KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION

SYNTHESE LIBRARY

STUDIES IN EPISTEMOLOGY,

LOGIC, METHODOLOGY, AND PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE

Managing Editor:

JAAKKO HINTIKKA, Boston University

Editors:

DONALD DA VIDSON, University of California. Berkeley GABRIEL NUCHELMANS, University of Leyden WESLEY C. SALMON, University of Pittsburgh

VOLUME 222

ROBERT HOWELL

Department of Philosophy. State University of New York at Albany

KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL

DEDUCTION

An Analysis of Main Themes in His Critical Philosophy

SPRINGER-SCIENCE+BUSINESS MEDIA, B.V.

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HOw,}} . Rebert . Kant's t r ansc endenta l d.duCtlen an analysIs ef Uln thellS In

hIS crit Ical phIlosophy I by Rebert Hewell. p . ce . -- (Synthue lIbrary, v. 222)

ISBN 978-90-481-4114-2 ISBN 978-94-015-8020-5 (eBook)DOI 10.1007/978-94-015-8020-51. Knew ledge. Theory of. 2. Klnt. hu nuel, 1724-1 804

- ContrlbuTiens In theery ef knowledge . 1. T·lt le. II . Ser ies . B2799 .I<7H68 1992 121 .• 092--dc20 91-4399 1

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In Memory of My Mother and Father, Lorinda Katherine Cottingham Howell Robert Donald Howell

Es ist miBlich, den Gedanken, der einem tiefdenkenden Manne obgeschwebt haben mag und den er sich selbst nicht recht klar machen konnte, zu erraten ...

- Kant to Marcus Herz, May 26, 1789, discussing Leibniz

Firm ground is not available ground.

- A. R. Ammons

TABLE OF CONTENTS

DISPLAYED SENTENCES REFERRED TO FREQUENTLY xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xv

PREFACE xvii

CHAPTER ONE: KANT'S PICTURE OF KNOWLEDGE 1 1. Kant's Goals 1 2. The Kantian Picture of Knowledge (I):

Intuition, Concept, Sensibility, and Understanding 4 3. The Kantian Picture of Knowledge (II):

Space, Time, and Transcendental Idealism 9 4. Summary 23

CHAPTER TWO: INTUITIONS AND THEIR OBJECTS 25 1. The Transcendental Deduction and Category Application 25 2. Kantian Representations in Our Knowledge:

Things Existing in Themselves or Things Merely Appearing to Us in Time or Both? 26

3. The Object That Kant Takes an Intuition to Represent to Us: Things as They Appear and Appearances 36

4. A Problem for Kant 40 5. Outer and Inner Sense and the Problem for Kant 53 6. Things in Themselves: A Preliminary Comment 56 7. Summary 57

CHAPTER THREE: INTUITION, THE MANIFOLD OF INTUITION, AND ITS SYNTHESIS 59 1. Introduction 59 2. Our Discursive Thought-Consciousness and the Nature of a

Kantian Concept 61

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x TABLE OF CONTENTS

3. The Elements of the Manifold of Intuition (I): Matters for Concepts

4. The Elements of the Manifold of Intuition (II): Matters for Spatial Parts

5. Problems and Loose Ends 6. Conclusions

70

80 89 99

CHAPTER FOUR: THE TRANSCENDENTAL DEDUCTION: ITS STRUCTURE, GOALS, AND OPENING CLAIMS 103 1. Introduction 103 2. 'Combination ... cannot be given' (B130) 105 3. 'How subjective conditions o/thought can have objective

validity' (A89!B122): The Transcendental Deduction in Kant's Conception of It 111

4. The Overall Shape of the Transcendental Deduction; the A-and B-Deductions 124

5. Final Preliminaries. The § 14, A92-93!B 125-26 Argument for the Deduction 135

6. Summary 138

CHAPTER FIVE: COMBINATION AND INTENSIONALITY: B-DEDUCTION § 15 141 1. Introduction 141 2. Claims of B-Deduction § 15 141 3. Intensionality 144 4. The Assumption That H Knows through i 148 5. Summary 153

