Wittgenstein's Tractatus: A Critical Exposition of the Main Lines of his Thought (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960). 14. It is not clear whether the claim is that the world might just have single degrees of every sense modality or whether it would be possible for us to have an experience which made it impossible to represent such degrees. 15. Berkeley does not use the term "just noticeable difference" but he might be regarded as anticipating the notion in his account of mathematics and infinitesimal quantities. 16. Michael Friedman expresses the reservation: "The above considerations make a certain amount of sense out of Kant's theory, but one might very well have doubts about attributing them to Kant . . . using such ideas to explicate his theory may appear wildly anachronistic, and my readings of the passages . . . may appear strained" (1992, 66). 17. The point is put in this way: "given any set of monadic formula involving k primitive predicates we can find a model containing at most 2k objects. In

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Notes to Pages 2 1 4 - 2 2 9 polyadic logic . . . we can easily construct formulas having only infinite models. Proof theoretically therefore if we carry out deductions . . . using only monadic logic we will be able to prove the existence of at most 2k distinct objects. . . . Hence monadic logic cannot serve as the basis for any serious mathematical theory . . . aiming to describe an infinity of objects (even 'potentially')."

18. Michael Friedman expresses provisos about naturalism and his own commitment to it in "Kantian Themes in Contemporary Philosophy," and "Philosophical Naturalism," Presidential Address in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association 71, no. 2 (1997). 19. It is not clear how Michael Friedman understands this claim. It appears to make formal mathematics rest directly on a fact about our psychological capacities, and is vulnerable to the objections that this misdescribes mathematics and also that it does not allow room for Kant's intention of representing mathematics as abstract and formal rather than as a description of our psychology. But the claim might be understood, more plausibly, to canvass a more remote relation between mathematics and our underlying psychology in which features of the latter are necessary for a grasp of the former. 20. B152: "This synthesis is an action [ Wirkung] of the understanding on sensibility, and is its first application—and thereby the ground of all its other applications—to the objects of our possible intuition." It is possible to read this as an explanatory account in psychology, but Kant explicitly distinguishes it from psychology in the next sentence. 21. Michael Friedman's excellent survey of Kant's account of Newtonian physics, in Kant and the Exact Sciences, 149-59, makes clear the characteristic order of priorities Kant assigns to universal gravitation and the comparison of masses in the solar system. The point is summarized: "Kant's point is that the notion of true or absolute motion does not even have objective meaning or content unless we employ Newton's procedure for determining the centre of mass of the solar system, and hence presuppose that absolute gravitational acceleration is in fact universal" (159) The account is based on the later Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences, but throws a clear light on the background to Kant's discussion of the principles in the Critique. The discussion does not show, however, that Kant assigns a general priority to science over ordinary experience in the Analytic. I have suggested that the principles in the Critique are sufficiently abstract to be realized in different ways in ordinary experience and in science. In the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences Kant focuses on the more subtle theoretical realization given in Newtonian physics but this is not necessarily involved in the abstract principles. 22. At B152 Kant distinguishes an intellectual synthesis (synthesis intellectualis) from a figurative synthesis (synthesis speciosa), and associates the latter with imagination, that is a faculty which represents absent objects in intuition. But although it is thoroughly plausible to associate the synthesis with the representation of spatialfiguresthe passage does not strictly say that it is geometry which makes experience possible. I have suggested that Kant holds that the metaphysical principles make possible both the formal development of sciences and mathematics, and that of ordinary experience. Synthesis speciosa makes both geometry and our ordinary experience of spatial objects possible. 23. Friedman's discussion of Newtonian physics shows how Kant's metaphysical background bears on the priorities in establishing a scientific concept of "true

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or absolute" motion or acceleration, but ordinary experience, as Kant clearly recognizes in the Critique, has and uses concepts of motion and acceleration, and distinguishes between true and apparent motion within its own sphere. What it lacks is any reference to absolute motion or acceleration, and the sophisticated conceptual and computational procedures that go with it in science. See the first and second parts of "Kantian Themes in Contemporary Philosophy," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 72,1998. Michael Friedman pointed out this difficulty to me in the discussion of "Kantian Themes in Contemporary Philosophy." 24. What does follow, and what Kant would accept, is that the structure of experience outlined in the metaphysical principles allows implicitly for the possibility of scientific developments along Newtonian, or Euclidean, lines. Later in the Analogies there is a parallel to this claim in the relationship between Kant's "core" proofs of the three principles and their extension to a global spatiotemporal structure for experience. The point has generated controversy about the distinction between constitutive principles of the understanding and regulative principles of reason, and the related requirements which Kant outlines in the Dialectic and in the third Critique for a "system" of all experience. Nor is Kant a naturalist in holding that where conflicts arise between ordinary experience and science they are always to be resolved in favor of science. Such an attitude is vulnerable to two kinds of query; first because apparent conflicts may not be irreconcilable, and second because they may not always lead us to prefer the scientific image. It is not obvious that an atomic, or even finer, structure for matter should lead us to reject our conception of physical objects. Scientists sometimes formulate their conclusions in popular ways whicn are misleading in these respects. It is common for physicists seeking a unified theory of the physical world to express their preferred candidate as a "theory of everything" without the qualification "everything physical." More sophisticated physicists may support their unqualified view with the claim that everything "reduces" to physics, but that claim is ambiguous with respect to "reduce" and dubiously acceptable in any case. See my "Kant and Naturalism," British Journal for the History of Philosophy 3, no. 2 (September, 1995); Michael Friedman, "Philosophical Naturalism." 25. Kant recognizes different forms of Platonism at B371 and note. 26. Current views in the philosophy of mathematics cover logicist, formalist, intuitionist, and structuralist accounts. I am representing him as a structuralist, but his version of that doctrine is both distinctive and unclear. See Benacerraf and Putnam, Philosophy of Mathematics. Chapter 19 THE THREE ANALOGIES OF EXPERIENCE 1. The earlier account claimed that Kant does not appeal to science in his account of the transcendental principles, but it recognizes that the best available realization for the principles comes from the sciences. The point is made at B748^19: "But these synthetic principles cannot exhibit a priori any one of their concepts in a specific instance; they can only do this a posteriori by means of experience which is possible only in conformity with these principles." 2. It is not my intention to offer an adequate historical survey of previous metaphysical issues about substance, but only to suggest that in comparison to the traditional labyrinth Kant is relatively clear.

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3. In the note to B750 Kant describes his proof of the principle of causality as "proceeding merely in accordance with concepts" but adds that it cannot use the mathematical "construction of concepts in pure intuition" since it involves a rule of synthesis of perceptions. The point is discussed further in chapter 29. 4. There is a large background issue here about Kant's use of the highly ambiguous "subjective/objective" distinction. For the present I note only that if Kant is concerned with the relation between modes of representing and contents represented as I claimed he was in the Aesthetic, then that use of "subjective" and "objective" is not the same as that involved in the traditional idealist distinction between mental states (mind), and external objects (world). 5. There is no serious doubt that Kant allows an inner experience which contains things and their properties and causal relations among them. That is a part of his commitment to empirical realism and is compatible with the priority he attempts to prove in the Refutation of Idealism for outer experience over inner. 6. Paul Guyer, in his discussion of the First Analogy in Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, reports this part of Kant's argument by ascribing "permanence" to time, but Kant's point as I have represented it, in line with the text, is to deny the appropriateness of ascribing temporal predicates to time itself. "Permanence" might be understood as a temporal predicate. 7. This is Arthur Melnick's way of putting the point in his Kant's Analogies of Experience. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). It expresses a plausible, intuitive distinction between our descriptions of objects and their properties and those of the time relations in which they occur. The premise involves Kant's claim that this feature of our experience, that items in experience are not presented direcdy with temporal properties such as dates or durations, refers to our common understanding of time rather than to some supposed private, "subjective," aspects of time. The natural idealist way of taking this, namely that I am presented with my private, subjective, time in inner sense in relation to my mental states, and that this is contrasted with an "objective" time attaching to outer spatial objects is not, as I shall claim, what Kant really has in mind. 8. This is the standard empiricist response noted before in relation to Pritchard and Quinton. Both provide excellent examples of critics who think that this reference to ordinary experience is already enough to refute, or at least damage, Kant, but it rests on a misunderstanding. Kant accepts these features of experience as a datum for his provision of the metaphysical inventory, and goes on to ask how they are possible. His answer does not conflict with the original datum, but is intended to explain it, to locate it properly in the transcendental topic. This is an essential aspect of his descriptive metaphysics. 9. It is possible to take the view that substance is no more than a bundle of properties, but this has notorious difficulties and in any case effectively denies any genuine role for the concept of a "substance." 10. Kant makes the point explicidy at B232 where he says that he will consider later the "empirical criterion of this necessary permanence." The later passages are B249 and B291-92. 11. A summary was provided of different ways in which Kant treats the parities and disparities between inner and outer sense in chapter 17.4.

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12. J. Mackie makes this claim in The Cement of the Universe (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), and Arthur Melnick righdy rejects it in his Kant's Analogies of Experience. 13. Strawson's account of reidentification is echoed in the Third Analogy, but Kant adds a point to it which is noted in this chapter 3.2. 14. At B229 Kant's point consistendy with the argument of the First Analogy is that to allow new substances to be created would prevent a representation of the unity of time. The same point is expressed in the terms of the "unity of time" at B231. There is a difference between these claims about a global unity of time and the disconnected personal experience in the Third Analogy. 15. Throughout the Analogies Kant considers a priori, necessary, connections between concepts, such as that between "event" and "cause," which he regards as nonanalytic. In chapter 29, I discuss the general character of these relations of "nonanalytic conceptual dependence." 16. I consider later the question whether Kant's subsequent explicit references to a spatial application of the Analogies should make us change this view. In the Guyer/Wood translation of the Critique (p. 229) Kant's marginal notes to the First Analogy in his copy of the book are reproduced. These, along with the B Refutation of Idealism and B General System of the Principles, express that subsequent emphasis on the spatial cases, but I argue that this does not affect the abstract character of the proofs in which they are not restricted to the spatial cases. 17. A principal consideration here is that if the First Analogy has already proved that substance has to be primarily outer or spatial it is difficult to see why Kant thought it necessary to add the Refutation of Idealism in B. 18. Michael Friedman's Kant and the Exact Sciences carries Kant's account of science through the Critique to the later works including the Opus Postumum. 19. Henry Allison, and others, have distinguished in these principles two claims, namely the "every-event-some-cause" and the "same-cause-same-effect" principles, but I claim that only the former is asserted in both versions. 20. Paton's Kant's Metaphysic of Experience, Kemp Smith's Commentary, and Guyer's Kant and the Claims of Knowledge all claim that the text contains several different proofs. 21. Arthur Melnick's Kant's Analogies of Experience has a clear and valuable discussion of this case. It reinforces the structure of Kant's argument, here and elsewhere, which relies on recognition of a "core" case with possible deviations from, or extensions of, that case. The structure was apparent in earlier discussions of the threefold synthesis and the mathematical principles. 22. The close links between all three Analogies have been righdy noted by recent commentators such as Beatrice Longuenesse in Kant and the Capacity to Judge, and Sebastian Gardner in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London: Routledge, 1999). 23. The point has been made before that Kant does not deny that we perceive events in ordinary experience. His interest is in clarifying what that ability rests on, and his claim is that it rests on certain basic a priori principles with their associated pure intuitions and concepts.

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24. Paul Guyer in Kant and the Claims of Knowledge criticized my account of the Second Analogy in Kant's Theory of Knowledge for representing Kant's principle as conceptual and analytic when Kant clearly regards it as synthetic. I hoped to have made it clear that Kant's argument has a two-stage structure, one involving analysis of the relevant objects of experience, in this case "events," and a second which claims to identify a synthetic condition under which alone those objects can be identified in experience. Guyer's misunderstanding rested in part on his failure to acknowledge that Kant thinks of metaphysics as "conceptual," that is, as involving concepts but not necessary analytic relations. His principles are examples of "nonanalytic conceptual dependence" considered in chapter 29. 25. Bella Milmed published this comment in "'Possible Experience' and Recent Interpretations of Kant," in Kant Studies Today, ed. L. W. Beck (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1969), 319-20, but I have heard it made in discussions many times. I had tried to show its irrelevance in Kant's Theory of Knowledge. 26. There are evidently a number of different necessary relations that might be involved in Kant's claim. The necessity that that event took place at that moment and place presupposes a unique determinism of events located within their unique order, and Kant undoubtedly makes reference to such a picture in the argument of the Third Antinomy, considered in chapter 27. That discussion involves the potential conflict between human freedom and a global causal determinism. I argue that that global determinism is not already expressed in the principle of the Second Analogy. 27. Although Kant refers to such inner causation he offers no extensive account of it and consequently makes no clear commitment to identity or functional theories of mind. 28. W. A. Suchting used the device ambiguously in commenting on my account in Kant's Theory of Knowledge in "Kant's Second Analogy of Experience," (in Beck, Kant Studies Today, 330), but had not understood that my account was designed to resist that kind of idealist treatment of the issue. It is the basis of well-known criticisms of Kant's argument such as those of Lovejoy and Strawson's objection to Kant's "non sequitur of numbing grossness" in The Bounds of Sense. 29. It is a common complaint against Kant that he has no right to speak, as he typically does, of "our" experience, or of "we" experiencers, for example, in the Aristotelian Society's symposium, "The Disappearing 'We,"' by Jonathan Lear, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 58 (1984). The complaint rests on the traditionalist assumption that Kant is essentially trying to reconstruct a public experience from its private origins, that is, trying to resolve traditional idealists' problems about an external world on the basis of private mental experiences. To see Kant's project not as a normative idealism but a descriptive metaphysics of experience bypasses such criticism. The recommendation is that since Kant so readily, and frequently, assumes the public experience which idealists question, perhaps we should conclude that his project is not that of traditional idealism. 30. Hume's skepticism about induction is connected to his belief that the GCP can be only either a trivial analytic truth or itself based on inductive arguments. In neither case can it be used properly to justify our inductive beliefs about the future. In "Kant's Transcendental Arguments" in Reading Kant, ed. Schaper and Vossenkuhl (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985) I argue that Kant differs essentially

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from Hume in giving a priority to the GCP over particular causal laws which Hume either denied or did not notice. 31. In the Treatise (book 1.3, §iii) Hume discusses and dismisses a number of interpretations of the GCP. His conclusion, that they are all trivial or useless for the purposes of justifying a belief in causal necessity, is entirely correct, but he does not consider the role which Kant envisages for the principle. 32. The point is reported in Kemp Smith's Commentary, p. 361, that Kant wrote in the margins of his copy of the first edition Critique that the argument should be rephrased in terms of spatial substance. It is referred to in Melnick's Kant's Analogies of Experience, p. 75, and in Michael Friedman's "Kant and the Twentieth Century" in Parrini, Kant and Contemporary Epistemology. That marginal note is given atAk. 23.30, E 80, and reads: "Here the proof must be so conducted that it applies only to substances as phenomena of outer sense, and so from space which, with its features, exists at all times. In space all alteration is motion; for were there another factor in these relations, a subject would have to persist in accordance with the concept of 'alteration'. Consequendy at the same time everything in space would have to disappear." Other such marginal notes are reproduced in the Guyer/Wood translation of the Critique (p. 299, note C). Those who wish to read back these references to spatial substance into the arguments of all the Analogies will be encouraged by these marginal notes, but the step is interpretatively dubious. The second sentence, obscure as it is, seems to refer to the argument of the Refutation of Idealism, in which without spatial substance no experience, inner or outer, would be possible. Kant may have come to think, as a result of that new passage in B, that the further argument about the priority of space over time should be marked in the Analogy, without supposing that the argument actually required this change. 33. If Kant had been wholehearted in a wish to make explicit an implicit preference for outer over inner experience he might have changed the text. 34. Jeffrey Edwards's Substance, Force, and the Possibility of Knowledge (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) explores further connections between Kant's metaphysical principles from the Critique and their relation to scientific theories. He considers not only the Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences but also Kant's Opus Postumum and the rather confused project discussed in that final work. These are further implications of the Critical principles but do not cast doubt on their pure, abstract form in the Critique. 35. Edwards's Substance, Force, and the Possibility of Knowledge places a particular emphasis on this point in his discussion of the implications of the principles for physics. Chapter 20 WHAT DO THE ANALOGIES ACHIEVE? 1. B748: "the matter of appearances, by which things are given us in space and time, can only be represented in perception, and therefore a posteriori. The only concept which represents a priori this empirical content of appearances is that of a thing in general and a priori synthetic knowledge of this can yield nothing more than the rule of synthesis of what perception may give a posteriori. It can never yield an a priori intuition of the real object, since this must necessarily be empirical."

