Ginsborg - Was Kant a Nonconceptualist

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Was Kant a Nonconceptualist? Author(s): Hannah Ginsborg Source: Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition , Vol. 137, No. 1, Selected Papers from the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division,

2007 Meeting (Jan., 2008), pp. 65-77Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40208780Accessed: 05-02-2016 22:51 UTC

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Philos Stud (2008) 137:65-77 DOI 10.1007/sl 1098-007-9163-3

Was Kant a nonconceptualist?

Hannah Ginsborg

Published online: 17 October 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007

Abstract I criticize recent nonconceptualist readings of Kant's account of perception on the grounds that the strategy of the Deduction requires that understanding be involved in the synthesis of imagination responsible for the intentionality of perceptual experience. I offer an interpretation of the role of understanding in perceptual experience as the consciousness of normativity in the association of one's representations. This leads to a reading of Kant which is conceptualist, but in a way which accommodates considerations favoring nonconceptualism, in particular the primitive character of perceptual experience relative to thought and judgment.

Keywords Kant Perception Nonconceptual content Intentionality Normativity

Kant says in the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason that there are "two stems of human cognition," namely sensibility, "through which objects are given to us," and understanding, "through which they are thought" (A15/B29). Although he mentions there that sensibility and understanding "may perhaps spring from a common.. .root" (ibid.), much of the discussion in the early parts of the Critique conveys the impression that they are independent faculties, each responsible for a distinct aspect of cognition. Sensibility provides us with intuitions of objects, that is, singular representations which relate immediately to objects. Understanding, on the other hand, enables us to think of the objects which are thereby given to us as falling under general concepts, and hence to make judgments about them. As Kant puts it in the Transcendental Logic, these two capacities "cannot exchange their functions" : the understanding cannot intuit and the senses cannot think (A51/B75). The fact that they are both required for cognition is, he says, no reason for confounding their

H. Ginsborg (El) Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720-2390, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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contributions; it is, on the contrary, a reason for carefully separating and distinguishing the one from the other. Kant goes on in the Transcendental Logic to suggest that his account of the a priori elements of cognition should be seen as structured in a way which corresponds to this distinction. In the Aesthetic he had dealt with those elements of cognition - the pure intuitions of space and time - which have their origin solely in sensibility. Now, he says, he will "separate out from our cognition that part of thought which has its origin solely in understanding" (A62/B87). The implication is that the discussion of the pure intuitions in the Aesthetic and that of the pure concepts of understanding in the Logic can proceed independently of each other: one is concerned with "the rules of sensibility," the other with the "rules of understanding" (A52/B76).

But this apparently clear-cut distinction is quickly complicated by Kant's introduction of the notion of synthesis, an act of combining or unifying the sensory manifold which he ascribes to the power of imagination. For imagination seems to have affinities both with sensibility and with understanding, suggesting that their functions, of intuition and thought respectively, cannot after all be so neatly separated. On the one hand, Kant says, "imagination... belongs to sensibility" (B151). The synthesis of imagination is needed in order for us to form perceptual images of objects (A 120), and thus is a "necessary ingredient" in the perception of objects (A120n). This suggests, at least on the face of it, that synthesis is required for objects to be "given to us" perceptually, at least if there is more to an object's being given to us than its merely causing sensations in us. Moreover Kant makes clear that the pure intuitions of space and time which he describes in the Aesthetic as conditions of the empirical intuition of objects depend on an imaginative synthesis which is responsible for their unity (B160n). Synthesis thus appears to be implicated in the having of intuitions, both empirical and pure. On the other hand, and indeed often in the very same passages, Kant seems to treat imagination as simply a manifestation of understanding. For example, just after saying that imagination belongs to sensibility, he claims that its synthesis is an expression of spontaneity, and that it is an effect of understanding on sensibility (B152). All combination, he says, including combination of the manifold of intuition, is an act of the understanding (B130): the spontaneity which "under the title of imagination... brings combination into the manifold of intuition" is one and the same with the spontaneity of understanding (B162n). Correspondingly, the pure representations of space and time, rather than being independent conditions of sensibility, appear to be structured by the operations of understanding. Thus, referring to the imaginative synthesis which is responsible for the unity of the intuitions of space and time, Kant describes it as a matter of "understanding determining sensibility" (B160n).

