Kant's Copernican Revolution 0195049578

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Kant's Copernican Revolution

ERMANNO BENCIVENGA

New York

Oxford

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 1987

Kant's Coper1lican Revolution

Oxford University Press Oxford New York Toronto Delhi Bombay Calcutta Madras Karachi Petaling Jaya Singapore Hong Kong Tokyo Nairobi Dar es Salaam Cape Town Melbourne Auckland and associated companies in Beirut Berlin Ibadan Nicosia

Copyright © 1987 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc., 200 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bencivenga, Ermanno, 1950Kant's Copernican revolution. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804. Kritik der reinen Vernunft. 2. Knowledge, Theory of. 3. Causation. 4. Reason. I. Title. B2779.B44 1987 121 86-23607 ISBN 0-19-504957-8

987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To Sara and Tommy, and their smile: because it soothes the pain.

Preface This is a book about Immanuel Kant, a historical figure. To a large extent, the book deals with one of Kant's works, probably his major one: the Critique oJPure Reason. But the book is not a commentary on the Critique, is not a vindication of its philosophy, and is not an attack on it. It is not concerned with unearthing Kant's "real intent," and it does not get involved in discussions of (or arguments with) the extant secondary literature. It even seems to disagree with Kant's and most of his interpreters' perception of the relative importance of the various parts of his work: the transcendental deduction and the analogies receive less concentrated attention here than a single passage from the second Preface. The fundamental reason for this glaring lack of orthodoxy is to be found in the way I relate to the Critique's celebrated "obscurity." I do not think that this greatest of obstacles in a reading of Kant has to do with Kant's either being a bad writer or having something very complicated to say. I think that it is the natural result of the kind of operation he was performing: a conceptual revolution, and a universal one at that. Such an operation requires time: the time to develop a new language, that is, to evolve new linguistic practices and to have a new linguistic community take shape around them. The Critique was written in the middle of this process, in a constant fight with old modes of expression and old canons of understanding. It was like throwing in the idea of a new game without having ever played it, and beginning to play it "by way of illustration" on the spot. It was an experiment, an attempt at looking at human cognitive (and other) activities from a different standpoint, but a standpoint that had to be created before you could look from it. It was an intellectual adventure, a voyage into high seas, with no idea of what fairies or monsters may lie ahead. And then there is something else that is even more important. The adventure is not over. Some additional steps have been made,

Vlll

Preface

but things are still far from clear. If the Critique was work in progress, the work is not finished yet. The operation Kant initiated is virtually as revolutionary today-at least in this part ofthe worldas it was at his time. And we need revolutionary operations in philosophy, not necessarily because they will bring us closer to "the Truth," but because they will make us question more of our assumptions, and wonder more. This is why I do not find it useful to argue with other commentators. Though I have learned a great deal from many of them, and I often use their suggestions below to articulate my discourse, the task they seem to set for themselves is in general so different from mine that discussion is not likely to be profitable. They seem to confront Kant's work as presenting a definite position, and one that they either want to reconstruct "sympathetically" or criticize. I, on the other hand, think of the same work as presenting a set of problems for whose solution Kant had most of the clues but lacked many of the tools. And this is why I often direct my attention to the margins of the text, because it is there, far from "the most considered statements" and from the greatest efforts toward systematicity and coherence, that the strain involved in Kant's operation is often revealed most clearly, and the best insight into the operation itself can be gained. What follows is my report on Kant's revolutionary turnabout, on what motivated it, and on where it took him. In this report, some aspects of the Critique "make sense" more than ordinarily alleged. I could have expanded the list of such aspects, but, in my opinion, this expansion would have detracted from the effectiveness of my attempt by confusing issues that do not belong together. My purpose here is not that of defending either Kant or my "understanding" of him, but that of telling an edifying story about man and his experience, a story that I consider worth putting on the record and that I have found sketched in that inexhaustible mine of thought which is the Critique of Pure Reason. I thank Kent Baldner, Nuccia Bencivenga, and various anonymous referees for comments on earlier drafts of this book. I thank the editors of the Canadian Journal ofPhilosophy and Nous for permission to utilize materials from my (1985) and (1987). Irvine, California June 1986

E. B.

Contents

1. Transcendental Philosophy

3

1. Textual puzzles 2. Kant's program 3. "Real" possibility

2. The Old Conceptual Framework

32

1. Objects and representations 2. The problem 3. Synthetic a priori judgments 4. Empirical idealism 5. Trying to save the framework

3. Between Old and New

59

1. A revolution for whom? 2. The main step 3. Difficulties with revolutions 4. Reflective 5. Intentional objects judgments

4. Thinking of Objects 1. Ladders 3. Criteria

89

2. Things in themselves 4. The human predicament

5. Experiencing Objects 1. Space and time

2. Counting oneself as one 3. Empirical correlations 4. Reasons for dissatisfaction 5. Hume revisited

119

Contents

x

6. The Conflict of Faculties

164

l. Divisibility and other enigmas 2. The transcendental illusion 3. Appearances 4. Understanding and reason

7. Knowledge in the New Framework

194

l. Synthesis 2. Wisdom 3. The problem resolved? 4. The point of story-telling

Notes

218

Bibliography

248

Index

259

Kant's Copernican Revolution

1 Transcendental Philosophy This is my foundation. I have already sketched out the course I want to take. I shall begin my journey, and nothing shall prevent me from pursuing it. Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces, I, p. lO

... nature has apparently made its decision regarding the duration of man's life with things other than the furtherance of the sciences in view. For just when the most gifted man stands on the brink of the greatest discovery that his skill and experience can allow him to hope for, old age makes its entrance; his mind becomes dull and he must leave it to a second generation ... to make a small contribution to culture's progress. Speculative Beginning of Human History, p. 55 footnote; VIII, p. 117

Until his time, Kant thinks, metaphysics has been "the battle-field of ... endless controversies" (Aviii). To resolve these controversies, something more is necessary than cleaning up details or displaying more ingenuity in the construction of proofs. It is necessary for human reason to enter a new path. To a large extent, the novelty of the path is to be found in Kant's realization and insistence that the philosopher's task must be redefined. Metaphysics (at least in the old sense) must be given up, and a new discipline must take its place: transcendental philosophy. In the present chapter, I want to investigate the significance of this new agenda that Kant set for his profession.

1.

Textual puzzles

The usual starting point for understanding Kant's notion of transcendental philosophy is a passage at All-12 B25: I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with the mode of our knowledge of objects in so far as 3

Kant's Copernican Revolution

4

this mode is to be possible a priori. A system of such concepts might be entitled transcendental philosophy.

In commenting upon this passage, Norman Kemp Smith (1923) articulates Kant's characterization in what appears to be a natural way: Transcendental knowledge and transcendental philosophy must therefore be taken as coinciding; and as thus coincident, they signify the science of the possibility, nature, and limits ofa priori knowledge. (p. 74)

For example, my knowledge that (1)

2

+2=4

is (a case of) mathematical knowledge, but my knowledge that it is possible for me to know (1) a priori is (a case of) transcendental knowledge, and hence (part of) transcendental philosophy. This picture is clear, and has become entrenched in our conventional wisdom about Kant. l But I want to argue that it makes things much too simple. To begin with, consider the following grammatical point. Kant says that transcendental philosophy is a system of such concepts. Which concepts? There is no reference to concepts in the sentences immediately preceding this one. The puzzle can be solved by comparing the A with the B edition. In A, the first sentence of the passage above reads: "I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with our a priori concepts of objects in general." So the puzzle is apparently a result of careless editing: there was a reference to concepts in A, but the reference was deleted in B, and thus the 'such' was left without an antecedent. It is natural to think that Kant substituted (a reference to) a priori modes of knowledge for (one to) a priori concepts of objects because he realized that his previous characterization would have excluded the Transcendental Aesthetic from the scope of transcendental philosophy: space and time are a priori representations but not a priori concepts. This conjecture seems to agree with the following statement, to be found later in the Critique: Not every kind of knowledge a priori should be called transcendental, but that only by which we know that-and how-certain representations (intuitions or concepts) can be employed or are possible purely a priori. (A56 B80-81; italics mine)

Transcendental Philosophy

5

But suppose that we emendate the passage at B25 to get rid of the poor editing. In A, transcendental knowledge is concerned "with our a priori concepts of objects in general." If transcendental philosophy is to be a system of such concepts, it is to be a system of a priori concepts of objects in general. In B, reference to concepts is replaced by reference to a priori modes of knowledge, that is, intuitions and concepts, so the most natural way to emendate the awkward 'such concepts' would be by replacing it with 'such intuitions and concepts' (that is, such modes of knowledge). By such a substitution, transcendental philosophy would become a system of a priori intuitions and concepts. But transcendental philosophy is a kind of philosophy and, according to Kant, philosophy is a purely conceptual enterprise, in which there is no room for intuitions. 2 It is for this reason, for example, that "mathematical principles form no part of this system [of principles]" (A149 BI88), and philosophy's concern with them is limited to rendering them conceivable. 3 Thus Kant's definition at B25 is confused (and confusing). As it reads, it makes no grammatical sense, and the most natural way to fix it gives us something that Kant would have to find unacceptable. Textual tensions of this kind are often evidence of underlying theoretical tensions, and I think that the present case is no exception. To identify the theoretical tension here, return to the text once more. The passage at AII-12 B25 I have been discussing contains not only the "official" definitions of transcendental knowledge and transcendental philosophy, but also the first significant occurrence of the word 'transcendental' in the Critique. 4 A common complaint about Kant's use of this word is that, after introducing it here in what is at least prima facie a relatively rigorous way, he proceeds to apply it to all sorts of things not covered by his definition.5 For example, he talks of a transcendental ground at A563 B59I and at A564 B592, referring in both cases to things in themselves (of which supposedly we have no knowledge);6 he talks of a transcendental substrate at A575 B603, referring to the transcendental ideal of reason (of which again we have no knowledge), and he talks constantly of a transcendental employment of understanding and reason, meaning their application to things in themselves (see, e.g., A238 B298). Surprisingly, there is also another (rarely noticed) side to the coin: the phrase 'transcendental knowledge' itself (in German, transzendentale Erkenntnis), 7 which Kant defines so carefully twice early in the Critique (at AII-12 B25 and A56 B80-81), occurs only twice more

6

Kant's Copernican Revolution

in the rest of the work. 8 One occurrence is in the Transcendental Doctrine of Method (at A783 B811, some eight hundred pages after the phrase was first introduced), and the other one is in the Analytic, in the chapter on phenomena and noumena, and it refers to a kind of knowledge of whose possibility we have no idea! Such objects of pure understanding will always remain unknown to us; we can never even know whether such a transcendental or exceptional knowledge is possible under any conditions-at least not if it is to be the same kind of knowledge as that which stands under our ordinary categories. (A258 B314; italics mine)

In order to bring some order into this textual morass, consider some applications of "transcendental" in more detail. The transcendental employment ofthe categories is their employment at a purely conceptual level. When we employ the categories at this level, we come up with thoughts such as that of a transcendental ground, or a transcendental substrate, or a transcendental ideal. A transcendental subreption (A509 B537, A583 B611, A619 B647) is a conceptual subreption, a confusion at the conceptual level. The transcendental division of an appearance (A527 B555) is its division at the conceptual level, and "the question how far it may extend does not await an answer from experience." A transcendental presupposition (A572-73 B600-1) is a conceptual presupposition. Transcendental answers for transcendental questions (A637 B665) are "answers exclusively based on concepts that are a priori, without the least empirical admixture," and a transcendental procedure for constructing a theology amounts to constructing it "through purely speculative reason" (A638 B666). The result of applying this procedure is a transcendental theology, which "thinks its object ... through pure reason, solely by means of transcendental concepts (ens originarium, realissimum, ens entium)" (A631 B659). A transcendental criterion (A640 B668) is a purely conceptual criterion, and a transcendental proposition "can never be given through construction of concepts, but only in accordance with concepts that are a priori" (A 720 B748). A transcendental synthesis is one that proceeds "from concepts alone, a synthesis with which the philosopher is alone competent to deal" (A719 B747), and a transcendental hypothesis is to be found when "a mere idea of reason is used in explanation of natural existences" (A 772 B800). This list is certainly not exhaustive, but is representative enough

Transcendental Philosophy

7

to reach a few tentative conclusions. First of all, the qualification 'transcendental' is sometimes applied by Kant to (mental) activities (such as an employment of the categories, a division, a synthesis). In this case, a transcendental (activity) X seems to be an X pel/ormed at a purely conceptual level, that is, an X whose performance requires nothing but (the possession and mobilization of) concepts, an X that is conducted in terms of (or utilizes) concepts only. Second, 'transcendental' is applied to results or tools of a transcendental activity; such is the case, for example, with transcendental propositions, presuppositions, or hypotheses. Third, 'transcendental' is applied to (kinds of) things that are thought of in the course of a transcendental activity, for example, a transcendental ground or a transcendental substrate. In this case, it can be cashed out as follows: a transcendental X is an X as it sur/aces within a transcendental activity. That is, it is a purely conceptual characterization (in short, a conceptualization) of an X. An important qualification can be added to this tentative account by considering another set of passages, in which transcendental activities are contrasted with a different kind of conceptual activities, the logical (or general-logical) ones. Here is a representative selection. General logic ... abstracts from all content of knowledge, that is, from all relation of knowledge to the object, and considers only the logical form in the relation of any knowledge to other knowledge; that is, it treats of the form of thought in general. But ... we should have a logic in which we do not abstract from the entire content of know1edge. This other logic ... should contain solely the rules of the pure thought of an object ... (A55 B79-80) General logic ... abstracts from all content of knowledge.... Transcendentallogic, on the other hand, has lying before it a manifold of a priori sensibility ... as material for the concepts of pure understanding. (A 76-77 B 102) In terms of this proposition [that is, "Everything which exists is completely determined"] the predicates are not merely compared with one another logically, but the thing itself is compared, in transcendental fashion, with the sum of all possible predicates. (AS73 B601)

A comparison of these passages with our earlier conclusions suggest the following picture. Some mental activities typically aim at

8

Kant's Copernican Revolution

the representation of objects; call them representational activities. Other mental activities are not representational: they consist of comparing and analyzing concepts. 9 Logical activities are non-representational mental activities. Transcendental activities on the other hand-or, as they are also called, to emphasize both their similarity and their contrast with (general-)logical ones, transcendentallogical activities-are conceptual representational activities. They must remain at the conceptual level to qualify as philosophical activities, but somehow they manage not to be void of content, and to involve reference to an object. to An explication of the other two major uses of 'transcendental' identified above (and exemplified in the phrases 'transcendental proposition' and 'transcendental ground,' respectively) follows easily. This account still leaves much to be desired, and a large part of my efforts below will have the effect of further articulating it. In particular, at virtually every major turn in the argument we will have something new to learn about the specific character, the complications, and the paradoxes of a "purely conceptual activity." But for the moment, the (misleadingly) innocent-looking formulation above may suffice, if for nothing else because it already gives us enough to worry about. It will become progressively clearer in this chapter, and will be illustrated in the rest of the book, that the project of distinguishing (general-)logical from transcendental activities is a delusive one, and the search for objects at the conceptual level collapses into a play with predicates (or, perhaps, just words). Briefly put, there cannot be a conceptual representational activity: pure thought has no object. As a first step toward establishing such claims, I will now apply my preliminary understanding of the word 'transcendental' to an interpretation of Kant's embarrassment with the phrase 'transzendentale Erkenntnis'. In the present context, 'Erkenntnis'is an ambiguous word: it may refer to the (mental) activity of erkennen, to a result of this activity, or to something which is characterized in the course of a mental activity. If we take it in the first sense, then a transcendental Erkenntnis is a conceptual erkennen; if we take it in the second sense, it is an Erkenntnis obtained at the conceptual level; and if we take it in the third sense, it is a conceptualization of Erkenntnis. But in all cases we have a problem. A transcendental employment ofthe categories is still an employment of them, maybe a misemployment, but an employment nonetheless. A transcendental subreption is still a subreption, a transcendental hypothesis is still an hypothesis, and

Transcendental Philosophy

9

a transcendental ground is still a ground. But a transcendental Erkenntnis is no Erkenntnis. For it is part of Kant's teaching that a limitation of erkennen to its purely conceptual component results in no erkennen, and that a pure conceptualization of Erkenntnis is no Erken ntn is. Without a contribution on the part of sensibilityspecifically, without an application of concepts to sensible material-there are no erkennen and no Erkenntnis: It is ... just as necessary to make our concepts sensible, that is, to add the object to them in intuition, as to make our intuitions intelligible, that is, to bring them under concepts.... The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only through their union can knowledge [Erkenntnis] arise. (A51 B75-76; italics mine)

So, no wonder that the phrase 'transcendental Erkenntnis' introduced at All-12 B25 is hardly ever used again. A transcendental Erkenntnis for Kant is almost a contradiction in terms. Or, more precisely, the phrase 'transcendental Erkenntnis' is highly misleading, since it is natural to think of it as referring to some kind of Erkenntnis, whereas a transcendental Erkenntnis is as little an Erkenntnis as an incomplete circle is a circle or an alleged proof is a proof pI We now have a clue as to the theoretical tension underlying the B25 passage. 12 On the one hand, Kant is aware of the fact that transcendental philosophy is a purely conceptual activity. On the other, he certainly wants transcendental philosophy to be more than wild speculation; in fact, at Axiv he characterizes his aim as that of obtaining "complete knowledge" of "reason itself and its pure thinking." But given the official characterization of knowledge in the Critique, a purely conceptual activity can yield no knowledge. At B25, Kant manages to hide this conflict by a miracle of obscurity, that is, by transforming it into a textual conflict: transcendental philosophy is characterized (consistently with the purely conceptual nature of all philosophy) as a system of "such concepts," but the previous sentence does not tell us which concepts the "such concepts" are. What that sentence refers to instead is (presumably) intuitions and concepts, that is, the two necessary ingredients of (human) knowledge. And, in conclusion, Kant's poor editing is seen to be not only the origin of the textual confusion but also (and more importantly) the consequence of a deeper theoretical confusion. 13 Apparently, there is a simple way of addressing this textual and theoretical conflict. It consists in the (relatively commonplace) sug-

10

Kant's Copernican Revolution

gestion that Kant's notion of Erkenntnis is too narrow to cover all of knowledge, and in particular the knowledge the Critique is supposed to give US;14 Rolf George (1981) points out that [s]ince the eighteenth century [the word "Erkenntnis'1 has migrated from the semantic field of reference to that of insight: "erkennen" used to mean, roughly, "to discern, make out, detect, perceive," or more generally, "to have before one's mind as an object," rather than "to know, ascertain, understand." (p. 241) In the serial arrangement given at A320 B376-77 Erkenntnis is defined as an objective conscious representation, and since 'objective' is the same for Kant as 'of an object', 15 an Erkenntnis turns out to be a (conscious) representation of an object. But then 'Erkenntnis' is not in a position to cover, for example, our knowledge of the laws of formal (or general) logic, which according to Kant do not concern objects at all, but only (the comparison and analysis of) concepts. And certainly (Erkenntnis' cannot cover philosophical knowledge, if any such thing exists. Philosophical knowledge is the result of philosophical reflection, that is, of a purely conceptual activity whose subject matter may be, for example, Erkenntnis but which cannot itself consist of(Kantian) Erkenntnis. The truths such reflection can prove, ifany, (and hence the truths we can know philosophically, if any) are purely conceptual truths, in Kant's terms analytical truths. 16 By taking this route, one could claim that Kant simply lacked a term to describe (the results of) his own philosophical activity, and that providing him with such a term would eliminate all the interpretive problems surrounding this activity and streamline the convolutions contained in his characterizations of the activity. But I think that this analysis does not go deep enough. I think that the attraction the notion of Erkenntnis exercised on Kant l7 and his unwillingness to give it up in favor of a different notion of knowledge more suited to the conceptual nature of his own philosophical activity are perfectly understandable once one forms a clear notion of Kant's philosophical program and of the (probably unexpected) difficulties this program eventually ran into. To put it in a compact (and, at this stage of the game, necessarily still opaque) form, by holding fast to his notion of Erkenntnis Kant tried to avoid havin:g to change the nature of philosophy not just once but twice. In the next two sections, I will account for this admittedly mysterious formulation.