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2. To separate [7] from earlier parts of the proofs is already to distinguish the formulation of the principles in the Analytic and their expression in the Dialectic in the Antinomies and the Third Antinomy especially. The point is discussed later and in chapters 26 and 27, but summarily it distinguishes the expressive network, or affinity, of a priori concepts and intuitions which make certain objects of experience, such as events possible, and a doctrinal theory which asserts that the categories apply completely throughout the whole of experience. Merely to use the category "cause/effect" to introduce the concept of an event does not by itself establish that every event has its necessary place in a complete, unique, global system. Some of the issues which arise from this are outlined in Paul Guyer, "Kant's Conception of Empirical Law" in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 64 (1990); in my "Reply to Ralph Walker," in Transcendental Arguments, ed. Robert Stern (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); in Friedman, "Kantian Themes in Contemporary Philosophy I"; and G. Buchdahl, Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Science (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969). 3. The point is evident from Hume's relative lack of interest in the GCP and consequent close attention to the character of specific causal laws in the Treatise. 4. The points raised by Kant's distinction between the two principles are discussed in chapters 24.1, 26, and 27. 5. Such a conception of hypothetical necessity is outlined in the Postulates considered in chapter 21; and some further reference is made to it in the Ideal, outlined in chapter 28. 6. The relation Kant envisages between "event" and "cause" is a paradigm example of his synthetic a priori connections, which I have called "nonanalytic conceptual dependence" and reconsider in chapter 29. 7. Kant's account of space and time as "modes" or "ways" of intuiting was discussed in the chapter 8.3.2 and chapter 9 on the Aesthetic. It should be recalled that Hume also categorized time as a "mode" and, like Kant, denied that it was simply presented to the senses. 8. See Arthur Melnick's discussion in Kant's Analogies of Experience, 67-69, and Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, 215-16. 9. Michael Friedman, Kant and the Exact Sciences, pt. 1, chap. 3. 10. The issue raised is discussed in Friedman's and my contributions to "Kantian Themes in Contemporary Philosophy." 11. There are two interpretative options. Either Kant decided to duplicate his proof of the priority of outer objects from the First Analogy in the Refutation of Idealism or else the First Analogy does not concern specifically outer substance and can be assumed in the proof of the Refutation. It seems to me that the second is correct. A third alternative of supposing that the First Analogy does give a priority to outer substance but that the Refutation makes no use of this seems to me the least likely option. The sentence at B275, "All determination of time presupposes something permanent in perception," restates Kant's central claim from the First Analogy. 12. The current conception of the contrast between "mind" and "world" is between what is mental and what is physical. It has the potential danger of

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locating the mind in some mysterious realm outside reality, and makes too many concessions to a Cartesian position. 13. It may be objected here that Kant really has no place for a priori psychological principles since he roundly condemns psychology as even less of a science than chemistry in the preface to Metaphysical Foundations of the Natural Sciences, but this is dubious. Kant rejects psychology's status as a "strict" science because mathematics cannot be applied to it, but he allows it to have a second-class status as a science, and he admits that there are a priori metaphysical principles governing psychology whether it is a strict science or not. 14. B876: "How is it possible to arrive at a rational physiology according to principles a priori? The answer is this: we take nothing more from experience than is required to give us an object of outer or of inner sense." 15. Except for the fact that "relative" and "relativism" are also ambiguous it might have been better for Kant to use those terms for this distinction rather than "subjective/objective." There is no doubt that at the transcendental level what is "subjective" for Kant is what is relative to human cognitive powers, with the further belief that those cognitive powers entail certain a priori resources which enable us to constitute objects in experience. 16. Hume thinks it a fiction to suppose that we can talk of exact equality in the length of lines or in other features of a pure mathematics. In this he follows a standard empiricist suspicion of pure a priori mathematics. 17. Kant's suggestion is that to recognize the holistic character of certain systems is already to involve an appeal to relations between concepts, dependence relations, which are not purely analytic. The issues of nonanalytic conceptual dependence, and its connection with holism, are considered in chapter 29. Chapter 21 THE POSTULATES AND REFUTATION OF IDEALISM 1. Evidendy there are two ways of denying an idealist priority for inner over outer experience: One (B54-55) is to claim a strict parity between them, and another (B275) is actually to reverse the priority. There is no conflict between these positions in Kant. In the Aesthetic Kant insists on the same immediacy, passivity, and causal connection in both; in the Refutation the claim is that the primary way of identifying substance is through outer objects not inner. The various parities and disparities between inner and outer sense were summarized in chapter 17.4. 2. The link with Wittgenstein has been so much noted in recent times that it is now perhaps better to underline the differences. Wittgenstein's argument turns on the requirements for a common language, and not as in Kant's argument on the requirements for an objective time. There is a similarity in the conclusions in which both claim that an idealist world is not just a private fragment of our ordinary experience but leaves out requirements which make that experience possible. Kant's argument is an attempt to show as incoherent the idealist conception of a basic private experience which is no less rich than our ordinary experience but just confined to one consciousness. If Kant, and Wittgenstein, are right then this belief is an illusion; a purely private experience cannot count as a genuine experience at all since it leaves out some of

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the latter's essential conditions, viz. either a stable meaning for language, or an objective discrimination of time relations. 3. Kant's distinction between modes and contents was discussed in chapter 8.3.2 and chapter 15. Its upshot is typically expressed in epistemic, modal, or psychological operators, such as "S thinks/hopes that P," "S imagines (recalls) that Q," "S perceives that R," and so on. 4. This marks a fundamental difference between Kant and Leibniz. Kant plainly marks a distinction between what belongs to the content of a judgment and what belongs to our cognitive attitude to it in his account of peculiar grammatical predicates like "is possible (necessary)," and "exists." In Leibniz's correspondence with Arnauld (May 1686; Parkinson, Leibniz, 60) he writes: "In fact in considering the notion I have of every true proposition, I find that every predicate, necessary or contingent, past, present, or future, is contained in the notion of the subject. . . . " Leibniz qualifies this claim sometimes by distinguishing between the strict necessity of metaphysical principles and the weaker necessity of such a principle as that of sufficient reason, and also by distinguishing our deductive powers, and God's, in elucidating everything contained in such a complete concept. Kant evidently, and surely rightly, rejects this idea. 5. It was noted in chapter 1 that Strawson had taken this view and rested it on the preface passage (Bxx) where things in themselves are said to be "real per se." In the light of this clear commitment to an immanent reality of phenomena or appearances instead of things in themselves at B270 that passage cannot be understood in that way. 6. Van Cleve, in Problems from Kant (p. 4 and 14), dismisses revolutionary accounts of Kant, such as Allison's, by claiming that Kant was an "honest to goodness (good old fashioned) idealist"; but there is overwhelming evidence that whatever form of idealism he did accept it cannot seriously be of the "good old fashioned" sort. 7. P. Abela, Kant's Empirical Realism, refers to a view of Kant as an "form-buttressed Berkeleian idealism" (3). 8. Kant does not formally classify the different kinds of priority which idealists confer on inner experience, but one (cf. B54-55) is that of immediacy, contrasted with a claimed mediate link between inner sense and outer objects, and another spells out the mediate relation between inner sense and outer objects as causal. According to Kant, and plausibly, inner experience for idealists is not mediated by any causal connections to its objects, while outer experience always is so causally mediated and is consequently doubtful. Kant rejects that disparity and claims that both senses present their objects immediately, and both have a causal relation to those objects. Kant evidently recognizes different ways of confronting traditional idealism, but the Refutation of Idealism provides the only formal proof of its incoherence. 9. Kant acknowledges a Humean point about the limitations of imagination at B798: "Thus it is not permissible to invent any new original powers . . . our reason can employ as conditions of the possibility of things only the conditions of possible experience; it can never proceed to form concepts of things quite independently of these conditions." 10. B275: "All determination of time presupposes something permanent in perception." B225: " Consequently the permanent is substance in the field of appearance."

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11. The proof at this stage leaves the nature of that awareness of a substantial self unclear. The argument continues by drawing an exhaustive and exclusive distinction between a sensory awareness in inner sense and an intellectual consciousness through apperception and understanding. There is consequently a requirement that the idealists Kant targets would themselves accept this distinction, but that is not obvious. It is not clear that Descartes would have accepted Kant's distinction between sense and understanding, but many of Leibniz's references to "the intelligent soul," or "rational mind," seem to commit him to something like Kant's view. This representation (of the soul) is accompanied by consciousness in a rational soul, and it is then that it is called thought. Correspondence with Arnauld, October 1687;

in Parkinson, Leibniz, 72.

This being so can we deny that there is much that is innate in our minds, since we are, so to speak, innate to ourselves, and since there is in ourselves being, unity, substance, duration, change, activity, and a thousand other objects of our intellectual ideas? And since these objects are immediate to our understanding and are always present (although they cannot always be apperceived on account of our distractions and needs) why be surprised. . . that these ideas. . . are innate in us? Preface, New Essays,

in Parkinson, Leibniz, 153.

Leibniz seems to be a more accessible target than the nominated Descartes, but Kant may have taken it that Leibniz's views were a better representation of Cartesian idealism. 12. This expresses another version of a weak point (in note 11): Why should we accept that everything in inner experience is an inner intuition, representation, or property, when it is part of Kant's own view that these already presuppose a substance to which they belong? 13. There is a difficulty here which some commentators have noted, namely the assumption that intuitions, as representations, are properties. Clearly in one way an intuitive representation is a sensory property belonging to the subject, but the content of such an expressed representation may not express such a property if it is an outer content. 14. B158: "Accordingly I have no knowledge of myself as I am but merely as I appear to myself. Consciousness of self is thus very far from being knowledge of the self. . . for knowledge of myself I require, besides the consciousness, that is, besides the thought of myself, an intuition of the manifold in me, by which I determine this thought." The apparent paradox that I have no knowledge of myself "as I am," but have knowledge of myself with the addition of intuition to the thought of myself, is resolved by recognizing that the former denies knowledge of myself "as I am in myself," that is, as a thing in itself. Kant accepts empirical knowledge of oneself, but for these reasons rejects transcendent knowledge of oneself as a thing in itself Such a view is opposed by traditionalist commentators who think Kant is firmly committed to the existence of noumenal selves. 15. It has been a common complaint among commentators that Kant overlooks the spatial, and embodied, aspects of selves and our knowledge of them even though it is recognized that he makes some references to those embodied features in the Critique (A360, A362-63). Part of the difficulty lies in the belief that Kant should be offering an account of empirical persons when he regards himself as supplying a transcendental, abstract account. The point is discussed in chapter 25.2 in connection with Cassam's Self and World.

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16. In the Fourth Paralogism: "Empirical idealism, and its mistaken questionings, is already sufficiently refuted, when it has been shown that outer perception yields immediate proof of something actual in space, and that this space itself, although in itself only a mere form of representations, has objective reality in relation to all outer appearances, which also are nothing else than mere representations" (A376-77). Such a passage at once expresses the general position of the B Refutation of Idealism, but then encourages a traditionalist commitment to the very idealism it rejects by speaking of space as "mere representation." The difficulty is avoided by a recognition that Kant uses the term "idea," as well as "outer object," in both empirical and transcendental senses, but not all commentators accept this. 17. In the original argument the question assumed a distinction between inner and outer sense and asked whether we had any justification for a belief in the existence of outer objects. If it is then shown that outer experience has a priority over inner experience it cannot be replied that even though this is true our outer experience may always be illusory. This is to change the character of the argument with no justification. 18. It was noted earlier in chapters 6 and 7 that Leibniz's account of space and time represented them as analytically complex and dependent on the existence of, and relations between, objects. Kant's own account of space and time rejects that view, but unless Kant was assuming this in the argument, and further claiming that his account presents space and time as "simple" representations, these considerations make the argument more difficult and inconclusive. Kant certainly makes no reference to them explicidy in the text. 19. In chapter 25, in discussing the Paralogisms, I emphasize how important these points are for Kant's criticism of "rational (transcendent) psychology." See my "The Paralogisms and Kant's Account of Psychology." 20. Berkeley in Principles of Human Knowledge, §34-37, expresses the view that the ordinary distinction between veridical and illusory perceptions can be consistentiy retained within his own idealist theory. Neither Kant nor Berkeley are direcdy concerned with those epistemological issues about perceptual illusion, and this is one of the points at which Kant's account is more metaphysical than epistemological. 21. I take it that it is always possible for a thoroughgoing skeptic to deny any counterclaim in the face of any arguments, but such a procedure should be recognized as an idle skepticism which is not worth pursuing. In the end such a position is irrefutable but totally pointiess. Idealists may choose to commit such an intellectual suicide, but it reflects not a strength but a decisive weakness in their position. 22. It is difficult to understand what could be meant by providing an argument for our belief in an external world independently of any ground for doubting it. It suggests that philosophers should not be content with a "conditional" proof against such skepticism, but what would an "unconditional proof' be like? 23. William James, Principles of Psychology, 1.185ff. In the passage James says that he repeats points that Mill had made in his System of Logic, but similar claims had been made by Kant in the preface to the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. Hume: "For my part when I enter most intimately into what I call myself I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch

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myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception" (Treatise, 1.4, §vi.) 24. Kant seems to have had some such idea in mind in distinguishing what he calls the "determining" as opposed to the "determinable" self in the Transcendental Deduction. Chapter 22 CONCLUDING SECTIONS OF THE ANALYTIC OF PRINCIPLES 1. It has been thought to be a serious problem on the ground that if a concept can be used in experience at all then it must be derivable from experience; or that if it is used in experience then even its abstract form has such a use; or that it commits an error of supposing that by abstracting from certain aspects of its realization it represents a quite different object. That last objection rests on a misunderstanding of Kant's appeal to such abstract concepts and is discussed in connection with Van Cleve's formulation of the criticism in chapter 29. The earlier criticisms rest on empiricist assumptions about concepts which Kant does not accept. His point is only that if you detach, even notionally, the sensory aspects from some concept then the resulting concept is not usable in experience in that form, i.e., without the necessary sensory factors. Additionally he claims that such abstract concepts may suggest wrongly that they must designate nonsensory, noumenal objects beyond experience. That is the general error Kant thinks Leibniz commits in the monadology. 2. B. Russell, "On Denoting" and "The Philosophy of Logical Atomism," both reprinted in Logic and Knowledge; P. F. Strawson, "On Referring," in Logicolinguistic Papers (London: Methuen, 1966) and Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar (London: Methuen, 1974); G. Evans, Varieties of Reference. Evans reports one of Russell's principles governing a "discriminating conception" of an object as requiring that the subject should be able "to distinguish the object from all other things" (65); this is a strong requirement probably never met. Kant requires only that a subject should be able to identify, or pick out, the object, whether it is thus distinguished from every other object or not. 3. Kant uses the terms Sinn and Bedeutung, but clearly not in the way that Frege does. It is not even certain that Kant has a clear, systematic, and consistent distinction between the terms, although he tends to use Bedeutung in association with "objective reality," and so associates it with something more like Frege's "reference." It might be conjectured that Frege derived his terms from Kant, but without some specific evidence this is doubtful. The terms have a common colloquial use and both Kant and Frege no doubt derived their uses from that. 4. It is easy to see how semantic verificationism came to be ascribed to Kant, but the attribution is mistaken. When Kant speaks of transcendent claims as "empty" (leer) it is easy to construe this as "empty of meaning." But Kant's conception of emptiness (B346-49) is associated with emptiness of "reference," lack of "objective reality," rather than with total emptiness of sense, and Kant allows even transcendent concepts to have some formal meaning. 5. Kant's complaint about philosophers' inclination towards the transcendent is not that the concepts are at fault but that the philosophers are at fault for their misuse of concepts which have a legitimate, regulative use but no constitutive or designative one.The point is made in the preface and extensively throughout the Doctrine of Method, and is discussed in chapter 29.

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6. This explains Kant's hesitation at B396-97 over saying that we have no concept of the transcendent or alternatively have such a concept but no knowledge of any corresponding object. Although he uses both descriptions he rightly prefers the latter. 7. A. W. Collins, Possible Experience: Understanding Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 8. Karl Ameriks used the term "epistemic modesty" in his Kant's Theory of the Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982). I also used it in "Kant's Transcendental Idealism," and had made the point, without using that terminology, in Kant's Theory of Knowledge. More recentiy Rae Langton's book Kantian Humility has used her notion for what is a quite different traditionalist view. Some aspects of her view are criticized in chapter 10.2, and later in this chapter in section 2. See my review of Kantian Humility in The Philosophical Quarterly 50, no. 198 (January 2000). 9. Kant's hesitations about the notion appear confused but they reflect a difficulty of deciding whether such cases are really unintelligible, or barely intelligible but cognitively empty. They indicate also that more flexible account of such divisions which is captured in the "core/deviant" model. 10. Kant uses the term eigentlich to mark what is a "strict" science, or the "strict" morality of an action, or a "strict" substance. Since in these cases what is said to be "strict" is also transcendent it can be only misleading, if not mistaken, to translate it as "true." That suggests wrongly that Kant endorses the standard of such transcendence. A good example of the resulting confusion is in P. Hacker's "Substance" in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. 78, (2004), 62. There Prolegomena §46 is quoted as saying that "the true subject . . . and hence the substantial itself, is unknown to us." Kant's view is not that transcendent, noumenal substances are the true or real substances but that they may be thought so on certain philosophical accounts. 11. This is a slogan which owes more to its incantational properties than to its clarity of sense. The only sense I can seriously attach to it depends on the ascription of a semantic verificationism which I have shown cannot be properly ascribed to Kant. 12. The principal reservations are expressed at B585-86 and are discussed in chapter 27. 13. That agnosticism is a central part of Kant's therapy throughout the Dialectic. It insists that we can properly neither assert nor deny things of transcendent objects. 14. It might be complained that Kant does not distinguish principles of understanding and reason, but the temptations to endorse transcendence arise from both sets of concepts; from pure unschematized categories and from such Ideas of reason as those of unity or system or completeness. 15. That claim has been rejected by traditionalist commentators. One example of such a view was discussed in chapter 10.2. 16. These examples all stem from Wittgenstein's later philosophy in Philosophical Investigations and the connection with Kant is underlined in chapter 24.2. 17. It might be added not only that so construed the claim becomes trivial but that it may also suggest some infallible truth about noumenal objects.

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18. Leibniz's position is qualified in various ways. In the Discourse on Metaphysics §13 he outlines one major qualification: I assert that connection or sequence is of two kinds. The one is absolutely necessary, whose contrary implies a contradiction; this kind of deduction holds in the case of eternal truths, such as those of geometry. The other is only necessary by hypothesis, and, so to speak, by accident: It is contingent in itself, since its contrary does not imply a contradiction. . . . all contingent truths have reasons for being thus rather than otherwise . . . they have a priori proofs of their truth which make them certain and show that the connection between subject and predicate . . . has its basis in the nature of one or the other. (Philosophical Writings, 2 3 - 2 4 ) Earlier, in §8, Leibniz had said: "The subject-term . . . must always include the predicate-term, in such a way that a man who understood the notion of the subject perfectly would also judge that the predicate belongs to it. That being so, we can say that it is in the nature of an individual substance, or complete being, to have a notion so complete that it is sufficient to contain, and render deducible from itself, all predicates of the subject to which this notion is attributed." (Philosophical Writings, 18)

These claims may be consistent, but some work needs to be done to make them clear. Kant is right that it is in this context that Leibniz outlines and derives his principle of the identity of indiscernibles at §9 (Philosophical Writings, 19). 19. The Fourth Paralogism A has a dubious reputation, considered in chapter 27, but there is no doubt that it constructs a veil of perception argument in which the causal relation between outer objects and the senses is uncertain. Kant's response is to charge the argument with the fallacies of ambiguity between "outer object" as "spatial phenomenon" or as "transcendent thing in itself." Effectively Kant claims that the argument conjures up a reference to inaccessible "outer" objects and supposes that this casts doubt on outer phenomenal objects. Chapter 23 THE WIDER THEORETICAL CONTEXT OF KANT'S APPEAL TO THINGS IN THEMSELVES 1. Many of Adickes's passages were discussed in my Kant's Theory of Knowledge chaps. 1, 2, and 3, but because of its limited aim I did not include all the detail provided here, and did not explicitly identify Adickes as the target. The detailed views outiined here were, however, already available to me during the late 1950s. Gerold Prauss's work reviews Adickes's evidence in even greater detail. 2. Adickes's account sees a similarity between Kant's views and those of Leibniz, which is canvassed by other commentators such as Ameriks in Kant's Theory of Mind and Rae Langton in Kantian Humility. The attempt to assimilate Kant's position to that of Leibniz faces severe difficulties in the light of Kant's criticisms of Leibniz in the Amphiboly and Ideal. Kant speaks of his own philosophy as a "true apology" for Leibniz, but commentators differ about what that amounts to. I suggest one answer in chapter 30, but it discloses a major disagreement between the two doctrines. 3. Adickes makes this point clear in Kant und das Ding an Sich (Berlin: Pan Verlag, Rolf Heise, 1924), chap. 1, 10-11, where he critcizes Schopenhauer, Riehl, Standinger, and Wernicke for having ascribed such a causal inference to Kant. For Adickes the belief in the existence of things in themselves is "unargued" and "self-evident." In the Fourth Paralogism A Kant rejects the

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Notes to Pages 214-229 traditional idealist argument to the existence of things in themselves via causality and to that extent Adickes is right, but it does not follow that Kant was committed to the existence of things in themselves as an unargued, self-evident assumption. Rejection of that idealist argument is compatible with no such commitment to things in themselves.

4. It has become common among contemporary commentators to disregard Kant's distinction between an empirical and a transcendental treatment of topics as too obscure, and I discuss one example in chapter 27. Yet many contemporary philosophers accept a distinction between the way philosophy deals with its topics and the way that scientists deal with the corresponding topics, and this is incorporated in Kant's contrast. 5. I pay no specific attention to the Opus Postumum here for the reason that Adickes's examination shows no greater commitment to things in themselves in that later work. But it is worth adding that of the two common views of that later work which Forster identifies in his editorial introduction to the Cambridge edition, namely, that it is the brilliant culmination of Kant's philosophy, or that it has very litde value, I take the latter. There is a serious issue in that final text about philosophy of science, as Michael Friedman shows in his Kant and the Exact Sciences, but beyond that the metaphysical claims are obscure and repetitious. 6. Adickes's complaint seems to have been against any attempt to understand a historical philosopher in contemporary terms. I have taken the view that many contemporary doctrines, phenomenalism, semantic varificationism, semantic externalism, and others thought to have some echo in Kant are not expressed in his text. 7. Gerold Prauss's books, but especially his Kant und das Problem der Dinge an Sich, provide that greater detail in generally offering a different view from that of Adickes. His view is close to mine, but not the same. But I have not thought it worthwhile to mark those differences here in the light of the far greater agreement between us. 8. There is some awkwardness in speaking, as Adickes does (Kant und das Ding an Sich, chap. 5, 84-86) of "absolute" and "relative" meaninglessness, but what he intends to express is quite correct, namely that Kant allows some meaning to a transcendent use of categories. Adickes does better in this respect than those recent commentators who ascribe a verificationist semantics to Kant, and then criticize him for hedging on the meaning of such transcendent uses. It would be better to express the point by talking of such uses having some "residual meaning" for Kant, but the difficulty reflects the fact noted earlier that Kant does not have an adequate semantic theory. Neither do we. 9. The supposed fundamental superiority attaching to things in themselves in Kant is a common view. See, for example, the earlier references to Strawson in chapter 1 and the later comments on Karl Ameriks in this chapter. 10. There are difficulties in identifying "conceivable" and "possible," which I have not considered. (See, e.g., E. Zalta, "Logical and Analytic Truths that Are Not Necessary," Journal of Philosophy 85 [1988], and S. Yablo, "Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 [1993]). Kant does not engage these problems, pardy because his strict formulation of the argument turns on "conceivability" rather than "possibility." That does not avoid all the problems, but in addition Kant is speaking in this context of bare logical conceivability, that is, that the concepts "thing in itself' and "noumenon" are at least consistent (B310-11).

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11. The central point in Kant's claim here is that of the ambiguity of the term "object" or "object in general," which points in one way, erroneously, towards inaccessible things in themselves, and in another, correctly, towards objects of experience. Adickes recognizes something of this, but he did not follow that insight. Had he done so his view of Kant's claimed commitment to things in themselves would surely have been modified. The two Janus faces of the term "object" in Kant match the two faces of reason noted earlier in chapter 2. 12. This is the usual hesitation, noted frequently already, between viewing transcendent references as meaningless or as cognitively empty. 13. Kemp Smith translates: "Since time is merely the form of intuition and so of objects as appearances that in the objects which corresponds to sensation is [not] the transcendental matter of all objects as things in themselves (thinghood, reality)" (B182). There is strong reason to interpolate the [not] as Kemp Smith did. 14. This provides another passage where Kant speaks of (transcendental) appearances "of" objects. It has been noted before that the " o f " relation may be understood in different ways, but that Kant's account of it as providing an "object for [zu] appearances," or as resulting from "rules for the exposition of appearances" (A106, A108, A l l l ) , marks a difference from traditional idealist, or phenomenalist, relations. It has to make room for the claim that the objects " o f " appearances are themselves appearances. 15. The use of the term "outside" in the quotation is conditioned by Kant's recognition of its two senses in the Fourth Paralogism A373. Kant does not explicidy distinguish these senses in this passage, but it is clear that he means "outer, spatial objects," and not "outer, transcendent objects," that is, things in themselves. There is also the possibility that it means "apart from subjects," but the earlier discussion in chapter 8 showed that this may not be significantiy different from the former. 16. Kant's notion of a metaphysical Grund should not be understood as a "ground" or "reason," or as a traditional "foundation" for knowledge. The notion is discussed in chapter 29. 17. The disagreement with Eberhard over his conception of a metaphysical Grund is discussed in chapter 29. 18. B310-11: "If the objective reality of a concept cannot be known, while yet the concept contains no contradiction and at the same time is connected with other modes of knowledge that involve given concepts which it serves to limit, I entitle that concept 'problematic'. The concept of a 'noumenon' . . . is not in any way contradictory. For we cannot assert of sensibility that it is the sole possible kind of intuition. . . . That is to say we have an understanding which problematically extends further, but we have no intuition, and not even a concept of a possible intuition through which objects outside the field of sensibility can be given, and through which the understanding can be employed assertorically beyond that field." The passage incorporates related doctrines noted earlier, for example, epistemic modesty and the diagnosis of philosophical error through hypostatizing the role of pure understanding and its a priori concepts. 19. Susan Neiman in her The Unity of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 112-14 discusses and criticizes Vaihinger's claim that ideas of reason are fictions, and quotes passages where Kant denies the claim (B371, B597).

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Notes to Pages 214-229 Although she does not put her conclusion in these terms it is consistent with the view expressed here, namely, that ideas of reason may deceive if we misconstrue their legitimate role. So it is a mistake to hypostatize or personalize such ideas, that is, to treat them as having "objective reality," and in that construction they are fictions. But in their legitimate regulative role they are, or may be, important and not fictional.