One way of responding to this complication is simply to assimilate imagination to understanding. This approach is taken by Sellars, for whom imagination, at least in the role presently under discussion, just is "the understanding functioning in a special way" (1968, p. 4). On this approach, the intuitions through which objects are perceptually given to us "constitute a special class of representations of the understanding" (1968, p. 9) and thus have conceptual content. There are in addition nonconceptual "impressions of sheer receptivity" (1968, p. 8) which are due to sensibility independent of understanding, and which "[provide] the 'brute fact' or

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Was Kant a nonconceptualist? 67

constraining element of perceptual experience" (1968, p. 9), but these are to be distinguished from intuitive representations proper (1968, p. 28). For Sellars, then, the distinction between sensibility and understanding is preserved, but intuitions, at least in the most central Kantian sense, are due to understanding as well as to sensibility. John McDowell follows Sellars in taking intuitions to be representations with conceptual content. But he takes a more radical line than Sellars in denying that there is any constraint on these representations from impressions of "sheer receptivity." There is thus no role for sensibility independent of understanding: "understanding is already implicated," he says, "in the deliverances of sensibility themselves" (1994, p. 46). The only "deliverances of sensibility," for McDowell, are intuitions in the primary sense, and, as for Sellars, these are conceptual representations.1

Recent critics of McDowell's conceptualist reading - and here I have primarily in mind Robert Hanna and Lucy Allais2 - have adopted a contrasting approach which emphasizes Kant's initial distinction between sensibility and understanding, and which assimilates imagination to the former rather than the latter. Hanna takes the distinction between sensibility and understanding to capture the difference between the "sub-rational or lower-level" cognitive powers of the mind, which we share with animals, and the mind's "rational or higher-level cognitive powers" (2005, p. 249). Sensibility, while passive relative to the understanding, is not "entirely passive," because it "expresses" a "mental power for spontaneous synthesis or mental processing" which is the "power of imagination" (ibid.). Although imagination qualifies as spontaneous, its spontaneity is independent of that of the understanding (2001, p. 37).3 Allais, while not explicitly ascribing imagination to sensibility, shares Hanna' s commitment to the view that it operates independently from understanding: a view which she supports with the claim that "synthesizing is not the same as conceptualizing."4 The upshot for both Hanna and Allais is that intuitions can be products of synthesis without being bearers of conceptual content.

Part of the appeal of nonconceptualism as a view in its own right is that it seems to do better justice than conceptualism to what we might call the primitive character of perception relative to thought and judgment. Conceptualism seems to get the relation between conceptual activity on the one hand, and perception on the other, the wrong way round. Surely, it might seem, I do not need to be able to entertain thoughts involving the concept dog or apple in order to have apples or dogs presented to me perceptually. On the contrary, it is precisely because I have perceptions of dogs or apples that I come to be capable of entertaining thoughts with the corresponding conceptual content. So it is tempting, especially for interpreters

For a recent and very clear statement of the view that intuitions are conceptually determined, see Engstrom (2006, p. 17).

Hanna (2001, 2005); Allais (forthcoming). Watkins (forthcoming) also criticizes McDowell's conceptualist reading of Kant, but along different lines which do not involve Kant's views on the imagination. 3 Rohs (2001) also defends the claim that Kant is committed to an "intuitive spontaneity." Rohs's view is criticized in Wenzel (2005). 4 Allais, forthcoming. For support, Allais cites Michael Pendlebury's very helpful articulation of the contrast in his (1995).

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who are sympathetic to Kant, to read his distinction between sensibility and understanding as indicating support for this apparently more primitive character of perception. That is, it is tempting to view sensibility, understood in a broad sense which includes imagination, as responsible for perceptions whose content can be entertained by us without any grasp of concepts.

I am sympathetic to many of the considerations which seem to support nonconceptualism, and in particular to the idea that perception is more primitive than thought. In this paper, though, I want to present two reasons for rejecting the nonconceptualist reading of Kant.5 First, as I shall argue in Sect. I, the nonconceptualist reading prevents us from doing justice to one of the central projects of the Critique, that of showing that the categories are applicable to objects given in experience. Second, as I shall argue in Sect. II, at least one of the considerations apparently supporting nonconceptualism, that bearing on the primitive character of perception, can be accommodated within a view which is, broadly speaking, conceptualist.