CHAPTER SIX: APPERCEPTION: B-DEDUCTION § 16 155 1. Introduction 155 2. Kant's View of Apperception in B-Deduction § 16 156 3. The Basic Structure of the § 16 Argument about Appercep-

tion; the Problem of Validating Kant's Claim in § 16 159 4. Three Ultimately Inadequate Kantian Attempts to Validate

Unity-of-Apperception Claims Like (S) 171 5. Can (S) Be Validated by Kant's Account of Synthesis?

A Fourth Argument for (S) 184 6. Summary 189

TABLE OF CONTENTS xi

CHAPTER SEVEN: TRANSCENDENTAL UNITY OF APPERCEPTION AND ITS

NECESSITY 191 1. Introduction 191 2. Stipulating (S) and Unity of Apperception 192 3. Necessity of Unity of Apperception 199 4. Summary 211

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE UNION OF THE MANIFOLD OF INTUITION IN THE

CONCEPT OF AN OBJECT: B-DEDUCTION § 17 213 1. Introduction 213 2. Uniting the Manifold of j 214 3. Preliminaries to B-Deduction § 17 220 4. B-Deduction § 17 and Kant's Attempts to Prove the Union

of j' s Manifold in the Concept of an Object 225 5. The Union of the Manifold of j in the Concept of an Object

as Yielding H Knowledge; Further Questions 233 6. Summary 243

CHAPTER NINE: OBJECTIVE UNITY OF APPERCEPTION AND THE LOGICAL

FORMS OF JUDGMENT: B-DEDUCTION § 18 AND § 19 245 1. Introduction 245 2. Objective Unity of Apperception 246 3. Objective Unity of Apperception and the Logical Forms of

Judgment 250 4. Questions about the Logical Functions 261 5. The Copula, Objective Unity, and Necessary Unity 265 6. Summary 272

CHAPTER TEN: CATEGORY APPLICATION TO THE OBJECT OF INTUITION:

B-DEDUCTION § 20 275 1. Introduction 275 2. Kant on Concepts and the Logical Functions of Thought in

Judgment 275 3. Concepts in Judgments and Features in Objects 279 4. Kant on the Categories (I) 289 5. Kant on the Categories (II): Further Development 296

xii TABLE OF CONTENTS

6. Kant on the Categories (ill): Aristotelian Explanations 303 7. Evaluations. The Necessity of Category Application 310 8. Final Issues 319 9. Conclusions. The Overall Interest and Success of the First

Half of the B-Deduction 333 10. Summary 335

NOTES 339

BIBLIOGRAPHY 409

INDEX 415

DISPLA YED SENTENCES

REFERRED TO FREQUENTLY

00 1~ (W) 161 (S) 161 actual-consciousness version of (S) 210 (NCA) 168 (NUA) 168 (N)) 201 (N2) 202 (N3) 203 (TJ) 217 (Ti) 220

xiii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In my references in this book to Kant's work, 'Ak. 3,45' refers to vol. 3, p. 45, of the Academy Edition of Kant's works. 'Schmidt, ed.' is Schmidt's edition of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft, as cited in the Bibliography. For Kant and other authors, I use the translations noted in the Bibliography, sometimes with alterations. Translations not otherwise identified are my own. As is standard, 'A4/B8' refers to p. 4 of the first edition and to p. 8 of the second edition of the first Critique, as noted in the margins of most editions, including Kemp Smith's translation, from which (with some changes) I quote. References to Locke and Berkeley and to Hume's Treatise are by book, chapter, and section ('IVA.5'). Aristotle is cited by work, using the translations listed in the Bibliog­raphy. 'McKeon, ed.' refers to The Basic Works of Aristotle (1941), cited in the Bibliography.