Transcendental Philosophy

2.

II

Kant's program

A large portion of the Kant literature, at least in English, is concerned with transcendental arguments. 18 In fact, the issue of transcendental arguments has been recently characterized by Ralph Walker (1978) as one of the two "central ones" in Kant's philosophy (the other being the "closely intertwined" one of transcendental idealism; see pp. vii-viii). Authors disagree widely on what the structure of these arguments is, but there seems to be a core of agreement on the following points: (a) (b) (c) (d)

(e)

transcendental arguments were inaugurated by Kant; the transcendental deduction is one of them; transcendental arguments are supposed to answer the skeptic; they do that by undercutting the skeptic's position, that is, by showing that the truth of some proposition p that the skeptic wants to deny is required (in a sense specified differently by different authors) for the very formulation of intelligible thought, so that, if the skeptic denies p, he ends up making no sense at all; and, finally, it is unlikely that any transcendental argument purporting to prove some interesting proposition can be made to work (though examples can be found of sound transcendental arguments that prove relatively trivial conclusions). 19

To give only a couple of recent examples, take Walker and T. E. Wilkerson (1970, 1976). Walker claims that transcendental arguments have the form: (l)(a) We have experience (of kind K) (b) It is analytic that the truth of p is a necessary condition for experience (of kind K) (c) Therefore, p.

But this form could be simplified. For an instance of (1) is sound if and only if an instance of the following is sound: (2)(a) We have experience (of kind K) (b) Therefore, p.

And (2) makes it clear that the first premiss is where the whole game against the skeptic is played (according to Walker). For as to analytic truths, if the skeptic raises doubts about them, then he is probably going to raise doubts about analytic inferences as well and hence be unimpressed by any argument one could come up with. In the particular case of the transcendental deduction, (2)(a) has the form

Kant's Copernican Revolution

12

(3)

We have sensible experience,

whereas in the Analytic of Principles, (2)(a) becomes (4)

We have temporal experience.

But none of this is going to impress the skeptic, Walker thinks. The weaker premiss (5)

We have experience

probably would, but Kant can get nowhere with just (5). And as soon as he qualifies the kind of experience we have, it is "open to [the skeptic] simply to deny that we do have experience or knowledge of that kind" (p. 15). Therefore, transcendental arguments can hardly be successful. On the other hand, in Wilkerson's position (as reconstructed by Walker20) the structure of a transcendental argument is the following: (6)(a) We have experience (of kind K) (b) It is synthetic but a priori that the truth of p is sufficient, ceteris paribus, for our having experience (of kind K) (c) Therefore, p.

In this reading, transcendental arguments not only have a special kind ofpremiss(es), but are also "arguments" ofa very special kind. For if they work at all, they do not work the way arguments normally do, by showing that the conclusion is logically implied by true premisses. As Walker points out, q does not follow logically from p and "q is a sufficient condition for p" (that is, "if q, then p"), and hence transcendental arguments a la Wilkerson are typically invalid. So the burden is on Wilkerson and those who agree with him to specify a sense in which such "arguments" work, and nobody has been successful in this enterprise yet. Walker's general point is not new. Robert Paul Wolff(1963) made the same point against Kemp Smith and Lewis White Beck, who both claimed that there was something "regressive" about Kant's arguing. A regressive argument in Beck's sense, Wolff pointed out, is simply a fallacy, and Kant's arguments are not fallacies, or at least not so obvious ones. So why, one might ask, such a recurring tendency to attribute to Kant blatant non sequiturs and to make them the (dubious) cornerstone of his philosophy? Walker (1978) himself asks this question, and he suggests two possible answers for it. On the one hand, he says, people have

Transcendental Philosophy

13

thought that normal (analytic) arguments are somewhat trivial, that their conclusions are already contained in their premisses, and therefore that in some sense they cannot really advance philosophy. But this, he thinks, is "rather harsh" (p. 22). Analysis can be complicated, and its results can be interesting. 21 On the other hand, according to Walker, Kant's arguments, when construed as normal arguments, are usually unsound, so thinking of them as having some nonstandard structure is a way of salvaging them. But we should not attempt such a rescue, Walker continues, since ... philosophers commonly do produce unsound arguments, and Kant is no exception, as a glance at his non-transcendental arguments will speedily confirm. We ought to recognize the fact, and not seek to disguise it by enveloping the argument-form in mystery. (ibid.)

On the face of it, this is good advice. In doing the history of philosophy, our charitable and sympathetic reading should not be carried to an extreme, and prevent us from recognizing the past masters' serious blunders. At that extreme, charity becomes intellectual fuzziness and dishonesty. But if the advice is generally good, I think it has no application to the present case. The problem of the status of transcendental arguments is largely a creation of Kant's interpreters, and Walker's advice is the ironic conclusion of blunders they make in reading the text. To see what these blunders are, let us take a fresh look at what Kant himself says. There are only two uses of the phrase 'transcendental argument' ('transzendentales Argument') in the whole Critique. The first one is at A589 B617, and it refers to the cosmological argument for the existence of God: "Though this argument, as resting on the inner insufficiency of the contingent, is in actual fact transcendental. ... " The second one is at A627 B655, in the context of Kant's discussion of the physico-theological proof: "To prove the contingency of matter itself, we should have to resort to a transcendental argument, and this is precisely what we have here set out to avoid." In both cases, 'transcendental' is to be understood as 'purely conceptual', and Kant is clearly not endorsing such arguments, even less indicating that they are somewhat central to his endeavors. On the other hand, there are four occurrences of the related phrase 'transcendental proof' ('transzendentaler Beweis') and one occurrence of'transcendental mode of proof' (transzendentale Beweisart') in the Dialectic. They are at A591 B619, A614 B642 (2), A615 B643, and A629 B657, respectively. All of them refer in effect

14

Kant's Copernican Revolution

to the ontological argument for the existence of God. 22 The context of the third occurrence is especially instructive: "Both the above proofs were transcendental, that is, were attempted independently of empirical principles" (italics mine). There are four additional occurrences of ' transcendental proof in the Transcendental Doctrine of Method: at A786 B814, A787 B815, A788 B816, and A 789 B817. They are contained in a section entitled "The Discipline of Pure Reason in Regard to its Proofs," which is concerned with transcendental proofs in general and begins as follows: What distinguishes the proofs of transcendental synthetic propositions from all other proofs which yield an a priori synthetic knowledge is that, in the case of the former, reason may not apply itself, by means of its concepts, directly to the object, but must first establish the objective validity of the concepts and the possibility of their a priori synthesis. (A 782 B81 0)

Since the possibility of this synthesis can be established for concepts of the understanding-Kant claims-the transcendental proof of the principle of causality is legitimate. Since this possibility cannot be established for ideas of reason, the transcendental proof of the existence of God is illegitimate. The picture suggested by these passages agrees with my earlier discussion of the general meaning of ' transcendental'. A transcendental proof is a purely conceptual proof, in particular, one that involves reference to (for example, tries to establish the existence of) some object or objects, and hence there is nothing new to it. Philosophers had been attempting such proofs long before Kant; in fact, Kant thinks, their major strategical mistake consisted precisely in relying on such a demonstrative tool too often and too indiscriminately. What is new to Kant's position is that he asks questions about these proofs; in particular, he asks for an account of how the proofs are possible.23 Such an account he calls a (transcendental) deduction: But if such professed proofs are propounded, we must meet their deceptive power of persuasion with the non liquet of our matured judgment; and although we may not be able to detect the illusion involved, we are yet entirely within our rights in demanding a deduc,tion of the principles employed in them .... (A 786-87 B814-15) Everyone must defend his position directly, by a legitimate proof that carries with it a transcendental deduction of the grounds upon which it is itself made to rest. (A 794 B822)

Transcendental Philosophy

15

The most fundamental of transcendental deductions is, of course, the deduction of the categories, which consistently with the characterization above is described by Kant as the "explanation [Erkliirung] of the manner in which concepts can thus relate a priori to objects ... " (A85 B117), and this explanation comes in the form of a philosophical theory-more generally, of a whole new philosophical standpoint-that allows one to conceptualize the possibility that categories may have application to objects. Later in the book I will articulate this reading of the transcendental deduction. For the moment, note that I am not the first to say that the deduction is something more (or less?) than an argument. Peter Strawson (1966) claimed that the deduction "is not only an argument. It is also an explanation, a description, a story" (p. 86)Y But if this claim is accepted, then Kant seems to be in conflict with his own intentions, as declared, for example, in the Preface to the First Edition: As to certainty, I have prescribed to myself the maxim, that in this kind of investigation it is in no wise permissible to hold opinions. Everything, therefore, which bears any manner of resemblance to an hypothesis is to be treated as contraband; it is not to be put up for sale even at the lowest price, but forthwith confiscated, immediately upon detection. (Ax v)

For is not a philosophical theory (or a "story"), such as the one that I (and Strawson) see embedded in the deduction, a more or less organized system of opinions, that is, the kind of thing that should be allowed no currency in transcendental philosophy?25 Not surprisingly, Strawson concludes that Kant acted against his better judgment, and that he must be saved from his own questionable maneuvers. Not only are the two aspects of the deduction separable: they must be separated, or "disentangled," in Strawson's terminology, to identify Kant's real contribution. The "austere" transcendental argument must be purified of its connections with the "transcendental drama." I, on the other hand, think that these two aspects are best seen together, that the deduction (and the Critique in general) are best seen as presenting an argument (or a system of arguments) which takes the form of a story, and that appreciating this point will bring us to a closer understanding of Kant's philosophical program. 26 In addition to the occurrences mentioned above, the phrase 'transcendental proof' occurs once more in the Critique. This last occur-

16

Kant's Copernican Revolution

renee is also its only occurrence in the Analytic. It is contained in the following passage: Almost all natural philosophers, observing ... a great difference in the quantity of various kinds of matter in bodies that have the same volume, unanimously conclude that this volume, which constitutes the extensive magnitude of the appearance, must in all material bodies by empty in varying degrees. Who would ever have dreamt of believing that these students of nature ... would base such an inference solely on a metaphysical presupposition-the sort of assumption they so stoutly profess to avoid? They assume that the real in space ... is everywhere uniform and varies only in extensive magnitude, that is, in amount. Now to this presupposition, for which they could find no support in experience, and which is therefore purely metaphysical, I oppose a transcendental proof, which does not indeed explain the difference in the filling of spaces, but completely destroys the supposed necessity of the above presupposition .... My proof has the merit at least of freeing the understanding, so that it is at liberty to think this difference in some other manner.... (A 173-74 B215-16; italics mine)

Transcendental proofs of this kind belong to what Kant calls the polemical employment of reason, which consists of ... the defence of its propositions as against the dogmatic counterpropositions through which they are denied. Here the contention is not that its own assertions may not, perhaps, be false, but only that no one can assert the opposite with apodeictic certainty, or even, indeed, with a greater degree of likelihood. We do not here hold our possessions upon sufferance; for although our title to them may not be satisfactory, it is yet quite certain that no one can ever be in a position to prove the illegality of the title. (A 739-40 B767-68)

Kant does in fact use reason polemically in a number of cases. At A363-64 he shows that the identity of self-consciousness at different times does not entail the numerical identity of the subject, since one could imagine self-consciousness to be transmitted from one substance to another the way motion is transmitted from one elastic ball to another. At B414-18 he counteracts Mendelssohn's proof of the permanence of the soul after death by imagining that the soul's powers be lost in a gradual and continuous way, and then observes in a long footnote that [s]ome philosophers, in making out a case for a new possibility, consider that they have done enough if they can defy others to show any

Transcendental Philosophy

17

contradiction in their assumptions .... But those who resort to such a method of argument can be quite nonplussed by the citation of other possibilities which are not a whit more adventurous.

And at A 778 B806, in a passage which has obvious resonances with his central claim that empirical objects are appearances, he says: If, therefore, having assumed (in some non-speculative connection) the nature of the soul to be immaterial and not subject to any corporeal change, we are met by the difficulty that nevertheless experience seems to prove that the exaltation and the derangement of our mental powers are alike in being merely di verse modifications of our organs, we can weaken the force of this proof by postulating that our body may be nothing more than a fundamental appearance which in this our present state (in this life) serves as a condition of our whole faculty of sensibility, and therewith of all our thought, and that separation from the body may therefore be regarded as the end of this sensible employment of our faculty of knowledge and the beginning of its intellectual employment.

So pure speculation can be useful to disarm our opponent, if not to establish our own position. But if this is all the use speculation can have, why does Kant characterize his strategy at A173-74 B215-16 as that of offering a transcendental proof? What can he hope to prove by just voicing a new hypothesis on the matter? Answering this question proves decisive in understanding the sense in which the deduction can be construed as establishing (or at least trying to establish) something with the apodeictic certainty Kant requires at Axv. My answer is as follows. To be sure, (the existence of) a (consistent) philosophical theory entailing, say, (7)

The self is not numerically identical through time,

is insufficient to prove the truth of (7), but such a theory may be sufficient to prove the truth of (8)

It is possible that the self be not numerically identical through time.

And, in general, merely imagining or describing a possible state of affairs in which p is true does not allow one to establish p, but may be taken as sufficient to establish (9)

It is possible that p.

With this in mind, consider again Kant's characterization of the deduction. The deduction is, he says, "[t]he explanation of the man-

18

Kant's Copernican Revolution

ner in which concepts can thus relate a priori to objects" (italics mine). This explanation, I noted above, comes in the form of a philosophical theory: more precisely, a theory concerning how representations are related to objects. It may be a consequence of this theory that some a priori concepts have objective validity, but the theory all by itself could not prove that these concepts do in fact have objective validity, so if that is what Kant is after, the deduction would not help him. However, Kant's own characterization of the deduction suggests that that is not what he is after. What he is after is proving that the concepts in question can have objective validity, and for this purpose a (consistent) theory (or, to put it a la Strawson, a [consistent] story) is perfectly adequate. 27 In the Introduction, Kant says that "the proper problem of pure reason is contained in the question: How are a priori synthetic judgments possible?" (B 19). Many have found this formula unjustifiably reductive, and have claimed that Kant has as many problems with a posteriori judgments as with (synthetic) a priori ones.28 And so it is-as I will argue in some detail in the next chapter. But there is a sense in which the formula above captures exactly the spirit of Kant's enterprise, in that it mobilizes from the beginning-and assigns a central role to-the notion of possibility. Kant is not a foundationalist: he says immediately after the last passage quoted that the actuality of mathematics and physics has never been in question, and that their existence is a simple fact which does not expect legitimation from philosophy. If anything, it is philosophy itself that is in question, insofar as philosophers cannot explain to themselves how something that happens all the time is possible, and in fact have remained largely impotent in the face of Hume's sustained attack against this possibility. What Hume's attack-or, better, a suitable generalization of it-has proved is that traditional philosophy provides no consistent conceptual model of human knowledge-and perhaps, though the thing is not immediately relevant here, of other aspects of human experience as well. It is the challenge represented by this attack that Kant wants to take up, by way of an "experiment" (see Bxvii29) which he hopes-in fact, initially is convinced-will be more successful than the traditional approach. 30 The experiment in question is Kant's conceptual revolution, that is, the main subject matter of the present book. But before we turn to the essence of that revolution, something more must be said about the nature of the task involved. To begin with what is prom-

Transcendental Philosophy

19

ising about it, this task seems both more feasible and more germane to philosophy (at least as Kant understood it) than, say, the Cartesian task of proving that our normal waking perception is truthful. For, on the one hand, Kant's task seems simpler: proving that something is possible seems simpler than proving that it is true. On the other, if a proof of possibility consists in the cooking up of a consistent story, it seems to be the kind of thing that an armchair thinker could obtain by playing with his concepts. So, once again, shall we conclude that Kant was simply missing a term for the knowledge that his own "experiment" would provide him with, and that supplying him with such a term would close the issue? Not quite.

3.