I

I noted above that both Hanna and Allais interpret imagination, for Kant, as functioning independently of understanding. This approach to imagination is, I think, essential to a workable nonconceptualist strategy. For otherwise the only candidates to be bearers of nonconceptual content are the sensible impressions belonging to "sheer receptivity," that is, sense-impressions or sensations. And while these clearly do not depend on concepts, it is implausible to view them as having representational content in the sense that is at issue in the debate over nonconceptual content. That debate, as Allais helpfully puts it, is about the possibility of intentional content without concepts: whether we can have nonconceptual representations which are object-directed, or which represent objects to us. So for a plausible nonconceptualist interpretation of Kant, it is not enough to show that Kant allows the possibility of some kind of sensory awareness prior to any imaginative synthesis. Rather the defender of the nonconceptualist reading has to show that human imagination can produce perceptual images of objects in which those objects are intentionally represented without being brought under concepts.

What, then, is the evidence that Kant takes imagination to function independently of concepts? Allais develops her point that "synthesizing is not the same as conceptualizing" by appeal initially to a passage at A78/B103 where Kant says that "synthesis is in general the mere effect of the imagination" and that the task of understanding is to bring this synthesis to concepts. She then turns to Kant's characterization of the "threefold synthesis" in the first edition deduction. Of the three elements of this synthesis, that is apprehension, reproduction and recognition, only recognition, she says, explicitly involves concepts; the other two are ascribed

5 I offer criticisms of the nonconceptualist reading as part of a more comprehensive discussion of Kant's account of experience in my (forthcoming). The present paper both draws on, and supplements, that discussion.

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to imagination. She acknowledges Kant's claim at B 129-130 that all combination, and thus all synthesis, is an action of the understanding, but points out that most of the time Kant attributes synthesis to imagination. The textual evidence here is not, however, conclusive. For if the spontaneity of imagination is, as Kant says at B162n., "one and the same with" the spontaneity of understanding, then Kant's attribution of synthesis to imagination does not rule out that it may also be viewed as an action of understanding.6 And while Kant does indeed describe the understanding as bringing synthesis to concepts, he also suggests that concepts are necessary for the unity of the manifold, and hence, it would seem a condition of synthesis. He says at A 103 that without the synthesis of recognition in a concept "the manifold of the representation would never form a whole" and that "a concept is the unitary consciousness which unites the manifold... into one representation."7

Now the passages I have cited are not on their own sufficient to undermine the nonconceptualist reading, for we might suppose that a charitable reading of Kant requires us to overlook his identification of the spontaneity of imagination with that of understanding.8 The problem I want to raise for the nonconceptualist reading is not the mere fact that Kant makes this identification, and correspondingly takes understanding to be required for perceptual synthesis, but rather that he needs to make it if the strategy of the Transcendental Deduction is to have any hope of success. For part of the aim of the deduction is to show that the pure concepts have application to objects given to us in experience. And the idea that understanding is required for perceptual synthesis seems to be an essential part of achieving this aim.9 Kant says in 21 of the second edition Deduction that he will show "from the way in which empirical intuition is given in sensibility that its unity is none other than that which the category prescribes to the manifold of a given intuition in general." Only by thus explaining "the a priori validity of the category in regard to all objects of our senses," will "the aim of the deduction be fully attained." But his strategy for showing that the unity of empirical intuition is "none other than" the unity prescribed by the categories seems to depend on claiming that this unity is due precisely to the spontaneity of understanding. He says at 26 that, "when through apprehension, I make the empirical intuition of a house into a perception... I as it were draw its form in accordance with the synthetic unity of space" (B162): this is the unity which initially seemed to be due to sensibility in contrast to understanding. But, he goes on, "this very same synthetic unity, when I abstract from the form of space, has its origin in understanding" (ibid.). And he says in the footnote that in this way he has shown "that the synthesis of apprehension must accord with the synthesis of apperception" and that it is "one and the same spontaneity," under the titles of imagination and understanding resoectivelv. which underlies both (B162n). 6 Cf. also B153: it is understanding "under the title [Benennung] of a transcendental synthesis of imagination" that determines inner sense.

Kant's identification, emphasized by McDowell, of the "function which gives unity to the synthesis of representations in an intuition" with the "function which gives unity to the different representations in a judgment" (A79/B104-105) can, I think, be read along similar lines.

As suggested by Rohs, who takes Kant's "limitation of spontaneity to understanding" in the second edition to be simply a mistake (2001, pp. 222-223).

The same conclusion is defended in Wenzel (2005).