Some parts of Chapters Two and Five through Eight are from two of my previous essays (1979 and 1981a, as noted in the Bibliography). I am grateful for permission to reuse the material.

xv

PREFACE

The Critique of Pure Reason is one of the two or three supreme texts of Western philosophy and the most influential philosophical work of the last 250 years. The Transcendental Deduction of the Categories, in the Critique, is the central argument of Kant's theoretical work and underlies much subsequent philosophical investigation. The categories referred to are, according to Kant, the a priori concepts of our mind's faculty of understanding - concepts such as those of quantity, quality, substance, and cause and effect. The argument of the Transcendental Deduction answers a fundamental question of classical metaphysics and epistemol­ogy: Can we know, through such categories, substantive facts about objects a priori, in independence of the evidence of our senses?

As we will see in Chapter One, the opinion of rationalist metaphysicians was that we can. But the opposing empiricist tradition, culminating in the work of Hume, held that we cannot know facts about objects in such a way and, further, that concepts such as those of sub­stance or of cause and effect are not a priori at all. In the Transcendental Deduction Kant tries to reconcile these two major positions and to settle once and for all the issue of the scope and limits of the categories.

Kant argued earlier in the Critique of Pure Reason that we can know objects only as they appear to us through our senses and not as they exist in themselves, in independence of our sense experience of them. He argued also that concepts such as those of substance or of cause and effect are a priori. In the Transcendental Deduction he now attempts to show that the categories do indeed apply to, and yield us knowledge of, objects, but he denies that they yield us knowledge of objects as they exist in themselves. Kant thereby vindicates the rationalist view that a priori knowledge of objects through the categories is possible. But at the same time he also curbs rationalism and vindicates empiricism by insisting that we have such a priori knowledge only of the objects of our sense experience.

In the Deduction, Kant's argument for his major conclusions is straightforward in its overall structure. Kant reasons, very roughly, that the mental representations, or intuitions, through which we know objects

xvii

xviii PREFACE

in sense experience are subject to what he calls unity of apperception: We can take all those representations, and their contained elements, to belong to ourself. From this fact Kant argues that, using our a priori concept of an object, we must judge the objects of such representations to be structured by what he calls the logical functions of thought in judgment. According to Kant, the result of this structuring is that those objects fall under the categories. So Kant proves the applicability of the categories to the objects that we know through sense experience. And he shows also that through the categories we can know only such objects and not objects as they exist in themselves.

Kant's argument - clear in outline but obscure in many of its details­is, I think, the deepest and most far-reaching in all philosophy. Besides the points already mentioned about the categories, it raises fundamental questions about the role of logic (or of the organization of concepts in judgment) in structuring the world that we know, the possibility of our knowing objects independently of such mind-imposed structures, the place of the self and its conceptual apparatus with respect to the world that it knows, the nature of self-knowledge, and the dependence of self­knowledge on knowledge of objects distinct from the self's mental states. These questions, and the points already mentioned, have had an immense influence on subsequent philosophy, and every theoretical philosopher, of whatever flavor, who engages with fundamental concerns is in one way or another working within, or reacting against, the intellectual situation into which Kant plunged us late in the eighteenth century.

The Transcendental Deduction has been the subject of much discus­sion from Kant's time on. But many of its particulars, including crucial points about unity of apperception, the concept of an object, judgment, the logical functions of judgment, and the categories, are still not well understood. And because the logical structure of Kant's inferences and the extensive role, in his reasoning, of the logical phenomenon of intensionality have not been widely grasped, even many ofthe points that have been worked through have not been fully comprehended.