"Real" possibility

The Kantian program as I characterized it so far has interesting analogies with David Hilbert's formalist program in the philosophy of mathematics. As in Kant's case, the situation Hilbert (1925) faces is one of conceptual crisis: ... a contradiction discovered by Zermelo and Russell had a downright catastrophic effect when it became known throughout the world of mathematics .... Cantor's doctrine ... was attacked on all sides. So violent was this reaction that even the most ordinary and fruitful concepts and the simplest and most important deductive methods of mathematics were threatened and their employment was on the verge of being declared illicit. (p. 141)

When such a conceptual crisis occurs, a natural reaction on the part of many is that of adopting a revisionary attitude with respect to ordinary beliefs and/or practices. If they get us in trouble, the revisionists claim, they must be modified. In the next chapter, we will encounter the major revisionists Kant was facing and opposing; as for the philosophy of mathematics, intuitionists were the most vocal and thorough in assuming this role. Consider, for example, the following passage by Arend Heyting (1931): A real number is defined according to Dedekind by assigning to every rational number either the predicate 'Left' or the predicate 'Right' in such a way that the natural order of the rational numbers is preserved.... In its original form, ... Dedekind's definition cannot be used in intuitionist mathematics. Brouwer, however, has improved it. ... (p. 43)

20

Kant's Copernican Revolution

The details of Heyting's objection to Dedekind and of Brouwer's "improvement" on the latter's definition are of no concern here; what matters for us is that Heyting and Brouwer found it necessary, on the basis of their philosophical conclusions as to what is and what is not legitimate, to intervene in, and modify, ordinary mathematical practice. Hilbert, on the other hand, is a conservative with respect to such practice. Of set theory, for example, he says: "No one shall drive us out of the paradise which Cantor has created for us" (1925, p. 141). His way out of the crisis is to be found not in a revision of ordinary mathematics, but in the establishment of a new discipline, metamathematics, which will essentially leave ordinary mathematics alone but proceed to argue and inquire about mathematics. And, to make the analogy with Kant even closer, the first substantive step of the formalist program consists in proving (or trying to prove) within metamathematics that the axiom systems in which ordinary mathematical practice is codified (or, to put it more provocatively, the stories used to conceptualize and systematize that activity) are consistent. Unfortunately, the analogies between Hilbert and Kant do not stop at the way in which they conceived of their programs, or at the confidence that at one time they seemed to have in the success of those programs,31 but extend to the fate of the programs as well. We know that Hilbert's program failed, and that it failed because of intrinsic limitations on what it is possible to prove at a purely conceptuallevel. In the end, Kant's program (as I formulated it so far) failed for similar (though even more general) reasons. It is to these reasons that I turn now. One of the most obscure Kantian doctrines is the thesis, proposed in the Postulates of Empirical Thought, that the field of the possible extends no further than the field of the actual. On the matter, Kant is adamant: Everything actual is possible; from this proposition there naturally follows, in accordance with the logical rules of conversion, the merely particular proposition, that some possible is actual; and this would seem to mean that much is possible which is not actual. It does indeed seem as if we were justified in extending the number of possible things beyond that of the actual, on the ground that something must be added to the possible to constitute the actual. But this [alleged] process of adding to the possible I refuse to allow. (A231 B283-84; italics mine)

Transcendental Philosophy

21

Not many commentators find it worthwhile even to consider this statement, and those who do have serious problems with it. Kemp Smith (1923), for example, thinks that Kant is simply confusing the issue: " ... Kant suddenly, without warning or explanation, attaches to the term possibility a meaning altogether different from any yet assigned to it" (p. 401). In part, this attitude is justified by Kant's own: he presents this subtle and surprising claim almost in passing, to discharge a task that he himself does not seem to judge particularly interesting: "I have made mention of these questions only in order to omit nothing which is ordinarily reckoned among the concepts of understanding" (A232 B284-85). But belittling the issue will not make it go away, nor will claiming-another thing Kant does here-that this is not the right place to deal with it. 32 So let us stay with the issue a little longer, and see what sense we can make of it. A first stab at the difficulties surrounding this doctrine could be made by pointing out that the possibility Kant is talking about here is not logical but his stronger real possibility. Logical possibility is absence of contradiction, whereas real possibility is the possibility of being experienced. Also, logical possibility is typically predicated ofconcepts, whereas real possibility is typically predicated ofobjects, and no easy inference can be made from the former to the latter: a concept may be logically possible and its object still not be really possible. A concept is always possible if it is not self-contradictory. This is the logical criterion of possibility, and by it the object of the concept is distinguishable from the nihil negativum. But it may none the less be an empty concept, unless the objective reality of the synthesis through which the concept is generated has been specifically proved; and such proof ... rests on principles of possible experience, and not on the principle of analysis (the law of contradiction). This is a warning against arguing directly from the logical possibility of concepts to the real possibility of things. (A596 B624 footnote)

And, finally the establishment of real possibility requires, in a way that is not yet entirely clear, the mobilization of our intuitive faculty: ... as concepts of objects they are then empty, and do not even enable us to judge of their objects whether or not they are possible ... For I have not then shown that the concept which I am thinking through

22

Kant's Copernican Revolution

my pure concept is even so much as possible, not being in a position to give any intuition corresponding to the concept. ... (B148-49) ... if all s'ensible intuition, the only kind of intuition which we possess, is removed, not one of these concepts can in any fashion verifY itself, so as to show its real possibility. Only logical possibility then remains, that is, that the concept or thought is possible. (B302-3 footnote)

But a reference to real possibility by itself will not do. For even if this possibility is stronger than the logical variety, it still does not follow that it should collapse into actuality. In Gordon Brittan's (1978) recent reconstruction, a logically possible proposition is one that is true in some logically possible world, and a really possible proposition one that is true in some really possible world, where really possible worlds are a (proper) subclass of logically possible worlds, but a subclass that, though it contains the real world, does not-according to Brittan-reduce to it: "One point Kant wants to make is that a great number of worlds are compatible with the actual world, although they differ from it in one respect or another" (p. 22). And it is exactly this great variety of "really possible worlds" that Kant seems to deny in the passage from the Postulates I have been considering here: That yet another series of appearances in thoroughgoing connection with that which is given in perception, and consequently that more than one all-embracing experience is possible, cannot be inferred from what is gi ven; and still less can any such inference be drawn independently of anything being given-since without material nothing whatsoever can be thought. (A231-32 B284)

Thus Kemp Smith's conclusion would seem to be justified that Kant is introducing here a whole new sense of possibility, to the utter bewilderment of his readers. But I think that this conclusion is rash. What is emerging here is not an (additional) ambiguity in the word 'possibility': it is rather an insight about (real) possibility as already characterized that proves Kant to have seen farther and deeper than even most contemporary philosophers of logic,33 though perhaps what he saw he did not like. Understanding this insight will require a digression. Suppose that in propositional modal logic we follow our most immediate intuitions and characterize necessity and possibility as truth at all possible worlds and at some possible world, respectively. Given the level of logical analysis at which we are, it will be natural

Transcendental Philosophy

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for us to formally construe possible worlds as assignments of truthvalues to (unanalyzed) atomic propositions. Now consider the proposition (1)

It is possible that p.

Since p is atomic, there certainly is a world (that is, an assignment) at which p is true, and hence (1) is logically true. But it we substitute q-and-not-q for p, the result is a proposition that not only is not logically true, but is in fact logically false: (2)

It is possible that q-and-not-q.

And the reason why this creates a serious problem is that p and qand-not-q may represent two distinct levels oflogical analysis of one and the same English proposition, so that, depending on how deeply we analyze that proposition, we end up jUdging it consistent and inconsistent, possible and impossible! Contemporary modal logic carefully avoids this difficulty by concentrating on schemes rather than propositions. Its subject matter, that is, is construed as being constituted not by those propositions that are true at all possible worlds but by those schemes of propositions whose instances are all true at all possible worlds. However, if this strategy effectively succeeds in insulating logic from the problem, it does not eliminate the problem. What we believe, question, or argue for are propositions, not schemes, and hence we must still face the fact that a judgment passed on a proposition at one level of logical (that is, conceptual) analysis could be contradicted at a subsequent, deepe-r level of the same analysis. 34 The problem could be deflated if we were dealing with an artificial language, a language defined once and for all. For then we could, conceivably, make sense of a deepest level of logical analysis, and count a proposition as really possible if it were recognized as possible at that level. But natural language does not work this way. Conceptual analysis in natural language may not be an infinite process as Leibniz claimed, but it certainly is an indefinite~ open-ended one,35 and this indefiniteness is enough to rule out any chance of successfully applying the strategy above. However long we may have taken examining the network of concepts mobilized by a proposition, we may never be conclusively certain that a contradiction that has not surfaced yet will not surface later. This discussion suggests that there may be room for two notions of possibility here. One is variable: it is a function of how much

24

Kant's Copernican Revolution

logical structure has been exposed so far, how long this structure has been analyzed, and so on. The other one is fixed and definitive, and is obtained by carrying the process to its (ideal) end: in this sense, something is either possible or not possible, and that is all. I suggest that Kant's logical possibility and real possibility, respectively, may be successfully explicated by these two notions, but this conjecture is really not relevant here. What is relevant is the sense in which the above excursion into modal logic may allow us to flesh out Kant's claim that no amount of conceptual analysis will ever justify inferring the possibility of anyone thing. To bring out this relevance more clearly, consider another example, which relates directly (not to a proposition but) to the thought of an object. Suppose that I think of a winged horse. Superficially, there seems to be nothing incoherent about this. At first sight, my concept of a horse seems to include nothing but the notion of a relatively large, gentle, four-legged mammal with a mane and a sensitive mouth. On the other hand, my concept of winged includes (again at first sight) the notion of having two or more feathery appendages, usually (but not necessarily) enabling their owner to fly. And there is no way one could derive a contradiction from these (superficial) specifications. But now imagine that I decide to analyze further my concept of a feather, and that upon such an analysis I discover that this concept (for me) includes the thought that feathers are only possessed by birds. Since it is also part of my conceptual scheme that mammals are not birds, my concept of a winged horse turns out to be incoherent after all. This is only an example, of course. In fact, my concept of a feather does not include the thought that only birds have feathers. But the example is not absurd, and it has a point. The point is that-given the open-endedness of conceptual analysis36-there is never going to be any definitive certainty at a purely conceptual level that the object of a concept even can exist. And if this is true of a single concept, consider how much truer it is going to be of the system of concepts involved in a story, say, the story of Pegasus, the winged horse, and its master Perseus and of how they together fought Medusa and eventually won and beheaded her. To put it in Wittgenstein's terms, . "But the fairy tale only invents what is not the case: it does not talk nonsense."-It)s not as simple as that. Is it false or nonsensical to say that a pot talks? Have we a clear picture of the circumstances in

Transcendental Philosophy

25

which we should say of a pot that it talked? (Philosophical Investigations, p. 97)37

In conclusion, independently of something being given, no objective possibility can be established: the only way to convince oneself that a thing is possible is by having it presented to oneself or connecting it to a presentation through necessary laws. In which case, of course, the thing is not only possible but also actual. 38 Of the many far-reaching consequences of this insight, I will briefly discuss three. First, a new sense can be made now of Kant's claim that existence is not a predicate-that is, a concept-and of his criticism of the ontological argument. Let us review the facts. Descartes (as Anselm before him, and perhaps Parmenides) had inferred the existence of an object from an analysis of its concept. 39 Leibniz criticized this inference, pointing out that thinking of something is not sufficient to guarantee that what we think makes sense: Whatever the conclusions which the Scholastics, Valerianus Magnus, Descartes, and others derived from the concept of that being whose essence is to exist, they remain weak as long as it is not established whether such a being is possible, provided it can be thought. To assert such a thing is easy; to understand it is not so easy. Assuming that such a being is possible or that there is some idea corresponding to these words, it certainly follows that such a being exists. But we believe that we are thinking of many things (though confusedly) which nevertheless imply a contradiction; for example, the number of all numbers. We ought strongly to suspect the concepts of infinity, of maximum and minimum, of the most perfect, and of all ness [omninitas] itself. (Letter to Henry Oldenburg, pp. 165-66)

Leibniz repeated this criticism a number of times,40 always insisting that proving the possibility of the existence of God was the heart of the matter. And he also seemed to satisfy himself that he had done it: Thus God alone, or the necessary being, has the privilege of necessarily existing ifhe is possible. And since nothing can prevent the possibility of that which is without any limits, without any negation, and consequently without any contradiction, this fact alone suffices to know the existence of God a priori. (Monadology, p. 647)

The way Kant understands this argument, it is based on Hthe principle that bare positives (realities) give rise to no contradiction" (A602 B630). But, he objects, "the realities are not given to us in their specific character," and therefore, Hthe connection of all real

26

Kant's Copernican Revolution

properties is a thing, the possibility of which we are unable to determine a priori" (ibid.). The objection is not immediately transparent, but my earlier ~eflections offer a way to understand it. That bare positives do not contradict each other simply means that, if we represent properties by primitive predicates, no two properties will ever be the negation of one another. But representing a property by a primitive predicate amounts to denying any logical structure to the property, and though this policy may be justified for particular purposes (say, for the establishment of some conceptual connection of a relatively superficial character), it by itself does not guarantee that the property has no logical structure. In Bas van Fraassen's (1969) words, ... ideal-language philosophers ... tended to conceive of atomic sentences as corresponding to an especially simple kind of sentence in natural language. But the symbolization of a sentence as [atomic] indicates only the extent to which its internal structure has been analyzed; and the depth of the analysis need only be sufficient unto the purpose thereof. (p. 90)

And, in conclusion (and in Kant's own words), "the celebrated Leibniz is far from having succeeded in what he plumed himself on achieving-the comprehension a priori of the possibility of this sublime ideal being" (A602 B630). Proving the possibility of an object amounts-as asserted in the Postulates chapter-to proving its actuality, and this can in no way be accomplished at a conceptual level, that is, by simply playing with predicates. Only a presentation-or necessary connection with a presentation-will do, which establishes once and for all that existence-even possible existence-on the one hand, and anything that can be gotten through conceptual analysis, on the other, are entirely different kinds of animals. The above analysis of possibility makes also for a stronger connection between Kant's and Hilbert's programs: more precisely, it connects Kant's difficulties with the dire consequences that Godel's theorem had for the formalist agenda. For if we were presented by the totality of mathematical entities, or at least by some such totality as is posited by a specific mathematical theory, this actual presentation would provide us with the best evidence one might wish of the truth, and hence the consistency, of that mathematical theory. But since no such presentation is possible, for any interesting mathematical theory, in view (at least) of its infinite scope, we are left

Transcendental Philosophy

27

with the project of trying to argue for this consistency at a conceptual level, where the thing turns out to be unfeasible. 41 The point has often been made in this century that Kant's invocation of the notion of intuition in mathematics is based on the limits of the logic he used: now we know better-it is said or implied-and hence we need no such invocation. 42 The fact that without intuition we may not be able to establish the consistency of what we are talking about, and hence the great significance that Kant's proposal could have for contemporary reflection, is kept out of sight by sticking to the notion of a logic of schemes in which results are established once and for all (but their relevance is never certain). Finally (and most importantly for my present purposes), proper appreciation of the gulf between logical and real possibility forces one to reevaluate the philosophical program sketched in Section 2 of this chapter in a decisive (and probably unwelcome) way. For it now appears that the only thing we can achieve in philosophy-or, for that matter, in any discipline that is purely conceptual-is the formulation of a theory-a "story"-which has not been proved inconsistent yet. The apodeictic certainty that no inconsistency will ever be found-the certainty that Kant claims for his enterprise in the passage from Axv quoted on p. I5-is out of the question. Officially, Kant did not accept this conclusion. In fact, if it had been presented to him, he would have probably rejected it contemptuouslyas reducing philosophy to a "groping among mere concepts" (Bxv). His most effective strategy in trying to avoid recognition of the limits of his enterprise consisted in calling upon the pure intuitions of space and time to provide him with the objective reference that would give him Erkenntnis at the conceptual level, and make possible the step from formal, "general" logic to the contentricher, object-related transcendental variety. Thus in the passage from A76-77 BI02 quoted on p. 7, the manifold ofa priori sensibility is singled out as what both makes the difference between the two logics and provides "material for the concepts of pure understanding." And at Al35 BI74 Kant claims that [t]ranscendental philosophy has the peculiarity that besides the rule ... , which is given in the pure concept of understanding, it can also specify a priori the instance to which the rule is to be applied.

But note the cautiousness of these formulations. Transcendental logic does not simply u~e pure intuitions to acquire representational

28

Kant's Copernican Revolution

character: it has the material of pure intuition "lying before it" (vor sich liegen). And transcendental philosophy does not simply apply a rule to an instance: it "can specify" (anzeigen kann) that instance. As it turns out, this cautiousness is justified: pure intuitions themselves have no currency in transcendental philosophy, only talk or thought of such intuitions does. More precisely, pure intuitions are not going to be mobilized in transcendental philosophy the way in which intuitions are ordinarily mobilized to grant objectivity and cognitive value: if they did, transcendental philosophy would become mathematics. And we know already that transcendental philosophy not only is not mathematics, but does not even include mathematics. As all philosophy, transcendental philosophy remains a conceptual enterprise, which deals with the concept of space as much as with the concept of God or the concept ofan object. So this brand of philosophy, too, is ultimately to share in the inconclusiveness of all philosophical inquiry.43 There are indications that Kant realized to some extent the unfinished-in fact, probably interminable-nature of his business. Thus in the Architectonic of Pure Reason he says: ... philosophy is a mere idea of a possible science which nowhere exists in concreto, but to which, by many different paths, we endeavour to approximate, until the one true path, overgrown by the products of sensibility, has at last been discovered, and the image, hitherto so abortive, has achieved likeness to the archetype, so far as this is granted to man. Till then we cannot learn philosophy; for where is it, who is in possession of it, an

and (2)

b is 4>.

For, one might say, all I can claim in situation C is that I represent a desk, maybe even a desk that is qualitatively indistinguishable

from the one that is in fact in front of me, but still not this one, not the one in front of me.

The Old Conceptual Framework

51

The reaction seems sensible, so let us try to follow it through. Suppose that we replace (2) on p. 40 with (3) (The mind) a has a -cognition of this (object) b = bas and this b is ,

df

a represents this

and consider the first conjunct of the definiens of (3). With (2) on p. 40, I argued that the corresponding conjunct could not be read as relational because there might be no object at all with which to establish the representing relation. Is the situation different when we move to (3) above? Some people think it is. They believe that the use of a demonstrative is sufficient to warrant the existence of a term for our relation. The following is a classical formulation of this position, by Bertrand Russell (1918): If ['Romulus'] were really a name, the question of existence could not arise, because a name has got to name something or it is not a name, and if there is no such person as Romulus there cannot be a name for that person who is not there.... (p. 243) [I]t [is] very difficult to get any instance of a name at all in the proper strict logical sense of the word. The only words one does use as names in the logical sense are words like 'this' or 'that.' (p. 201)

If a demonstrative cannot fail to denote, then the claim that a representing is not always a representing ofsomething is falsified in the specific case of demonstrative representings, and hence it becomes possible to construe demonstrative representings in a de re, relational way. And it also becomes possible to argue that in situation C the definiens of (3) is not satisfied: I do represent a table (or, more precisely, represent-a-table), but do not represent this table. Demonstratives have recently become a popular topic in various areas of philosophy, from the semantics of modal logic to phenomenology.26 Not surprisingly (in view of the above), they have also been applied to the interpretation of Kant, most notably by Robert Howell (1981). Consider, for example, the following passage: [The transcendental-object] theory suggests an analysis of human de re thought of outer objects ... in terms of human de dicto thought plus certain individuative factors having to do with perceptually displayed (and indexically, demonstratively, or ostensively designatable) locations in space. [A specific version of this analysis, which reads 'space' as 'physical space'] can be related in an important way to the

52

Kant's Copernican Revolution account of indexical and demonstrative reference that philosophers like Kaplan have developed in recent years. According to this account, an indexical or demonstrative term like 'this' achieves de re reference to an object directly and without the mediation of any Fregean sense-or Kantian concept-that one might suppose (mistakenly, as this account holds) to be associated with that term. Such an idea already can be seen to resemble Kant's view that our de re cognitive relations to objects require direct-object displays in intuition rather than mere intellectual conception. And the resemblance can be made quite close if one follows out [this version of the analysis] and takes Kant to make the following sort of specific proposal. The proposal would be that H's de re thought of an outer object always takes the form of a non-conceptual display to H, in perception or intuition, ofa physical space location that is indexically or demonstratively designated by H. And the proposal would take that display to be coupled with H's de dicta thought roughly to the effect that there is a certain object that occurs at the location that H thus designates. Such a proposal then amounts to an attempt to analyze all human de re outerobject thinking via a specifically perceptual and de dicta thought application of the basic above account of indexicals and demonstratives. (pp. 107-9)

In the end, Howell thinks, this proposal will not work. And there is a good reason for its failure: it is the Russellian (?)27 account of demonstratives on which the proposal is based that does not work. It is simply not true that demonstrative reference is a sufficient guarantee of the existence of the object referred to. Henry Leonard (1956) pointed out (with homage to Dewey) that one can use demonstratives to refer to all kinds of non-existents, such as pink elephants. In fact, I would add, one may want to use demonstratives to distinguish this pink elephant, the one I see in the center of the room, from that one, the one I see in the corner. And if the details of Russell's metaphysics are spelled out, one realizes that Russell himself did not claim that demonstratives are proper names of physical objects. He claimed that demonstratives are proper names of sense data: ... if you try to apprehend the proposition that I am expressing when I say 'This is white,' you cannot do it. If you mean this piece of chalk as a physical object, then you are not using a proper name. It is only when you use 'this' quite strictly, to stand/or an actual object a/sense, that it is really a proper name. And in that it has a very odd property for a proper name, namely that it seldom means the same thing two

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moments running and does not mean the same thing to the speaker and to the hearer. (Russell [1918], p. 201; italics mine)