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The central line of thought which I take to be expressed in the passages just quoted is that the objective validity of the categories depends on their having a role to play, not just in explicit judgment, but also in our perceptual apprehension of the objects about which we judge.10 And this line of thought is, I think, essential to the anti-Humean aspect of Kant's view in the Critique. Putting it very crudely, Hume had denied that the concept or idea of causality had application in experience since, he had pointed out, we have no sensory impression of necessary connexion. Kant's strategy in response, again very crudely, is to claim that even though we have no sensory impression corresponding to the concept of causality, causality as necessary connexion nonetheless figures in the content of perception. It does so because perceptual content is arrived at through a synthesis of sensible impressions which accords with rules of the understanding, and one of these rules is, or corresponds to, the concept of causality. Now it is hard to see, on the nonconceptualist reading, how anything like this strategy is available to Kant. So the nonconceptualist reading seems to leave Kant without a response to the Humean worry which he describes in 13, and which the Deduction is meant, at least in part, to address: that because objects of sensible intuition might not conform to the conditions of the synthetic unity of thought, the concept of cause might be "empty, null and meaningless" (A90/B122).

My appeal to 13 here might seem surprising, since it is cited by both Hanna and Allais to support the claim that understanding is precisely not required in order for objects to be given to us in sensible intuition.11 What I described as Kant's "Humean worry" arises in a context which Kant introduces by saying that "since the categories of the understanding do not represent the conditions under which objects are given in intuition, objects can appear to us without necessarily being referred to the functions of understanding" (A89/B122); in related formulations Kant goes on to say that "appearances can be given without functions of the understanding" (ibid.), and that "appearances could be so constituted that understanding does not find them in accordance with the conditions of its unity" (A90/B123).12 It is this possibility which generates the "difficulty... of how "subjective conditions of thought should have objective validity" (A89/B122) which Kant goes on to characterize in connection with the concept of cause. But the possibility that sensibility could present us with appearances which are not governed by the conditions of thought is presented in a context which abstracts from the role of imagination in perception. Even though Kant's lead-in to the Deduction at 13- 14 comes after his introduction of the notion of imaginative synthesis in the Metaphysical Deduction, it is still framed in terms of the simple division of labour between sensibility and understanding presented in the Aesthetic and at the beginning of the Transcendental Logic. Kant's strategy in the Deduction, as I understand it, depends on the claim - initially introduced in the Metaphysical

Wenzel (2005) sees the same line of thought in a series of passages from the first edition Deduction. 11 Allais forthcoming; Hanna (2001, p. 199); Hanna (2005, pp. 259-260). lz Following Paton (1936, vol. I: 324n.), Allais emphasizes the contrast between the indicative "can" [ko'nnen] in the first two formulations, and the subjunctive "could" [kdnnten] in the third. While I think the contrast is worth noting, I do not think that it affects the point at issue.

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Deduction, but presented anew in the argument of the Deduction itself - that the presentation of appearances in perception requires a synthesis of imagination which can be shown to depend on the understanding. If we abstract from the role of this synthesis in perception then it does at least seem possible that appearances can be presented to us independently of the conditions of understanding, but once we have recognized the role of synthesis in perception, we are in a position to see that this apparent possibility is illusory.

II

I have just been arguing that Kant is committed to a view on which perceptual synthesis involves the exercise of understanding. If this is correct, then the nonconceptualist reading is untenable. But I want now to propose that we can accept conceptualism while still accommodating the considerations I mentioned earlier as supporting the nonconceptualist view. I want to introduce this proposal by asking the question: what is it for understanding to be required for perceptual synthesis? Typically, this claim is assumed to imply that we need to grasp concepts, whether pure or empirical, as a prior condition of being able to engage in perceptual synthesis. On this assumption, Kant's claim that perceptual synthesis is due to the spontaneity of understanding amounts to the claim that it consists in the application of antecedently possessed concepts to whatever preconceptual material is presented to us by sensibility. Only someone who already grasps the concept dog, and thus is already capable of making explicit judgments like dogs have four legs or dogs are furry, is capable, when confronted with a dog, of forming a perceptual image which represents it as a dog. For the synthesis required for the formation of the image is carried out, so to speak, under the guidance of that concept. It is the subject's grasp of the concept dog, and hence her knowledge that dogs are four-legged and furry, that enables her to include representations of four-leggedness and furriness in her perceptual representation of the dog.