20. Kant's view is that philosophers have constructed different ways of conceiving and talking about "objects" and "objects in general," but that it is a mistake to regard these as always differentiating objects that we can discriminate. 21. Kant demonstrates in this general respect an interest in differentiating different discourses of the kind discussed in chapter 15.2. Clive Cazeaux's "Kant and Metaphor in Kant's Aesthetics" discusses the issue in Kantian Review 8 (2004). 22. This makes clear one of Adickes's background convictions that Kant's Critical epistemology retains much of Leibniz's philosophy. That conviction drives also Rae Langton's Kantian Humility and Karl Ameriks's Kant's Theory of Mind. I discuss one aspect of the latter's view in 23.4. 23. At B880 Kant claims that metaphysics was originally inclined to "begin" with transcendent interests in the existence of God, but that strictly these should come at the end of such an enquiry as they do in the Critique. The work ends with a proper appreciation of the legitimate role and illegitimate conception of such transcendent Ideas. This suggests that such Ideas should function not as assumed premises in metaphysics, as Adickes thought, but only as conclusions to the investigation into the authority of philosophy. Kant's central point is evidently to deny philosophy any cognitive authority in those transcendent realms. 24. These considerations show something of the special character of a metaphysical Grund for Kant. The issue is considered finally in chapter 29. 25. Manfred Kiihn, Kant, a Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 26. Neiman (Unity of Reason, 125-29) characterizes two aspects of the doctrine as involving the greater importance and the greater power of practical reason. She also usefully, and I believe correctly, identifies some misunderstandings about the differences between theoretical and practical reason, for example, that practical reason can be understood to provide genuine knowledge of a realm of things in themselves. As she points out such a view fails in the light of Kant's own strict limits on what can count as knowledge, which exclude knowledge of things in themselves. Even Adickes rightly acknowledges that limit and for that reason regards the commitment to things in themselves as an unargued assumption. Chapter 24 THE APPARATUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL THERAPY OF THE DIALECTIC 1. "Hyperphysical" is a term Kant uses to mean "transcendent." 2. Kant may be criticized for not distinguishing clearly between reason and understanding, or criticized for trying to make the distinction too rigid. There

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are natural reasons to expect the roles of understanding and reason to overlap. For one thing, both pure concepts of the understanding and Ideas of reason have a built in temptation to encourage illusory forays into the transcendent. 3. "Going transcendental" in all contexts is Kant's attempt to identify the underlying presuppositions of some system of belief. It occurs as one factor in a set of mutually related concepts in such a holistic system, and cannot properly be regarded as traditional foundations for knowledge or morality. One essential factor in Kant's conception is that the Grund is to be not merely prior to other subsidiary concepts in the system but a priori. 4. Kant abandons the idea that in the speculative context reason can simply bring about truths, since it has to wait upon the circumstances. But in morality and politics Ideas can take effect. The restriction on the speculative use of reason underlines again the absurdity of ascribing to Kant the crude doctrine of the "mind making nature." 5. Norbert Hinske, Zwischen Aufklarung Frommen-Holzboog, 1998).

und Vernunftkritik

(Stuttgart:

6. Kant is cavalier about this and uses "principle" to cover rules of understanding as well. There is bound to be some overlap between the cases but there is a distinction to be drawn between Ideas which have only a regulative use and others which have the possibility of a constitutive use. 7. J. Bennett in Kant's Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974) is particularly critical of Kant's therapy, and his views are considered in chapter 28. 8. The belief that undue philosophical emphasis on abstract concepts is liable to produce errors is generally plausible. Such an account was offered by Berkeley in Principles of Human Knowledge in criticizing Locke, and forms part of Wittgenstein's therapy in focusing on particular examples rather than constructing general theories. Kant evidendy has a similar motivation, but his views have sometimes been understood to produce the opposite effect. Van Cleve, in Problems from Kant, provides such an example which is discussed in chapter 29. 9. In the pre-Critical period the suggestion in Schonfeld 2000 seemed to be that metaphysics might dictate to the sciences by adding a qualitative factor to the merely quantitative features of natural science. A large part of Kant's revolution in the Critical philosophy consists in abandoning this ambitious role for metaphysics and leaving it with a more modest but more realistic goal. A proper modesty in philosophy is a central theme in the Doctrine of Method considered in chapter 29. 10. Progress towards more specific developments seems to be a primarily scientific activity while regress towards more general elements seems to be primarily metaphysical. Kant seems to envisage no formal dividing line between science and metaphysics, so it is not surprising that some commentators, such as Bennett in Kant's Dialectic, complain that Kant is unclear or confused. But there is no reason why he should not connect the two, just as he connects an overlapping understanding and reason. In chapter 28, I examine Bennett's complaints in more detail. 11 Kant tends to represent the steps in such an enquiry as deductive, or deductive-related, but that may be only because he thinks dogmatic rationalists take that view.

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Notes to Pages 214-229

12. The danger in these abstract concepts or Ideas is that we may step from legitimate queries about immanent experience to illegitimate questions about transcendent objects, to commit the "subreption" of confusing appearances and things in themselves. It is typical of Kant that he is less interested in using the terms than in stepping back and asking what they signify. 13. B359-61: "A distincuon is commonly drawn between what is immediately known and what is merely inferred." 14. Bennett, Kant's Dialectic, 267. 15. Michelle Grier's Kant's Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) surveys the Dialectic very helpfully. 16. If this view is correct then the attempt to assimilate Kant's views in the Critique to those of Leibniz must be severely constrained. In chapter 30, I suggest what the real relation between them is, and the sense in which Kant's philosophy might be seen as "the true apology for Leibniz." 17. The distinction between radical revolutionaries and others is not totally clearcut. Although the Logical Positivists rejected much of earlier metaphysics, as they conceived it, they nevertheless believed that their new logical methods might resolve traditional epistemological problems such as skepticism about the external world, or other minds. 18. In a more literary way it is interesting to compare the similar change in attitudes of Kant and Wittgenstein as they move from earlier to later works. The Prefaces to Tractatus and the first Critique are optimistic and ambitious, but those to Philosophical Investigations and the second edition of the Critique are more guarded and pessimistic. 19. Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1953), Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1956), Blue and Brown Books (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), On Certainty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969). 20. It is worth recalling Kant's opening claims in the Prolegomena preface where he urges those interested in metaphysics to set aside everything that has been done in its name in the past and to step back and ask if metaphysics is possible at all (Ak. 4.255). 21. On Certainty, §614: "if I were contradicted on all sides and told that this person's name was not what I had always known it was . . . then in that case the foundation of all judging would be taken away from me." §494: "I cannot doubt this proposition without giving up all judgement." 22. Remarks on the Foundation of Mathematics, 1.125: "When we do philosophy we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the expressions of civilized men, put a false interpretation on them, and then draw queer conclusions." 23. Kant denies that he appeals to "common human understanding" to refute skepticism in the Prolegomena preface. Both Kant and Wittgenstein use that common understanding as a datum in order to understand experience and its structure rather than to defend it against skepucism. 24. Kant is interested in general system-building in metaphysics but it is not obvious that he abuses this interest.

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25. McDowell (Mind and World, 77) talks of "rampant Platonism" and identifies it as a "supernaturalism." 26. The point was discussed in chapter 15.2 in connection with Wright's Truth and Objectivity. 27. Zalta (Abstract Objects, 148): "the Platonists who accept Tarski's theory of truth both mistakenly suppose that mathematical assertions are literally true, and fail to distinguish the quantifier 'there is' from 'there exists'." 28. Friedrich Waismann's Introduction to Mathematical Thinking carried out a Wittgensteinian project of distinguishing the different types of abstract object to be found in arithmetic and mathematics. 29. The result is the natural but trivial claim that possibilities and numbers exist in the way they do. 30. Other commentators, such as Guyer (Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, 337-40) have made the same criticism. 31. It is characteristic of traditionalist interpretations to regard Kant as committed to an exhaustive dualism of mental experiences (ideas) and (real, independent) things in themselves. Van Cleve's argument rests on that traditionalist assumption, noted in chapter 1. Chapter 25 THE PARALOGISMS 1. Because Kant expresses the point in terms of his faculty psychology they may seem unacceptable, but it was shown in chapter 24 that these terms can be understood functionally. Sensibility is the function of particularizing; understanding that of generalizing or conceptualizing; and reason is that of inferring or reasoning. 2. Later in the chapter I examine the doctrine of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM) which is often ascribed to Kant. Anyone who accepts such an account is likely to miss the central point that the Paralogisms rejects a transcendent theory of the self. It is not primarily designed to throw light direcdy on the character of the empirical self. 3. Kant's diagnosis of the errors in the Paralogisms committed by dogmatic rationalists follows the general pattern from B88-89 and B186-87 and pursued throughout the Dialectic. It presupposes the model of an abstract representation of a priori elements in experience which are then mistakenly taken to stand for "real," transcendent objects. The point was made in my "Kant's Account of Psychology in the Paralogisms," Kant-Studien 91 (2000). 4. The claim echoes Kant's reallocation of idealist priorities in the Refutation of Idealism. The notion of "substance" has its primary application to outer objects and to matter. 5. Kant distinguishes "empirical" and "transcendental" dualism at A379 and A389. Empirical dualism accepts the empirical conceptions of "mind" and "outer objects" or "body," and an empirical psychology which investigates the laws connecting these items. It is a summary of the commitments of his

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Notes to Pages 214-229 empirical realism. Transcendental (better transcendent) dualism is the view of the rational psychologists that mind and matter are two separate noumenal substances. Kant's rejection of a real cognitive commitment to noumena means that such a dualism is mistaken. Kant's arguments throughout the Paralogisms, especially in the second, trade on this general point.

6. The point trades on Kant's distinction between the determining and the determinable self, introduced in the Deduction. These expressions should not be understood as designating distinct, specific objects. They stand for the difference between a spontaneous thinking on one side and the passive presentations to inner sense on the other. But in both cases to have genuine knowledge of the relevant object, the empirical self, both sense and understanding are required. The determining self appears to inner sense just as physical objects appear to outer sense; but it should be remembered that this use of "appear" is Kant's technical, transcendental, not the colloquial, use. 7. I have altered the official translation but without changing the sense of the passage. Kant indicates, for example, at A359-60, that he has a clear conception of the immanent, phenomenal context of our ordinary conception of the self, and its distinction from his transcendental account of it. 8. Kant would be sympathetic to the argument since he effectively uses it in his reference to Zeno's paradoxes at B530. 9. Parfit's Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) is an example of an emphasis on continuity in our understanding of persons. 10. William James makes the point in Principles of Psychology, 1.340-401. 11. It is not clear whether in the argument all causal inferences are taken to be dubious or only those involving outer objects and the senses. The latter is particularly involved in idealist skepticism about the external world since it produces at once a "veil of perception" doctrine which makes it impossible to gain the required independent access to that world which the skeptic requires. 12. The relevant views of Adickes and Gardner were considered in chapters 23 and 2.1.1.

13. Stroud takes the view that Kant's appeals to the immediacy of our perception of outer objects at A378 and in the Aesthetic is an attempt to prove that traditional idealism is mistaken. It is difficult to see what it proves against such an idealism and I have construed it as a report, conformably with the project of a descriptive inventory, of the phenomenology of perception. It denies idealism but does not demonstrate its falsity. Kant's proof that idealism is mistaken is provided in the Refutation of Idealism (chapter 21). 14. It is characteristic of traditionalist accounts of Kant that he is taken to hold an exhaustive dualism of "empirical ideas" and "transcendent objects," despite the fact that his classifications of transcendental and empirical realism and idealism are more complex. Even where the ambiguity is noted (Bounds of Sense, 112) that exhaustive dichotomy may still be applied. 15. Colin McGinn, The Problem of Consciousness (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) is cited by Karl Ameriks and P. Carruthers as one who holds the view that consciousness is irredeemably mysterious.

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16. In Quassim Cassam's Self and World, Kant's position is described as: "The self is not a piece of the world because, to put it crudely, that which 'makes' the world cannot simply be an element in the world which it makes" (11-12). Cassam evidently has some qualms about that "crude" view but it seems that he endorses it. 17. I have suggested that to treat "the world" as signifying only the "physical world" is potentially misleading. It suggests that the mind is outside the world and so irredeemably mysterious. It is feasible to hold that the mind is distinctively separate from the physical world, but this can be taken in two ways. The mind might be regarded as a supernatural item, or it might be regarded as having an essentially nonphysical character such as "intentionality." Only the latter is a serious, but still an unclear view. 18. I have added "type" to Cassam's text because that is his view. Later he uses the idea of a "form" but I claim that this rests on a misunderstanding. 19. It is not clear but the temptation is to think that the argument rests on the noted confusion between Kant's method of philosophical abstraction and a Lockean empiricist account of concept learning by abstraction. Whether that is so or not there is no doubt that Cassam's appeal to the "type-token" distinction is part of an empiricist assumption. 20. It was noted earlier in chapters 15 and 23 that Kant's notion of a transcendental "object" or "subject" is a device used to mark the alternative ways of understanding the notion of an object in general. In one, for Kant erroneous, way it refers to supposed transcendent noumena; in the other, accepted, way it refers to our immanent experience of phenomena or objects of experience. 21. R. Harrison took this view in "Strawson on Outer Objects." Philosophical Quarterly 20 (1970). 22. It is important to recognize this aspect of Kant's transcendental enquiry, that it does not concern particular occurrent circumstances of utterance or of self knowledge. It is incompatible with interpretations of Kant's view in terms of immunity to error through misidentification. 23. D. Rosenthal's "actualist" HOT theory and P. Carruthers's "dispositional" HOT theory, are directed at providing an "explanation" for a unity of consciousness, but neither the explanation nor the item to be explained are directly relevant to Kant's enquiry. Kant is not explaining consciousness but identifying an aspect of consciousness, its "unity," as a necessary condition of possible experience. The point was discussed in chapter 16. It seems to me quite unclear whether either HOT theory can succeed in the task, which relies on an obscure belief in a "deep" problem of consciousness, and requires that a self-referential belief explains rather than merely manifests that consciousness. 24. The issue of personal identity over time is an extensive issue. In chapter 16, I argued that this was not Rant's primary concern in the Transcendental Deduction. 25. "Kant's Account of Psychology in the Paralogisms," Kant-Studien 91 (2000),

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Chapter 26 THE MATHEMATICAL ANTINOMIES 1. Hinske, Zwischen Aufklarung und Vernunftkritik, has an extended discussion of the historical background. 2. Both Wittgenstein and Kant modify their views on the faults in philosophy which lead to dialectical illusions. Wittgenstein admits that the mistakes are not "stupid" errors; and Kant recognizes that they are unavoidable, even though we can take steps to recognize the illusion. 3. Logic and self-evidence are naturally associated for Kant with reason, inference, enquiry generally, and reasoning. 4. There is disagreement about Kant's commitment to a noumenal, monadic substance. He talks of the immanent reality of phenomenal substance as "comparative" and characterizes the traditional, rationalist view of substance as eigentlich, but in chapter 22.2, I argued that Kant is not endorsing but seriously criticizing Leibniz's view of this in the monadology. 5. Kant's conception of an ultimate metaphysical Grund is the locus for a range of different views about his commitment to noumena. It is natural to treat it, as Adickes did, as a foundational premise on which Kant's whole account is based, but I have rejected this in chapter 23. The issue is considered in chapters 9 and 23 and summarized in chapter 29. 6. One of the complaints made about Kant's account of the distinction between constitutive and regulative principles in the Dialectic turns on a distinction between regarding the principles of reason as scientific or metaphysical principles. Bennett in Kant's Dialectic takes it that the relevant principles of reason are scientific hypotheses, and then claims that Kant tells no "believable tale" about them. In chapter 28,1 discuss the issue and argue that Bennett has misunderstood the role of such principles. Although they can be related to heuristic devices in science, they are basically metaphysical principles. 7. Kant refers to quaestiones domesticae at B507-8. His comment there is that it is surprising, but true, that philosophy has the requirement of resolving all its questions even if the resolution amounts to showing that "no answer is the only answer." The Antinomies remain problems for metaphysics, even though they arise out of nonphilosophical disciplines. 8. The point is connected to the ban on indirect transcendental proofs in the Doctrine of Method at B810. 9. This more modest conception of metaphysics is an advance on Kant's more dogmatic pre-Critical views. The general point was made in relation to Schonfeld's The Philosophy of the Young Kant in the notes to chapter 24.9. 10. The predicate "valid" is presumably not susceptible of degrees, but Kant suggests that the arguments are on a par, equally good or equally bad. 11. It may be objected that only one side in the Antinomies is dogmatic and the other skeptical, but Kant also indicates that both skeptic and dogmatist are equally "dogmatic" although they differ in that one asserts and the other denies a proposition in a context where neither can have any knowledge.