What does the work in Russell's position is not any mysterious de re-ifying quality of demonstratives; it is the old empiricist line of conceptualizing perception as a relation of the mind with its own contents. And thus in the end we have little to learn from this whole approach. Demonstrative reference and representation certainly have interesting specific features, and it certainly is philosophically illuminating to study these features, but such a study is not going to resolve our problem. For, once again, our problem is that if representation is to be a .relation, then there must be things for it to relate, but the injection of demonstratives is not going to guarantee that such things exist-unless of course we think of them as minddependent entities. The third proposal I want to consider here was made by Richard Aquila (1981, 1983), with specific reference to Kant. The following is a clear formulation of it: It is not unreasonable, I think, to suggest that Kant was virtually alone in refusing to choose between the following two alternatives: Either a sensory state is not, intrinsically, object-directed at all (like Kantian "sensations"), or else it is merely a relational state of affairs of some sort, one of whose terms is the "proper" or "immediate" object of the state in question. Rather, a sensory state, insofar as it is an object-directed state, is more like a particular of some sort, where one of that particular's properties is simply that of directedness to the object in question. This view, unlike the other, leaves room for the possibility that the object in question has no existence at all (apart, that is, from its existing in the sense that there is an apprehension oj it). (Aquila [1981], p. 12)

In the terms I have been using here, a sensory state is neither a property of a mind nor a relation between a mind and an object, but rather an object which can itself have properties and stand in relations with other objects. I am not concerned here with the full import of Aquila's position. Later in the book I will have more to say about another crucial aspect of his interpretation of Kant, but for the moment my only interest is in determining whether or not his proposal can help us solve our present problem. Thus I will not stop to consider the possible metaphysical complications of introducing an ontology of sen-

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sory states, nor the textual difficulties of arguing that Kant actually held such a position, in the light of comments like the one from Refl. 3873 qu~ted on p. 33. I will only inquire whether or not Aquila's view allows us to give a consistent conceptualization of cognition in a modified version of the traditional framework. If a sensory state is a particular, a sensory cognition must be a particular, too. But certainly not every sensory state is a cognition, so there must be some differentia that identifies the species sensory cognition of the genus sensory state. This differentia is going to be either some property or properties of the state or some relation or relations of the state with some object(s). And at this point we face exactly the same problems we faced in Section 2. If the differentia is some property or properties, we face the Cartesian problem that no such property is shared by only cognitions. If the differentia is some relation or relations, then when we try to specify which relation or relations these are, we are likely to end up with degenerate relations which once again capture cognitive as well as non-cognitive sensory states. So whatever other merits Aquila's proposal may have, it seems to make no new contribution to a solution of our present difficulties. The last two proposals I will consider are those that deviate the most from Baumgarten's framework. For they do not limit themselves to attributing object status to entities (such as sensory states) that Baumgarten would have called modifications or determinations of objects. They introduce whole new categories of entities: the first one propositions, and the second one events. Consider propositions first. The relevant proposal consists of conceptualizing knowledge in terms of a relation between the mind and (not an object but) a proposition. From a linguistic point of view, this propositional construal (far more popular nowadays than Kant's objectual construal) amounts to regarding sentences of the form (4)

a knows that B

as the primary contexts of occurrence of the very 'to know', and thinking that sentences of the form (5)

a knows b

must somehow be reduced to the form (4).

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There may be metaphysical problems with the notion of a proposition which make this approach unpalatable to extreme empiricists. A proposition is an abstract entity, and the postulation of relations with such entities may be more than some are ready to accept. But if propositions are accepted, the approach in question seems to hold promise of a real ad vance concerning our central difficulty. For consider: in the objectual case, we could not think of representing as a relation because it is possible to represent things that do not exist. In the propositional case, on the other hand, the corresponding notion of believing a proposition can always be regarded as a relation because propositions exist (if at all) whether they are true or false, and hence in particular whether what they talk about exists or not. But appearances deceive here, and the above is a way not to address but rather to evade our difficulty. What we have done in fact is to replace the original problem with another (easier) one, much the way in which-as was pointed out in Chapter I-modal logicians resolve the problems of real possibility by switching to a logic of schemes. In the present case, we started out with the project of conceptualizing our knowledge of the world, and of objects in it, and after getting in trouble with that project we are now moving to a different one, which amounts to conceptualizing our knowledge of something else. The last wrinkle in this strategy of (self-) deception would consist of redefining the world as a set of propositions, thus insulating us completely from the impact of the original puzzlement: not surprisingly, this wrinkle is quite common in contemporary formal semantics.28 If we do not want to use the propositional approach to hide our problem, on the other hand, we must think of the (cognitive) relation we are interested in as a compound one, that is, as the result R of composing some relation S (say, believing) minds have with propositions with some relation T (say, describing) propositions have with objects (or perhaps facts). In other words, we must think that propositions at best mediate (not abrogate) our knowledge of objects. But when it comes to characterizing this compound relation, we run into essentially the same difficulty we faced originally, with an epicycle added. For now the cognitive relation is likely to dissolve not into two monadic properties, but rather into two (other) relations: the Sand T above. To illustrate, consider the following (Platonic) proposal:

56 (6)

Kant's Copernican Revolution a has a ¢-cogni tion of b = df a has justified belief in the proposition "b is ¢" and the proposition "b is ¢" is true (that is, verified by the world).

Insofar as the two component relations of justified belief and ofverification are independent of one another, a wedge can be driven between them, as was in the case of the two monadic properties, and examples can be found in which the two relations are (independently) satisfied but nothing that we would want to call knowledge results. The reader will recognize here the familiar Gettier problem. 29 And when he does, he may want to throw up his hands in despair. For though this is not the place to enter into a detailed discussion of the issue, it is fair to say that, in spite of the monstrous body of literature generated by the Gettier counterexamples,30 and of the many ingenious devices utilized in the contest, the current situation is one of stall. In reviewing a recent (large) collection in epistemology, John Bacon (1983) talks of "post-Gettier disillusionment" (p. 663), and then gives the following preliminary account of the contributions to be reviewed: Embracing the moral that knowledge cannot be a simple matter, some enterprising souls are venturing bewilderingly complex definitions. Others, more cautious, have gone back to refining the ingredients, such as belief, justification, and other necessary conditions for knowledge. (ibid.)

But at the end of the review, Bacon's fina,l assessment is quite skeptical: [The collection] seems to typify what must surely be a transitional impasse. The Gettier problem exposed a deep anomaly in traditional epistemology. It is not yet clear which responses are paradigm-patchwork and which may contain the seeds of renewal. (p. 668)

If I am right, the essence of the Gettier problem was already present to Kant. And in the rest of the book, I will try to show that his response went well beyond mere paradigm-patchwork. Finally, consider events. Once again, there are metaphysical problems here: most important (and most relevant for our present concerns), the problem of coming up with reasonable criteria of identification for events. 31 But let us bracket such problems here and

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direct our attention to the particular events that could be crucial for characterizing cognitions. These events must be two-part events. 32 The first part is some kind of interaction between a mind a and an object b, and the second part is a's having a representation that (in some sense to be specified) resembles h. What is most important to it all, however, is that there is a causal connection between the two parts: it is because a/the interaction between a and b that a has the representation, and it is this causal link that supposedly allows the present proposal to escape the semblance of arbitrariness haunting the relational construe. In view of the importance of causality in it, this position is often called the causal theory 0/ knowledge. But consider now the following situation D. Every time somebody hits me over the head with a hammer, I see (hallucinate) my friend Max in front of me. I am asleep or otherwise incoherent, and what I am seeing in front of me is some scene from A Thousand and One Nights, but in fact my friend Max is in front of me, and at some point he decides to hit me over the head with a hammer. Immediately I have a representation that resembles him very closely. Would this event count as a cognition? I think that for most of us it would not, but still all the requirements of the causal theory are satisfied. I have a representation that resembles Max, Max has had an interaction with me, and it is because a/that interaction that I have the representation. The most natural reaction to situation D consists of saying that there is something deviant or non-standard in the kind of interaction I have with Max. And so, in fact, it is. But when it comes to characterizing this notion of non-standard, and the correlative notion of standard, we begin to have (familiar) problems. For either we define "standard" by means of a reference to the fact that the result has to be a cognition, and then we fall into circularity, or we try to do without such a reference, and then it seems always possible to think of cases in which all standard requirements are met but no cognition results. The above is not, and could not be, a definitive judgment: too much effort is currently being spent on the causal theory of know1edge,33 and too much confidence is shown by many that some version of this theory will eventually be made to work, for it to be time to think of closing the issue-especially in a context such as the present one. But though the jury is still out, progress reports are not encouraging. The following is a representative example:

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Kant's Copernican Revolution Whatever the reason, many philosophers have endorsed some version of the causal theory .... We shall argue that it isn't clear whether a causal theory can do the job it is supposed to do, but, if it can, some fundamental revisions must be made in the role the causal condition plays in the production of belief (Dretske and En9 [1984], p. 517)

After a discussion of some twenty years, it is still time for uncertainty and for "fundamental revisions." To be sure, this situation per se does not Jorce one to abandon hope, nor do the various difficulties indicated in this section prove that knowledge cannot be assigned a place in any reasonable modification of the traditional framework. After all, nothing would, given the vagueness of the phrase 'reasonable modification' and the kind of commitment-to be explored in Chapter 3-one usually has to a conceptual framework. But these difficulties may incline us, at least "by way of experiment," to look in a different direction: the direction of the conceptual revolution Kant envisioned.

3 Between Old and New Thence originated the present treatise, which, we flatter ourselves, will fully satisfy the reader; for the main part he will not understand, another part he will not believe, and the rest he will laugh at. Dreams oj a Spirit-Seer JIIustrated by Dreams of Metaphysics, p. 39; II, p. 318

1.

A revolution for whom?

Strawson (1959) characterizes Kant as a descriptive metaphysician. "Descriptive metaphysics," Strawson says, "is content to describe the actual structure of our thought about the world," whereas "revisionary metaphysics is concerned to produce a better structure" (p. 9). This distinction, and the assigning of Kant to the descriptive camp, has gained some currency in the literature. I And there seems to be a basis for them in the methods Kant uses; in the second analogy, for example, he apparently argues against Hume that we infact understand the notion of an objective sequence in terms of the notion of a necessary sequence, not the other way around. But how is it possible to reconcile this picture of Kant the descriptivist, the careful explorer of "the actual structure of our thought about the world," with the fact that he repeatedly characterizes his major contribution to philosophy as coming in the form of a conceptual revolution of some sort?2 To find an answer to this question, it is crucial to reach an understanding of the public to which Kant's revolutionary pronouncements were addressed. And to remain on the topic of the second analogy for a moment, the following is a suggestive way in which Kant sums up his position on the matter: "This may seem to contradict all that has hitherto been taught in regard to the procedure of our understanding" (A 195 B241). Note that Kant does not say that his teachings contradict the current procedures of our understanding, or even what we ordinarily 59

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(tend to) think about them, but rather what we have been taught about them. This statement, as it turns out, is a lucid if perhaps condensed assessment of Kant's revolutionary objective; in the remainder of the present section, I intend to articulate it. To begin with, consider the following passage, from the A Preface: ... as I perceived that even if treated in dry, purely scholastic fashion, the [Critique] would by itself be already quite sufficiently large in bulk, I found it inadvisable to enlarge it yet further through popular examples and illustrations. These are necessary only from a popular point of view; and this work can never be made suitable for popular consumption. (Axviii; last italics mine)

So far, nothing much is new. The Critique, Kant says, is to be conceived as a scholarly work, and hence as addressed to a public of scholars. For this reason, it can never become popular reading, and examples would be out of place in it. Things become more interesting when we move to the B Preface, and consider this other passage: I appeal to the most rigid dogmatist, whether the proof of the continued existence of our soul after death, derived from the simplicity of substance, or of the freedom of the will as opposed to a universal mechanism, arrived at through the subtle but ineffectual distinctions between subjective and objective practical necessity, or of the existence of God as deduced from the concept of an ens realissimum ... have ever, upon passing out from the schools, succeeded in reaching the public mind or in exercising the slightest influence on its convictions? ... When the Schools have been brought to recognise that they can lay no claim to higher and fuller insight in a matter of universal human concern than that which is equally within the reach of the great mass of men (ever to be held by us in the highest esteem), and that, as Schools of philosophy, they should limit themselves to the study of those universally comprehensible, and, for moral purposes, sufficient grounds of proof, then not only do these latter possessions remain undisturbed, but through this very fact they acquire yet greater authority. The change affects only the arrogant pretensions of the Schools, which would fain be counted the sole authors and possessors of such truths.... (Bxxxii-xxxiii; last italics mine)

This passage suggests that the teachings of the Critique may be addressed to a public of scholars in a more substantial way than was formerly indicated. It is not just that only scholars (or, more precisely, only professional philosophers) will be able to understand them; it begins to look as if only professional philosophers are intended to be affected by them. The Critique is not going to have

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an impact on the man in the street not Oust) because the man in the street is somewhat intellectually inferior to the task of mastering it, but rather (and more important) because the man in the street is largely right in thinking (and acting) the way he does, and the mistakes Kant wants to correct are mistakes professional philosophy has made. Kant's revolution is addressed to what professional philosophers have thought (and taught) about knowledge, and hence it is in principle compatible with a conservative, descriptive position concerning our ordinary view of the world and of our cognitive relations with it. There is substantial textual support for this reading of Kant's revolutionary intents. Here is a highly incomplete but sufficiently representative selection of passages: ... it would be more consistent with a wise regard for science as well as for mankind, to favour the freedom of such criticism, by which alone the labours of reason can be established on a firm basis, than to support the ridiculous despotism of the Schools, which raise a loud cry of public danger over the destruction of cobwebs to which the public has never paid any attention, and the loss of which it can therefore never feel. (Bxxxv) Do you really require that a mode of knowledge which concerns all men should transcend the common understanding, and should only be revealed to you by philosophers? Precisely what you find fault with is the best confirmation of the correctness of [my] assertions. For we have thereby revealed to us, what could not at the start have been foreseen, namely, that in matters which concern all men without distinction nature is not guilty of any partial distribution of her gifts, and that in regard to the essential ends of human nature the highest philosophy cannot advance further than is possible under the guidance which nature has bestowed even upon the most ordinary understanding (A831 B859) ... in trying to determine honestly for its own instruction the value of various actions ... , [ordinary intelligence] can ... have as good hope of hitting the mark as any that a philosopher can promise himself. Indeed it is almost surer in this than even a philosopher, because he can have no principle different from that of ordinary intelligence, but may easily confuse his judgement with a mass of alien and irrelevant considerations and cause it to swerve from the straight path. (Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, p. 72; IV, p. 404)

Furthermore, the above interpretation is consistent with a number of historical data. It is consistent with Kant's early association

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with Pietism, given the latter's disregard for purely intellectual enterprises and high regard for the ordinary man's (especially moral) intuitions. 3 And it is consistent with the general cultural scene in which Kant's work must be situated and, more specifically, with the relations of mutual influence existing between his Copernican revolution and (the ideological framework of) the political revolutions of the late eighteenth century.4 Last, but not least-in fact, most important here-this interpretation is also consistent with the theoretical understanding of Kant's project I have been developing in the previous chapters. I argued that the new discipline of transcendental philosophy promoted by Kant aimed (not at establishing truths about the world but rather) at conceptualizing the world and our (cognitive) relations with it in a consistent way, and that the reason why this new discipline was necessary is that the received framework in which philosophers did their conceptualizations before had proved inadequate. I pointed out that such a failure left two major options open: either place the blame on our ordinary cognitive practices or place the blame on the received framework itself And I argued that Kant chose the second option, leaving ordinary practice alone and concentrating his revisionary efforts on the philosophy of that practice. The result is a peculiar blend of conservatism and radicalism, which in the end will have to face more problems than may be apparent now. But before we get to the problems, we must give a clearer articulation of how the blending works.

2.

The main step

Kant's first characterization of his revolution is contained in the following passage: What ... is the reason why, in this field [of metaphysics], the sure road to science has not hitherto been found? Is it, perhaps, impossible of discovery? Why, in that case, should nature have visited our reason with the restless endeavour whereby it is ever searching for such a path, as if this were one of its most important concerns? ... The examples of mathematics and natural science, which by a single and sudden revolution have become what they now are, seem to me sufficiently remarkable to suggest our considering what may have been the essential features in the changed point of view by which they have so greatly benefited. Their success should incline us, at least by way of experiment, to imitate their procedure .... Hitherto it has been

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assumed that all our knowledge must conform to objects .... We must ... make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge. (Bxv-xvi)

This passage needs some explaining. The pre-revolutionary conception of knowledge conforming to objects is, at least prima facie, relatively clear-though, as I pointed out in Chapter 2, when we get to the details, we face unexpected difficulties in making sense of it. The conception of objects conforming to knowledge, on the other hand, is unclear from the start. Its idealistic suggestions are unmistakable, but the problem is: how is this idealism to be understood? One's answer to this question ultimately determines one's construal of Kant's revolution, or at least of the first and fundamental step in this revolution. We know that Kant called his idealism transcendental. In Chapter 1, I pointed out that, in most of its occurrences, 'transcendental' could be replaced by 'conceptual'. What happens if we perform this substitution in the present case? What sense can we make of a conceptual idealism? Transcendental idealism is contrasted by Kant with empirical idealism. We know from Chapter 2 what empirical idealism amounts to (according to Kant): it is the doctrine that what we experience is ideas, or. in a more Kantian language, representations. Alternatively put, representations come first in the order (field) of experience, and objects-if they surface at all-only surface as convenient abbreviating devices for patterns of representations. Of himself, Kant says that he is an empirical realist, and what this means is that for him things (res) come first in the order of experience. It is things that we see and hear, not complicated bundles of representations, and any credible empirical theory must explain my representation of, say, a table (in standard cases) as a consequence of (among other things) the existence of a table and its action on my representative faculties, not the other way around: In whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intuition is that through which it is in immediate relation to them, and to which all thought as a means is directed. But intuition takes place only in so far as the object is given to us. This again is only possible, to man at least, in so far as the mind is affected in a certain way. (A19 B33)

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Kant's Copernican Revolution

On the other hand, empirical activities do not exhaust the range of human pursuits, and empirical theories are not the only human theoretical concern. There is a philosophical activity as well, whose aim is not to make statements about matters offact, but to abstract from such matters and reflect on the process of thinking itself,5 not as it occurs empirically in an empirical mind but as a self-enclosed system where minds have no more currency than tables or chairs do-though of course the thought of them does. To bring out more clearly the difference between the two (kinds of) activities, and show the significance of a conceptual revolution such as Kant's, it will be convenient to use an example. Thus suppose that in my ordinary, empirical mode, I face some of the writing I have just done, and ask myself how it came about. An answer will probably be given in terms of my pressing a few keys on the word processor, of the software providing the necessary instructions, and of the printer receiving the information, being adequately fed with paper, and so on. But suppose now that I switch to my philosophical mode. Then I will begin to have worries of an entirely different kind. For example, I might ask myself would this still be a piece of writing if the keys had been pressed by the wind, or in had pressed them automatically while in a state of absolute stupor, or as the result of an experiment of free association? As I ask these questions, it will become progressively clear to me that the physical, empirical nature of the object I am facing is not enough to determine its being a piece of writing, that I could be faced by exactly the same object and not want to call it a piece of writing. And so gradually this piece of writing, or for that matter any specific piece of writing, will lose importance for me, and the following issue will become paramount: what is it for something to be a piece of writing? Or, in other (and more Kantian) words, how are pieces of writing possible? Suppose I decide that for something to be a pIece of writing its production must have been initiated by an intelligent being with the intention of expressing some thoughts. I might then phrase my conclusion by saying that it is intentions (of intelligent beings) that make pieces of writing. But note that, in spite of the use of such a concrete word as 'make' here, no suggestion is implied that my conclusion has any relevance to the production of concrete things in the world. All that I have done is spell out (some of) the content of the concept of a piece of writing, or of what it means to be a piece of writing. Within the scope of this activity, the existence of actual

