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Ratio (new series) XIII 2 June 2000 0034–0006
Robert Hanna
Abstract
Skeptical idealism says that possibly nothing exists outside my own
conscious mental states. Purported refutations of skeptical ideal-
ism – whether Descartes’s, Locke’s, Reid’s, Kant’s, Moore’s,
Putnam’s, or Burge’s – are philosophically scandalous: they have
convinced no one. I argue (1) that what is wrong with the failed
refutations is that they have attempted to prove the wrong thing –
i.e., that necessarily I have veridical perceptions of distal material
objects in space, and (2) that a charitable reconstruction of Kant’s
‘Refutation of Idealism’ in fact provides a sound refutation of
skeptical idealism.
How could it be denied that these hands or this whole body are
mine? Unless perhaps I were to liken myself to madmen, whose
brains are so damaged by the persistent vapours of melancho-
lia that they firmly maintain they are kings when they are pau-
pers, or say they are dressed in purple when they are naked, or
that their heads are made of earthenware, or that they are
pumpkins, or made of glass. But such people are insane, and I
would be thought equally mad if I took anything from them as
a model for myself. – René Descartes1
I can prove now, for instance, that two human hands exist.
How? By holding up my two hands, and saying, as I make a cer-
tain gesture with the right hand, ‘Here is one hand,’ and
adding, as I make a certain gesture with the left, ‘and here is
another.’ . . . But did I prove just now that two human hands
were in existence? I do want to insist that I did; that the proof
which I gave was a perfectly rigorous one; and that it is perhaps
impossible to give a better or more rigorous proof of anything
whatever. – G. E. Moore2
1
Descartes, ‘Meditations on First Philosophy,’ in The Philosophical Writings of
Descartes, 3 vols., trans. John Cottingham et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984),
vol. II, pp. 12–62, at 13.
2
Moore, ‘Proof of an External World,’ in G.E. Moore: Selected Writings (London:
Routledge, 1993), pp. 147–170, at 166.
KANT’S ‘REFUTATION’ RECONSTRUCTED 147
I. Introduction
Here is an old philosophical problem. The realist believes that
there is an external world – a world outside her own mind, con-
taining all material objects – and that she can know some things
about that world. But the skeptical idealist points out (1) that he
is directly aware only of the contents of his own consciousness,
and (2) that for all he knows right now, he might be dreaming.
Both claims seem true, and then his thesis apparently follows
automatically:
(*) Possibly nothing exists outside my own conscious mental
states.
Now (*) is a deeply troubling thesis. For from (*) we can easi-
ly derive both the possibility of solipsism and external-world skep-
ticism. First, if possibly nothing exists outside my own conscious
mental states, then not only is it the case that those states must be
individuated without reference to anything existing outside
themselves (individualism), it is also possible that only my own
conscious mental states exist (solipsism). And secondly, if possi-
bly nothing exists outside my own conscious mental states, then
every belief I have about the external world is possibly false, and
since knowledge plausibly requires the removal of all relevant
doubts, it follows that I know nothing about the world (external-
world skepticism).
For obvious reasons, many philosophers have tried to refute
(*), including Descartes, Locke, Thomas Reid, Kant, G.E. Moore,
and more recently, Hilary Putnam and Tyler Burge.3 But it is a
well-known philosophical ‘scandal’ that all of these attempted
refutations have failed.4 Indeed, Kant famously says of his prede-
cessors that
3
See: Descartes, ‘Meditations on First Philosophy,’ pp. 50–55; J. Locke, Essay con-
cerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), book IV, chapter xi, pp.
630–639; Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1969), pp.
625–627; Moore, ‘The Refutation of Idealism,’ ‘A Defense of Common Sense,’ and ‘Proof
of an External World,’ all in G.E. Moore: Selected Writings, pp. 23–44, 106–133, 147–170;
Putnam, Reason, Truth, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 1–21;
and Burge, ‘Cartesian Error and the Objectivity of Perception,’ in P. Pettit and J.
McDowell (eds.), Subject, Thought, and Context (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1986), pp.
117–136.