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12. Kant makes a number of references to "proper," or "strict," or "true" substance (cf. B579n and B520). These tend to be references to the relevant noumena which Kant regards as radically problematic. I have suggested that a better translation than "true" would be "strict" since the latter does not endorse the conception which Kant regards as problematic. 13. See Schonfeld's The Philosophy of the Toung Kant. 14. Commentators have disagreed over the implications of the Antinomies for the full doctrine of transcendental idealism, and the issue is discussed in this chapter, section 4. 15. C. Posy's "Kant's Mathematical Realism," Monist 67 (1984) offered an intuitionist account of the Antinomies. Van Cleve examines that account and the more general view in Problems from Kant, 220-23, and came to the right conclusion that the attribution is anachronistic. To be fair to Posy he also made that point. 16. These issues are discussed in S. Hawking, The Big Bang and Black Holes (Singapore: World Scientific, 1993) and in S. Hawking and J. Penrose, The Nature of Space/Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996). 17. Hawking says that "The condition is virtually unverifiable by observation," and that "there is no information on the observability of singularities" in The Nature of Space/Time. He adds in The Big Bang and Black Holes (Singapore: World Scientific, 1993) that "theory definitely had the lead over observation." 18. In line with the admitted deficiencies of observational evidence Hawking points out that the conclusions arrived at about "bouncing" consist of showing that such a phenomenon either is, or is not, compatible with some mathematical model for the universe. In Hawking on the Big Bang and Black Holes he says: "Presumably this would have implied that the universe had a contracting phase and some sort of bounce before the present expansion which was ruled out on theoretical grounds by the singularity theorems Penrose and I proved" (529-30). The same point is made more generally in Hawking, Black Holes and Baby Universes (London: Bantam, 1994). In other places he refers to "the models for which the expansion eventually reverses." All these claims underline the theoretical and logical character of the arguments. 19. Hawking is aware of the metaphysical implications of his views, and of disagreements he has with Penrose in The Nature of Space/Time, chapt. 7, p. 121. He calls Penrose a Platonist on the ground that his theories about the physical universe are purely mathematical; a consistent, and very sophisticated, mathematical model for the universe is simply assumed to be true of physical reality. Hawking calls himself a Positivist, but seems unsure of his position since he says: "I don't demand that a theory corresponds with reality, since I don't know what it is. All I'm concerned with is that the theory should predict the results of experiments . . . and observation." He does not explain why, for a Positivist, agreement with experiment and observation should not count as corresponding with reality. 20. Strawson makes this assumption even though he recognizes (Bounds of Sense, 112) that Kant's claim that space and time are "ideas" "in us" is ambiguous and presumably cannot be taken just in the ordinary empirical sense to assert a mental property of some subject or subjects.

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Notes to Pages 214-229

21. Large cosmological issues clearly raise the question of testability of opposed theories, as the account of Hawking and Penrose illustrated. It is difficult to see what an additional idealist commitment to a world of purely private experiences could add to this. Kant plainly has no need to advert to a traditional idealism to resolve the cosmological Antinomies in the way indicated, but the claim is that his resolution is not of that kind. Chapter 27 THE THIRD ANTINOMY: FREEDOM OF THE WILL 1. The discussion rests on the account given in chapters 19-20 of Kant's general causal principle (GCP) of the Second Analogy as constitutive, not regulative, and his current view in the Antinomy that what conflicts with transcendental freedom is a purely regulative principle of universal determinism. 2. It has been pointed out that Kant regards metaphysics as "conceptual" but not analytically conceptual. The issue is discussed in chapter 29. 3. P. Van Inwagen's An Essay on Free Will (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983) contains a complex analysis of the freewill/determinism issue. His central claim is that the only serious threat to free will arises from the belief that everything, including human action, is necessitated by prior causal conditions. He agrees with Kant that the threat arises from that notion of a completed causal series in which every event has its necessary place in the order of world states. Kant thinks that there is room for freedom even on this assumption and Van Inwagen denies this. Both agree that a Humean compatibilism is inadequate to refute such a deterministic view. 4. This explains why Kant thinks indirect arguments are inappropriate in transcendental proofs (B810). In the dialectical contexts it is relatively easy to object to the opposition, but impossible, according to Kant, ever to establish either of the opposed views. 5. It has been noted before that Kant distinguishes his strict transcendental claims from their empirical realizations. The former are pure a priori the latter are not, but in realizing the categories they provide an empirical example of their use. 6. It is not obvious that a failure to have a complete explanation in Kant's sense casts any doubt on the relative and restricted causal explanations normally offered. The requirement for completeness is in any case never satisfied, and if that is a condition for the adequacy of a particular causal explanation, then no such explanation satisfies the test. 7. Kant makes the claim that without a resolution of the Antinomy neither freedom nor causality can survive at B571. The suggestion for causality seems to be the point noted above that to require a complete explanation is never satisfied. 8. I oudined the qualifications Rant explicitly make to his conclusion in Kant's Theory of Knowledge, chap. 12. 9. The debate between Bennett and Wood is recorded in Self and Nature in Kant's Philosophy, ed. Allen Wood (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), chapter 3.

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10. The point was made in H. Frankfurt, "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971), 15-20. 11. Van Inwagen, Essay on Free Will, criticizes compatibilist theories in chapter I. 12. Van Inwagen has an argument against compatibilism (Essay on Free Will, 17) which turns on his claim that a man locked in a room who wants to stay there "has no free will" about staying there and yet "stays there of his own free will." It seems odd to use that latter description, but the former presumably rests on the fact that his staying or leaving the room is constrained. 13. That is the natural conclusion to draw from the passage in which Kant effectively concedes Van Inwagen's appeal to determinism. If every event in the universe is causally necessitated by antecedent events in a complete causal series, then the argument goes we cannot be free, and in that case a compatibilist position is set aside. 14. Henry Allison refers to "prescinding" and what he takes Irwin to claim in Kant's Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 33-34, 35. 15. I had noted a similarity of structure between moral and prudential considerations in Kant's account in Kant's Theory of Knowledge, chap. 12. Although Kant separates morality from prudence he regards them both as responding to a similar set of conditions. Prudence involves only hypothetical imperatives and is a posteriori, but it is not an immediate response to some stimulus coupled with a desire. 16. This is a typical strategy in Kant, in which he reverses the idealist priority of inner experience over outer, an empiricist priority of specific causal laws over a general principle of causality, and at B841-42 a Utilitarian priority for happiness over morality. 17. B826: "In respect of all three (freedom, immortality, God) the merely speculative interest of reason is very small; and for its sake we should hardly have undertaken the labour of transcendental investigation." 18. Although Henry Allison attributes the view to Irwin it seems to be as a derived consequence of his view rather than actually asserted by him in Self and Nature in Kant's Philosophy. 19. The point was discussed in relation to the Transcendental Deduction in chapter 16.3. 20. An account of nonanalytic conceptual dependence is given in chapter 29, and related to Kant's notions of holism and necessity. 21. Kant undoubtedly talks of acts of the intelligible character but such language is only as comprehensible as that of intelligible character itself. Kant's usual position, in relation to psychological phenomena which have an empirical and a transcendental aspect, is to say that the acts are empirical occurrences but their transcendental significance cannot be regarded as a further "hidden" act of a transcendent or noumenal kind. 22. B836: "The idea of a moral world has, therefore objective reality, not as referring to an object an intelligible intuition (we are unable to think such an object) but as referring to the sensible world viewed however as being an object of pure reason in its practical employment. . . . "

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Notes to Pages 2 1 4 - 2 2 9 Chapter 28 THE FOURTH ANTINOMY, IDEAL, AND APPENDIX TO THE DIALECTIC

1. B610n: "This ideal of the ens realissimum, although a mere representation, is first realised, that is made into an object, then hypostatised, and finally by the natural progress of reason towards the completion of unity, personified." 2. See my "Tradition and Revolution in Kant," Proceedings of the Eighth International Kant Congress 1, pt. 3 (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1995). 3. At B605 Kant allows that even the concept of "God" has a transcendental sense. 4. At B651 Kant talks "sinking into the abyss of nothingness" and of an anxiety to find an "absolute necessity to stop the mere contingency of the endless chain of causes." Kant is sympathetic to these feelings but he declines to endorse them. He is not approving the anxiety or suggesting that the search for an absolute necessity to allay the anxiety is worthwhile. On the contrary he thinks that like all Ideas of reason it is inevitable that we have it, but it has no genuine constitutive role. The issue is explored in chapter 29. 5. William James's account of the squirrel is in Pragmatism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978), 27-28. 6. Kant refers to Zeno's paradoxes and the need for category discipline at B530. 7. In Prolegomena §59 Kant talks of "symbolic analogies" with which we might begin to have some understanding of transcendent objects, but he regards these as severely limited. 8. Kant explored he same idea in Phenomena and Noumena which was discussed in chapter 22. 9. Some discussion of these issues was given in chapters 5.3, and 15.2.1. 10. Kant echoes the claims noted in the Prolegomena §59. 11. A. Plantinga wrote about Kant's objections to the ontological argument in "Kant's Objections to the Ontological Argument," Journal of Philosophy 63 (1966). 12. In most cases of Ideas of reason the danger is that philosophers misuse the concepts by thinking that they designate some intelligible entity, but in the case of the supreme being the concept itself signifies such an object. In both cases we have no ground to infer the actual existence of a corresponding object. 13. Hume on Religion, ed. R. Wollheim (New York: Meridian Books, 1963) includes the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 14. The issue was discussed in chapter 15.2.2 in relation to Wright's project in Truth and Objectivity of examining the realist/antirealist commitment in different forms of discourse.

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15. In the discussion of Wright in chapter 15.2.2 it was suggested that Kant would have opposed both a "rampant" Platonism of the kind McDowell (Mind and World, 77) describes as "supernaturalism" but also a milder form which attempts to establish the existence of abstract objects from internal criteria. 16. Kant at various places throughout the Dialectic talks of asserting, assuming, postulating, and positing, but he offers no clear indication of how to differentiate them. 17. Kemp Smith translates urtheilen as "contemplate," which is not wrong but is unusual. 18. In Bennett, Kant's Dialectic (p. 276) Kant is said to treat principles of reason sometimes not as imperatives but as indicatives which describe the world. But the cited passages in Kant do not make this clear and do not conflict with his pervasive claim that the relevant principles, whatever their verbal form, do not assert constitutive truths for us. 19. In Kant's Dialectic, Bennett talks of the possibility of a "sharply pyramidal and utterly comprehensive science" (274) which would enable us to identify the highest genus, but it is difficult to make sense of this. It suggests that we might be able seriously to complete some science when it seems that the most we can achieve is to accept its current forms as the best available and liable to be superseded. 20. Kant does not consider that in certain respects Nature is not especially parsimonious but even quite prodigal. 21. B675: "The hypothetical use of reason based on Ideas viewed as problematic concepts is not, properly speaking, constitutive, that is it is not of such a character that judging in all strictness we can regard it as proving the truth of the universal rule which we have adopted as hypothesis." What Kant here calls the "hypothetical" use of reason is evidendy a procedure in science in which we accept a hypothesis just so long as it withstands falsification. It testifies to Kant's belief that there is a continuous connection between science and metaphysics, but it would be wrong to infer from this that all principles of reason, especially metaphysical principles, are just testable scientific hypotheses. 22. The point is made in my "Reply to Ralph Walker." Chapter 29 THE DOCTRINE OF METHOD 1. Kant is not the only philosopher to succumb to overoptimism about philosophy's future. Austin is alleged to have had the belief that with a group of congenial philosophers he could resolve all philosophical problems in a decade. It is not clear what he meant by this but, like Kant, he may have thought that the old traditional questions could be finally set aside in favor of a more fruitful exercise. I argue in chapter 30 that Kant's optimism was misplaced by about one hundred years, and that the revolution finally effected at the turn of the nineteenth/twentieth centuries was in line with his hopes. 2. See, for example, Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) and Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) for accounts of the links Rorty makes between truth and solidarity.

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3. Kant distinguishes between Grund concepts which have a legitimate realization in experience and others which do not. The transcendental concepts of "God" and "systematic unity" have no such realization, but the formal, abstract categories have such a legitimate use outiined in the Analytic of Principles. In both cases the abstract form of pure concepts may mislead us into thinking that they designate items beyond the world of sense experience. They exemplify the perennial temptation to dialectical illusion which Kant diagnoses and explains in the Dialectic. 4. B763: "Such pretensions are idle claims which can never be satisfied and must divert philosophy from its true purpose, namely to expose the illusions of a reason which forgets its limits, and by sufficiently clarifying our concepts to recall it from its presumptuous speculative pursuits to modest but thorough self-knowledge." The passage testifies to Kant's insistence on a modest role for philosophy, incompatible with transcendent pretensions. 5. The quotation marks again, as in many other noted passages, Kant's insistence on the ultimate contingency of our experience. The point is important in rejecting lines of argument considered in Stroud's discussion of Kant (chapter 11.3.2) and Van Cleve (this chapter, 2.3). Kant's appeal to necessity claims not that our experience can be guaranteed against skeptical doubt but that it has "internal" necessities in its a priori, governing concepts and their making possible certain fundamental objective, true/false, discriminations and judgments in experience. 6. The issue was discussed in chapter 10.1, in connection with Sellars's account of the myth of the given and the question whether the relation he canvassed between " . . . appears . . . " and ". . . is . . ." judgments was mutual. Kant's account of such relations is typically of a mutual dependence, in which, in experience, pure categories both make possible and depend on an a posteriori realization. 7. The issue is discussed primarily in relation to Quine's "holism" in Fodor and Lepore, Holism, a Shopper's Guide (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992). 8. Russell's criticism is in Problems of Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), and Moore's in Some Main Problems of Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1953). Moore's objection, different from Russell's, is that "It never seems to have occurred to Kant to ask how we can know that all men's minds are so constituted as always to act in a certain way." It makes two separate points which have been implicitiy answered in the commentary. The first objection is that Kant never asked how we know about our mental contribution to experience, but that is answered by Kant's proofs of a priority for space, time, and categories, and the connection he then makes between that a priority and our cognitive powers. Kant may be wrong and his proofs invalid, but he plainly did both ask and answer Moore's question. The second objection concerns Kant's apparent generalization to all men's minds and their acts. In this case the objection reflects Moore's assumption that such a generalization must be either empirical and inductive or transcendent, and this is answered by a recognition that Kant's transcendental psychology is neither empirical nor transcendent. Beyond that it has been made clear that Kant's descriptive metaphysics assumes the character of our experience in order to disentangle its a priori features. In that project Kant is not required to justify Moore's generalization. 9. It was pointed out in chapter 24.1.1 that Wittgenstein's On Certainty makes similar claims for certain of the beliefs which he regards as somehow unalterable. He talks of fundamental propositions whose abandonment would mean