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pieces of writing, or of anything at all, is entirely irrelevant. As it turns out, there are pieces of writing, but that is an empirical matter, and one that in my philosophical mode I am not (necessarily) concerned with. 6 At most, such an empirical matter can be (as in the present example) the starting point of my reflection, but even then it is not going to remain important for long, because very quickly possible pieces of writing will become as important for that reflection as actual ones. To go one step further, suppose now that upon additional reflection I conclude that I really do not have a consistent notion of what an intention is. I may then decide to give up my first conceptualization of a piece of writing and replace it with another. This latter attempt may make no reference to the writer and be formulated instead in terms of the possibility on the part of some reader to make intelligible sense of the scribbling in front of him. I may then phrase my conclusion by saying that it is readers that make pieces of writing, but once again the strong causal resonances of this formulation must not mislead one into thinking that my conceptual revolution had any impact on empirical matters. No new piece of writing has been added to the universe (or subtracted from it), and if I were asked how this piece of writing came about, I would still answer the same way, that is, that I pressed the keys and so onand this in spite of the fact that I am no longer even mentioned in the philosophical explanation (the "story") of what makes pieces of writing possible. Before we leave the example, two additional remarks are in order. First, I could extend my second philosophical explanation to an explanation of what makes (not just a piece of writing but) a writer. Thus I could say that a writer is somebody who has initiated the production of something of which it is possible for a reader to make intelligible sense. Then the (kind of) entity that played the decisive role in my first philosophical explanation would become conceptually dependent on another, which originally might well have been conceptually dependent on it. Second, my first philosophical explanation of what it is to be a piece of writing went in the same general direction as my empirical explanation of an individual piece of writing, in that its starting point was the writer and his causal action. I might express this agreement by saying that I was at first both empirically and transcendentally writer directed. When I moved to my second philosophical explanation, on the other hand, I became transcendentally

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Kant's Copernican Revolution

reader directed while remaining empirically writer directed. And note that, while the transcendental switch has at least some plausibility, the corresponding empirical switch would look entirely silly: I certainly do not want to say that it is the reader that causes (the existence of) this piece of writing, or perhaps (that of) the writer (that is, myself). Turn to Kant now. In the empirical mode, empirical psychology will explain how it is that I come up with the image of this table, probably on the basis of how the object this table interacts with my sensory apparatus. And in general, representations (or, more collectively, consciousness, or, as I will also say, experience[sf) will be explained there on the basis of what objects (and among them subjects) do. On this, Kant has nothing to say: he is empirically object directed (or a realist). What he is proposing to do, however, is to tell a different philosophical story concerning how objects are possible, and that story is going to begin with representations: what it is to be an object will be cashed out in terms of what it is to be a representation (of a certain kind). Whereas for transcendental realism-the traditional conceptual framework-objects are the conceptual starting point and representations (consciousness, experience) are (is) conceptualized as representations (consciousness, experience) of objects, for the new framework of transcendental idealism representations (consciousness, experience) are (is) the conceptual starting point and objects a!"e conceptualized as objects of representations (consciousness, experience). In the new framework, therefore, the ontological primacy and independence of objects is not challenged, but their conceptual independence (from experience) is. It is still true that objects are whether or not one experiences them; in fact, it may still be true that they are in the most basic sense of the word, but that is not what their being objects (or, for that matter, their being) reduces to. A good way of articulating this interpretation is by confronting it with a common worry Kant commentators have, that is: was Kant a phenomenalist?8 There are various kinds of phenomenalism, but for our present purposes it will be sufficient to focus on two. One might be called objectual phenomenalism: it is the doctrine according to which (real) objects are to be reduced to (in the sense that they literally are) sets of experiences structured in certain ways: this is the kind of phenomenalism Kant was most familiar with (as instantiated, for example, by Berkeley) and the one he has been most frequently associated with. The other is the more recent and

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sophisticated linguistic phenomenalism: the doctrine that sentences about (real) objects are to be reduced (in the sense that they are logically equivalent) to sentences about sets of experiences structured in certain ways.9 We know by now that Kant definitely wanted to distinguish his position from Berkeley's (that is, from what he called empirical idealism), and later in this chapter we will go some way toward understanding why Kant's formulations so often sound (apparently against his intentions) like formulations of Berkeleian phenomenalism; here I am interested in whether (or, better, how far) Kant (as I am reconstructing him) is in fact committed to phenomenalism. I will address the issue by considering another example. Suppose that I tell my six-year-old daughter: "Look, Sara! The man across the street is a general." And suppose that she asks me what a general is. Perhaps mentally regretting my indexical outburst, I enter into a lengthy explanation of what an army is, what ranks in the army are, and so on, and at the end of the explanation Sara says that she understands: she now knows what a general is. Ask yourself what exactly I have done. Have I reduced the general to a set of relations among ranks in an army, in a sense analogous to the one involved in objectual phenomenalism? Of course not: the general simply is not any such set. He is a man who happens to have relations to (other) members of the army. Well, then, have I at least made the general ontologically dependent on those relations? Not at all: the general is ontologically independent from the relations in question in the precise sense that were the relations to cease to exist, there is no reason to think that he would have to cease to exist, too. Is it, then, the case that I have reduced sentences about the general to (sets of) sentences about relations among ranks in an army, in the sense demanded by linguistic phenomenalism? Once again the answer is no: sentences like (1)

The man across the street is redheaded

or (2) The old bastard really wants war

are about the general, and there are no sentences about relations among ranks in an army that are logically equivalent to themthough some may happen to be factually equivalent to them. But perhaps I want to say that I have reduced sentences about the general and containing the phrase 'the general' to sentences about rela-

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tions among ranks in an army. This last proposal is the only one that has some appearance of plausibility,1O but it is still far from being uncontroversial. In fact, to implement it we would have to accept something close to Russell's theory of definite descriptions, 11 for which a sentence like (3) The general is redheaded

is logically equivalent to a sentence in which the (alleged) singular term 'the general' does not occur, but the predicate 'a general' occurs instead-which predicate could then be eliminated in terms of my analysis of what it is to be a general. Within other positions, however,12 even the last proposal would be unacceptable, because (3) would not literally say something about (there) being a general, but only presuppose it, and hence 'the general' could not be eliminated in favor of general terms (no pun intended). In conclusion, all that I have done in the example is to reduce the concept of a general to the concept(s) of relations among ranks in an army, so that now Sara knows that somebody is not to be called a general unless he bears those relations. And the situation is analogous to Kant's case. I pointed out earlier that Kant does not want to turn objects into patterns of representations: my example illustrates how he can be an idealist (and even a phenomenalist) of sorts without being committed to any such'- move. According to him, objects (what "objects" refers to) are going to be ontologically independent from representations, experience, consciousness, and possibly anything at all. What it is for them to be objects, on the other hand, will be explained in terms of what it is for experiences to be structured in certain ways. And, in conclusion, is Kant a phenomenalist? In a way, yes: a transcendental phenomenalist. He is interested in reductions of some kind, not, however, in reductions of objects (or sentences about them) but in reductions of concepts (and possibly sentences about them). One important point of difference between the example of the general and Kant's case must be mentioned, however, since it can help us to explain why people have such a hard time understanding Kant's project (or at least formulating it clearly). When I explain what a general is, I can use a number of other sufficiently stable concepts to get my point across: say, the concept of a person, or the concept of war. And even if I were to reconceptualize generals in an important way, the chances are that I would still have a number of other well-established concepts to rely on (as in the previous exam-

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pIe, where I reconceptualized pieces of writing). When it comes to reconceptualizing objects, on the other hand, matters are more difficult, given how central the concept of an object is. Think of it: you can begin to say what a general is by saying, "He is a person such that ... ," but if you want to say what an object is, how do you begin? Perhaps you will say, "It is a ... ehm ... thing such that ... ," and you may well feel that you are stretching language when you distinguish in this way between objects and things, or try to refer to something more basic than objects. In fact, your feeling is justified: as I will argue in detail in the next four sections, when you hit the boundaries of your conceptual framework, you also hit the bounds of sense. 13 Given the importance of this issue, it may be useful to elaborate on it from yet another angle. So consider again the passage quoted on pp. 62-63. "Conformity" suggests the existence of some standard, and the use of the standard to assess a given performance or entity. It is by reference to the standard meter kept in Paris that we decide whether or not a given stick is one meter long, and it is by reference to the standard provided by the Richter scale that we decide whether a given earthquake was a "major" one: in both cases, what is in question is conformity to the relevant standards. Of course, it is always crucial to determine who (or what) sets the standards and who (or what) is subject to them, and quite often a revolution of any kind ca~ be characterized as a switch in this delicate relation of dominance. Now suppose that a desk is in front of me, that light is reflected from it into my retina, and that an accurate image of the desk is formed there. The resulting experience might be called a cognition, and one might ask oneself why. The answer of the transcendental realist will come by way of reference to the desk, the light conditions, and the action of both on my visual apparatus: for him, the standards of cognitive value are based on objects (knowledge conforms to objects). The transcendental idealist, on the other hand, will begin by saying that the experience is a cognition insofar as it is related (in ways to be specified later) to other experiences: his standards of cognitive value are based on experiences. And then he will also say that the desk is an object insofar as the experience of it is cognitive (objects conform to knowledge). But note once again that there is no issue here of creating anything (if not in a metaphorical sense): all that happens if something does not conform to a standard is that a certain denomination cannot be used for it.

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Also, conservatism at the empirical level will require that the standards of objecthood be given in such a way that all (and only) the empirical objects (as formerly recognized) pass them, and hence the revolutionary import of this conceptual move will manifest itself in connection with a typical question a/principle: the question of what is prior to what, or, to use a metaphor that Kant might have liked, what legislates upon what.

3.

Difficulties with revolutions

The reading suggested in the previous section agrees with Allison's (1983) at least to the extent of assigning a central role to the Kantian contrast between transcendental idealism and transcendental realism. 14 Allison points out that "the significance [he wants to] attribute to transcendental realism seems to be belied by the paucity of references to it in the text" (p. 14). He reports only three occurrences of this phrase, all in the Dialectic (A369, A490-91 B518-19, and A543 B571), but he does not comment any further on the meaning of this "paucity of references," not to mention try to explain it. Later in this chapter, we may be able to see some reason for Kant's reticence in this regard,15 but for the moment, note that Allison's short list can be somewhat extended if we include in it (as seems natural) those passages in which Kant talks about the empirical reality and transcendental ideality of space and time. And if we do so extend the list, we find such suggestive passages as the following: Our exposition therefore establishes the reality, that is, the objective validity, of space in respect of whatever can be presented to us outwardly as object, but also at the same time the ideality of space in respect of things when they are considered in themselves through reason, that is, without regard to the constitution of our sensibility. We assert, then, the empirical reality of space, as regards all possible outer experience; and yet at the same time we assert its transcendental ideality. ... (A27-28 B44)

A natural paraphrase of this passage seems to be that whatever the transcendental ideality of space amounts to, it is something that surfaces only within a rational reconstruction of experience, which abstracts from how things are in fact given to us and limits itself to thinking 0/ things. And this paraphrase is consistent with Kant's idealism being conceptual in the sense I proposed above.

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Not all of Kant's statements about his new philosophical position, however, can be paraphrased so favorably for my reading as the last one quoted. Consider for example the following passages: By transcendental idealism I mean the doctrine that appearances are to be regarded as being, one and all, representations only.... (A369) ... appearances in general are nothing outside our representationswhich is just what is meant by their transcendental ideality. (AS07 BS3S)

It is difficult to conclude from such statements that Kant was only

proposing a conceptual idealism, as I claimed, or an epistemic idealism, as Allison claims. The statements in question suggest a much more robust, ontological brand of the article; in fact, they make Kant's position sound much like that of the revisionists (Berkeley, for example) he was supposedly reacting against. At least three interpretive problems surface here. One is the problem of understanding exactly what Kant's position was, and whether this position was in fact as new as Kant claimed. The second is the problem of why Kant formulated his position in what seem to be inconsistent ways. In passages like the ones above he seems to be saying that the objects we experience (that is, the appearances l6 ) are nothing but a species of our representationswhich, by the way, is exactly what Berkeley would say. In other passages, however, he says that we experience objects which are not representations,17 and in any case he claims that his position could not be farther from Berkeley's. In fact, we know that he got extremely upset about the Berkeleian reading some critics (most notably Garve and Feder) made of the Critique, 18 and in the second edition of the work (as well as in the Prolegomena) set out to explicitly refute them. The third interpretive puzzle here concerns why Kant did not see the inconsistency of his formulations. To mention only the most blatant example of this (apparent) lack of sensitivity, the first passage quoted above comes from the fourth paralogism, which is also called the first-edition refutation of idealism. There Kant proceeds to counter a position like Descartes' or Berkeley's by the following argument: For in both cases alike [that is, in the case of both outer objects and the object of inner sense] the objects are nothing but representations, the immediate perception (consciousness) of which is at the same time a sufficient proof of their reality. (A371)

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Kant's Copernican Revolution

In the second edition of the Critique, on the other hand, Kant added a new section explicitly entitled Refutation of Idealism, and there he proceeds as follows: I am conscious of my own existence as determined in time. All determination of time presupposes something permanent in perception .... perception ofthis permanent is possible only through a thing outside me and not through the mere representation of a thing outside me; and consequently the determination of my existence in time is possible only through the existence of actual things which I perceive outside me. (B275-76)

In commenting on this change in the Preface to the second edition, Kant says: "The only addition, strictly so called, though one affecting the method of proof only, is the new refutation of psychological idealism . ... " (Bxxxix footnote; first italics mine). And this is a surprising comment. To be sure, the method of proof has changed, but it also seems that what is proved has changed. In the first edition, it was just a matter of proving the existence of (kinds of) representations; in the second, what Kant is after is proving the existence of things which are not representations! All of the above is part of our conventional wisdom about Kant. Most commentators note the problems, and then they proceed in one of two major directions. Some take a critical stand and argue either that Kant's position was not as new (in particular, not as different from Berkeley's) as he claimed '9 or that Kant had something new to say but was hopelessly confused about ie D As for remarks such as the one quoted above from the B Preface, at least one commentator has suggested attributing them to deception (and/or selfdeception) on Kant's part. 21 Others prefer a more sympathetic approach: they construe Kant as being quite novel (and quite right) when he said what he really meant but also as being forced away from what he really meant (and into pre-critical or un-Kantian modes of expression) by a variety of extrinsic factors: old metaphysical relics,22 strained and mistaken analogies,23 or architectonic obsessions.24 To my knowledge, nobody ever explains in any detail why Kant should have been led astray so often and so easily into saying the opposite of what he meant~ the only significant comment we find in this connection is that what he was trying to say was very difficult. 25 I think that I belong to the sympathetic camp. But I also think that something more can be done with the apparent inconsistencies

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of Kant's formulations than blaming them on the difficulty of the subject. I think that these inconsistencies can be explained when one considers closely what kind of an operation a conceptual revolution is. One can understand then why the proponent of a revolution may simply not see contradictions in his statements that are apparent to the public; in fact, one can even come to the conclusion that these apparent contradictions are not really there. And one can appreciate the value that analogies and tradition and architectonic considerations have in the formulation of a revolutionary proposal. To flesh out this approach, I will proceed in the remainder of the present section to discuss the problems of conceptual revolutions in general. In the next two sections I will show the relevance of this discussion to Kant. Here is how Thomas Kuhn (1962) describes Herschel's discovery of Uranus: On at least seventeen different occasions between 1690 and 1781, a number of astronomers ... had seen a star in positions that we now suppose must have been occupied at the time by Uranus. One of the best observers in this group had actually seen the star on four successive nights in 1769 without noting the motion that could have suggested another identification. Herschel, when he first observed the same object twelve years later, did so with a much improved telescope of his own manufacture. As a result, he was able to notice an apparent disk-size that was at least unusual for stars. Something was awry, and he therefore postponed identification pending further scrutiny. That scrutiny disclosed Uranus' motion among the stars, and Herschel therefore announced that he had seen a new comet! Only several months later, after fruitless attempts to fit the observed motion to a cometary orbit, did Lexell suggest that the orbit was probably planetary. When that suggestion was accepted, there were several fewer stars and one more planet in the world of the professional astronomer. (p. 114)

The main point Kuhn wants to make with this example (and with subsequent ones in which he compares the Galilean and the Aristotelian "reading" of the pendulum, and mentions Lavoisier's "seeing" oxygen where Priestley had seen dephlogisticated air) is that many discoveries in the history of science involved not just new observations but rather "shifts of vision" that allowed one to place old and familiar observations under new perceptual categories. In Kuhn's terminology, these discoveries represented (at least

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Kant's Copernican Revolution

minor) paradigm changes, where paradigms are "universally recognized scientific achievements that for a time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners" (p. X).26 A paradigm generates both a world view and a set of standards: when a paradigm changes, so do the value judgments the community of scientists makes (p. 13) and, in some sense, the very environment that community responds to (p. 110). In an earlier study specifically devoted to the Copernican revolution, Kuhn (1957) did not use the term 'paradigm', but he made much the same points with reference to the more conventional notion of a conceptual scheme. The following is a typical example of such references: ... conceptual schemes have psychological as well as logical functions, and these do depend upon the scientist's belief or incredulity. For example, the psychological craving for at-home ness ... can be satisfied by a conceptual scheme only if that scheme is thought to be more than a convenient device for summarizing what is already known. During antiquity and again in the later Middle Ages the European world did have this additional commitment to the conception of a two-sphere universe. Scientists and non-scientists alike believed that the stars really were bright spots on a gigantic sphere that symmetrically enclosed man's terrestrial abode. As a result, two-sphere cosmology did for centuries provide many men with a world view, defining their place in the created world and giving physical meaning to their relation with the gods. (p. 38)

The abandonment and replacement of a conceptual scheme (as, in the later book, the abandonment and replacement of a paradigm) is a scientific revolution. But the interpretive and value-ridden nature of conceptual schemes creates a first problem for such revolutions: no amount of data is ever going to compel a community of scientists to accept a new conceptual scheme. To Copernicus the behavior of the planets was incompatible with the two-sphere universe; he felt that in adding more and more circles his predecessors had simply been patching and stretching the Ptolemaic system to force its conformity with observations; and he believed that the very necessity for such patching and stretching was clear evidence that a radically new approach was imperatively required. But Copernicus' predecessors, to whom exactly the same sorts of instruments and observations were available, had evaluated the same situation quite differently. What to Copernicus was stretching and patching was to them a natural process of adaptation and extension .... Coperni-

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cus' predecessors had little doubt that the system would ultimately be made to work. (ibid., p. 75)

