Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
DOI 10.1007/s10790-007-9009-4
Springer 2007
1. Introduction
In a brief and obscure remark, Kant says that there are both Objective
and Subjective Deductions contained in the Transcendental Deduction,
the heart of the Critique of Pure Reason.1 Commentators have disagreed
about what the Subjective Deduction is. They have taken it to be a wide
variety of things, most of them negative. They have also disagreed about
which part of the Critique of Pure Reason it occupies. The commentators
fall roughly into two categories with regard to it: commentators who are
unsympathetic with its heavily psychological language and agenda, and
commentators who believe that while it is psychological, it contains
important, defensible arguments in Kants philosophy of mind. In an
eort to salvage something of value from it, some commentators in the
rst group like Henry Allison have said that the Subjective Deduction is
an aborted argument for the categories.2 Peter Strawson, also in the rst
group, makes no attempt to repair what he believes is a hopelessly mistaken argument because it contains illegitimate speculations about mental
functions that are beyond the proper reach of our knowledge.3 H. W.
Cassirer also atly rejects it because psychological claims like the claims
contained in the Subjective Deduction stem from the fact that Kant
himself is somewhat confused, and that whenever such language
[psychological] occurs, one must rst of all, substitute epistemological
terms for psychological ones, and it is only after this has been done that
one can raise the question whether Kants reasoning may be allowed to
stand.4
The second group of commentators have embraced the Subjective
Deduction and argued that it presents the transcendental requirements
placed on the mind of a subject who is capable of cognition. Kants
*This article is one of two winners of the 2002 Rockefeller Prize awarded by the
American Philosophical Association.
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refers to the objects of pure understanding and is intended to establish and make comprehensible the objective validity of understandings
a priori concepts, and precisely because of this pertains to my purposes essentially. The other side [the Subjective Deduction] seeks to
examine pure understanding itself as regards its possibility and the
cognitive powers underlying it in turn, and hence seeks to examine
it in a subjective respect. And although this latter exposition is of
great importance for my main purpose, it does not pertain to it
essentially. For the main question is always this: what, and how
much, can understanding and reason cognize independently of all
experience? rather than: how is our power of thought itself possible?
This latter question is, as it were, a search for the cause of a given
eect, and to that extent there is something about it resembling a
hypothesis (even though in fact, as I shall show on another occasion, it is not so). Thus it seems as if in this case I have permitted
myself to hold an opinion, and that the reader must hence be free
to hold a dierent opinion. On this point I must ask the reader in
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our faculties is distinct from showing that they are necessarily presupposed by experience of objects and that any other application is
illegitimate. Kant believes that he has shown both in the A edition, but
the explanation of the pre-cognitive processes that utilize a priori concepts
has proven to be a distraction or stumbling block for his audience. He
resolves in the B edition to shorten the treatment and focus on showing
rst and foremost that the categories cannot be employed legitimately to
anything that cannot be an object of experience. Metaphysical knowledge
of the non-empirical world is impossible.
We can see, then, that Kants motive for altering the B edition is not
that he changed his position with regard to the transcendental psychology
of the Subjective Deduction. He wants to clarify the argument that
knowledge is limited to the world of experience. He does not alter the
Subjective Deduction because he has lost condence in it, or because he
does not think it is a worthy topic. He reduces its size and shifts its
location in order to focus attention on the limitation thesis.
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sensations must have some temporal location and duration. His rst
concern in the Subjective Deduction argument is to begin building upon
only that which can be said of all sensations so that conclusions about the
subjects abilities based upon them have a comparable universality. The
spatiality of intuitions gets little mention in the argument that follows.
But the temporality of intuitions plays a prominent role.
Another implication of the temporality of all intuitions, Kant says, is
that we must order, connect, and relate our appearances in time. The fact
that our intuitions occur serially imposes a special kind of cognitive labor
on the mind. Forming judgments about them requires that they be
organized temporally. Kant believes that he has shown in the Transcendental Aesthetic that the only sort of experience of objects that we can
have is experience in which we judge objects to occupy some determinate
region or duration of time. We grasp, locate, and judge them to be in
temporal relation to each other and to ourselves.
The temporality of all intuitions is closely tied to their diversity or
manifoldedness, Kant says. Since our intuitions are had over time, a
theory of cognition would be insucient if it only addressed what occurs
in a single instant. Our sensory systems are subjected to a multitude of
serial inputs. It is the manifold of presentations that the mind must
incorporate into its judgments. In the most general terms, Kant is concerned to address how it is that a being can have experience that is unique
and diverse from moment to moment and form judgments about that
experience that casts it into a stable world lled with recurring, homogenous, and predictable objects.
