Kant: Theoretical Judgment

Kant holds that the applicability of the moral ‘ought’ depends on a kind of agent-causal freedom that is incompatible with the deterministic structure of phenomenal nature. I argue that Kant understands this determinism to threaten not just morality but the very possibility of our status as rational beings. Rational beings exemplify “cognitive control” in all of their actions, including not just rational willing and the formation of doxastic attitudes, but also more basic cognitive acts such as judging, conceptualizing, and synthesizing.

This paper formalizes part of the cognitive architecture that Kant develops in the Critique of Pure Reason. The central Kantian notion that we formalize is the rule. As we interpret Kant, a rule is not a declarative conditional stating what would be true if such and such conditions hold. Rather, a Kantian rule is a general procedure, represented by a conditional imperative or permissive, indicating which acts must or may be performed, given certain acts that are already being performed. These (...) acts are not propositions; they do not have truth-values. Our formalization is related to the input/ output logics, a family of logics designed to capture relations between elements that need not have truth-values. In this paper, we introduce KL3 as a formalization of Kant’s conception of rules as conditional imperatives and permissives. We explain how it differs from standard input/output logics, geometric logic, and first-order logic, as well as how it translates natural language sentences not well captured by first-order logic. Finally, we show how the various distinctions in Kant’s much-maligned Table of Judgements emerge as the most natural way of dividing up the various types and sub-types of rule in KL3. Our analysis sheds new light on the way in which normative notions play a fundamental role in the conception of logic at the heart of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. (shrink)

In this article, I respond to critiques of my book Kant’s Radical Subjectivism: Perspectives on the Transcendental Deduction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). I address issues that are raised concerning objectivity, the nature of the object, the role of transcendental apperception and the imagination, and idealism. More in particular I respond to an objection against my reading of the necessary existence of things in themselves and their relation to appearances. I also briefly respond to a question that relates to the debate (...) on Kantian nonconceptualism, more in particular, the question whether Kant allows animals objective intentionality. Lastly, I respond to one objection against my reading of Hegel’s critique of Kant. (The copy uploaded here is an English translation of the original Dutch version that is published in the journal.). (shrink)

This article discusses an interpretation of Kant's conception of transcendental subjectivity, which manages to avoid many of the concerns that have been raised by analytic interpreters over this doctrine. It is an interpretation put forward by selected C19 and early C20 neo-Kantian writers. The article starts out by offering a neo-Kantian interpretation of the object as something that is constituted by the categories and that serves as a standard of truth within a theory of judgment. The second part explicates transcendental (...) subjectivity as the system of categories, which is self-referential and constitutes objects, in order to then evaluate this conception by means of a comparison with Hegel's absolute subject. Rather than delineating the differences between neo-Kantian writers, the article systematically expounds a shared project, which consists in providing the ultimate foundation for judgments by means of an anti-psychologist and non-metaphysical interpretation of transcendental subjectivity. (shrink)

Kant describes the understanding as a faculty of spontaneity. What this means is that our capacity to judge what is true is responsible for its own exercises, which is to say that we issue our judgments for ourselves. To issue our judgments for ourselves is to be self-conscious – i.e., conscious of the grounds upon which we judge. To grasp the spontaneity of the understanding, then, we must grasp the self-consciousness of the understanding. I argue that what Kant requires for (...) explaining spontaneity is a conception of judgment as an intrinsic self-consciousness of the total unity of possible knowledge. This excludes what have been called ‘relative’ accounts of the spontaneity of the understanding, according to which our judgments are issued through a capacity fixed by external conditions. If so, then Kant conceives of understanding as entirely active. Or, to put it another way, he conceives of this capacity as absolutely spontaneous. (shrink)

What method should we use to determine the nature of perceptual experience? My focus here is the Kantian thought that transcendental arguments can be used to determine the nature of perceptual experience. I set out a dilemma for the use of transcendental arguments in the philosophy of perception, one which turns on a comparison ofthe transcendental method with the first-personal method of early analytic philosophy, and with the empirical methods of much contemporary philosophy of mind. The transcendental method can avoid (...) this dilemma only if it commits to our possessing a capacity for imaginative reflection, one which is capable of identifying certain formal properties of experience.This result indicates some of the commitments which must be made if transcendental arguments are to be used in the philosophy of perception, and it has implications for those views that take the philosophy of perception to be autonomous of the empirical science of perception. (shrink)