As Kuhn himself sums it up, "observation is never absolutely incompatible with a conceptual scheme" (ibid.). Scientists are usually able to "devise ... articulations and ad hoc modifications of their theory in order to eliminate any apparent conflict" with what Quine would call recalcitrant experiences (Kuhn [1962], p. 78).27 At the very worst, they are perfectly "willing to wait, particularly if there are many problems available in other parts of the field" (ibid., p. 81), and occasionally this attitude pays off. 28 Normal science can coexist with anomalies and discrepancies without showing any apparent stress. What the revolutionary perceives as counterinstances to the existing scheme, normal scientists perceive simply as puzzles to be solved, and "[f]ailure to achieve a solution discredits only the scientist and not the theory. Here ... the proverb applies: 'It is a poor carpenter who blames his tools'" (ibid., p. 80). In conclusion, those who are committed to the pre-existing conceptual scheme are not likely to be convinced of the necessity of a revolution by any rational argument. There is also a second, possibly more serious problem with conceptual revolutions: a communication problem. If a conceptual scheme is a way of seeing the world, and a conceptual revolution is a "shift of vision," such a revolution is (at least initially) a very private experience that scientists tend to describe in almost mystical terms. [Anomalies and crises] are terminated, not by deliberation and interpretation, but by a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gestalt switch. Scientists then often speak of the "scales falling from the eyes" or of the "lightning flash" that "inundates" a previously obscure puzzle, enabling its components to be seen in a new way that for the first time permits its solution. On other occasions the relevant illumination comes in sleep. No ordinary sense of the term 'interpretation' fits these flashes of intuition through which a new paradigm is born. Though such intuitions depend upon the experience, both anomalous and congruent, gained with the old paradigm, they are not logically or piecemeal linked to particular items of that experience as an interpretation would be. Instead, they gather up large portions of that experience and transform them to the rather different bundle of experience that will thereafter be linked piecemeal to the new paradigm but not to the old. (Kuhn [1962], pp. 121-22)

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Kant's Copernican Revolution

After receiving the "illumination," the scientist is to put it in words, to describe what the "new world" looks like. And here is where the cOITullunication problem surfaces. For given the delicate relation of mutual influence existing between our conceptual scheme and our language, a full articulation of the new conceptual scheme would in general require a new language, and this new language is not available yet. The revolutionary scientist has been trained to use the old language, which may be totally inadequate to the new content he wants to express. There are two sides to this predicament. One is that the revolutionary scientist will have a hard time expressing precisely what is most novel in his view. He will oscillate between using the traditional linguistic structures in order to be better understood and trying to create new linguistic structures more consonant to the new scheme. When he does the former, he will in general look a lot more conservative than he is; when he does the latter, he will often substitute living metaphors for the old, dead ones that others by now take to express literal meanings, thus appearing substantially less sophisticated and precise than the typical normal scientist. And occasionally he will also be urged by his "psychological craving for at-homeness" and his lack of adequate strategies of expression to play the tradition against itself and become in the process more traditional than the tradition, that is, refer to an older tradition to oppose a more recent one. Thus Copernicus' defense of his theory of motion is described by Kuhn (1957) as playing Aristotle against Ptolemy. 29 On the other side of the issue, the public will have analogous difficulties understanding the revolutionary scientist. At times, it will simply not see what is new to the matter; at other times, it will recognize that something is new but not welcome it, finding it obscure and artificial, if not downright absurd. And, finally, there will be times when the revolutionary will appear to his public as nothing less than reactionary. The relevance of this Kuhnian analysis to a solution of Kant's exegetical problems is probably apparent to the reader. But before we turn to those problems once more, I will show in the next section that there is enough theoretical machinery in Kant himself .to express many of the central themes mobilized here, and that, though doing Kuhn on Kant may make our terminology sound more contemporary, it is also possible-to some extent-to do Kant on Kant, and formulate (some of) our thoughts about conceptual revolutions

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in a specifically Kantian language. This illustration will also allow me to articulate an additional (though not unrelated) problem such revolutions face: the problem of their reception after they have become part of (ancient) history.

4.

Reflective judgments

According to Kant, judgments are mental acts: "we can reduce all acts of the understanding to judgments" (A69 B94).30 Thus, for example, it is not the sentence (1) All bodies are extended

or the proposition expressed by (1) that Kant is talking about when he says that the judgment (1) is analytic: it is rather the mental act performed by some (definite) intelligent being at some (definite) time in thinking or uttering (1). But then the judgment I make when I think or utter (1) at t may be numerically distinct from the judgment you make when you think or utter (1) at t-or, for that matter, from the judgment I make when I think or utter (1) at any t ' distinct from t. And if all these judgments may be numerically distinct, nothing in principle prevents them from also being qualitatively distinct: in particular, nothing prevents the judgment made by a person who thinks or utters (1) at t from being analytic while the judgment made by a different person who thinks or utters (1) at t-or even the judgment made by the same person in thinking or uttering (1) at some other time t'-is synthetic. These considerations are relatively standard by now, and they are decisive in defusing an old and commonplace criticism of Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic judgments. As such, they will be referred to again in the next chapter. 31 Here, however, I want to bring out their relevance to another fundamental distinction drawn by Kant: that between determinant and reflective judgments. The classical reference here is a passage from The Critique of Judgement, Part I: Judgement [Urtheilskraft] in general is the facuIty of thinking the particular as contained under the universal. If the universal (the rule, principle, or law) is given, then the judgement which subsumes the particular under it is determinant . ... If, however, only the particular is given and the universal has to be found for it, then the judgement is simply [bloss] reflective. (p. 18; V, p. 179)

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Kant's Copernican Revolution

No definition can be found of specific determinant or reflective judgments (Urtheile) that parallels this definition of the faculties of determinant ahd reflective judgment. But, then, none is needed either. That the mind has a faculty to do something simply means for Kant-following Baumgarten-that it can do that somethingY So to say that the mind has a faculty of subsuming particulars under given universals simply means that the mind can do such subsuming, and each individual mental act where a particular is subsumed under a given universal will be called a determinant judgment (Urtheil). Analogous considerations apply to reflective judgments. Now consider some concrete examples. I see an object three feet away, at a certain angle and under good light conditions. Once the angle and the light conditions are taken into account, my concept of a brown desk happens to fit this object satisfactorily. Therefore, I conclude that (2) This object here, three feet away from me, is a brown desk.

The act consisting of my thinking (or uttering) (2) is a typical case of a determinant judgment. On the other hand, I see an object three feet away, at a certain angle but under poor light conditions. Given the angle at which the object appears to me, it might possibly fall under my concept of a brown desk, but since the light conditions are poor, I decide to get closer to the object and touch it. It feels made of wood, which seems to confirm my initial hypothesis, but all of sudden, while I am touching it, it raises one of its (wooden) legs and slaps me. Bewildered and afraid, I run out of the room and on my way out I turn the light on. I then decide to examine the object from the keyhole, and my bewilderment increases: under the light of the lamp, the object definitely looks like a wooden desk, but it also moves like an animal, and even utters sounds like one. I desperately look for an assessment of what this thing is, but I can find none: my conceptual repertory has no place for a desk that shows such a pathological behavior. All that I am left with is my search for a concept, and during this search I may happen to think or utter all sorts of sentences that have the same grammatical structure as (2) above. But until and unless this search is successfully concluded (perhaps with the introduction of a new concept), all mental acts performed in the course of it-including the thinking or uttering of subject-predicate sentences-cannot be more than simply reflective judgments.

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If we are to take seriously the claim that a scientific (or philosophical) revolution amounts to a "shift of vision," then such a revolution may be seen as an extremely severe (because generalized) case of the confusion described in the last paragraph. For the revolutionary, the old conceptual framework is all of a sudden inadequate: the world is felt differently, and new concepts may be necessary to express this feeling. The revolutionary is in search of these new concepts, which he does not yet have, and as a consequence virtually all his judgments at this juncture are likely to be simply reflective. Even ifhe utters words and sentences in the process, even if he composes texts, those words and sentences and texts are no indication that anything definite is being said, and determinant judgments are made. Those words and sentences and texts are simply part of the way in which he looks for the new framework, usually by straining and twisting the codified use of the received language. 33 But now suppose that the revolution is completed, and the required new framework has emerged. Suppose that this framework is in use by some linguistic community, and that members of the community recite to each other (during a final exam?) the revolutionary's words and sentences and texts. In spite of these being (numerically) the same words and sentences and texts, the mental acts thus performed by the community are likely not to be reflective judgments. By now the new framework has solidified, the new concepts have definite barriers and relations, and hence the acts ofjudgment involved are as determinant as they can be. According to Kuhn (1957), "the immense irony of Copernicus' lifework" consisted in the fact that this work was marred by the same "inaccuracy, complexity, and inconsistency" for which Copernicus had indicted the tradition (p. 170). We know by now some of the difficulties that Copernicus had to face, and we know how far such difficulties may explain the unfortunate outcome signalled by Kuhn-in this case as in other similar ones of conceptual revolutions. But our present discussion indicates that this result may not be the only element of irony here. Decades of predominance of linguistic philosophy and of almost single-minded concern with words and sentences may make us underestimate the difference that often exists between the mental act of writing or uttering certain sentences or words and the mental act of reading or hearing them (especially when the reading occurs centuries later). In a situation like this, Kant's psychologistic jargon is a useful corrective and reminds us that the sublime irony of a conceptual revolution may be different

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from what Kuhn suggests: it may be the fact that, if a revolution has succeeded, then a formulation of it-no matter how much effort it cost at the time-is likely to read now as not just "determinant," but trivial! If Kant is ultimately immune to this sublime irony, it is because his revolution is far from having succeeded: in fact, in some circles it may have gone back one or two steps. But, still, to appreciate the significance of this revolution, it is important to bring life to the words and sentences and texts presented to us, and generate the same kind of conceptual confusion and inadequacy that Kant was facing. Only then will we be able to take the reflective standpoint Kant took. So no matter what one thinks of the value of the analysis tried in Chapter 2, without some such analysis we may be able to approach perhaps the letter of Kant's pronouncements, but not the mental acts behind those pronouncements. Some have said that in order to understand Kant we must rethink his thoughts; Kant-we know now-would agree.

5.

Intentional objects

In turning to an application of the general discussion above, I will begin by making a couple of historical points. First, the only fullscale controversy Kant ever entered was the one with Eberhard. In his critical study on this controversy, Allison (1973) points out that the avowed goal of the Eberhard attack was to establish the following thesis: The Leibnizian philosophy contains just as much of a critique of reason as the new philosophy, while at the same time it still introduces a dogmatism based on a precise analysis ofthe faculties of knowledge. It therefore contains all that is true in the new philosophy and, in addition, a well-grounded extension of the sphere of the understanding. (p. 16)

Kant, Allison informs us, "was particularly upset by Eberhard's attack" (p. 9). He "not only viewed it as a misguided, albeit rhetorically effective assault on the whole significance and originality of the critical enterprise, but he came to regard Eberhard as a dishonest man who deliberately distorted the teachings of the Critique in order to sway an ignorant public" (p. 10). This feeling was, in Allison's view, "not entirely justified" (p. 13), but in any case it gave Kant's response (which is sarcastic from its very title, "On a Dis-

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covery According to which Any New Critique of Pure Reason Has Been Made Superfluous by an Earlier One") "a personal, polemical tone which is lacking in Kant's other writings" (ibid.). Part of the reason for this tone is to be found, Allison thinks, in "a growing concern of the aging Kant to clearly define his philosophy vis-it-vis the Leibnizian, and thus to establish once and for all its originality and its role in the history of thought" (pp. 13-14). Our analysis of the specific difficulties of conceptual revolutions provides us with an interesting perspective on this strange incident, in which intellectual misunderstanding reached so deep as to generate personal abuse. For on the basis of that analysis there is no need to explain such an incident in terms of either bad faith or old age on the part of the two actors. We can instead see the misunderstanding and the irritation that went with it as consequences of two relatively common phenomena: the public's resistance to accepting the necessity of a conceptual revolution, and its incapacity to capture the new meaning that the revolutionary injects into old modes of expression. Kant himself states at least the second of these problems with admirable clarity in the Prolegomena: If in a new science which is wholly isolated and unique in its kind, we started with the prejudice that we can judge of things by means of alleged knowledge previously acquired-though this is precisely what has first to be called into question-we should only fancy we saw everywhere what we had already known, because the expressions have a similar sound. But everything would appear utterly metamorphosed, senseless, and unintelligible, because we should have as a foundation our own thoughts, made by long habit a second nature, instead of the author's. (p. 10; IV, p. 262)

The second historical remark concerns the great haste with which, apparently, the Critique was prepared. Kant talks about it in at least two letters: ... I must admit that I have not counted on an immediately favorable reception of my work. That could not be, since the expression of my ideas-ideas that I had been working out painstakingly for twelve years in succession-was not worked out sufficiently to be generally understandable. To achieve that I would have needed a few more years instead of the four or five months I took to complete the book.... (To Christian Garve, August 7, 1783; Philosophical Correspondence, p. 100; X, p. 338) ... although the book is the product of nearly twelve years of reflection, I completed it hastily, in perhaps four or five months .... (To

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Kant's Copernican Revolution Moses Mendelssohn, August 16, 1783; Philosophical Correspondence, p. 105; X, p. 345)

Why, one might ask, such a great haste? Why did not Kant, who had already worked on the same project for twelve years, just wait a little longer, if in fact he was the first one to be dissatisfied with the result, at least from a stylistic point of view? In both letters, Kant justifies his decision by referring to his age (again!), but there may be another explanation. What happened to him seems a typical example of the "illumination" that usually accompanies conceptual revolutions. It is not by chance, I think, that he described the relevant experience in the quasi-mystical terms of an "awakening from slumbers" (Prolegomena, p. 8; IV, p. 260). And he was not alone in manifesting haste in a case like this: when the gestalt switch occurs, and a new world appears to the revolutionary, it is natural to hurry, lest the vision go away as abruptly as it came. 34 But now let us get to the heart of the issue. I said that a digression through the general problems of conceptual revolutions might prove useful in understanding (not only the hasty preparation of the Critique and the public's negative reactions to it, but also) the obscurities and contradictions that undeniably can be found in the work. It is time to begin to pay my promissory note, and to do so, I need to articulate further my reading of the revolution. The Copernican revolution, I said, consists in conceptualizing objects as objects 01 experience. But this is more easily said than done. The primacy of objects is deeply embedded in the language we speak: our most elementary sentences (purport to) attribute properties to objects or state relations among them. So how can we evenlormulate the new revolutionary framework? Clearly, we need a new language. One possible approach to the generation of this language is the following: retain the same forms of expression but weaken some of the relevant inferential patterns; in particular, make reference to objects have no existential import. This step has by now an established tradition in contemporary philosophy of logic, and is commonly described as a liberalization of language or the creation of a neutral or free language. 35 The sense in which a free language is an expression of the same philosophical tendency as Kant's Copernican revolution can be made apparent with relative ease to the reader who has followed the discussion so far. Within the traditional conceptual framework,

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objects come first, and their determinations or properties are dependent on them. Among such determinations, there is the fact that (some of) these objects have names, so again names depend (conceptually) on there being objects for them to be names of The explanation of what it is for something to be a name must begin with a reference to an object; therefore, whenever the language contains a name "a," it must be not only factually but logically true that (1)

For some (existing) object x, x

= a,

or, more perspicuously for our present purposes, (2)

For some (existing) object x, "a" names x.

And, in fact, (1) and (2) are logical truths of classical quantification theory, the very truths that free logicians question. On the other hand, suppose that you take experience to be the conceptual starting point, and that you conceive of objects as objects ofexperience. Given the primacy oflanguage within analytic philosophy, you may want to limit yourself to linguistic experience, and hence rephrase this point of view as follows: let discourse be the conceptual starting point, and let objects be conceptualized as objects of discourse. Then, in particular, a reference device like a name-that is, a device supposed to bring objects (of discourse) into discourse-will be conceptually prior to the object it brings into discourse, and it will be perfectly possible-though admittedly not necessary36-that in some cases we do not want to recognize the existence of its object. In conclusion, then, (1) and (2) will no longer be counted as logical truths, but at most as factual and contingent ones. 37 Given Kant's preference for a mentalistic terminology, this strategy of liberalizing language is not the most immediately suited to expressing his position. But essentially the same points can be made in a mentalistic jargon by adopting instead the phenomenological terminology of intentional objects. 38 An intentional object is the target of a psychological attitude, that to which such an attitude is directed: it is an object ofthought, or ofdesire, or ofperception. And an intentional object need not exist: once again, since this kind of object is conceptually dependent upon experience, not the other way around, one need not refer to an (existing) object to account for a (subsisting) experience of it. 39 By accepting and using the terminology of intentional objects, the aim of the Copernican revolution could be redescribed as follows:

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to conceptualize objects as intentional objects. We will see in the next chapter that this description is not completely accurate. Not all intentional obJects will turn out to be objects in the full, "official" sense of the Critique: only some will. And after the revolution is completed, it will be incorrect to say that objects are merely intentional. But at least this much is true of the above reformulation: that it offers a useful starting point for expressing the revolution, and a useful tool for overcoming the linguistic limitations of the traditional framework. There are clear indications that Kant is looking for some such tool. Thus appearances-the only objects with which we can establish cognitive relations-are defined as the objects of representations (more precisely, of empirical intuitions; see A20 B34), and they are clearly thought of as dependent on experience: Save through its relation to a consciousness that is at least possible, appearance could never be for us an object of knowledge, and so would be nothing to us; and since it has in itself no objective reality, but exists only in being known, it would be nothing at all. (A120; italics mine)

But, in general, the tool was not available: the philosophical language in which Kant had been educated, and in which so much of his own teaching was conducted, allowed for no reference to intentional entities. In a way, then, Kant had to create for himself ways of making such references. As we saw in our earlier treatment of Baumgarten, in the traditional philosophical language received by Kant one could refer only to things (ordinary things) or to determinations of things, and everything had to fit one category or the other. Now an intentional object seems somewhat intermediate between ordinary objects on the one hand and representations or states of mind on the other. Like ordina~ objects,--aQ.intentionaLobject is an object, with properties like being red or round, not (only) like being vivid or recollected or before one's mind. Like representations, an intentional object is (conceptually) dependent on (the having of) experience. So it was not unnatural for Kant (though certainly confusing for his readers), in the absence of the general notion of an intentional object, to describe appearances by emphasizing sometimes their similarity to ordinary objects, and some other times their similarity to representations or states of mind. And it is also not unnatural that he should regard such shifts of emphasis as just that, shifts of emphasis,

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whereas his critics, who usually work with a philosophical language very similar to the one that made things so difficult for him, are led astray into thinking that a dramatic change has occurred in his philosophy. Consider again the refutation of idealism, as possibly the clearest example of the linguistic problems I am discussing. To summarize the difficulties to be found in this text, (i)

in A, Kant proves the existence of outer appearances by arguing that appearances are representations, and that consciousness of representations is a sufficient proof of their existence, whereas in B he proves the existence of appearances as objects which are not representations, but (ii) in spite of the apparent radical change in his position as to what appearances are, he describes the change as one "affecting the method of proof only."