4
As I will indicate directly, Kant correctly isolates the underlying flaw in Descartes's,
Locke's, and Reid’s arguments. In turn, Moore argues that Kant’s argument fails (see
‘Proof of an External World,’ pp. 147–159), yet remains unconvinced by his own argu-
ment: see ‘Certainty,’ in G.E. Moore: Selected Writings, pp. 171–196, at 194–196. Finally, A.
Brueckner has made it his business to refute both Putnam and Burge; see his ‘Brains in a
Vat,’ Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986): 148–167, and ‘Transcendental Arguments from
Content Externalism,’ unpublished MS.
5
For convenience, I cite Kant’s works infratextually in parentheses. The citations
normally include both an abbreviation of the English title and the corresponding volume
and page numbers in the standard ‘Akademie’ (Ak) edition of Kant’s works: Kants gesam-
melte Schriften, 29 vols, hrsg. Koeniglich Preussischen (now Deutschen) Akademie der
Wissenschaften (Berlin: G. Reimer (now de Gruyter), 1902–). For references to the first
Critique, however, I follow the common practice of giving page numbers from the A
(1781) and B (1787) German editions only. And for references to Kant’s Reflexionen –
entries in one or another of the ten volumes of the untranslated Kants handschriftlicher
Nachlass – I give the entry number in addition to the Akademie volume and page num-
bers. I generally follow the standard English translations for quotations, but modify them
where appropriate. The translations of the Reflexionen are my own. Here is a list of the rel-
evant abbreviations and translations:
A: Anthropology. Trans. M. Gregor. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974.
CPR: Critique of Pure Reason. Trans. N. Kemp Smith. New York: St. Martin’s, 1965.
DS: ‘Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space.’
In Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy 1755–1770. Trans. D. Walford and R.
Meerbote. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992. pp. 361–372.
JL: ‘Jaesche Logic.’ In Immanuel Kant: Lectures on Logic. Trans. J.M. Young. Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992. pp. 517–640.
OT: ‘What is Orientation in Thinking?’ In Kant: Political Writings. Second edition. Ed.
H. Reiss. Trans. H.B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991. pp.
237–249.
P: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Trans. J. Ellington. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett,
1977.
R: Reflexionen = Kants handschriftlicher Nachlass.
6
See esp. the fourth Paralogism (CPR: A344–253), and also H. Schwyzer,
‘Subjectivity in Descartes and Kant,’ Philosophical Quarterly 47 (1997): 342–357.
7
There are, of course, other possible ways of interpreting (*), hence other possible
ways of denying (*). The description ‘every creature having a cognitive constitution like
mine’ is supposed to range over all and only actual or possible human beings. By a
‘human being’ I mean – and so I think does Kant – any creature that is cognitively func-
tionally equivalent to us. That is, the property of being human is ‘compositionally plastic.’
This implies that it is not absolutely necessary that a human being be a member of the bio-
logical kind homo sapiens.
8
In a nutshell, Kant’s transcendental idealism is the two-part thesis that (1) all the
objects of human cognition are nothing but sensory appearances (phenomena) and not
things-in-themselves (noumena) (CPR: A369), and (2) that all the formal structures of
those objects are strictly ‘imposed’ upon them by the ‘synthesizing’ or generative activities
of the a priori faculties of the human mind, as applied to raw sensory input (CPR:
Bxvi–xix). Kant thinks that both (1) and (2) are directly entailed by his thesis (3) that
space and time are neither things-in-themselves, nor properties of or relations between
such things, but instead only a priori subjective forms of human sense perception or
empirical intuition (CPR: A26–28/B42–44, A32–36/B49–53, A369). There are one or two
other arguments for transcendental idealism in the first Critique, but the argument from
the ideality of space and time is the primary argument in the sense that if it fails, the oth-
ers will too.
9
Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press,
1984), p. 274. Similar charges are also made in his ‘Kant and Skepticism,’ in M. Burnyeat
(ed.), The Skeptical Tradition, (Berkeley, CA: Univ. of California Press, 1983), pp. 413–434,
and ‘Kantian Argument, Conceptual Capacities, and Invulnerability,’ in P. Parini (ed.),
Kant and Contemporary Epistemology, (The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1994), pp. 231–151.