If this is how we interpret the claim that perceptual synthesis involves understanding, then it is clear that it fails to do justice to the intuition I described earlier regarding the "primitive" character of perception relative to thought and judgment. But I want to claim that there is room for a less demanding conception of what it is for understanding to be involved in perceptual synthesis, a conception which does not require that any concepts be grasped antecedently to engaging in synthesis. On this conception, to say that synthesis involves understanding is simply to say that it involves a consciousness of normativity, or in other words, that in perceptual synthesis the subject does not merely combine or associate her representations, but, in so doing, takes herself to be doing so appropriately, or as she ought. I want to claim that this consciousness of normativity is possible without the subject's first having grasped any concept governing her synthesis, and, more specifically, without her synthesis needing to be guided by any concept. So for example she can synthesize her sensations so as to form a perceptual image of a dog, and in so doing take herself to be synthesizing as she ought, without having antecedently grasped the concept dog or any other concept, pure or empirical. And

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this consciousness of normativity, I want to argue, captures what Kant means by the involvement of understanding in perceptual synthesis, or, on my view equivalently, the spontaneous character of this synthesis.13

To make this proposal clearer, it will help to have in view a specific model of the imaginative activity which, for Kant, leads to the formation of a perceptual image. Kant characterizes this activity of imagination, in the first edition deduction, as involving "apprehension," in which the manifold is "run through and held together" (A99) and "reproduction," in which previously entertained intuitions are reproduced or recalled. This suggests, at a first approximation, that a perceptual image is formed out of sense-impressions through the establishment of some set of associative connections among them. The disparate sense-impressions caused in a particular subject by, say, a red apple on a brown table, come to be unified in specific ways both with one another (apprehension) and with other sense- impressions which the subject has received on previous occasions (reproduction). The suggestion can be filled out by supposing that the impressions caused by features of the apple's exterior - its red colour, its shininess, its roundish shape - come to be connected with one another, or "held together," in a way which contributes to the apple's being picked out against the background against which it is seen, and thus perceived in a way which registers its distinctness from the table. These impressions, we might suppose, also lead the subject to recall previous impressions of similar objects perceived on other occasions. The impressions caused by the apple's red exterior prompt the reproduction of impressions of the white interior of an apple, derived from the perception of apples which had been cut up or bitten into. While the apple's white interior is not seen on the present occasion, it nonetheless figures in the subject's perceptual image: the imagined whiteness of the apple plays a role in the subject's perceptual experience of the intact apple and contributes in particular to the apple's being seen as white on the inside and, more specifically, as an apple.14

Now I take it that this model, as described so far, corresponds roughly to the nonconceptualist approach to perceptual synthesis. For it depicts the formation of a perceptual image with intentional content as the result of an imaginative process which does not depend on the subject's possession of concepts corresponding to that content. The subject does not need to recognize that she is seeing an apple, or more minimally, that she is seeing something red, round and shiny, in order for her to associate her impressions of redness, roundness and shininess so that they collectively represent a single object, or for her to call to mind impressions of whiteness derived from the insides of apples, so that the resulting image represents a genuine apple as opposed to an apple-facade or a wax replica.15 No exercise of understanding is required to bring about the unity among her sense-impressions

13 I defend and motivate this claim more fully in my (forthcoming). 14 Here I am drawing on examples offered in Strawson (1970) and Sellars (1978), although both of these see the process as depending on the subject's grasp of the corresponding concepts. Pendlebury (1995) develops a nonconceptualist version of this kind of example in extremely helpful detail. 15 I am here using "impression of redness" as shorthand for "impression of the kind caused by something's being red"; it should not be taken to imply that the impression as such has intentional content.

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which constitutes them as a perceptual image with intentional content; instead the process is a purely naturalistic one which can be understood on the lines of Hume's association of ideas.16 But one might here wonder how it is that an associative process of this purely naturalistic kind could introduce intentionality or object- directedness into the manifold of one's perceptual impressions. If the impressions themselves lack intentional content, why should the mere fact that some of them are retained in memory and called to mind on the occasion of having others be sufficient to confer intentionality on the resulting aggregate? It is not hard to see why the habitual association of sense-impressions of one kind with those of another should influence a subject's behaviour with respect to what she perceives. That the impressions of redness and shininess caused by the apple's exterior call to mind previous impressions of whiteness and sweetness presumably contributes to an explanation of why she might try to bite into the apple: an explanation which will in principle apply no less to animal than to human subjects. What is less clear is why it should account for the apple's becoming available as an object of cognition, so that the subject is able not only to respond to it in a way which is sensitive to its being an apple (or, more minimally, to its being red and shiny), but also to represent it as an apple (or as red and shiny). The worry here, in more Kantian terms, is that the relation of association is too external to bring about the kind of unity in the manifold of intuitions which is needed if our sense-impressions are, collectively, to amount to the representation of an object.