I think that we are now in a position to resolve some of the problems connected with (i)-(ii). If Kant had had the notion of an intentional object at his disposal, he could have given a more satisfactory (if only provisional) formulation of his position by saying that appearances are intentional objects of a certain kind. The reason why he makes apparently inconsistent statements is that he does not have (anything like) the notion of an intentional object available, and so has somehow to build it from scratch by talking about entities that share a few properties with objects and a few properties with representations, or that are in some sense objects and in some sense representations. And, finally, the reason why he does not see the inconsistency of his formulations is that from his point of view they are not inconsistent. He is not moving from a Berkeleian position in A to a more robustly realist position in B (and possibly a thoroughly realist one later).4o He is holding the same position all along, but having problems expressing it. Consider, for example, the following passage from the first-edition refutation: External objects (bodies), however, are mere appearances, and are therefore nothing but a species of my representations, the objects of which are something only through these representations. (A370; italics mine)

Here the familiar claim is reiterated that appearances are only representations, but a new character enters the picture: the objects of these representations. If we read the whole section as a reformulation of Berkeleian subjectivism, the introduction of this new char-

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acter makes no sense, but ifI am right and the passage only has the semblance of Berkeleian subjectivism while trying to teU an entirely different story, then the new character introduced here should in fact become the main character, and the fact that Kant introduces it in spite ofthe linguistic limitations he is fighting with is one more piece of evidence of his genius. 41 The analysis above may be enough of an illustration of how a general discussion of conceptual revolutions can help us reach a sympathetic understanding of Kant's obscurities and (apparent) contradictions. More illustrations will occur later in the book. But before closing the present chapter, I want to discuss briefly a difficulty that Kant's revolution does not seem to share with most others. The following passage from Walker (1978) is a good introduction to the issue: The objection is sometimes raised that it makes no sense to talk ... about alternative conceptual schemes. Our present conceptual scheme is the only one we can envisage. We are, as it were, trapped inside it; we can never get outside to ask whether others might be worse or better. All we can do is to examine it from the inside, seeing how the various concepts function and which beliefs rest upon which. (p. 17)

The conceptual scheme of a scientist, normal or revolutionary, is a partial world view. The part of the world it conceptualizes may be by far the most important for the scientist, but still there is a lot of the world and of the scientist's own activities it leaves out. It is a conceptual scheme relevant to cosmology, or electromagnetism, or evolution; it is not necessarily and directly relevant to, say, one's eating habits or political creed. So it is in principle possible to see how one could discuss different such schemes in a sensible way. One could, for example, bring different analogies (taken from other aspects of the world or of one's activities) to bear upon the problem at issue, and think of the problem in terms of these different analogies, But in Kant's case, the conceptual scheme is all-inclusive, it is the way one thinks of everything, so how can one even make sense of another such scheme? Is not any attempt at modifying one's overall conceptual scheme inevitably going to be pointless and ineffectual?42 The objection has a point, but is also somewhat misdirected. 43 To be sure, talking in the abstract about the likelihood or possible use-

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fulness of such a momentous gestalt switch will in general be a waste of time, but, still, the gestalt switch may occur, and when it has occurred one may in fact be in the position of experiencing both conceptual schemes (at different times), just as one experiences the same picture sometimes as a duck and sometimes as a rabbit. Also, one may find one scheme more revealing and suggestive than the other, and try to bring other people to seeing things the same way. At that point, a discussion of the alternative schemes need not be pointless and ineffectual. But even if the objection does not prove that there is something intrinsically wrong with Kant's enterprise (as I construe it), there are at least two (not unrelated) reasons why considering it proves instructive. First, the objection emphasizes that, no matter what problems of expression and communication Copernicus might have had, Kant's problems were more serious. I pointed out above that the revolutionary scientist needs in general a new language to express his new viewpoint, but that remark must be taken in a limited sense. What the scientist needs is largely a new scientific jargon, or, to put it in Kuhn's (1957) phrase, a new set of "intellectual and observational tools" (p. 135). On the other hand, if Kant is after a modification of the whole conceptual framework, the same remark must be taken in his case in an unlimited sense. He really needs a new language altogether, and hence his difficulties in communicating his "illumination" and the public's difficulties in understanding it will be far more severe. Second, reflection on the objection shows that a revolution like Kant's is not going to be (experienced as) only (or even primarily) a theoretical affair. Maybe this is true of all conceptual revolutions, but it is especially true of one that is as general as Kant's. A conceptual revolution takes place, Kuhn says, when we come to see the world in a new way. But nobody can do your seeing for you; the most one can do is tell you where to look and what to look for. And in a case like Kant's, in which language is likely to be systematically misleading, even these instructions may not be available. Plato had some of the same problems telling people how to get to see the Forms. The most he could say was: turn your head away from the spatio-temporal world and look intently and for a long time in the direction of abstract mathematical objects, which at least are objects of the same kind as the Forms. If you look long enough and with enough attention, you may eventually see them. Or you may not, depending on how much iron there is in your makeup.

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I will suggest in the next chapter that in Kant's case, too, instructions for the revolution may have to take this practical form, that is, have us do s6inething rather than simply tell us something, even if the doing is often a doing with language. By the end of the book, this suggestion will be ready to explode into the general thesis that the practical significance of philosophical and other human activities is the main (perhaps even the only) manifestation of human wisdom. Which may be one important truth hidden under Kant's assertion of the "primacy of practical reason. "44

4 Thinking of Objects Kneeling down or groveling on the ground, even to express your reverence for heavenly things, is contrary to human dignity; as is also invoking heavenly things in actual images, for you then humble yourselves not to an ideal which your own reason sets before you, but to an idol which is your own handiwork. The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue. p. 99; VI, pp. 436-37)

1.

Ladders

In the last few years, Richard Aquila (1979, 1981, 1983) has repeatedly suggested that Kantian appearances be regarded as intentional objects. Superficially, this proposal agrees with the one I sketched in the last chapter, but in fact the agreement is purely verbal, and understanding why this is so will prove useful in developing my interpretation. Consider the following passages: Kant avoids [the] supposition [that appearances be identical with some sort of transcendentally real particular] by suggesting that they are, in an important sense, not existing objects of any sort. They are merely jl1tenti9naLQ,bjects. (Aquila [1979], p. 302) I ... propose to consider the possibility of regarding the apprehension even of objective appearances as the apprehension of merely intentional objects. (Aquila [1981], p. 28) ... we do not now suppose that the apprehension of a merely hallucinated object is the apprehension of some entity related to the perceiver in some way. The object of such a perceptual state is a merely intentional object, and merely intentional objects, considered precisely as such, are something that do not exist at all. (Aquila [1983], p.97)

I said that the introduction of the notion of an intentional object is an important first step in carrying out Kant's conceptual revolution. Using this notion, we can temporarily "bracket" our ontolog89

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ical assumptions, while we are in the process of reconceptualizing what it is to have an ontology. But unless we go further than this step, no conceptual revolution will actually occur. If we stop here, we are left in a no-man's-land in which the new notion of an (existi'ng) object is not yet worked out and the old one has been rejected. It is from this no-man's-land that Aquila's statements seem to come; what he seems to be doing is perversely looking at the results of Kant's revolution from the standpoint of the old conceptual framework. For it is only from that standpoint that Kantian appearances can be regarded as merely intentional objects that in an ifijportant sense do not exist at all. From the new (post-revolutionary) standpoint the sense in which appearances exist is the only one that matters. Misperceptions like Aquila's are inevitable when one fails to appreciate the specific character of a conceptual revolution. I pointed out that there are communication problems with such revolutions: a new conceptual framework goes hand in hand with a new language, and coming up with this new language is not easy. Part of what makes the operation difficult is that it is not enough simply to create new strategies of expression: a new language also involves a new linguistic community, and the problem of establishing and extending this community remains even after some new linguistic machinery has been devised. Suppose, for example, that somebody who has gone through a conceptual revolution, and perhaps even has (the rudiments of) the required expressive means, wants to describe the effects ofthe revolution to somebody who has not gone through it yet. How can he do it? More specifically, what language can he use? Ifhe uses the old language, he will probably not be making much sense (at least, not the sense he wants to make), and if he uses the new one, he will not be understood. Is there any alternative? Consider the following passage from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico~ Ph i!osophicus: My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them-as steps-to climb up beyond them, (He must, so to speak, throwaway the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright. (p. 151; ital ics mine)

What Wittgenstein is after here has interesting connections with our present concerns. He intends people to see things his way, and

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he recognizes that there is nothing he can tell them that will simply make them see that way. Earlier on the same page he notes: "There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical." We are familiar with this issue by now. A conceptual shift like the one Wittgenstein is advocating is ultimately mystical because it is ultimately priyate. Nobody can make "scales fall from your eyes": it must happen to you. One may tell you all the right things and you may always get them wrong: the sense of relevance that is crucial in reaching a proper understanding here cannot be directly verbalized. But, then, what should one do when scales have fallen from one's eyes? Perhaps follow the suggestion implicit in the Tractatus'last remark: "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence" (ibid.). Or perhaps not. Wittgenstein himself, after all, does not follow this suggestion. In the first passage quoted above, he makes (in effect) an alternative suggestion. One may use propositions that one recognizes as meaningless (from the standpoint of the new framework) but that at the same time one also thinks might help people look in the right direction, and thus possibly have in the end the "mystical" experience. It is in these purely instrumental terms that I understand my mobilization of the notion of an intentional object in the interpretation of Kant's revolution, and Kant's own (less satisfactory) mobilization of notions such as that of a representation. I From the postrevolutionary standpoint, saying that, for example, this table is an intentional object, or that it is a representation, or a modification of myself or my mind, is speaking nonsense. This table is an objectnot an intentional object, but simply an object, the_only kind of object there is-it is real, it is out there in space, and it is independent from me and my mind. Saying otherwise would amount to taking a revisionary attitude with respect to the ordinary practice of ordinary men, and reducing (at least outer) experience to illusion. Kant wants to do neither, but he does want to revise the way philosophers conceptualize what it is to be an object, to be real, to be out there, and to be independent from one's mind. In particular, he wants to reverse the conceptual relation between objects and consciousness: whereas the philosophical tradition speaks of (our) consciousness of objects, he wants to speak of objects of (our) consciousness. In view of the difficulties that revisions of this kind face in being

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communicated and understood, a paradoxical (and ultimately meaningless) statement may be most useful partly by its very shock value (not so much in expressing the significance of the revolution but) in inducing (some) people to start making the right kinds of moves, those moves in fact that will make them recognize in the end that the original statement was meaningless. And since in the traditional framework it was at least approximately true of representations that they were objects of consciousness, a good candidate for this role of paradoxical but possibly edifying statement is precisely "This table is a representation." Had Kant had at his disposal the language of intentionality, he would have used instead (and more appropriately) "This table is an intentional object." When hearing such paradoxical pronouncements, some will take the safe course and simply declare them absurd, but others may want to take them seriously, and by reflecting on them eventually come to see things the new way. At that point, the paradoxical pronouncements will have ended their role, and will be ready to be dismissed as nonsensical. But this dismissal will not be equivalent to the earlier one of the safe-players, for while it will probably attribute to the statements in question no theoretical significance, it will appreciate their great practical, instrumental significance. In conclusion, Aquila gives an incomplete and misleading picture of the Copernican revolution when he says that appearances are merely intentional objects. Quite simply, this statement is false, both before and after the revolution. 2 The positive role the statement can play is that of a useful tool in the process of making the revolution, but a tool eventually to be disposed of. And, in a way, Aquila's misunderstanding, which could be described as taking the statement too seriously, is a natural complement of the misunderstanding of those who take the statement too little seriously, and readily junk it as absurd. These two attitudes are two faces of the same coin, that is, of the same cognitivistic fallacy that would have us collapse useful into true. Recently, some analytic philosophers have begun to question this fallacy,3 but Kant's practice (if not always his explicit statements 4 ) antedated their efforts by two centuries. 5

2.

Things in themselves

An intentional object, I said, is the object of a psychological attitude. It is an object of desire, of belief, or of concern. In the ordinary

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way of looking at things, some of these objects exist and some do not. The $2,000,000 grand prize of the Reader's Digest Sweepstake, which is the intentional object of the strongest of my current wishes, exists (at least according to the ads), but the big bad wolfthat frightens my young son so much probably does not. Ordinarly, one also thinks that only those intentional objects that exist are really objects: the others, one says, are merely intentional objects. 6 What this means, in terms of the old conceptual framework, is that in some cases an existing (and independent) object happens to be the target of a psychological attitude, whereas in other cases such an attitude is simply off target, that is, its ostensible target is really no target at all. Now Kant certainly wants to change this way of conceptualizing the relation between objects and mental attitudes, but he does not want to change the empirical distinction between existent and nonexistent intentional objects, between those intentional objects which are really objects and those which are not, between realities and delusions. Once again, his attitude is not revisionary with respect to any distinctions the ordinary man would want to make. When I say that the intuition of outer objects and the self-intuition of the mind alike represent the objects and the mind ... as they appear, I do not mean to say that these objects are a mere illusion. For in an appearance the objects, nay even the properties that we ascribe to them, are always regarded as something actually given. (B69)

So the challenge for Kant is that of coming up with a conceptualization of "real" objecthood (or, alternatively put, of the transcendence that some intentional objects seem to have with respect to their intentional status) that is not phrased in terms of the conceptual priority of objects. Here is one of the (few) places in which he faces this challenge explicitly: At this point we must make clear to ourselves what we mean by the expression 'an object of representations.' We have stated above that appearances are themselves nothing but sensible representations, which, as such and in themselves, must not be taken as objects capable of existing outside our power of representation. What, then, is to be understood when we speak of an object corresponding to, and consequently also distinct from, our knowledge? It is easily seen that this object must be thought only as something in general = x, since outside our knowledge we have nothing which we could set over against this knowledge as corresponding to it. (AI04)

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In other words, how are we to think of an object for a typically "success" (and, in particular, existence-entailing) mental verb such as 'to know' if we take our (conceptual) lead from representations and consciousness only, and do not assume (existing) objects to start with? Or, to stay closer to Kant's suggestive metaphor, how are we to resolve the equation of knowledge, in which the object is referred to as an unknown quantity? Here is Kant's answer: Now we find that our thought of the relation of all knowledge to its object carries with it an element of necessity; the object is viewed as that which prevents our modes of knowledge from being haphazard or arbitrary, and which determines them a priori in some definite fashion. For in so far as they are to relate to an object, they must necessarily agree with one another, that is, must possess that unity which constitutes the concept of an object. (AI04-Sf

There are two interesting things about this passage. One is the particular solution Kant offers for our problem. Briefly put (I will elaborate on it later), representations are to be conceived as related to an object insofar as they are necessitated. But it is on the other aspect of the passage that I want to focus now, that is, on the strategy Kant uses for obtaining his solution. In order to find standards for the objectivity of representations, or, alternatively put, for the existence of the relevant intentional objects, he refers in effect to the old conceptual framework, in which, of course, "[the object] determines [the representation] in some definite fashion."g This framework is rejected as the ultimate account of the relation between objects and representations, but it is still used as a tool to provide us with standards by which we can make crucial distinctions in elaborating the new framework. What Kant is proposing is a two-part operation. If you want to know when a representation is to count as the representation of an object (or as objective), think first of objects in the old sense, of objects as primary, and of the representation as related to its object in the way the old framework used to conceive this relation. This first step will result in your attributing some specific properties to the representation, for example, in your thinking. of it as necessjtated. Then, however, bracket the object out, or, in more Kantian terms, downgrade it to the status of an "imaginary focus,"9 and concentrate on the properties you have attributed to the representation. These properties will now constitute your unpacking of the notion

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of an objective representation, only that (since in the new framework representations are primary) the properties will no longer follow (conceptually) upon the presence (and influence) of an object. Rather, that an object is present will now mean that the representation has the properties in question. 10 So the old framework maintains an important instrumental role within the Kantian system. But this is not to say that Kant's is an incomplete conceptual revolution, or even that it is strange or unjustified for him to proceed as I described. For, to begin with, consider the following example. In Ptolemaic astronomy, it made immediate and direct sense to say that the sun rises and sets. When the Copernican system replaced the Ptolemaic, these expressions became meaningless: the sun does not move (in the relevant sense), and hence in particular does not rise above the horizon. Theoretically, such a development left two options open. One might try to change ordinary discourse, and convince people not to use sentences like "The sun also rises," or one might instead leave ordinary discourse alone and simply think of what it is for the sun to rise in a different way. If one chooses the second option, however (the "descriptivist" one), the most natural way to implement it is this: first one thinks of ' the sun rises' in terms of the old framework, one thinks of what kind of a state of affairs the sentence describes in that framework, then one finds a description of that state of affairs in terms of the new framework, and finally one declares that the description in question is the new meaning of the sentence. By proceeding in this way, one is following exactly the same strategy as Kant is (according to my reconstruction) when he defines what it is for a representation to be objective. 11 But an example by itself will not carry the point. What we need to go from mere illustration to argument here is to take another look at the peculiar mixture of idealism and realism, of a revisionary and a descriptive attitude, that characterizes Kant's position. Kant, I said, is a conservative and a descriptivist at the level of ordinary experience: at that level he does not want to change anything. If the ordinary person is convinced that there are independently real objects, and that knowing them results in having one's experience somehow mirror them, the ordinary person is just right, at the level ofexperience. If the ordinary person thinks that there are tables first, and then the concept of a table is formed by abstraction on (the representation of) tables, again the ordinary person is right, within the pre-reflective, pre-philosophical mode that is typical of ordinary

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consciousness. '2 It is only when we switch to our philosophical mode, and ask such philosophical questions as "How is this all possible?," "How"-c::an I account for the fact that my representations 'transcend' themselves in this way?," "What kind of story (or philosophical theory) am I to tell myself here to satisfy my urge for an explanation?," it is only at that point that the paradigm shift becomes necessary, and it becomes best (in Kant's view) to start at the other end, at the end of consciousness, and work our way toward (the notion of) objects. This, as we have seen, is what it means for Kant to be an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist at the same time. But once Kant's general position is understood along the lines above, it seems natural that he should be using the framework of transcendental realism to articulate his own (transcendentally idealist) conceptualization of (cognitive) experience. For transcendental realism is nothing but the extension to the philosophical mode ofthat (pre-reflective) realistic attitude which is perfectly in place in the empirical mode: it is nothing but the attempt at telling a transcendental story that follows the same pattern as our ordinary awareness of objects. 13 So if our goal is that of explaining and justifying within the framework of transcendental idealism the statements, distinctions, and value judgments the ordinary person makes (say, the statement that in fact the desk is brown, the distinction between the representation of a brown desk and the representation of a pink elephant, or the value judgment that the representation of the brown desk is cognitive whereas the representation ofthe pink elephant is not), and ofdoing so not in a piecemeal, caseby-caseform but in general terms, there seems to be no better course of action than provisionally assuming the standpoint of transcendental realism-that is, provisionally taking ordinary realism seriously in the philosophical mode-seeing where that standpoint takes us (that is, what general kinds of statements, distinctions, and value judgments it makes us come up with), and then trying to unpack the results so obtained in terms of the new, revolutionary standpoint. Successful execution of this project should guarantee that our revolution will only concern our philosophical reflection upon objects, and not infect our ordinary concerns with them. We know from Chapter 2 that the mistake the transcendental realist makes, according to Kant, is that of assuming that objects of experience be things in themselves, (conceptually) independent of expe-

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rience. 14 But now it turns out that thinking of these objects (the appearances) in terms of the old framework is a crucial move within Kant's project of reconceptualizing the whole of human (cognitive) experience. So the following is a useful way of summarizing this move: Kant uses the thought of things in themselves to establish criteria of objectivity for appearances. And note that this formulation suggests not (only) a contrast but (also) a possibility of reconciliation between appearances and things in themselves. For if the move were successful, we might then want to say that we have discovered a sense in which appearances can be said to be things in themselves. As it turns out, the move will not be successful,15 and eventually appearances and things in themselves will have to come apart; but for that development of the story we must wait a little bit longer.