10
By ‘externalism’ I mean the view that at least some of our mental states must be
individuated by reference to something existing outside those states, in the worldly envi-
ronment. See: Burge, ‘Individualism and the Mental,’ in P.A. French et al. (eds.), Studies
in Metaphysics, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 4 (Minneapolis, MN: Univ. of Minnesota
Press, 1979), pp. 73–122; and C. McGinn, Mental Content (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), pp.
1–119.
11
More precisely, I think that this version of Kant’s argument entails what I call
‘direct perceptual realism’ (DPR). According to DPR, every self-conscious cognizer nec-
essarily has at least non-epistemic (= non-descriptive, non-conceptual, non-belief-based)
demonstrative perceptual access to some macroscopic causal physical objects.
12
There is also a wealth of relevant material in the Reflexionen, e.g., at (R: 5653–5654,
5709, 5984, 6311–6316, 6323; Ak 18, 306–313, 332, 416, 610–623, 643).
13
See Nagel, ‘What is it like to be a bat?,’ in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 165–180; and James, Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York:
Dover, 1950), vol. I, pp. 224–290.
14
Some determinations are non-individuating by virtue of their form, e.g., ‘N.N. is a
such-and-such’ (indefinite description). But other determinations are designed for indi-
and closely connected it with his studies in anthropology. See H. Caygill, A Kant Dictionary
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), pp. 214–215.
18
This point yields a result very similar to S. Shoemaker’s attack on what he calls the
‘perceptual model of self-knowledge’ in his seminal paper, ‘Self-Reference and Self-
Awareness,’ Journal of Philosophy 65 (1968): 555–567, at 562–564, and also the ‘object per-
ception model’ of self-knowledge in his 1993 Royce Lectures, ‘Self-Knowledge and "Inner
Sense",’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (1994): 249–314, at 249–269.
19
Kant of course attempts to solve this problem in the second Analogy of Experience
by sharply distinguishing between arbitrary and necessary orderings of representational
contents in time (CPR: A189–211/B232–256). P.F. Strawson and Paul Guyer have con-
vincingly tied this argument both to the B Deduction and to the Refutation; see the for-
mer’s The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (London: Methuen,
1966), pp. 72–152 and the latter’s Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), chapters 3–5, 10, and 12–14. Unfortunately, Kant’s solu-
tion fails because he does he does not notice that both waking experiences and dreams can
include either arbitrary or necessary orderings of perceptions. See R. Hanna, ‘The
Trouble with Truth in Kant’s Theory of Meaning,’ History of Philosophy Quarterly 10 (1993),
pp. 13–17.
20
Moore, ‘The Refutation of Idealism,’ p. 37.
21
Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, trans. F.
Williams and R. Kirkpatrick (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Geroux, 1987).
* * *
22
See, e.g., J. Vogel, ‘The Problem of Self-Knowledge in Kant’s "Refutation of
Idealism": Two Recent Views,’ Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993): 875–887.
23
See Kripke, Naming and Necessity, second ed. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press,
1982), p. 48. The proviso in parenthesis is needed to avoid the problem of vacuous names.
25
Later, however, we will see what Kant was really driving at – somewhat obscurely –
by including the simultaneity condition.
28
See (DS: Ak 2, 381–383). Kant famously uses the very same argument from incon-
gruent counterparts in 1783 in the Prolegomena (P: Ak 4, 285–286), in order to prove the
transcendental ideality of space. But as many have noted, since Kant uses the same argu-
ment in ‘Directions in Space’ to prove Newton’s theory of space, it cannot alone establish
idealism. As I see it, however, the fact that Kant uses the case of enantiomorphs to argue
for spatial realism and spatial idealism alike simply shows that it is neutral as between real-
ism and idealism, and thus consistent with both.
29
See G. Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1982), pp.
153–154.
30
See also Q. Cassam, ‘Inner Sense, Body Sense, and Kant’s Refutation of Idealism,’
European Journal of Philosophy 1 (1993): 111–127. This necessary ascription of conscious
states to the body should not, I think, be construed as a token-token identity thesis,
although R. Meerbote takes it this way: see his ‘Kant’s Refutation of Problematic Material
Idealism,’ in B. den Ouden (ed.), New Essays on Kant (New York: Peter Lang, 1987), pp.