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giving up all judgments, or all discrimination between truth and falsity, at §494 and §614. 10. Van Cleve, Problems from Kant, 42: "The leading theory of necessary truth in the twentieth century—that all necessary truth is a matter of convention—is open to the same difficulty, since it is contingent that our conventions are what they are. In this section I air the suspicion that the problem is quite general— that any theory which tries to explain necessity (as opposed to accepting it as ultimate) is bound to fail." Kant talks of "contingency" but not of "convention," and seems to be able to escape from Van Cleve's difficulty. Van Cleve's qualms about necessity seem to rest on the belief that philosophy is required to explain everything, cannot leave anything unexplained, despite the fact that he actually rejects the view later (Problems from Kant, 41-42). Kant offers some explanation of the provenance of our a priori concepts and of their role in experience, but he, quite reasonably, accepts that that experience is ultimately a contingent circumstance, and that neither philosophy nor science can explain everything. 11. Kant does not suggest that the concept of "truth" exhibits an ambiguity of the same kind as the categories. In the latter case his diagnosis of dialectical illusion turns on the distinction between pure, formal, concepts and their sensory realization in experience, and the suggestion is that the former encourage us to think of them as constituting a super-reality of things in themselves unencumbered by any appeal to mere sense experience. In a similar way it might be claimed that we have an ideal, or idealized, concept of "truth" whose legitimate use can only occur in the less ideal circumstances of ordinary experience. To think of truth as an ideal, of "Truth" in the singular with a capital "T," as William James put it, is to conceive of such a final, complete, and unrevisable discovery of an ultimate reality. The same distinction, differentiy explained, can be seen in ideal realist and practical antirealist conceptions of truth. The quotations from Quine's Word and Object in notes 13-14 to chapter 3 make a similar point, and Quine, like Kant, emphasizes the practical (less than ideal and complete) ascription of truth as the only legitimate aspiration in the context. Such a parallel suggests that Kant could have added such an idealized concept of "truth" to the other Grund concepts which are both indispensable in experience and also potentially misleading. In Word and Object Quine makes the following points: It seems likelier . . . that countless alternative theories would be tied for first place. Scientific method is the way to truth, but it affords even in principle no unique definition of truth. . . Have we now so far lowered our sights as to settle for a relativistic doctrine of truth—rating the statements of each theory as true for that theory, and brooking no higher criucism? Not so. The saving consideration is that we continue to take seriously our own particular aggregate science, our own particular world-theory. . . . Within our own total evolving doctrine, we can judge truth as earnesdy and absolutely as can be; subject to correction, but that goes without saying. (23-25)

Evidendy for Quine truth, synonymy, and translation can be adequately achieved within their practical—scientific or linguistic—contexts. Kant has a different conception of "relativity" but would agree with Quine's principal claim. Chapter 30 A CONCLUDING SUMMARY OF TRANSCENDENTAL IDEALISM 1. Kant talks of his own work as the "true apology" for Leibniz in the polemic against Eberhard (Ak. 8.250). I have suggested that Kant acknowledges some

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residual truth in virtually all the philosophical doctrines he rejects, such as idealism, empiricism, and Platonism, and the same evidentiy holds for Leibniz's philosophy. I have taken that residual truth for Kant to be his recognition that Leibniz's "material" monadology cannot be accepted although it points correctly to a purely "formal" conceptual requirement of our experience. The formal necessity for the concepts of an "object in general," and a "noumenon," as correlates of what is presented to the senses is only misconstrued as a genuine reference to material objects of reason hidden behind appearances. 2. In Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, pt. 4, pp. 235, 240, 248-49, 254, 260, and elsewhere. Kant's "metaphysics of transcendental idealism" is described as a "delusion," as "perverse," with a "phantasmagoric quality" and "incantations as inefficacious as spells." It is also said to be "inconsistent" and to "traverse the bounds of intelligibility on any standard." These are extreme complaints which all rest on the dubious attribution to Kant of the traditionalist conception of a transcendent "mind making nature." There is no doubt that Kant regards our experience as in some way "mind-dependent," but there is equally no doubt that he rejected that conception of transcendent psychology. Quinton's "The Trouble with Kant" claims that the "trouble" is that Kant provides no arguments for his claims. Paul Abela makes a reference in Kant's Empirical Realism to "what Buchdahl calls the 'Kant constantly contradicts himself' club" (255n7). 3. McDowell's project, which he thinks Kant got "within a whisker" of resolving, is an issue about coherence or correspondence theories of truth. It was noted in chapters 10, 12, and 13 that McDowell misunderstands Kant's claim that both sense and understanding are required for genuine experience. Kant indicates a general lack of interest in philosophical issues about truth at B82-83. 4. Coffa's The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap: To The Vienna Station claims that Kant's philosophy had the merit of turning philosophers towards a reform of semantics at the end of the nineteenth century because his semantic claims were what Coffa calls a "semantic swamp" (21). Later Coffa partially retracts the claim in saying: "It would be grossly unfair to Kant to say that the main reasons he had for thinking that mathematics involves pure intuition were the semantic considerations examined in the previous chapter" (23). Coffa is right to regard Kant's "semantics" as inadequate, as is ours, but his principal objections to Kant's account of the "analytic/synthetic" and "a priori/a posteriori" distinctions rest on misunderstandings. Later in this chapter I claim that Kant would have welcomed that change and indeed pointed towards it in his own philosophy. 5. The passage at A370, along with others in the Fourth Paralogism A, can be read as a commitment to a Cartesian idealism with its appeal to the cogito, but Kant clearly intended to distance his own view from that of Descartes both in the Transcendental Deduction at B132-33 and throughout the Paralogisms. It is consequently natural to understand the claim as reinforcing the more subtle non-Cartesian account in B §16. It would be equally natural to see such forms of expression in A as Kant's reason for rewriting the Paralogisms in B, and for adding the new Refutation of Idealism. 6. That distinction has encouraged the belief that Kant is giving an account of the relation between inner experiences, subjective ideas, and outer objects in the idealist tradition, but it is clear that Kant uses the contrast in different ways. In the Aesthetic subjectivity amounts to a relativity to human experience and its distinctive cognitive powers, but I have argued that this is not a com-

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mitment to traditional idealism. Objectivity in the Deduction involves the relation between beliefs and truth or falsity, and that cannot properly be understood in that idealist fashion. Kant is at fault for using the terminology and leaving it to commentators at the salient points to clarify it. 7. In Kant's Theory of Knowledge, I had expressed the point in the following way: "Kant's construction is not 'vertical' from low level to higher level descriptions, but 'horizontal' from an indiscriminate manifold to discriminated items within it." (57). Kant's aim is to separate, notionally, a pure sensory manifold without conceptual resources from the conventional descriptions we give of the same content. I am grateful to Paul Abela's Kant's Empirical Realism (p. 59) for his account of the claim and for reminding me of it. The point is further elaborated in Chapters 2 and 10.2, and Van Cleve's misunderstanding about the two "aspect/two worlds" accounts is discussed in chapter 24.3.1. 8. It was noted earlier in chapter 16.3 that traditionalists take Kant to be committed to noumenal selves even if he is not committed to noumenal objects. In that section I argue that §§24-25 in the B Deduction make no such commitment. Van Cleve's quotation is a clear example of such a view, and patently rests on the traditional doctrine of the transcendent "mind making nature." 9. It is not clear that Van Cleve's evident intention of identifying some form of phenomenalism in the passages is properly fulfilled. It rests on a claimed deduction from "to say someone is aware of an appearance . . . is only to say that he is sensing or intuiting in a certain way" to "all objects in space and time (appearances as virtual objects) are logical constructions out of perceivers and their states." But the conclusion is a formulation of a philosophical, phenomenalist theory while the premise can be interpreted as an admitted truth independent of such a theory. All that the premise says is "if X is aware of an appearance (in his sense experience) then he is sensing in some way," and this seems both trivial and uncommitted to any form of logical construction. Perhaps "being aware of' is meant to have some additional significance, but it is not made clear. 10. This objection to traditional idealism is not the same as Strawson's refutation of skepticism in Individuals pp. 35-36, at least as it has been generally understood. The discussion in chapter 11.3 showed that that refutation was understood as making the skeptical conclusion "meaningless," "nonsensical," or even "unformulable," but the incoherence suggested here is in an argument which accepts a premise as a ground for its denial. The earlier discussion in chapters 10.1 and 15.2 of Sellars and Stroud underlined the difficulties in characterizing the "inner experiences" whose priority in experience is an essential part of traditional idealism. The discussion of "virtual objects" in this chapter suggests that the notion does not eliminate those difficulties. 11. The reference is to the Prolegomena appendix at Ak. 4.374-75. Kant attributes to Eleatic idealists up to Berkeley the view that the senses yield only illusion and reason provides truth, and accepts the reverse claim as his own. 12. These expressions are from The Bounds of Sense, 38, 88, 92, 235-36. 13. It is sometimes claimed that Kant commits himself to the reality of things in themselves in the B preface: "For we are brought to the conclusion that we can never transcend the limits of possible experience, though that is precisely what this science (metaphysics) is concerned above all else to achieve. This situation yields . . . just the very experiment by which indirectly we are enabled to prove the truth of this first estimate of our a priori knowledge of reason,

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Notes to Page 770 namely that such knowledge has to do only with appearances and must leave the thing in itself [die Sache an sich selbst] as indeed real per se but as not known by us" (Bxix-xx; my emphasis). It is not clear what "real per se" means, but this is a very meager, and surely inadequate, basis on which to make the claim. It would be natural to take Kant to mean that (transcendental) things in themselves no doubt exist and are real in their fashion even though we have no knowledge of them (B308-9). The claim must be about transcendent things in themselves since he proves the existence and reality of empirical (outer, spatial) things in themselves against idealism in the Refutation of Idealism. The preface passage is an expression of the relativity and modesty of our immanent knowledge, and should be read in conjunction with the discussion of the concepts of "noumenon" and "thing in itself" as necessary conceptual shadows cast by our experience. It would be very odd if in a passage where Kant denies the possibility of transcendent metaphysics he nevertheless commits himself to it and its reality.

14. The description of Kant's complaints against dogmatic rationalism echo the points made in chapter 24.2 in comparing them with Wittgenstein's diagnostic therapy. Wittgenstein likens philosophers to savages at Philosophical Investigations, §194, and Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, 1.125.

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Index

analytic judgment, 22, 50-52, 54-56, 69-71 tests, 69-70 and conceptual, 29-30, 85, 741-44, 746-50 Analytic of Concepts, 445, 595, 611 See also ontology analytic opposites, 611 Anscombe, E., 805, 816 anthropocentricity, 15, 39, 75, 163, 178, 353-55, 466, 478, 489, 597, 662 Anthropologic, 384 anticipations of perception, 429-36, 637 Antinomies, 26-27, 31, 35, 237, 391, 591, 593, 604 Third, 366, 689-718 proofs, 664-70, 693-98, 721-24 mathematical, 661-88 Fourth, 721-27 a posteriori, 22-23, 50, 89-92, 421-26, 430 See also a priori; empirical criteria; empirical enquiries; empirical illustrations; empirical judgment appearances, 2, 4, 8-9, 10-25, 32-34, 40-44, 50, 100-101, 110-15, 117, 122-26, 174-78, 184-85,203,212-19, 282, 380-84, 412, 462-68, 529-30, 533-39, 553-85, 602, 628, 639, 633-37, 648, 698-700, 723, 788, 790, 819, 821, 833

Abela, Paul, 12, 642, 776, 802, 813, 832 absolute reality, 111-12, 158, 171, 175, 184, 244, 320, 342, 349-57, 489, 600-601, 724, 766 abstraction, 22, 44, 52, 66, 81, 103, 119, 127-9, 154—56, 178-79, 223, 300, 401, 595, 621-23, 646-47, 649, 739, 763 abyss, 723, 741, 745, 752-56, 767 Adickes, Erich, xiii, 9, 42, 123-24, 210, 392, 530, 536, 538, 551, 554-80, 641, 773-74, 837-38, 840, 844 aesthetic arguments, 156-64 Allison, Henry, xii, 12, 159, 168, 322-23, 335, 621, 623, 645, 653, 686, 689, 712-17, 776, 778, 792, 794, 796, 806, 811, 821, 827, 849 Ameriks, Karl, 551, 580-5, 626, 628, 631, 634-5, 779-800, 836, 844 Amphiboly, 45-46, 391, 409, 412-13, 504, 524,539-52, 591, 612, 627 anachronism, 1, 15-16, 277, 805-6, 818 Analogies, 389, 404-8, 479-99 First, 406-7, 445-55, 631 Second, 407, 455-72, Third, 407-8, 472-78 analytic apparatus, 22-23, 49-62, 64-71 869

870 a priori, 22, 38-40, 54-56, 64-9, 432-3 and "innate," 31 relative, 75 Appendix dialectic, 727-37 apperception, 66, 260-62, 288-91, 301-3,365-86, 625, 645-54, 659-60, 698, 715-17 Aquila, Richard, 274, 774, 790, 805 arbitrium brutum, 698 Aristotie, 272 as if, 710, 756 atomism, 147, 264 See also holism Austin, J. L., 17, 37, 347, 592, 609, 739, 749, 779-801, 805-6, 812-13 a temporality, 696, 699, 716 awareness, 289-90, 297-99, 326-27, 369-75, 379-384 axioms of intuition, 418-29 Ayer, A. J., 73, 781-82 Baker, G., 804, 820 Baum, Manfred, 310, 809-11 Baumgarten, A. G., 95 Beck, Lewis White, 436-37, 809, 828 Beattie, 235 Bedeutung, 15, 343-44, 400, 600, 749 See also meaning and use Bell, David, 820 Bennett, Jonathan, 13, 53, 56-58, 95, 266, 272-73, 324-25, 487, 667, 730-33, 776, 781, 785, 788, 790, 804-5, 818, 820 Berkeley, George, 2, 5, 8-9, 100, 104, 112, 114-15, 179, 210-12, 218-19, 399,429,439,443, 781, 823, 834, 841 Beth, Evert, 152, 793 black holes, 678-79 "blindness," 100-1, 121, 126-30, 185, 204-6, 280, 302, 382 Bradley, F. H., 340, 783-84, 812 Brittan, Gordon, 76, 152-53, 436-37, 784,793 Brandt, Reinhardt, 259-60, 801-3 Brentano, Franz, 805

Index Brook, Andrew, 315-19, 777, 785, 791, 809 Buchdahl, Gerd, 830 Buroker, Jill, 797 Campbell, John, 655-58 Carnap, Rudolf, 15, 45, 92-96, 265, 245-46, 362-63, 394, 480, 612, 615, 618-19, 780, 786, 801, 841 Cartesianism, xii, 10-12, 31, 39, 44, 105, 114, 142, 501, 505-6, 515-17, 757, 764 cartography, 44, 412, 594-95 Carruthers, Peter, 817, 844 Cassam, Quassim, 324, 625, 627, 629-30, 644-54, 776, 785, 792, 833, 845 category discipline, 45, 590, 722-3, 740, 850 See also Ryle, Gilbert cause, 407-8, 455-78, 479-99 natural/phenomenal, 690, 693 coercive/noncoercive, 702-4 Cazeaux, Clive, 840 Chalmers, David, 817 changes from A to B, 46-48, 25-26 Deduction, 312-13,340-£2 chess models, 74-75, 746-50 choice inhibiting/exhibiting, 702-4 Clarke-Leibniz exchange, 668 coexistence, 472-78 Coffa, Alberto, 793, 854 cogito, 11, 227, 247, 261, 298, 338, 350-51, 321, 343, 350, 366-69, 507, 515 Collins, Arthur, 8, 12, 530, 533, 535-39, 776, 836 combination, 269, 295-97, 331-32 common sense, 37, 99, 118, 123-26, 234-39, 799 See also fruitful bathos common understanding, 739-40, 616,799 compatibilism, 690-91, 700-704 completion, 601-5, 662 concepts for intuitions, 30, 106, 132, 138-39, 166, 279 use/misuse, 742-44 conceptual unity, 331-48, 375-78