Past approaches to Kant's theoretical philosophy have ranged from painstaking philological investigations of the texts to freewheeling 'reconstructions' of his theses that build up Kantian or semi-Kantian constructions out of contemporary philosophical ideas. The goal of some (but not all) parts of my previous essays on Kant, especially my 1973 NoUs paper (cited in the Bibliography), has been reconstructive - to show, in part, how various concerns from contemporary intensional logic and

PREFACE xix

philosophy of language reflect, or can be used to illuminate, Kantian theoretical claims. But the aim of the present book is rather different. Although I make a number of reconstructive suggestions, I am not here attempting to re-create the Transcendental Deduction in terms of contem­porary logic or to compare Kant's ideas in detail with all the recent logical views. Rather, I seek to use specific ideas from contemporary philosophy and intensional logic in order to understand Kant's own reasoning and views as he himself presents them in the Deduction. I intend my findings to throw considerable new light on crucial claims and arguments in Kant's theoretical philosophy and on many obscure details of the Deduction. Of course the ultimate justification for this undertaking can be seen only by studying its results. However, I can say now that the procedure is vindicated by the fact that many of Kant's concerns in the first Critique are reflected in current philosophical work, and the sharp tools that that work has forged make possible a finer, keener grasp of Kant's manifold subtleties than has hitherto been available - subtleties that, despite past scholarship, have kept much of the Deduction a mystery.

A brief outline of the course of my discussion may be useful here. In Chapters One to Five, I explain Kant's basic picture of knowledge and the ideas needed to understand the argument of the Deduction - for example, the notion of an intuition and its manifold of elements; the view that we know objects only as they appear to us through our senses; and the nature of a concept and of the elements of the manifold of intuition. I also examine the overall structure of the Transcendental Deduction and of its 1787 (or B-) version, which is (for reasons noted below and explained in Chapter Four) the especial focus of this book. And I discuss in detail the idea of intensionality and begin to show its central role in the Deduction.

In Chapters Six through Ten I then develop the main argument of the first half of the B-Deduction, which provides Kant's clearest, most developed, and philosophically most stimulating exposition of his main lines of thought. In Chapter Six I consider apperception and its unity. I complete that discussion in Chapter Seven and also there examine the idea - on which Kant places much emphasis - of the necessity of unity of apperception. In Chapter Eight I study Kant's deep and interesting claims about the union of the elements of intuition in the concept of an object. In doing so, I resolve an apparent fallacy at the heart of his reasoning from unity of apperception to that union. I then turn in Chapter Nine to Kant's account of judgment and of the logical functions of thought in judgment. In Chapter Ten I explain how, by appeal to that account and to his

xx PREFACE

previous results, Kant finally infers category application to the objects that we know through sense experience. As I do so, I try to make clear, with greater exactness than has been previously attained, precisely how the structuring of judgments by the logical functions of thought leads to category application to the objects of those judgments. And I suggest an Aristotelian origin for some hitherto unobserved, puzzling features of Kant's claims about judgment and the categories.

Throughout this book I try to state Kant's views with logical precision. This project sometimes entails complexities, particularly in the discussion of Kant's central claims about apperception, objectivity, and the categories. But the difficulty and depth of the Deduction demand close attention from any serious reader, and I have tried to pursue Kant's views with the same sort of patience, clear-headed penetration, and use of the relevant tools that one would bring to the work of a contemporary philosopher for whom one has the greatest respect.

Because my goal in this book is to understand and evaluate Kant's own reasoning in the Deduction, I did not begin my work with any fixed idea of how far the Deduction might succeed. Given the importance of the issues that Kant raises, the depth to which he pursues them, and the influence of his reasoning and framework, it seemed sufficient to follow the argument of the Deduction wherever it led, without worrying about the outcome. As the reader will discover, the results of my study are negative. It turns out that there are serious problems with - or there is a serious lack of evidence for - each of Kant's main claims about unity of apperception and its necessity, about the unity of elements of intuition in the concept of an object, and about the logical functions and the categories. The argument of the Deduction, as Kant presents it, fails; and that fact has serious implications for Kant's own theoretical philosophy. As I urge in Chapter Ten, I think that this situation must be acknowledged and not pushed aside while the Deduction is wafted upward on clouds of unthinking piety.