The B edition contains more evidence of Kants striving to build his
analysis of mind on only the highest level of abstraction justied by his
transcendental method. He manages to separate the temporality of
intuitions from their manifoldedness and the need for combination,
making it possible to widen the domain of his theory of mind to those
cognitive systems that judge objects on the basis of non-temporal
intuitions. The question of what can and cannot come to us through
intuition plays a more basic role in the argument. Combination of the
relevant sort, we learn, can only be produced by an act of the mind: A
manifolds combination (conjunctio) as such can never come to us
through the senses; nor, therefore, can it already be part of what is
contained in the pure form of sensible intuition. For this combination is
an act of spontaneity by the power of presentation; and this power must
be called understanding, in order to be distinguished from sensibility.
Hence all combination is an act of understandingwhether or not we
become conscious of such combination.36
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Being able to draw on the past is necessary for judgment, but it is not
sucient, Kant argues. We must be able to recall non-occurrent intuitions
in order to form thoughts about the objects they represent. But how they
are reproduced, in what order, and how they are connected to other mental
states is vitally important if judgment is to be possible. In his explanation of
the Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept, we get the more complete
account of what is required from the subject to forge intuitions into object
awareness. Kant has established that multiple presentations need to be
combined, and in his rejection of associationism he makes it clear that
judgments of objects cannot be achieved by merely connecting the
presentations in the order they occur. At best, associating our intuitions
informs us of only our subjective states: we feel redness and heaviness, but
it would not allow us to assert that there is a red, heavy body. Sensations
alone cannot inform us that there is such a thing as a body with its own
properties independent of the sensations. Strictly speaking, we would not
even be able to attribute sensory experiences to ourselves such as that we
are having a red, heavy sensation, because that too presupposes the ability
to recognize objects and attribute properties to them. Associationism
underdetermines the distinction between subjects and objects in judgment.
Nevertheless, in order to have cognition of objects, the mind must reproduce its non-occurrent presentations. If the presentations are reproduced
haphazardly, or without any determinate order or arrangement, the mind
will not be able to grasp any unied object. There will be nothing but a
random play of representations, associated only in the order in which they
were experienced. Kant says, But if presentations reproduced one another
indiscriminately, just as they happen to come together, then there would
again arise no determinate coherence of presentations and hence no cognition whatever, but merely an accumulation of them devoid of any
rule.47 Let us suppose that a mind reproduces and combines red and
heavy presentations in one moment, then red and lightweight, and then
lightweight and painful presentations without any regularity or structure.
We would not say that such experience was experience of objects at all, but
just a booming, buzzing confusion, as William James put it.
The combination of presentations involved in judgment must occur
according to some non-associative and non-random scheme. It is not
possible to form judgments of objects that have no determinate, regular,
or predictable behavior. Unless it is equipped with rules or laws for
organizing the reproduction of its intuitions, a mind will not be able to
conceive of objects at all. To connect presentations in some order that is
not just their order of occurrence, a rule is needed to indicate which
presentations out of the manifold should be connected and which should
be ignored.
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represents the intuitions for synthesis in judgment, the faculty of recognition that guides the reproduction of non-occurrent intuitions, and the
faculty of concepts that governs the synthesis of reproduction and
recognition.
One of the sources of confusion about the chapter on the transcendental deduction has been the various unities that play a role in cognition.
The confusion is compounded by Kants insistence on mingling the discussion of the various unities involved in ordinary experience with a
discussion of what kind of cognitive access we can have to the transcendental unity of the self. Let us call the unied cognition of intuitions
in an object judgment the synthetic unity of representation. This is the
unity that Kant has in mind when he says, When we have brought about
synthetic unity of the manifold of intuitionthis is when we say that we
cognize the object.56 Transcendental apperception or sometimes the
transcendental unity of apperception is the unied self that must necessarily possess the faculties and intuitions for cognition, as we saw above.
As Kant puts it, Now there can take place in us no cognitions, and no
connection and unity of cognitions among one another, without that
unity of consciousness which precedes all data of intuitions, and by
reference to which all presentation of objects is alone possible. Now this
pure, original, and immutable consciousness I shall call transcendental
apperception.57
We can see the extent of the agreement and the disagreement between
Hume and Kant with regard to the self. Kant refutes Humes argument that
we cannot give a philosophical defense of the existence of a self. Kant
agrees with Hume, however, that we cannot introspect a persisting,
autonomous substance. The only sorts of objects with a determinable
existence for us are the objects that can aect our faculty of sensibility and
be subjected to the conditions of judgment in the understanding. The
transcendental unity of apperception is not that sort of object. As Kant
says, I have no cognition of myself as I am but merely cognition of how I
appear to myself. Hence consciousness of oneself is far from being a cognition of oneself.58 Introspection cannot reveal the transcendental ground
of unity that makes experience of objects possible. Nevertheless, we have
deduced the existence of this highest formal ground of the self in the
arguments of the Subjective Deduction with a transcendental argument. It
is necessarily presupposed by ordinary empirical cognition of objects.
