Mind Association

The Necessity of Kant

Author(s): Graham Bird
Source: Mind, New Series, Vol. 68, No. 271 (Jul., 1959), pp. 389-392
Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the Mind Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2251660 .
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THE NECESSITY OF KANT
MR. ROBINSON, in an article in MIND (July 1958), blames Kant
for what he takes to be muddles about necessary propositions. He
says in the paragraph central to his criticism of Kant (p. 293):
I regret to say that I think that the concept of a necessary pro-
position is now a muddle, and that this muddle began with Kant.
I think that Kant's concept of a necessary proposition is nothing
definite, but just a confusion of the four- clear concepts of a necessary
proposition which I have indicated. Kant's necessary proposition is
none of these four necessary propositions precisely, but it is all of
them confusedly.
I want in this brief note to suggest that at least part of whatever
blame is to be distributed for any such muddles about necessary
propositions should be allotted to commentators on -Kant, such
as- Robinson himself. It may be true (and part of what Robinson
says) that in Kant is to be found the origin of muddles of this kind,
much as it may be true, as Balfour once implied, that in Christianity is
to be found the origin of sin. . But Robinson evidently wishes to say
more than this, namely that Kant was muddled in his own account
of necessity, and not merely the original occasion of others' muddle
on the same subject. Since Robinson's conclusions in this paragraph
are suppQrted by reference to the ways in which Kant is supposed to
have confused the four clear senses of 'necessary proposition', I shall
consider his arguments one by one.
(i) Kant's necessary proposition is partly and confusedly the Aristo-
telian necessary proposition (p. 293).
The first argument in favour of this is to say that it is sug-
gested by those of Kant's examples of necessary propositions
which contain the word
'
must
'
(or some such word, e.g. in German).
For this criterion of a necessary proposition is simply that it should
contain some such word as ' must '. This argument is simply
absurd. There may be some senses of '.necessary proposition' in
which -it would be unnatural or impossible to express such a proposi-
tion by adding-such a word (e.g. perhaps this second sense is such), but
there are also many cases (among the first, third and fourth senses) in
'which this would be both natural and possible. That is, if I happen
to believe that a proposition 'A is B
'
is necessary, it would be quite
natural to express it by saying, sometimes, 'A must be B '. The fact
that I might sometimes do so is quite irrelevant to the question of
what I mean by '.necessary proposition '. The same fact certainly
does not in the least suggest that I mean by 'necessary proposition
'
one which contains some such word as 'must'. It may be that
Robinson has been misled here by his claims that the four senses are
'.independent '; for the relation betweeA the Aristotelian account and
the others is somewhat more intimate than this austere- word suggests.
For one natural way either of expressing propositions said to be
necessary in the other senses, or of expressing the propositions that
389
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390 G. BIRD:
they are necessary, would be to satisfy this Aristotelian criterion.
And for this reason if I do choose to express such propositions in this
natural way, I will be satisfying this criterion, but I won't in the
least necessarily want to say that it is in this sense that I use
necessary' of propositions.
The second argument in favour of this first claim is that Kant's
talk of statements which ' think necessity' ' (B 4) ', or 'contain
necessity', or 'whose assertion brings necessity along with itself',
' more than suggests ' that he was adopting this criterion. Robinson
tries to support this claim by saying that 'When Kant said meta-
phorically that a statement
"
contained " necessity, he meant in part
that it asserted necessity, i.e. asserted that all S must be P'. But no
reason is given why we have to construe the metaphor as meaning' the
statement asserting that something is necessary 'rather than as' the
statement asserting something that is necessary'. Even if the former
construction is put upon Kaint's metaphor it does not follow that he
is subscribing to the second criterion. Two points serve to
support the claim that this construction is anyway not certain.
At B 100-101, where Kant discusses his 'modal' classification of
judgments, although he links the propositions that p and 'p is
necessary', he distinguishes them rather than identifies them with
each other. Also at B 142, where Kant discusses how we should ex-
press the necessity that attaches to judgments, he explicitly says, of
this kind of case, that in such a judgment 'I do not here assert that
these representations (the subject and predicate) necessarily belong to
one another, in the empirical intuition. . . .' In this case, then (and
it is obviously enough a central one), Kant means by 'necessary pro-
position' something that could not legitimately or unambiguously
be explained by such a form as 'A must be B'. For these reasons
Robinson's argument seems to me to be iniadequate. I conclude
that unless he has some unstated evidence for his claim that this is
what the metaphor precisely means (even though perhaps metaphors
just do not precisely mean anything) there is no reason to believe
that it is. Curiously Robinson himself appears to admit this on
page 292, where he says of Kant's idea of 'necessary proposition'
that
'
He certainly did not understand it in the Aristotelian sense '.
If I follow the argument aright, then this should have read, ' He
certainly did not understand it only (or clearly or unambiguously)
in the Aristotelian sense'. But the subsequent arguments are too
weak to establish that Kant understood it at all (unclearly or am-
biguously) in this sense.
(ii) Kant's necessary proposition is partly and confusedly the universal
proposition (p. 293).