A number of other commentators have thought the official argument of the Deduction a failure. (And certainly 200 years of investigation have failed to yield a clearly sound version of Kant's Deduction reasoning.) But no one, I believe, has pursued Kant's argument through every twist and tum, with the focus on exact statement and explicit inference, and the emphasis on intensionality and related matters, that I have tried to maintain here. Nor have earlier scholars treated apperception, the concept of an object, and the categories and logical functions in the manner and

PREFACE xxi

detail that I do. Nonetheless, some prospective readers may perhaps wonder what the value can be of a study whose main conclusions about the overall Deduction are negative. To my mind, there are two answers to this question.

First, and as I have emphasized, the Transcendental Deduction is unmatched in modem philosophy for importance, depth, and influence. The framework and ideas that Kant lays down in the Deduction are the basis from which all subsequent theoretical philosophy has proceeded, whether in agreement, rebellion, or bemusement. Each of us is gripped by, or is fighting the grip of, that framework today. One has to look no further than current disputes over realism and antirealism, the role of linguistic and conceptual frameworks in fixing our version of reality, and similar matters. It therefore is of great importance to realize that Kant's own fundamental claims and inferences in the Deduction are subject to the most serious objections. I think it is an open question whether, on some careful formulation, current and broadly Kantian ideas like those concerned with linguistic or conceptual frameworks and our version of reality will tum out to be correct. (Part of the effect of the Deduction is simply to have forced such questions on us.) But the fact that Kant's own claims in the Deduction fail means that those claims themselves cannot be appealed to in defense of the recent, broadly Kantian ideas. Nor can those claims support the many other views contemporary philosophers have tried to derive from the Deduction (for example, views about self­knowledge as requiring knowledge of objects distinct from one's experiences or views about the inevitability of our possessing the capacity for first-person ascription of our experiences). Whatever the fate of all the contemporary ideas whose ultimate origins lie in the Transcendental Deduction, my results show that that fate cannot be settled by appeal to the argument and claims of the Deduction itself.

Second, a cardinal task of scholarship is the dispassionate examination of the master texts of our tradition. In a famous essay, Kant praises enlightenment, which he describes as the release from a self-incurred tutelage in which one lacks the resolution and courage to use one's reason without direction from another. It is in the spirit of this ideal of enlighten­ment that I have tried to read the Deduction, endeavoring as far as possible to see for myself what actually lies in Kant's own reasoning in that text. My goal throughout is understanding, not cbeedeading for Kant.

As I have noted, I concentrate on the first half of the 1787 version of the Transcendental Deduction as presented in the second (or B-) edition

xxii PREFACE

of the Critique of Pure Reason. I do so because of that version's clarity and philosophical interest and because it raises succinctly almost all the main issues about Kant's positive account of our knowledge. The B­Transcendental Deduction is Kant's final extended statement of the argument of the Deduction, and it explicitly introduces themes about judgment, the logical functions of thought, and the categories that the first (or A-) edition (1781) does not discuss. However, I comment on the second half of the B-Deduction as well as on the A-Deduction, and on various of Kant's remarks elsewhere about the Deduction. I also consider the relationship of Kant's ideas in the Deduction to other parts of his theoretical philosophy. Thus this book is a study of the main themes of the Transcendental Deduction and of Kant's overall theoretical philosophy, as well as of the actual B-Deduction itself. I try to take up most of the important disputed issues in the history of Deduction interpretation and to make a precise, reasoned contribution to the debate about them.

I have tried to push my examination of Kant's argument quite deep. The Deduction is, however, an enormously fertile piece of reasoning, and much more could be said, both philosophically and historically, than I have been able to say here. Thus Kant's views on self-knowledge, on the categories, and on the relationship of his claims in the Deduction to ideas that he presents in the Transcendental Dialectic deserve discussion beyond that which I can give them in this book. I also have had to truncate an account of Kant's historical background and of his position (in my opinion) as the supreme 'Aristotelian-Cartesian' philosopher - a philosopher who took into his hands, and reshaped, over two thousand years of thought. I hope to be able to present some of this additional material elsewhere.