On my proposal, by contrast, the process of associating sensations which I have described does not exhaust what is involved in perceptual synthesis. For in perceptual synthesis, we not only associate representations in the ways I have described, we associate them with a consciousness of normativity, that is, with a consciousness of the appropriateness of what we are doing. When the impression caused by the apple's exterior redness brings to mind an impression corresponding to an apple's white interior, that impression comes to mind with a sense of its appropriateness under the circumstances: I take it, in reproducing the latter impression, that it ought to be reproduced under the present circumstances. It is virtue of this consciousness of normativity in the association of our representations that our perception has intentionality or object-directedness. For, very roughly, it is this consciousness of normativity which secures what Kant calls the "element of necessity [etwas von Notwendigkeit]" involved in "our thought of the relation of all cognition to its object" (A 104). Our perception is intentionally directed towards objects, as opposed to merely being causally elicited by them, in virtue of the consciousness, accompanying each apprehended or reproduced sense-impression, that it is normatively necessitated given the circumstances in which I have it. It is precisely in virtue of that normative necessity, which is responsible for my taking the impression of whiteness I reproduce as belonging with the impressions of redness and roundness which have iust been caused in me, that my impressions,

16 It might also be understood in terms of more recent psychological theories of how visual information is

processed. Allais, for example, cites the visual system's "binding" of information from different

processing streams as an instance of perceptual synthesis. It seems to me that this way of understanding svnthesis is vulnerable to the same kind of worry that I go on to mention for the Humean model.

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taken together, have the right kind of unity to count as impressions of - in the sense of intentionally directed towards - an object.

It is an essential feature of this proposal that the consciousness of normativity here does not presuppose any antecedent grasp of concepts. It is not that I first conceive of what I am seeing as an apple, and then, on that basis, take an impression of whiteness to be appropriate to the impressions that I am now having. Nor, to consider a related possibility, do I first conceive of it as red, and then infer accordingly that I ought to recall the impressions previously accompanying red things. That I call to mind the particular impressions I do is a reflection of the same natural dispositions to associate representations that characterize the imaginative activity of animals. It is because of what we might, following Quine, call my innate similarity space - a natural feature of my associative dispositions which is shared to varying degrees with many of the higher animals - that the impressions presently caused by a particular red apple elicit the reproduction of impressions derived from prior experiences of red things or apples, rather than experiences of an infinite range of other objects which have properties in common with the particular apple now in view. But that does not rule out, I want to claim, that my associations differ fundamentally from those of animals in that they carry with them the consciousness that I am associating my impressions as they ought to be associated. And I want to claim also that it is precisely this consciousness of normativity which constitutes the involvement of understanding in perceptual synthesis, and, relatedly, the conceptual character of perceptual content.17 To the extent that impressions derived from the perception of things which are red and round lead me consistently to reproduce impressions derived from previous perceptual encounters with things that are red and round, and to the extent that I reproduce these earlier impressions with the consciousness of the appropriateness of what I am doing, I am, on the view here proposed, subsuming these impressions under the concepts red and round. Similarly, to the extent that being presented with an apple leads me to reliably reproduce impressions previously made on me by apples, again with the consciousness of normativity, I am bringing the apple under the concept apple}* For what it is to conceptualize one's sense-impressions, on the view I am proposing to ascribe to Kant, is just to associate them imaginatively in determinate ways with the awareness that one is associating them as one ought. The consciousness of normative necessity in these associations is responsible, as I have already suggested, for the object-directed character of our perceptions; but insofar as our particular way nf associating nresent with nast sense-imoressions on anv eiven occasion is sensitive

17 This has to be emphasized to distinguish my view from a possible version of nonconceptualism which would allow the kind of normativity I have been describing but deny that this entails that synthesis requires the understanding or concepts. Allais describes this view as one on which "the way we pre- conceptually synthesize introduces normativity, or proto-normativity, into the content of perception in a way which makes it possible to bring the normativity of concepts to the content of perception" and she cites my (1997) as an example. But the normativity I am invoking, both here and in the earlier article, is the normativity of concepts. My point is not that synthesis makes possible a consciousness of normativity which allows for the application of concepts as a separate, and subsequent, cognitive step. Rather, as I go on to claim in the text, the consciousness of normativity in the synthesis of the manifold just is the application of concepts to the objects we represent. 18 For more discussion of this point, see my (2006a).