Robinson claims in this passage that Kant was in part talking
of necessary propositions when this meant only ' propositions of
unrestricted generality '. In this way he tries to show that Kant
was, in part at least, committed to this fourth sense of 'necessity
'
in
which a proposition is necessary simply when it has the form of an
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THE NECESSITY OF KANT 391
unrestrictedly general proposition. So far as I can see Robinson does
not argue that Kant uses this criterion at all, but simply assumes that
he does. If his ground for this assumption is the passage at B 4, where
Kant discusses the twin criteria for a priority, namely universality
and necessity, then this assumption is quite unjustified. It is, of
course, true that in the passage Kant once speaks of unrestricted
generality as a means of determining whether propositions are a
priori or not. But of the five, direct or indirect, appeals to the
universality criterion, no less than four refer not to ' unrestricted '
but to ' strict
'
generality. Moreover Kant cannot, in this passage,
have wished to say, as Robinson suggests, that any proposition that
is unrestrictedly general is therefore necessary, since he explicitly
provides an example of an admittedly unrestricted claim, 'All
bodies are heavy', which is certainly not a necessary proposition.
Since this example is just as explicitly stated to be a necessary
proposition under Robinson's fourth test, it appears obvious that
Kant was not talking of necessity in this way. What Kant
appeals to when he talks of 'strict generality' is not a simple
criterion of the (unrestrictedly general) form of a proposition, but a
criterion for the authority in accordance with which a statement of
such generality is legitimately made. A statement may, like ' All
bodies are heavy ', be unrestrictedly general, but it would be necessary
or a priori only if there were a strict authority to make it in this form.
That is, Kant's universal criterion for a priority turns on the question
whether there is authority for a claim of unrestricted generality,
and not on the question, which governs Mr. Robinson's fourth sense
of 'necessity ', whether a claim simply is expressed in an unre-
strictedly general form. Since this is so, the assumption underlying
Robinson's argument at this stage that Kant is, even partly or
obscurely, relying on this fourth sense of necessity, seems to me to
collapse, and to bring the argument down with it.
Robinson tries, however, to provide cases where Kant's ascription
of necessity amounts only to the necessity which he claims is to be
found in all universal propositions. The one example that he gives
is the proposition that ' In all changes of the physical world the
quantity of matter remains unchanged'. This proposition is
either a version of the second part of the principle of the first Analogy
in the second edition, or else derives from it. In this case Kant's
'
proof
'
of the proposition derives from the proof of the first part of
the first Analogy, namely that
' In all change of appearances sub-
stance persists'. Kant provides
a
very complex and elaborate
argument in the first Analogy to establish the special truth of this
principle. It is simply unwarranted to say, without any argument
at all, that the only kind of necessity about this proposition is that if
it were true it would necessitate each particular change to preserve
the total quantity of matter. It must be
remembered, too, that
Robinson has to show not only that the proposition in question is
necessary only in this trivial sense,
but rather that Kant is
partly
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392 G. BIRD: THE NECESSITY OF KANT
relyi;ng on this sense of 'necessary'. That anyone should seriously
believe -this is astonishing. Robinson believes 'it largely, I think,
as a result of his failure to distinguish between Kant's account of
'strict' as opposed to 'unrestricted' generality. I conclude that
even Kant's partial or obscure reliance on the fourth sense of
'
neces-
sary proposition' is by no means established.
(iii) The ' compulsory-belief' sense of 'necessary proposition'.
Robinson does not claim in this case that Kant was partly
adopting this sense of 'necessary proposition'. It is remarkable,
therefore, that Kant actually did adopt such a use, though he does
not seem to have been especially confused about it. At B 851-852
Kant distinguishes between what he calls contingent and necessary
belief, and it is clear that his account of the latter would come under
Robinson's 'compulsory belief', and that it would be quite natural
to speak in this way of a necessary proposition so believed. Neverthe-
less Kant does not confuse this account of necessity with any of the
senses which are given to '
necessary
' in the theoretical part of the
Critique, since he restricts the former to what he calls the 'practical
point of view ', i.e. the spheres of ' skill ' and ' morality '. This
' compulsory-belief ' account of necessity has therefore nothing to
do with the accounts given earlier in the Critique, and particularly
in the Analytic.
The interest of this last example is primarily the light it casts on
Kant's ability to discriminate between different senses of the same
word. Throughout Robinson's attack on Kant reference is made
to '
Kant's necessary proposition
' or the ' Kantian sense of " neces-
sary proposition
"
', as though Kant could only ever have meant
to use this phrase in a single unequivocal way. This example
(and there are others) shows that such an assumption is simply
unjustified. Even if Robinson had been right in his attempt to show
that Kant uses the term 'necessary
'
in different ways more evidence
would be required to show that Kant was confused about this. But
in fact I do not believe that Robinson has identified any of the im-
portant ways in which Kant does use the term. Nor is this surpris-
ing, since he restricts his attempt to 'collect this Kantian sense of
".';necessary proposition"' almost entirely to the Introduction to
the Critique, and particularly the passage B 3-5. This may be only
to follow Kant's own naively optimistic view (B 19) that something
is to be gained from a preliminary general account of the Critique;
but that this is a naive view is clear from the muddles which commen-
tators get into when they concentrate only on this preliminary
passage. Kant's account of necessity is very complex, and can be
constructed only from a careful interpretation of the whole Critique,
particularly the Analytic. Robinson takes himself to be opposing a
contemporary clarity to Kantian muddle, but his argument is
only optimistically simple, where Kant's is justifiably complex.
University of Aberdeen GRAHAm BIRD
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