Index conditions of sense, 526, 662-63 of possible experience, 32-33, 261,393 consciousness, 147, 292-95, 369-75 constitutive principles, 396, 599, 603, 673, 675, 692, 707, 727-33 construction mathematical, 108, 152-54, 427-28, 438-39 content, 288, 298 See also origin; provenance contingency, 50, 64-66, 78-79, 724-26, 784 continuity, 428-32, 435-36 convergence, 358 Copernicus, 30 Copernican hypothesis, 1, 12, 22, 25, 30-32, 38-40, 74, 131, 281, 410, 614, 761-62 cosmology rational, empirical, 237, 664-80, 745 Dancy, Jonathan, 73 Davidson, Donald, 783, 791, 802, 807,818 Dawkins, Marion, 797, 817 Deduction, 698 A, 282-95 B, 295-305 changes A to B, 25, 47, 312-13, 340-42 preliminaries §14/15, 278-82 modest or ambitious, 320-35 Deduktionsschrift, 274 denseness, 430-31 dependence, 126-30, 198-203, 256-57, 263-65, 274, 289-90, 375-78, 483, 598-601, 744-52, 797 Descartes, 1, 105, 114, 142, 211, 366, 515, 517, 625-26, 635, 775, 796, 814-15, 833 descriptive metaphysics, 15, AA-A6, 780 determinacy, 105, 298, 339, 343-i6, 381, 400-401, 428, 458-59, 494,526-29, 532-33 determinism, 690-93, 705-9, 711-12

871 deviant experiences, 128-29, 333-34, 354, 497 diagnosis, 43-£4, 560-61, 391, 402, 589-94, 622, 636-37, 643-£4, 660, 672-74 See also therapy disquotation, 359 Dissertation, xii, 14, 86, 100, 103, 142, 160, 172, 287, 412, 590, 600, 605, 607-9, 787, 793, 798, 822 Dreams of a Spirit Seer, 600, 605, 671 Doctrine of Method, 16, 21, 30, 436, 524, 591-2, 739-56 dogmatism, 16, 21, 27, 29-30, 35, 49, 231-3, 238-9, 253, 589, 592, 600, 661, 743 and scepticism, 739, 742-4 dualism empirical, 10, 13, 126, 169-72 Dummett, Michael, 777, 785, 817 Easton, Patricia, 801-2, 804, 806 Eberhard, J. A., 546, 559, 568-70, 753-55 Edwards, Jeffrey, 829 empirical criteria, 365-66, 406, 450, 454 empirical enquiries, 23-24, 83-96, 115,201,354-56, 452, 640, 611-12, 693-95, 704-5, 716, 712-17, 776, 843 See also transcendental enquiries empirical illustrations, 396, 794 empirical judgment, 613-14 See also grammatical judgments empiricism, 16, 21-23, 39-iO, 52, 67, 73-77, 80-82, 100, 103-6, 131, 140-41, 158, 161, 194, 251, 264-65, 271-72, 278-79, 293, 301, 346-£7, 405, 443, 447, 461-62, 467-72, 490-99, 650-51, 700-704, 711,737, 740, 745, 757, 762, 764, 766 fallacy of, 49-51 universal, 251-53, 498 See also going transcendental empiricist dogmas, 783 empty space, 478

872

Index

ens realissimum, 724-27 epistemic modesty, 531-32 Erscheinung and Schein, 87-88, 112, 179 esse estpercipi, 326-28, 759-63 expositions metaphysical, 105-8, 137-50 transcendental, 108-9, 150-52 extension, 180-81, 214-17, 798 Euclid, 5, 29, 76,145,150,156,159, 280, 290,437, 439,478,621, 646, 650, 621, 744 Evans, Gareth, 193, 204-6, 527, 797, 815, 817, 835, 844 exclusion thesis, 629 extensive magnitude, 418-26 externalism, 15 faith, 32, 595 Falkenstein, Lome, 106, 122, 777, 789, 793 fallacies (empiricist/rationalist), 49-51,146-47, 300, 541-43 Fechner, 823 FederJ. G., 2, 773 Fehr, J., 803 Fichte, J. G., 39, 556 fiction, 697 figurative language, 225, 576 first person pronoun, 636, 646, 816 Fischer, Kuno, 173-78, 181, 774, 795-96 Flew, Antony, 778 Fodor, Jerry, 804, 852 formal mode, 189-90, 223, 282, 286-87, 290, 293-94, 303, 313-15, 332-35, 401, 611-12, 629, 635-36, 642, 719,745, 758, 785,812 Forster, Eckart, 240, 779 Frankfurt, Harry, 849 freedom, 601-2, 689-95, 704-5, 707, 709-10, 714-18 transcendental, 694-95, 704-5, 707, 709-10, 714-15 Frege, Gottlob, 15, 224, 263, 340-41, 526-28, 610, 620 Friedman, Michael, xii, 151-54, 4 3 6 ^ 2 , 486, 783, 793, 820-21, 823-25, 830

fruitful bathos, 7, 9-10, 17, 96, 319, 345, 360-61, 609,739 fundamental elements, 261 See also Grund Gardner, Sebastian, 124-26, 641, 790 Garve, Christian, 2-7, 12, 24, 26, 39, 167, 170, 189,211,231, 546, 566, 577, 661, 720, 773 GCP (General Causal Principle), 455-78, 479-99, 504 geometry. See Euclid; mathematics given, 66-68, 106, 127, 193-207, 419 global community, 477-78 Glock, Hanjo, 240 God, 601-2, 668, 719-29, 754-55 going transcendental, 141, 251, 264, 293, 297, 365, 375, 596, 711 grammatical judgments, 612-17 Gregor, Mary, 775 Grenze, 570-71, 778 Grier, Michelle, 842 Grund., 5, 15, 536, 568-76, 573-76, 596-97, 629, 634, 641, 663, 697, 700, 707-8, 710, 716, 720, 746^t7, 752-56 Grundlegung, 236, 689, 708, 712 Guevara, D., 776 Guyer, Paul, 8, 168-78, 180-1, 187, 235-39, 259-60, 268, 432-33, 451-55, 773-74, 776, 779,788, 800, 807, 811, 826-27, 828, 830,843 Haack, Susan, 778, 786, 804 Hacker, Peter, 820, 836 Haller, Albert von, 754 Hamann, 773 Hamilton, Andy, 655-58, 816 Harrison, Ross, 240, 845 Hatfield, Gary, 790 Hawking, Stephen, 679-80 Hegel, G. W. F., 37-39, 84 Henrich, Dieter, 226, 295, 300-301, 307-13, 321-22, 806, 809 Herder, G., 773 Herz, Marcus, 287, 304, 548, 809-10

Index hidden, 293, 600, 614, 643, 674, 764 See also occult Hinske, Norbert, 226, 841, 846 Hintikka, Jaakko, 793 holism, 44, 497, 736-37, 744-49 See also atomism Hookway, Christopher, 804 house and ship example, 458-62 Howell, David, 801, 806 Hudson, Hud, 818 Hume, David, 7, 37, 51, 105, 131, 160-61, 176, 249-52, 257, 272, 293, 297, 289, 345, 376, 399, 447, 458, 460-62, 467-72, 481, 485,491-93, 513,518-19, 546-47, 600, 604, 690-91, 697, 700-705, 708-10, 727, 736-77, 739, 745, 792, 796, 798, 821-22, 828-29, 831, 834, 850 human standpoint, 109, 163, 178, 616 See also anthropocentricity Hurley, Susan, 807, 818 hypostatizing, 43, 606, 629, 644, 719, 729 Ideal, 391, 591, 593, 604, 626, 664, 724-727 idealism, 1-8, 10-13, 21, 37-38, 41, 94, 99-101, 104, 109-12, 114, 167-72, 179, 181-98, 207-13, 294-95, 318, 345, 385-86, 409-11, 426-29, 499, 516-21, 623, 639-42, 680-88, 717-18, 757-71, 834 Eleatic, 5-6, 179, 426-29, 608, 775 empirical, 6, 17, 159, 164, 176, 185-91, 211-13, 467, 535, 637, 6 3 9 ^ 2 , 683-88, 757-71 varieties, 505-6, 706 traditional, 17, 164, 757-771 transcendental, 120-21, 499, 623, 676, 680-88, 711,717-18, 757-71 Idee (Idea of reason), 17, 125, 392, 539,589-90, 598-601, 628-29 IEM (immunity to error through misidentification), 369, 654-60

873 illusions perceptual, 434, 459, 489 logic of, 523 dialectical, 18, 26, 43-4, 594-8, 644 images, 399-400 See also schematism imaginary psychology, 92, 133-35, 189-90 immanence, 5, 23-24, 83-96, 132-35, 177, 573, 733, 771 See also transcendence independence, 225, 347, 349-56, 766 from experience, 82, 686-88 (see also a priori) See also dependence indeterminacy, 105, 344, 428, 494, 729 See also determinacy infinity, 146, 149-50, 158 indifference, 27 innate ideas, 40, 304, 314, 809 inner/intrinsic, 547-52 intensive magnitude, 429-32 indeterminism, 690-92, 699-700, 705-12 Intension. See extension intentional acts, 695 intentional language, 197, 203-4 intentionality, 121, 724 introspective semantics, 54, 65 intuitionist logic, 677 intuitions, 117-22, 132, 138 inventory, 10, 16, 28-29, 44-46, 130-31, 138, 190, 177-8, 262, 266, 286, 352, 412, 434, 540, 543, 595 irreversibility, 460-62 Irwin, Terence, 324 "I think," 297-98, 366-69, 425 See also cogito Jacobi, Heinrich, 577 James, William, 370, 518, 632-33, 638, 722, 773, 789, 814, 816, 818, 834, 844, 850 judgment, 50-51, 55, 64-77, 255-58,266-75, 395-98 judgment of experience (perception), 128, 299, 395-98, 794

874 judgment forms, 266-70 just noticeable difference, 435, 823 Kant's psychology, 576-77 Kant's Theory of Knowledge (Bird), xi, 12, 84, 779, 785, 789, 796, 817, 828, 836, 848, 855 Kemp Smith, Norman, xi, 4, 110-11, 259, 263, 285-86, 346, 435, 530, 550, 635, 697, 773, 788, 803,818,821-22, 829,839, 851 Khalatnikov, 679 Kitcher, Patricia, 315-19, 777, 785, 791,809 Kitcher, Philip, 438 Kripke, Saul, xii, 23, 77-82, 782, 784,820 Kiihn, Manfred, 323, 577 Lambert, J. H., 36, 86 Landau, Albert, 2-4, 773, 777 Langton, Rae, 9, 101, 214-9, 335, 547-552, 776, 779, 788, 796, 807,836 Laywine, Alison, 86-87 Lear, Jonathan, 828 Leibniz, G. W., 9, 28, 39, 51, 82, 100, 104-5, 107, 114-5, 137, 155, 157, 175, 215-17, 233-34, 304, 409, 412-13, 447, 502, 513, 515, 524, 540-42, 543-47, 591, 609, 623, 625, 666, 668, 680, 676, 724, 731, 753-54, 757, 775, 778, 780-81, 784, 787, 792, 798, 802, 832-34, 837,853-54 LEM (law of excluded middle), 676, 695 LePore, Ernest, 804, 852 Leppakoski, Markku, 806 Lewis, David, 780, 804 Lifshitz, 679 limitation, 146^7 Locke, John, 27, 44, 52, 105, 175, 210-12, 215, 218-9, 249, 268, 399, 447, 449, 524, 609 logic, 255-58, 523, 593 logical positivism, 6-7 logical possibility, 408-9 logical subject, 631, 638

Index Longuenesse, Beatrice, 257, 270-72, 287, 802, 804, 808, 820, 827 "looks," 196-98 Mackie, J. L., 827 Mally, 620, 854 making possible, 280-82, 317 material mode. See formal mode mathematics, 49-50, 53, 85-86, 101, 108-9, 128, 145-47, 150-57, 403-4, 436-44, 440-41, 525, 741—44 and philosophy, 741-44 materialism, 635 matter, 514, 633-37 McDowell, John, 106, 126-27, 193, 195, 200-201, 204-7, 368-69, 652, 686, 777, 843, 780, 791, 796-97, 801, 815-16 MCI (mutual causal interaction), 472-79, 492 McGinn, Colin, 645, 844 meaning and use, 58, 400-402, 525-30 See also Bedeutung verificationism Meinong, Alexius, 620 Melnick, Arthur, 826-27, 830 Mendelssohn, Moses, 627, 635, 637 mereology, 157, 426, 431 metaphysics of experience, 15, 4:4-46 and science, 85-86, 403, 417 Metaphysical Deduction, 259-60, 263-75 Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, 47, 318, 436, 441-42, 454-55,486, 518, 780, 807, 810, 824, 831 metaphysical jugglers, 593 Metaphysics of Morals, 486 Mill, John Stuart, 279, 394, 443, 518, 834 Milmed, Bella, 828 mind-dependence, 12-13, 101, 111-12, 114-15, 137-38, 172, 186-91, 217, 318, 353-56, 466-67, 765-67, 814 mind malting nature, 3, 9-10, 17, 21, 40, 75, 94, 133, 167, 210, 225-56, 285, 314-15

Index monadology, 391, 543-52, 724 modality, 502-5 modes of intuition, 101, 145, 158-64, 160-64, 186-68, 448, 464-65, 466-67, 502 Moore, G. E., 17, 243, 246-48, 750, 852 morality, 33, 359-60 Mumford, S., 805 mutual dependence, 126-30, 198-203, 256-57, 263-65, 274, 289-90, 375-78, 598-601 NACD (nonanalytic conceptual dependence), 497, 504, 737,

744^9

natural or normative, 195, 202-3 naturalism, 36, 437-38, 4 4 1 ^ 3 Nagel, Thomas, 645 Nagel, Gordon, 12, 776 necessity, 50, 64-66, 78-79, 343, 471-72, 496-97, 703-4, 750-52, 784 Newton, Isaac, 29, 104, 107, 137, 216,411,430, 441,486, 538, 549, 674, 792 neglected alternative, 173-78, 188 Neiman, Susan, 839—i0 Nolan, Peter, 779 notion, 598, 606 noumena, 335-38, 391, 411-12, 506-7, 525-39, 544, 549-52, 633-37, 660, 668, 672, 675-76, 680, 692, 698-701, 715, 717-18, 753-54, 774, 790,822 See also thing in itself; transcendental object object of representation, 287-91, 335-45 virtual, 759-63 See also weighty object objectivity, 225, 229, 260, 274-75, 299, 300-301, 322-24, 342ff., 348-64, 686-88, 402-3, 405, 803 objective judgment, 299-300 occult, 643, 674 See also hidden O'Leary-Hawthorn, John, 783