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to the object's being of this or that particular kind, it is also responsible for the object's being perceived as belonging to that kind, and thus for the object's being brought under the corresponding concept.

The view I am proposing to ascribe to Kant is thus a form of conceptualism. To the extent that our perception is intentionally directed towards objects, I am claiming, it involves the application of concepts to those objects. But the view differs from the stronger kind of conceptualism which the nonconceptualist finds objectionable. For it does not suppose that the application of concepts in perception requires a grasp of those concepts antecedent to the perceptions in which they figure. Rather, it is in virtue of our having the perceptions we do that we count as applying, and a fortiori as grasping, those concepts.19 My proposal thus respects the primitive character of perception relative to thought by denying that we must possess the capacity to entertain thoughts about, say, apples, as a prior condition of being able to perceive an apple as such. It remains true, as on the conceptualist view as standardly understood, that we cannot perceive something as an apple if we do not have the capacity to entertain thoughts involving the concept apple. For I cannot perceive something as an apple, on this view, without conceiving it to be an apple, and hence judging that it is an apple. But my carrying out the synthesis through which I come to perceive it as an apple is not guided by my antecedent recognition that, say, this is an apple and that apples have white insides. Rather, I judge the thing to be an apple, and to have a white inside, precisely in virtue of carrying out that synthesis.

I want to end by noting briefly how this view portrays the distinction between sensibility and understanding. It does not deny that the distinction is a genuine one. But it does not interpret it as the nonconceptualist does, by supposing that we can isolate, within human cognition, actual representations that can be ascribed to sensibility alone (where sensibility is understood in a broad sense which includes imagination). Rather, to speak of sensibility in isolation from understanding is to speak counterf actually: it is to speak of what would be left of human perceptual experience if the synthesis of imagination did not involve the consciousness of normativity. We would still have sensations, and we would associate them in more or less the same patterns that we associate them now. But we would associate them blindly, just as Kant takes animals to do, instead of with a consciousness that we were associating them as we ought.

This is not to deny that sensibility makes a contribution to human cognition. On the contrary, it is sensibility alone which is responsible for our perceptions' having

19 On my version of conceptualism, then, concepts do not "restrict" or "limit" the contents of perception. A subject's stock of concepts, rather, is determined by which kinds of perceptions she is capable of having: as she acquires more habits of association, and thus becomes capable of a wider range of perceptual experiences, she thereby comes into possession of more concepts. It might be objected that my version thus fails to count as a genuine form of conceptualism. According to Jose Bermudez, "the import of placing a conceptual constraint on perceptual content is to capture the idea that the type of perceptual experiences a perceiver can have is determined by the concepts he possesses... It follows from this that if we know what concepts a perceiver possesses, we will be able to define what might be termed a perceptual space limiting the colours, shapes, objects etc., that he can properly be described as perceiving" (1998, p. 56; the operative word here is "limiting"). I try to address this objection, and the related worry (raised in discussion by Robert Hanna) that the kind of view here ascribed to Kant is conceptualist only in a trivial sense, in my (2006b).

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the particular representational contents that they do. What makes it the case that we in fact associate sensations in the particular patterns that we do - grouping them in ways that fit the concepts red and apple as opposed to nonstandard concepts like grue and emerire - is something that we share with animals: it is a matter of our natural dispositions to associate representations in one set of ways rather than another. And the same indeed holds good for the higher-order patterns of association corresponding to the pure concepts: for example, we share with animals a tendency to reproduce representations in ways that are sensitive to the causal relations holding among the objects which give rise to them, and to the status of those objects as capable of undergoing changes while enduring through time. This is why - insofar as our perceptual experience has representational content at all - we perceive things not only as red and as apples, but also as substances, as having qualities, and as standing in causal relations.20 But that our perceptual experience has representational content in the first place is not due to the particular ways that we associate our representations, but rather to the consciousness of normativity in those associations. So while the specific representational contents of our perceptions can be ascribed to our sensibility, it is understanding which is responsible for these perceptions' having representational content uberhaupt.