This book has been long in the writing. I began it in the fall of 1972 and completed a first draft in August 1973. I presented some of my fundamental ideas (for example, about intuition, synthesis, individuation, intensionality, operator-shift fallacies, the concept of an object in general, and unity of apperception) in a series of papers published from 1973 to 1981. But most of those ideas are refined here, and there is much that is new. I also have tried to take into account relevant parts of the secondary literature, which is becoming enormous. In many respects, however, my approach differs from that of other authors, principally in its application of close logical analysis to Kant's argument, its emphasis on the role of intensionality, and its many specific points about the interpretation of

PREFACE xxiii

apperception, unity of the object, the logical functions, and the categories. My stress on the importance of the Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories to the Transcendental Deduction - with which Kant would agree - also is unique to this work. A point of convergence exists with Guyer's criticisms, in his recent book, of Kant's treatment of necessity. Although my views (which go back to my 1973 manuscript) differ in detail from Guyer's, we both see Kant as falling victim to some of the same general kinds of errors about necessity. (So also does Harrison in a 1982 paper cited in the Bibliography.) I would like to think that this agreement is evidence for the general correctness of our discussions of Kant at this point.

lowe many debts. P. F. Strawson's lectures on Kant, which I heard at Oxford in 1965-66, have influenced my understanding of Kant's position, although I do not agree with everything that Strawson maintains in The Bounds of Sense. I have profited also from Jonathan Bennett's work on Kant. Jaakko Hintikka's well-known ideas about intensionality have been important to my view of the logical underpinnings of the Deduction, and Robert Paul Wolff's interpretation of the Transcendental Analytic both convinced me that Kant has one definite line of argument in that section of the Critique and helped me to see what it is. Both Hintikka and Wolff also gave me considerable, and much-appreciated, encouragement. lowe Wolff special thanks for persisting with detailed suggestions about substance and style while disagreeing strongly with many of my major claims. I found essays by Dieter Henrich, Charles Parsons, and Stephen Barker stimulating and far more helpful than many book-length works. Through his writings and in the few conversations I have had with him, Lewis White Beck has both clarified and altered my grasp of Kant's notion of the concept of an object in general. Early on, Konrad Marc­Wogau and Manley Thompson offered useful suggestions, as did Julius Moravcsik, who also improved my understanding of Aristotle. In addition, John Perry, Patrick Suppes, and Arthur Melnick deserve thanks for their support. In the SUNY Albany philosophy department, I want especially to thank Berel Lang and Robert G. Meyers for their efforts on my behalf. Further back, lowe much to my teachers V. C. Aldrich and Frithjof Bergmann. Thomas B. Kirsch was a source of unfailing insight. It goes without saying that none of these people should be held responsible for the opinions that I express in this work.

Much of the final draft of this book was written while I was a Visiting Member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and I am very

XXIV PREFACE

much indebted to the Institute for having me and to Morton White for his help and encouragement while I was there. I must also thank: the National Endowment for the Humanities for partial support at the Institute. I received funds for earlier essays related to this book from the American

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Council of Learned Societies, the SUNY Research Foundation, and from a National Endowment for the Humanities summer grant. I am grateful to SUNY Albany and its Faculty Research Awards Program (and to Francine Frank, dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, and Jeanne E. Gullahom, vice-president for research) for providing funds for manuscript preparation. And I appreciate the help of Donna Magee, who typed successive drafts with skill and dedication.

I want finally to thank: my wife, Pam, for her patience and encourage­ment, and, as well, my children, Robbie and Kate, who were there, each day, messengers of hope as I scaled the sheer face ofthe Deduction.