875 ontology, 96, 224, 445, 590, 595-96, 611, 620-21, 628-29 Opus postumum, 555-56 origin, 35, 106, 121, 132, 288, 298 See also content; provenance Oswald, 235 Paralogisms, 25-6, 44, 321, 366, 519-20, 583-85, 591, 604, 627-44 First, 630-31 Second, 631-37 Third, 637-39 Fourth, 639-14 See also Refutation of Idealism Parfit, Derek, 816, 844 parity, 100, 113, 126, 144, 261-62, 404, 413-15, 450, 566, 790 Parsons, Charles, 152, 789 Parsons, Terence, 620 Paton, H. J., xi, 12, 226, 775-76, 780,827 Peacocke, Christopher, 783 Penrose, Roger, 679-80, 847-18 perceptual vocabulary, 100, 105, 117-22, 788 Pereboom, Derk, 801, 807 personal unity, 365-86, 375-78 phenomenon, 2, 4, 8-9, 10, 17, 25, 32-34, 40-44, 50, 282, 391, 411-12, 482,525-39, 549-52, 629, 633-37, 668, 672, 675-76, 690-91, 699-701, 706-7, 715, 717-18, 753-54, 779 See also appearance phenomenalism, 8, 39, 147, 346, 517, 609, 681-83, 774, 779, 789, 807 philosophy as conceptual, 29-30, 95, 138, 741—44 and science, 29-30, 35-38 and mathematics, 741-44 Pippin, R , 12 Plantinga, Alvin, 725, 850 Plato, 6, 49, 95-96, 155, 215-16, 291, 302,401,443, 539, 541, 546, 553, 571, 591, 595-96, 598, 611-12, 614, 623,679-80, 728, 740, 757

876

Index

Pluhar, Werner, 259-60, 779, 788, 807 politics, 596-97, 739-40, 779 Popper, Karl, 736, 802 positing, 729 possible worlds, 76-82, 497 postulates, 408-9, 501-5 postmodern philosophy, 36 Posy, Carl, 789, 806, 847 practical point of view, 699 Prauss, Gerold, xii,12, 776, 838 Prichard, H. A., 459, 821, 826 principles of reason, 598-601 private language argument, 609 problematic concepts, 532-33, 549, 571-72, 682, 729 Prolegomena, 1-2, 4-7, 14, 29, 37, 50, 101, 104, 123, 125, 128, 147, 185-86, 207-19, 299, 318, 397, 410, 412, 428, 488, 491, 503, 505, 517, 523-24, 551, 558-76, 600-601, 616, 720, 768, 773, 775, 778, 780, 794, 799, 807, 822, 832, 850, 855 proofs aesthetic, 137-52 of principles, 393-94, 402-9, 418-21, 429-32, 447-50, 455-62, 472-74, 479-86 provenance, 90, 106, 121, 132, 288, 590 psychology, 27-28, 44-47, 76, 84-85, 118, 130-35, 157, 189-90, 301-3, 314-17, 583-85, 623, 625-26, 628, 636, 766, 776-78 psychologism, 332, 443 Putnam, Hilary, 777 qualities primary/secondary, 210-12, 218-19 questions internal/external, 92-96, 612, 618-24 domestic, 661, 846 quietism, 27, 361, 618-21 Quine, W. Van Orman, 36, 45, 53, 58-62, 73, 224, 265-66, 748-49, 782

Quinton, Anthony, 459, 783, 793, 821, 826, 854 rational cosmology, 670-1, 675, 677-80, 745 rational psychology, 298, 335, 583-85, 623, 625-26, 628, 636 rationalism, 16, 21-22, 27, 29-30, 35, 49-50, 146, 216, 236-38, 253,412-13,443,458, 501, 513, 515, 534-35, 539^0, 542-47, 551, 589-90, 598, 600, 604, 607-8, 625-26, 662-63, 666, 671-72, 717-18, 724, 728, 757 rationalist fallacy, 49, 51, 523, 542 realism transcendental, 99-101, 167, 174-75, 181-91, 357-66, 499, 516-21, 641, 680-88, 717-18, 757-771, 759, 763-67, 777 and antirealism, 357-64 empirical, 99-101, 104, 110, 156, 167, 174-75, 181-91, 356, 386, 462 See also idealism reality, 9, 111, 363-64, 394, 402, 433-35 See also absolute reality reason, 27-28, 392, 594-609, 625-27 not fiction, 628-29 dialectical, 395-96 and understanding, 594-98 and logic, 595, 601 receptivity, 122-26 reciprocity, 472ff. reduction, 170, 263, 286, 346 reflexion, 412, 524, 5 4 0 ^ 3 Refutation of Idealism, 11, 25, 163, 190, 390-91, 394, 409-11, 413, 455, 505-21, 473, 539, 578, 627, 631,639, 642, 688,764 Reich, Klaus, 804 reidentification, 451-52, 475 regulative principles, 396, 599, 603, 673, 675 Reid, 235 representation, 144-45, 494, 642 representative, 449, 494

Index reversals, 6, 12, 15-16, 39, 50, 180, 230-31,250,410,415,473, 613-14, 796 revolutionary views, xii, 1-18, 22, 35-38, 40-i2, 44-45, 112, 115, 123-26, 133-34, 160-64, 167-72, 173-78, 180-81, 192, 207-13,217, 225-26, 229, 231-34,252-53,258,261, 274-75, 286-87, 315-16, 319, 320-21, 328-29, 347-48, 364, 383-84, 386, 426-28, 490-1, 543, 648-54, 733, 769-71 Robinson, Hoke, 778, 803 Rorty, Richard, 740, 851 Rosenthal, David, 655-59, 791, 817, 845 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 600 rules and regress, 395-97 rules of understanding, 598-601 Russell, Bertrand, 17, 36-37, 152, 265,527-28, 610, 750-52 Ryle, Gilbert, 45, 543, 777-78, 780, 812 schematism, 390, 398-102, 445, 524,627 school metaphysics, 6-7, 611, 743, 799 Schlettwein, 556 Schonfeld, Martin, xii, 600, 671, 787, 8464:7 Schmnke, 570, 778 Schulthess, Peter, 804 Schwarmerei, 6-7 Scott-Taggart, Michael, 335-36 Searle, John, 779, 805 self-consciousness, 289, 366, 378-84, 653 self, 226-27, 289-90, 294-95, 301-3, 365-86, 378-84, 627-39, 643—14, 645-60 determining/-able, 630, 835, 844 identity, 370-72, 631 Sellars, Wilfred, 101, 127, 193-204, 410, 791, 796-97 Sense-data (sensation), 67, 140, 193 sensibility, 99, 1 0 3 ^ , 126-30, 223, 595, 602, 606-9 See also understanding; reason

877 Shoemaker, Sidney, 654-5 singularity, 678-79 skeptical method, 230-33, 402, 589, 661 skepticism, 7, 11, 16, 21-22, 27, 35-37, 45,130-32, 167, 177, 191, 205-6, 229-53, 277-78, 324ff., 362-63, 402, 410, 498-99, 589, 640-11, 657, 661, 671, 736-37, 745, 755, 766-67, 796, 798-800, 802 solidarity, 740 Sokal, D., 778 space, 104-10, 121, 137-52, 156-64, 165-83, 279-80 space of reasons, 203 spontaneity, 255, 712-17 Stenius, Erik, 823 Stratton-Lake, Philip, 776 Strawson, P. R, 8-9, 12, 39, 45, 133-35, 171, 189, 242-43, 272, 286, 315, 324, 384, 450-51, 475-76, 527, 543, 625, 646, 654-55, 667-70, 672, 680-84, 720, 768, 774-76, 780-81, 785-86, 802,811,815,820, 835, 847, 855 Stroud, Barry, 233, 349-56, 241-18, 324, 435, 755, 775, 777, 785-86, 797-99, 805, 807 structuralism, 443 subreption, 412, 539, 590, 605-9, 629, 644, 673 subjective deduction, 313-20 subjectivity, 2, 120-21, 124-26, 173-78, 389-90, 448, 460, 462-67, 480, 488-90 substance, 406-8, 445-55, 548-50, 630-31 Suchting, W., 828 superassertibility, 358-59 supersensible analogies, 574-75, 607, 723, 729-30 synthesis threefold, 266-70, 283-87, 313-14 speciosa, 441, 824 synthetic judgment, 22, 50-52, 54-56, 69-71 synthetic a priori, 23, 52, 63-64, 71-82, 422-26

878

Index

system, 601-5, 733-37 Tarbert, M., 778 therapy, 43-44, 391, 401-2, 589-94, 622, 636-37, 643-44, 660, 672-74 See also diagnosis thing in itself, 2, 4, 8-9, 10, 16-18, 25, 32-34, 40—44, 50, 104-12, 114-15, 122-24, 137-52, 156-64, 165-67, 173-78, 180-85,189-90, 212-19, 257-58, 279-80, 380-84, 462-67, 490, 529-30, 533-39, 553-85, 633-37, 680, 723, 795, 819, 833 See also noumenon; transcendental object Thompson, Manley, 789 time, 99-101, 107-9, 137-52, 157-80, 185-87, 190-91, 405-6, 479-90 traditionalism, xii, 1-7, 8-11, 13, 21, 40—11, 44—45, 50, 53, 82-83,94-95, 100-101, 110-11, 114, 122-25, 131, 133-35, 151, 164, 167,170-72, 173-78,180-81, 189-90, 212-13, 214-15, 218, 225, 258, 260, 275,285-86, 314,315, 318, 320, 324-29, 368-69, 384-86, 409-10, 426-29, 433-34, 443, 462-64, 512, 525-26, 554, 646, 698-99, 720, 730-33, 755, 757-59, 760-63 transcendence, 88-89, 134-35, 524, 556, 630, 723-24, 733 See also immanence transcendental arguments, 239-248 transcendental enquiries, xii, 5, 10, 16, 23-24, 53, 82-96, 112-13, 114-5, 134-35, 183, 283, 293, 355, 384, 452, 525-26, 640-642, 646, 693-95, 704-5, 712-17, 776, 843 See also empirical enquiries transcendental "I," 635-36, 646^7, 659 See also apperception; cogito; "I think"

transcendental object, 290, 335-38, 402,411,523,534, 644 See also noumena transcendental topic, 524, 540—13 Trendelenburg, Adolf, 173-78, 774, 795-96 truth theories, 257-58, 288, 358 as ideal, 853 Tuschling, B., 811 two aspect/two-world views, 34, 41-44,215-17,550-51, 778 types and tokens, 648-52 Uehling, T., 808 unconditioned, 589-90, 602-5, 626, 662-63, 692-93 understanding, 103-4, 126-30, 223, 739-10 See also sensibility; reason unity of space/time, 148—19 of self, 292-93, 297-98, 365-66, 370-72, 375-78 purposive, 597-98 universality, 50, 54, 64-69 universal empiricism, 251, 498, 744-45 Vaihinger, Hans, 173-77, 181, 187, 226, 795 validity (objective), 260, 274-75, 299,320-21 Van Cleve, James, 8, 622-23, 750-52, 759-63, 774, 777, 779, 781, 789, 797-98, 806, 808, 813-15, 832, 843, 853, 855 Van Inwagen, P., 705, 849 verificationism, 15, 2 4 0 ^ 2 , 346-47, 524, 528-29, 554, 683, 820 vicarious experience, 274, 280 See also "blindness" virtual objects, 759-63 Vleeschauwer, H. J.de, 266, 804 Vorlander, Karl, 773 Waismann, Friedrich, 843 Walker, Ralph, 101, 789, 830 Walsh, W. H., 12, 776 Waxman, Wayne, 820 Watkins, Eric, 803

Index weighty objects, 225, 324-29, 582, 625 Weldon, T. D., xi, 12, 776 Williams, Bernard, 349, 435 windy metaphysics, 7, 9-10, 17, 96, 319 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 15, 17-18, 37, 45, 265, 270, 283, 341, 361-62, 391, 394, 396, 410-11, 432-33, 501, 606, 609-18, 636, 645, 653, 660, 662, 674, 686, 731, 769, 779-80, 782,804,812, 814,831,836, 841-42, 846, 852,856

879 Wolff, Christian, 447, 582, 625, 780, 802 Wolff, Michael, 270 Wood, Allen, 259-60, 779, 788, 807, 827,848 Wright, Crispin, 349, 357-64, 619-21, 777, 786, 802-3, 810, 814,843,850-51 Yablo, Stephen, 838 Zalta, Eddie, 619-21, 649, 780, 838, 843 Zeno, 668,850

PHILOSOPHY There is a major division in the interpretation of Kant, between traditionalists and revolutionaries. Traditionalists tend to assimilate Kant to predecessors such as Leibniz, Hume, or Berkeley. Revolutionaries take more seriously Kant's vehement repudiation of all the earlier empiricist, rationalist, realist, idealist, skeptical, and dogmatic doctrines. The traditionalist view was once dominant, but revolutionaiy interpretations have found more favor recently. The Revolutionary Kant systematically develops the revolutionaiy account. A.t the heart of these disputes is the character of Kant's idealism. Kant's doctrine has been mfluentially described, in a phrase he never used, as 'the mind making Nature'. Such a slogan makes it easy to assimilate Kant to an extreme idealism, but even if that misunderstanding is avoided, the problem remains of reconciling Kant's system with his uncompromising realism. Kant himself was aware of these ambiguities and sought to resolve them, but philosophers have often ignored his clarification or judged it unavailing. The Revolutionaiy Kant scrutinize?, and outlines the whole text of the Critique, to show that Kant has adequate defensive resources, even though they require a transformation in our understanding of his great work. "Required reading for all serious students of Kant' The Revolutionary Kant is the first lull-scale commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason to appear in English since the books of Kemp Smith and Pa tori earlv in the last century. It is also the first work to oppt>.n at evei i point tne traditionalist picture of Kant as an idealist philosopher operating within the modern epistemological problematic assoc iated with Descartes and Berkeley ' author of 1 Parting of the Ways

-Michafi Friedman,

Lucid and accessible, uraliam Bira s new book is informed equally by a close reading •
-Gordon Brittan,

\n ambitious hool that delivers on its promise. Bird's The Revolutionary Kant achieves a rare combination oj breadth, depth, and sustained critical punch. A must read /'" all tho«? "'/"> do hattl" with the Critique." author of Kant Empirical Realism

Pai i Abela,

v

Graham Bird is Emeritus Professoi of Philosophy at the University of Manchester and Honorary Professor of the University of Wales. He founded the U.K. Kant Society and is cofounder and co-editor of the journal Kantian Review. He wrote Kant's Theory of Knowledge (1962), Philosophical Tasks (1972), and William James (1986), and edited Selected Writings »f William James (1995) and /A Companion to Kant (2006).