Acknowledgements This paper was presented as part of a symposium at the 2007 Pacific Division Meeting of the APA. I am very grateful to Jose Bermudez for his comments on that occasion. Thanks also to Lucy Allais, Stephen Engstrom, and Eric Watkins for helpful discussion.

20 This attempts to address a worry Bermudez raised in his penetrating comments at the APA symposium where this paper was presented: if understanding is the bare consciousness of normativity, how can it be responsible for the pure concepts? I take it to be responsible for the pure concepts in the same sense that it is responsible for empirical concepts: namely, by making the difference between an association of representations that is determined only by external natural laws, and an association of representations which the subject represents as according with a normative rule. This is a controversial view which deserves more defence that I can provide here.

References

Allais, L. Forthcoming. Non-conceptual content and the representation of space. Bermudez, J. (1998). The paradox of self-consciousness. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Engstrom, S. (2006). Understanding and sensibility. Inquiry, 49{\\ 2-25. Ginsborg, H. (1997). Lawfulness without a law. Philosophical Topics, 25(1), 37-81. Ginsborg, H. (2006a). Thinking the particular as contained under the universal. In Rebecca Kukla (Ed.),

Aesthetics and cognition in Kant's critical philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ginsborg, H. (2006b). Empirical concepts and the content of experience. European Journal of

Philosophy, 14(A\ 372-395. Ginsborg, H. Forthcoming. Kant and the problem of experience. Philosophical Topics. Hanna, R. (2001). Kant and the foundations of analytic philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hanna, R. (2005). Kant and nonconceptual content. European Journal of Philosophy, 13{2), 247-290. McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and world. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Paton, H. J. (1936). Kant's metaphysic of experience. London: George Allen & Unwin. Pendlebury, M. (1995). Making sense of Kant's schematism. Philosophy and Phenomenenological

Research, 55(4), 777-797. Rohs, P. (2001). Bezieht sich nach Kant die Anschauung unmittelbar auf Gegenstande? Akten des IX.

International Kant-Kongresses, vol. II. Berlin: de Gruyter. Sellars, W. (1968). Science and metaphysics. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

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Sellars, W. (1978). The role of the imagination in Kant's theory of experience. In Henry W. Johnstone Jr. (Ed.), Categories: A colloquium. Department of Philosophy, The Pennsylvania State University.

Strawson, P. F. (1970). Imagination and perception. In Lawrence Foster & J. W. Swanson (Eds.), Experience and theory. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.

Watkins, E. Forthcoming. Kant and the myth of the given. Inquiry. Wenzel, C. H. (2005). Spielen nach Kant die Kategorien schon bei der Wahrnehmung eine Rolle?

Kant-Studien, 96, 407^26.

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Issue Table of ContentsPhilosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, Vol. 137, No. 1, Selected Papers from the American Philosophical Association, Pacific Division, 2007 Meeting (Jan., 2008), pp. A1-A6, 1-158Front MatterPhilosophical Studies: Issue from the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting, San Francisco, April 2007 [p. 1-1]Identifying and Dissolving the Non-Identity Problem [pp. 3-18]Author-Meets-Critics: "In Praise of Blame" by George SherReview: Sher's Defense of Blame [pp. 19-30]Review: Character, Blameworthiness, and Blame: Comments on George Sher's "In Praise of Blame" [pp. 31-39]

Kantian Non-Conceptualism [pp. 41-64]Was Kant a Nonconceptualist? [pp. 65-77]Contemplative Withdrawal in the Hellenistic Age [pp. 79-89]Author-Meets-Critics: "Theories of Judgment" by Wayne MartinReview: Comments on Wayne Martin, Theories of Judgment [pp. 91-108]Review: Wayne Martin on Judgment [pp. 109-119]Review: Kant and the Problem of Existential Judgment: Critical Comments on Wayne Martin's "Theories of Judgment" [pp. 121-134]

Author-Meets-Critics: "Exceeding Our Grasp" by Kyle StanfordReview: Epistemic Instrumentalism, Exceeding Our Grasp [pp. 135-139]Review: Recurrent Transient Underdetermination and the Glass Half Full [pp. 141-148]Review: What You Don't Know Can't Hurt You: Realism and the Unconceived [pp. 149-158]

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