Kant's Notion of "Transcendental Truth". [English] The aim of this work is to elucidate the notion of “transcendental truth” and to show its role in the Kantian system. I will argue that this notion is in line with the traditional definition of truth, i.e., that it consists in the correspondence between knowledge and object. I will also argue that criteria of transcendental truth are provided by transcendental logic, and that it is this notion of truth what makes it possible to (...) establish the truth of a priori knowledge and delimitate the field of empirical truth. [Español] El objetivo de este trabajo es dilucidar la noción de “verdad trascendental” y mostrar su lugar en el sistema kantiano. Se defenderá que la verdad trascendental consiste, en línea con la definición tradicional de verdad, en un sentido de correspondencia entre conocimiento y objeto, que la lógica trascendental establece criterios de verdad trascendental, y que es esta noción de verdad la que permite establecer la verdad del conocimiento a priori y delimitar el territorio de la verdad empírica. (shrink)

In the Transcendental Ideal Kant discusses the principle of complete determination: for every object and every predicate A, the object is either determinately A or not-A. He claims this principle is synthetic, but it appears to follow from the principle of excluded middle, which is analytic. He also makes a puzzling claim in support of its syntheticity: that it represents individual objects as deriving their possibility from the whole of possibility. This raises a puzzle about why Kant regarded it as (...) synthetic, and what his explanatory claim means. I argue that the principle of complete determination does not follow from the principle of excluded middle because the externally negated or ?negative? judgement ?Not (S is P)? does not entail the internally negated or ?infinite? judgement ?S is not-P.? Kant's puzzling explanatory claim means that empirical objects are determined by the content of the totality of experience. This entails that empirical objects are completely determinate if and only if the totality of experience has a completely determinate content. I argue that it is not a priori whether experience has such a completely determinate content and thus not analytic that objects obey the principle of complete determination. (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defends the mathematically deterministic world of physics by arguing that its essential features arise necessarily from innate forms of intuition and rules of understanding through combinatory acts of imagination. Knowing is active: it constructs the unity of nature by combining appearances in certain mandatory ways. What is mandated is that sensible awareness provide objects that conform to the structure of ostensive judgment: “This (S) is P.” -/- Sensibility alone provides no such objects, so (...) the imagination compensates by combining passing point-data into “pure” referents for the subject-position, predicate-position, and copula. The result is a cognitive encounter with a generic physical object whose characteristics—magnitude, substance, property, quality, and causality—are abstracted as the Kantian categories. Each characteristic is a product of “sensible synthesis” that has been “determined” by a “function of unity” in judgment. -/- Understanding the possibility of such determination by judgment is the chief difficulty for any rehabilitative reconstruction of Kant’s theory. I will show that Kant conceives of figurative synthesis as an act of line-drawing, and of the functions of unity as rules for attending to this act. The subject-position refers to substance, identified as the objective time-continuum; the predicate-position, to quality, identified as the continuum of property values (constituting the second-order type named by the predicate concept). The upshot is that both positions refer to continuous magnitudes, related so that one (time-value) is the condition of the other (property-value). -/- Kant’s theory of physically constructive grammar is thus equivalent to the analytic-geometric formalism at work in the practice of mathematical physics, which schematizes time and state as lines related by an algebraic formula. Kant theorizes the subject–predicate relation in ostensive judgment as an algebraic time–state function. When aimed towards sensibility, “S is P” functions as the algebraic relation “t → ƒ(t).”. (shrink)

By transcendental aesthetic, Kant means “the science of all principles of a priori sensibility” (A 21/B 35). These, he argues, are the laws that properly direct our judgments of taste (B 35 – 36 fn.), i.e. our aesthetic judgments as we ordinarily understand that notion in the context of contemporary art. Thus the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason, entitled the Transcendental Aesthetic, enumerates the necessary presuppositions of, among other things, our ability to make empirical judgments about particular (...) works of art. These presuppositions are sensible rather than intellectual because on Kant’s view, all intellection that considers objects of any kind, whether abstract or concrete, must at base connect to actual, material objects with which we come into direct contact; and this we can do only through sensibility (A 19/B 33). Thus the following discussion explores what Kant claims must be true of us in order to make the sorts of aesthetic judgments we make, rather than any particular class or quality of aesthetic judgments itself. On Kant’s view, what must be true of us in order to make aesthetic judgments is not different from what must be true of us in order to make any other kind of judgment about empirical objects. (shrink)

In the 'Critique of Pure Reason' Kant appears to characterize analytic judgments in four distinct ways: once in terms of “containment,” a second time in terms of “identity,” a third time in terms of the explicative–ampliative contrast, and a fourth time in terms of the notion of “cognizability in accordance with the principle of contradiction.” The paper asks: Which of these characterizations—or apparent characterizations—best captures Kant’s conception of analyticity in the first Critique? It suggests: “the second.” It argues, further, that (...) Kant’s distinction is intended to apply only to judgments of subject–predicate form, and that the fourth alleged characterization is not properly speaking a characterization at all. These theses are defended in the course of a more general investigation of the distinction’s meaning, its epistemology, and its tenability. (shrink)