The existence of the transcendental self is unique among the things we
can direct our thoughts toward. The transcendental self cannot become
an object of experience for us because it is a thing that makes objects of
experience possible for us. The paradox is that to cognize it would be to
subject it to its own pre-cognitive processes, or in eect make its existence
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5. Conclusion
Kants comments regarding the Subjective Deduction and his revisions
in the B edition are not indicators that Kant lost condence in the
argument or that he changed his view about it on any philosophical
grounds. His reasons involve clarifying and focusing on the larger aims
of the Critique of Pure Reason and the limitation thesis. The arguments
in the B edition also appear to be dierent because Kant broadens the
range of cognitive systems that his analysis includes. The combination
argument in the B edition is more general in that it addresses nontemporal intuitions, but it is no less psychological in its implications. As
opposed to commentators such as Brook, Kitcher, and Meerbote, Kant
did not see the Subjective Deduction as a crucial part of the central aim
of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kants principle task in the Critique of
Pure Reason is to present an argument that constrains metaphysics by
limiting the possibility of knowledge to the empirical realm. The notoriously dicult Transcendental Deduction, and more specically the
Objective Deduction, are essential to Kants task of arguing for the
objective validity or universal and necessary application of the categories
to all objects of experience. In addition to the argument for the limitation thesis, but not essential to it, Kant oers a theory of mind that is
built upon the requirements of making judgments of objects from
experience in the Subjective Deduction. This argument can stand largely
on its own and hence can be reduced in the B edition, not because Kant
disavows it, but because it does not contribute directly to showing why it
is that knowledge of the realm beyond empirical experience is impossible. Since Kant is concerned to reduce potential confusion for his
readers, focus directly on the argument for the limitation thesis, and to
streamline his argument for it, he chooses to reduce the presence of the
Subjective Deduction in the B edition. But his condence and interest in
a transcendental account of the mind of a knowing subject never waned.
We have seen that there is a great deal in the argument that deserves
attention. It has been suggested, especially by Brook, that contemporary cognitive science research might be able to take something from
Kant. Separating the Subjective Deduction and reconstructing it as we
have done here makes that possibility even more plausible. Echoing
Kants well-known plea about metaphysics, articial intelligence
researchers like Jon Doyle have complained, Is it not a scandal that
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Notes
1. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1996), A xvi.
2. See Henry Allison, Kants Transcendental Idealism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1983), p. 133.
3. See Peter Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Routledge, 1989), p. 12.
4. H.W. Cassirer, Kants First Critique (London: George Allen and Unwin, Ltd.,
1954), p. 64.
5. See Andrew Brook, Kant and the Mind (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See Patricia Kitcher, Kants Transcendental Psychology (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1990). See Ralf Meerbote, A Sometimes Neglected
Aspect of Kants Subjective Deduction, Proceedings: Sixth International Kant
Congress, (Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1989), pp. 259270.
Also see Norman Kemp Smith, Commentary to Kants Critique of Pure Reason
(Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1992).
6. See Brook, op. cit., p.159
7. Kitcher, op. cit., p. 90.
8. See Kant, op. cit., A xvi.
9. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. in Philosophy of
Material Nature, trans. James Ellington, (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), Ak. 475,
n. 8. See also Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 119.
10. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 146.
11. Kant, op. cit., B 147148. See also Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics,
trans. James Ellington. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), Ak. 297.
12. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A xvi.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Kemp Smith, op. cit., p. 236.
16. Kant, op. cit., A xvivii.
17. Kemp Smith, op. cit., p. 48.
18. Kant, op. cit., A xvivii.
19. See ibid., A xvii.
20. Ibid., A 93, B 126.
21. Ibid., B 145.
22. See ibid., A 93, A 129130, B 166.
23. Kant, op. cit., B 119. Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. in Philosophy of
Material Nature, trans. James Ellington. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), Ak. 475, n 8.
24. See Ralf Meerbote, A Sometimes Neglected Aspect of Kants Subjective Deduction, Proceedings: Sixth International Kant Congress. (Washington, D.C.:
University Press of America, 1985), p. 267.
25. See Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Ak. 265.
26. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A ix.
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