112–138. Instead, I think that Kant anticipates the increasingly popular contemporary
view that the human mind is an ‘embodied mind.’ See: M. Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology
of Perception, trans. C. Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), part one, ch. 3,
pp. 98–147; J.L. Bermudez et al. (eds.), The Body and the Self (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995);
and F. Varela, E. Thompson, and E. Rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1996).
31
This should be compared with P.F. Strawson’s famous argument in Individuals
(London: Methuen, 1959), chapter 2, that one can in principle individuate oneself pure-
ly in terms of a system of auditory experiences alone, as an isomorphic analogue of spa-
tial representation. If correct, Strawson’s argument would suffice to show that psycholog-
ical individation does not require that I ascribe my mental states directly to my own body
in space. But Strawson’s sound-system cannot distinguish between incongruent counter-
parts, hence cannot distinguish between the very different experiences of the same sound
heard as ‘coming from my right’ and as ‘coming from my left.’
32
See B. Brewer, ‘Self-Location and Agency,’ Mind 101 (1992): 17–34. Brewer argues
that perceptual self-location is based on a more basic perceptual grasp of determinate pos-
sibilities of spatial bodily self-movement. The text I quoted from ‘Orientation in Thinking’
can be used to support Brewer’s conclusion, although in both ‘Directions in Space’ and in
the first Critique Kant places more emphasis on perceiving the motions of other bodies than
on the movement of one’s own body. Also, some qualifications will be needed to handle
tricky cases in which self-movement is reduced or ruled out. See note 40.
33
See H.P. Grice, ‘The Causal Theory of Perception,’ in Studies in the Way of Words
(Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), pp. 224–247.
34
Sailors using an astrolabe or sextant, e.g., navigate by referring to the contempo-
rary apparent stars in the night sky, not by referring to the much earlier causal sources of
those light signals.
IV. Conclusion
If I am right, then although Kant’s Refutation of Idealism fails to
35
See B. Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ.
Press, 1998), pp. 391–393.
36
See: F. Dretske, Seeing and Knowing (Chicago, IL: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1969),
chapter II; and R. Hanna, ‘Direct Reference, Direct Perception, and the Cognitive Theory
of Demonstratives,’ Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 74 (1993): 96–117.
37
See N. Eilan ‘Objectivity and the Perspective of Consciousness,’ European Journal of
Philosophy 5 (1997): 235–250, at 247–248, for a defense of the opposing position. Eilan’s
view implausibly entails, however, that if I wake up suddenly in total darkness and cannot
for the life of me remember where I am, then I am neither perceptually conscious nor
empirically self-conscious.
38
See G. Santayana, Skepticism and Animal Faith (New York: Dover, 1923), chapter
xviii, esp. pp. 171–176. Otherwise put, from a Kantian point of view one can refute skep-
tical idealism and be an externalist, while conceding ‘content skepticism.’ By contrast,
most contemporary externalists are also ‘content infallibilists.’ But this view does not
stand up to critical scrutiny: see A. Brueckner, ‘Trying to Get Outside Your Own Skin,’
Philosophical Topics 23 (1995): 79–111.
39
Strawson, by contrast, argues that although persons are normally and paradigmat-
ically embodied, it is at least conceptually possible for them to be disembodied; see
Individuals, pp. 115–116. A Strawsonian critic of my account might grant Kant’s point
about the necessary connection between psychological individuation and unique spatial
location, and also claim that one can in principle be uniquely located in space, yet dis-
embodied. For example, it might seem that someone could have a disembodied purely
visual awareness of directions and of various purely visual objects in a purely visual phe-
nomenal space. But that seems to me absurd. It would be to say that I could somehow be
uniquely in space without literally occupying any space. If I were an extensionless point, I
certainly could not look around.
40
I could, of course, have a body which is tied down, paralyzed, limbless, or listlessly
floating around in a vat. But in principle it could be moved about, either by myself or by
some external agency.
41
I grateful to Evan Thompson and Dana Vanzanten for very helpful conversations
about these and related topics. And I would also like to thank an anonymous referee at
this journal, and audiences at York University and the University of Colorado at Boulder
– especially George Bealer – for equally helpful critical comments on various versions of
the paper.