3.

Criteria

Kant's application ofthe strategy described above is not systematic: nowhere in the Critique does he run through at least the major suggestions mobilized by his thought of objects in an explicit waY,16 and this in spite of his claim that the Transcendental Logic "should," as already noted on p. 7, "contain solely the rules of the pure thought of an object." The reason for such lack of systematicity is that (on the surface, at least l7) he prefers to pursue a different (and equally systematic) strategy. The results he obtains are essentially the same, because the strategies are essentially equivalent, but his procedure is more awkward and has given to the relevant section of the Critique (that is, the metaphysical deduction of the categories) what George (1981) accurately describes as "a bad press" (p. 241). Since I find my reconstruction clearer, I will exploit it thoroughly here, and then at the end of the section I will articulate its connections with Kant's original formulation. To begin with, consider the following passage from the second analogy: How, then, does it come about that we posit an object for these representations, and so ... ascribe to them some mysterious kind of objective reality.... Ifwe enquire what new character relation to an object confers upon our representations, what dignity they thereby acquire, we find that it results only in subjecting the representations to a rule, and so in necessitating us to connect them in some one specific manner; and conversely, that only in so far as our representa-

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Kant's Copernican Revolution tions are necessitated in a certain order as regards their time-relations do they acquire objective meaning. (A197 B242-43)

This statement gives an additional clear formulation of the twopart process that (in my interpretation) Kant is proposing. How shall we unpack the "mysterious" notion of the object-relatedness of representations, Kant asks. And his answer is: first, think of what objects were supposed to do to representations (make them necessitated), and then (in the text, "and conversely") use that character for your unpacking of object-relatedness. But the passage in question is also a useful complement ofthe one at AI04-5 from the substantive (not methodological) standpoint of understanding what Kant's solution is (as opposed to how he obtained it), since it makes it clear that by 'necessitation' Kant means 'rule-directedness' (I will also say 'regularity' or 'connectedness'). And this in turn suggests that it is probably best not to begin by conceptualizing the objectivity of a single representation. We cannot talk about rules here unless there are several representations that follow one another according to such rules. Therefore, it is natural to think that if regularity is to playa decisive role in the present enterprise, it is the objectivity of a system of representations that should be regarded as primary, and then the objectivity of a single representation will probably follow in terms of its membership in such an objective system. Which in turn suggests one further move: since a system of (rule-directed) representations will in general represent a system of (interconnected) objects, and there is in principle no place to stop when we consider how big this (latter) system is to be, the most helpful thought of all here may be that of a world in itself, or, as Kant also says, or a noumenalor intelligible world. That there is an intrinsic affinity between rational reflection and global considerations like the last one above is a common theme in Kant's works. The Dissertation of 1770 begins quite appropriately with the definition of a world, as "a whole which is not a part" (p. 43; II, p. 387). And in the Critique an appropriate generalization of this whole, the "unconditioned,"18 will be repeatedly characterized as "what reason, by necessity and by right, demands in things in themselves, as required to complete the series of conditions" (Bxx;). This demand of reason, of course, will be proved unsatisfiable, and the concept of a world (or of the unconditioned) will be shown to have no empirical realization (that is, no realization at all): it will turn out to be an idea in Kant's technical sense.

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Owing to our here leaving out of account all conditions (ends) and even all the special difficulties to which morality is exposed ... , this [moral] world is so far thought as an intelligible world only. To this extent, therefore, it is a mere idea . ... (A808 B836; italics mine)

But even if delusive, this concept will not be useless, just as in general the delusiveness of ideas does not prevent them from playing a crucial role in providing us with moral and theoretical standards. '9 In the present case, one of the standards they provide us with is the following: since objects have a definite structure (they are what they are and not something else), no experience will count as the experience of objects if not to the extent to which it is connected "in some one specific manner." If experience were to proceed in an entirely arbitrary, chaotic way, if we could not find definite laws in it, it "would be without an object, merely a blind play of representations, less even than a dream" (AI 12; italics mine). In the next section, necessitation will become a central character. It will be pointed out that Kant's rewriting of it as regularity leaves an important residue unaccounted for, and the other criteria of objectivity will be shown to depend on it in subtle and decisive ways. But at the present preliminary, analytical stage, it will be useful not to force the issue by injecting too much structure into it (a mistake that, as we will see, Kant himselfwas guilty 00, and to continue to look for the required criteria in an unbiased, unprejudiced way. In this spirit, the passage from A104-5 quoted above may be seen as making another suggestion, besides that of necessitation, which is worth pursuing. It talks about objective representations as having to "agree with one another"; in other words, they must (at least) be consistent. 20 And the suggestion makes sense. Given the way we think of a world of objects, a system of representations can be taken to partially represent such a world only if it entails no contradiction. This is at least one important truth behind Kant's statement at A651 B679 that "without reason [we should have] no coherent employment of the understanding, and in the absence of this no sufficient criterion of empirical truth"-a statement that Bennett (1974) is quick to dismiss as "extravagant" (p. 264). The fact that (empirical) truth requires logical consistency is one that we can make intelligible to ourselves (in our philosophical mode) only by referring to an entity (the noumenal world) that will in the end prove unable to have any empirical realization, and whose significance therefore will remain confined to the activity of rational (that is, reason's) reflection and reconstruction. 21

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The same section, on the Regulative Employment of the Ideas of Pure Reason, from which the last quote was taken has more to tell US. 22 In particular, consider the following passage: ... every genus requires diversity of species, and these in turn diversity of subspecies; and since no one of these subspecies is ever itself without a sphere (extent as conceptus communis), reason, in being carried to completion, demands that no species be regarded as being in itself the lowest. For since the species is always a concept, containing only what is common to different things, it is not completely determined. It cannot, therefore, be directly related to an individual, and other concepts, that is, subspecies, must always be contained under it. (A655-56 B683-84)

This quote contains at least three major (and related) suggestions for continuing our discussion. First, it suggests that we think of objects as essentially richer than any conceptual characterization we might give of them. No matter how detailed our notion of an object is, the object (we think) has always more to tell us. A brief digression will help us appreciate the significance of this point. The topic of analytic and synthetic judgments does not have the popularity among Kant scholars it once had,23 and there is nothing wrong with that: as I argued in Chapter 2, Kant's insistence that the problem of synthetic a priori judgments is the fundamental problem of the Critique is reductive and probably misleading. But, still, the distinction is an important one, and one that has been vigorously criticized. A common criticism, which goes back to Maass, is formulated by Allison (1973) as follows: One person may simply "think more on a given concept" than another, and thus for him a judgment would be analytic, while for another person, with a less determinate concept, it would be synthetic, involving a predicate which was not part of his original concept. ... the situation is hardly improved if one turns to Kant's second formulation, i.e., to the distinction between explicative (analytic) and ampliative (synthetic) judgments ... : whether a given judgment serves to extend one's knowledge or merely to clarify what one already knows is a contingent, psychological matter, depending upon the extent of a given individual's knowledge at a particular time. On this basis the distinction remains completely relative and of no real philosophical significance. (pp. 42-43)

In particular, it seems that a true synthetic judgment of the form "A is B" can always be made analytic by just extending the definition of A as to include B.

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In 1790, Schulze answered (under Kant's supervision) to Maass' criticism (published in 1789). Here is how Allison (1973) formulates the first (and, for our present purposes, fundamental) point made by Schulze: 24 ... in order to determine the content of a judgment expressed by a given sentence, it is necessary to determine what is signified by the subject and predicate terms .... If different things are thought under these terms, then we are dealing with different concepts, and if this is the case, with different propositions. The fact that one of these is analytic and the other synthetic has no bearing at all on the firmness of the Kantian distinction. (p. 66)

Simply put, the criticism is based on confusing a judgment with the sentence expressing that judgment. When the definition of the subject A of a sentence (not a judgment) of the form "A is B" is modified, the sentence comes to express a different judgment. But, one might ask, is it not possible to think of the distinction between synthetic and analytic judgments as one that is only provisional and belongs to a primitive stage of human knowledge, as it were? Is it not possible to think that, when all objects are fully known and we have full definitions of them, all judgments made then will be analytic? The Kantian answer to these questions, in line with the suggestion we are presently exploring, is negative. Given the way we think of objects, as essentially richer than any conceptual characterization of them, it must always be (conceived as) possible to extend such characterizations (and hence our knowledge), that is, there must always be a place for (empirical) synthesis and synthetic judgments. The only objects we can really define, Kant reminds us, are mathematical objects, because mathematical concepts are arbitrarily invented and objects for these concepts can always be constructed in pure intuition (A 729-30 B757-58).25 When it comes to empirical objects (and concepts), on the other hand, [w]e make use of certain characteristics only so long as they are adequate for the purpose of making distinctions; new observations remove some properties and add others; and thus the limits of the concept are never assured. (A 728 B756)

The second suggestion coming from the A655-56 passage quoted above can be brought out by comparing Kant with Leibniz. Leibniz would have accepted the substance of the previous point that our conceptual characterization of objects is always going to be incom-

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plete, but would have put the blame for this limitation on us, not on concepts. A complete conceptual characterization of an object is possible, he would have said, but is also infinite, and cannot be captured by a finite mind. For God, of course, things are different: He sees objects (correctly) as infimae species. 26 With Kant, on the other hand, the blame for the limitation in question falls squarely on concepts. For objects, as we think of them, are irreducible to concepts. A concept corresponds to a property an individual might have, and even if only one individual in fact has it, more than one individual could have it. But an object is thought of as a bearer of properties, as something individual that has the properties. Once the more technical notion of substance is substituted for the notion of object, and once we remember that concepts for Kant are primarily "predicates of possible judgments" (A69 B94), clear statements of this point can be found relatively often in the Critique: We could not ... apply to [the object of a non-sensible intuition] the concept of substance, meaning something which can exist as subject and never as mere predicate. (BI49) ... how ... something can exist as subject only, and not as a mere determination of other things, that is, how a thing can be substance .... (B288) If! leave out permanence ... , nothing remains in the concept of substance save only the logical representation of a subject-a representation which I endeavour to realise by representing to myself something which can exist only as subject and never as predicate. (A24243 B300-1)

Ultimately, Kant's position amounts to taking the old paradigm more seriously than Leibniz did. For in the old paradigm objects are the basic support of their determinations, and these in turn onto logically dependent on the objects. So if we think of concepts as expressing determinations, the "reduction" of an object to a complicated concept (which is in fact realized as soon as one says that there is nothing more to an object than its individual concept) results in depriving the "object" of true object status. But a moment's reflection will show that there is nothing paradoxical to Kant the revolutionary playing the ultraconservative here.27 Somebody committed to the traditional paradigm has to find ways to resolve within that paradigm the tensions I discussed in Chapter 2. In particular, he has to justify the (alleged) fact that the world is and

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will remain intelligible to us, and hence, given that this intelligibility is gained by applying to the world our conceptual specifications, he has to account for the (alleged) existence of an epistemic homogeneity between (independent) objects and concepts. Acceptance of the metaphysical principle of the identity of indiscernibles is part of the strategy by which Leibniz addressed this issue, a strategy that also included the equally metaphysical doctrine of pre-established harmony; among the alternative ways of addressing the same issue at the time one might cite occasionalism and Spinozian parallelism. And of course all such ways resulted in manipulations and weakenings of the most extreme form of the traditional framework, because in that form that framework had problems. 28 Kant, on the other hand, uses the framework in question purely instrumentally, and has no commitment to it as the ultimate horizon within which philosophical explanations are to be provided. This does not mean that he has no problem at all in understanding the epistemic homogeneity of objects and concepts, for the problem will simply surface for him at a different place: when it comes to accounting for the empirical application of the conceptual criteria identified through the present "mental experiment." But it does mean that for the moment, while the mental experiment is still in course, he need not fudge the issue, and can stick to the primacy (irreducibility, independence) of objects in its strictest form. The third suggestion derived from A655-56 shows us yet another angle of this distinction between (our thought of) objects and (our thought of) concepts, and hence yet another aspect of the conceptualization of objects we are presently interested in. Concepts, Kant says, are not "completely determined." An object, on the other hand, is completely determined, that is, it is at least in principle possible to give identification conditions for it, to specify which object it is, that it is that object and not another. And determining (or, as he sometimes expresses it, distinguishing) an object is for Kant a necessary condition for knowing it,29 Once again, this is a crucial point of disagreement between Kant and Leibniz, and a large portion of the Amphiboly section is to be seen as defending the claim (against Leibniz) that objects cannot be identified in purely conceptual terms. The analysis conducted so far is sufficient for our present purposes, so let us summarize its results. In specifying what intentional objects are to count as objects within his new framework, Kant finds

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it useful to mobilize the notion of an object, or, more generally, of a world of objects, as found in the old framework, that is, to mobilize the notion of an intelligible or noumenal world, of a world as it would be in itself. Among the features of such a world (call it w) that he finds it worth emphasizing are the following: (a)

members of ware bearers of properties and, as such, irreducible to properties; (b) they have definite conditions of identification; (c) they are always richer (in properties) than any conceptual characterization we might give of them; (d) w is consistent, and hence a system of representations can represent w (at least in part) only if it is consistent; (e) w has a definite structure, and hence a system of representations can represent w (at least in part) only if it is necessitated, in the sense of showing some rule-directedness.

Ifmy analysis is correct, the above is Kant's deep-seated strategy. But, as I suggested earlier, his superficial strategy is different; I will now turn briefly to it and to how its results are substantially equivalent to mine. I have suggested that the thought of a world of objects is more useful for our purposes than the thought of a single object. Let us therefore use that thought as our starting point, and ask ourselves what kinds of worlds we can possibly think of To think of a world is to think that that world is such and such, that is, it is to make judgments about that world. So a world that we can think of is a world about which we can meaningfully make judgments, a world to which the kinds of judgments we can make have meaningful application. Therefore, one way to find out what kinds of worlds we can think of, that is, what conceptual conditions must hold on something for it to be a world for us, is by running through the various general features of our judgments and considering the structures within which such features would make sense. First, every judgment we make has a quantity, that is, it is supposed to hold for one individual only, or for some individuals, or for all individuals. But judgments ofthis kind only make sense of a world in which it is possible to identify and count individuals. Second, every judgment we make has a quality, that is, it affirms or denies something. Judgments of this kind only make sense of a world in which some things are and some are not the case. Third, every judgment we make is either an elementary (subject-predicate)

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judgment or it is a compound of such judgments, and when it is a compound, it is either of conditional or of disjunctive form. For judgments of this kind to make sense ofa world, there must be ways of distinguishing in that world entities that are the references of subject terms-that is, substances, or (real) objects-and entities that are the references of predicate terms-that is, determinations, accidents-and there must be ways of assigning a definite sense to the various parts of complex judgments and to their relations: in particular, of discriminating between the reference of an antecedent clause and the reference of a consequent clause and of specifying how the former relates to the latter. Finally, every judgment we make has a modality, that is, it is asserted either in a problematic, or in an assertoric, or in an apodeictic way. Judgments of this kind only (seem to) make sense of a world in which some things are (or occur) possibly, some actually, and some necessarily. This is the thread of thought that brings Kant, in the metaphysical deduction, to the discovery of the categories, that is, of the general rules according to which we think of objects and make judgments about them: [The categories] are concepts of an object in general, by means of which the intuition of an object is regarded as determined in respect of one of the logical functions of judgment. (B 128)

So let us compare his results to mine, that is, to criteria (a)-(e) on p.104. To begin with what is simple, there is an obvious correspondence between (a) and the category of substance, (b) and the categories of quantity, (e) and the category of cause. Also, to say that in any world we can think of some things are and some are not the case is equivalent to saying that any world we can think of is consistent: everything can be asserted (or denied) of an inconsistent structure, and vice versa. It is more complicated to see what relation there could be between the category of community and any of (a)-(e). But this is because Kant asks too much of this category, and makes it fulfill at least two different tasks. On the one hand, the category in question will be correlated in the third analogy with the notion of simultaneity or coexistence, and thus, as I will argue in the next chapter, used to give (more) empirical content to the notion of consistency. On the other, the disjunctive form of judgment from which this category originates is clearly connected for Kant with a notion of ontological

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completeness that holds for objects but not for concepts. The connection is established in the Dialectic, where disjunctive judgments are associated wlth the ideal of pure reasons, and the discussion of this ideal begins as follows: Every concept is, in respect of what is not contained in it, undetermined, and is subject to the principle of determinability. According to this principle, of every two contradictorily opposed predicates only one can belong to a concept. This principle is based on the law of contradiction, and is therefore a purely logical principle. As such, it abstracts from the entire content of knowledge and is concerned solely with its logical form. But every thing, as regards its possibility, is likewise subject to the principle of complete determination, according to which if all the possible predicates of things be taken together with their contradictory opposites, then one of each pair of contradictory opposites must belong to it. (A571-72 B599-600)

Whereas concepts only obey the negative principle ofnon-contradiction "not (P and not-P)" (for any determination P that can be sensibly included in them), things are expected to obey the positive principle of the excluded middle: the disjunction "P or not-P" (for any determination P that can be sensibly predicated of them). And this is to say that things, objects, are taken to be complete in ways in which concepts are not taken to be, or, to put it differently, that objects are taken to be essentially richer (in determinations) than concepts: my criterion (c). Finally, I have no criterion corresponding to the categories of modality. But, then, Kant has none either. At A219 B266 he explains that these categories ... have the peculiarity that, in determining an object, they do not in the least enlarge the concept to which they are attached as predicates. They only express the relation of the concept to the faculty of knowledge.

Modalities do not extend our notion of what an object is, but only our notion of how we relate to concepts. The reason for this conclusion is to be found in Kant's analysis of real possibility, discussed in Chapter 1: such an analysis reveals that, as far as objects are concerned, possible and actual cannot be distinguished. Which of course means that impossible and non-actual cannot be distinguished, either, nor can actual and necessary: at the objectual level, modalities all collapse into one another. The only way in which

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such collapse can be avoided is if we consider our thought (of objects): at that level, there is a difference between, say, judgments that we find ourselves forced to make and judgments that (we feel) we make somewhat arbitrarily. But at that level, we are only dealing with logical possibility and the like: when things are in question, modal notions do not allow any significant discrimination among them. So there is a considerable amount of overlap-in fact, almost coincidence-between Kant's ostensible strategy and the one I preferred to use. This is not surprising in view of the strict relation that exists for Kant between thinking of an object (which is where I started) and thinking of a judgment (which is where he started): I have never been able to accept the interpretation which logicians give of judgment in general. It is, they declare, the representation of a relation between two concepts .... I need only point out that the definition does not determine in what the asserted relation consists. . . . to say 'The body is heavy' is not merely to state that the two representations have always been conjoined in my perception, however often that perception be repeated; what we are asserting is that they are combined in the object, no matter what the state of the subject may be. (B140-42)

Thinking of an object is thinking of what you could say about that object, that is, is thinking of judgments, and thinking of judgments is thinking of how what we say or think holds of objects: in essence, therefore, as I anticipated earlier, Kant's strategy and mine are equivalent. The considerations above suggest that the metaphysical deduction may not deserve its bad press after all. For example, the point Strawson (1966) uses to show that this "excursion through the forms of logic has not advanced us a single step" (p. 82) is the following: Kant has not proved that the logical features of judgments he identifies constitute "the minimum that the logician must acknowledge in the way of logical forms" (p. 80), and if he had limited himself to this minimum, the result would not have been "likely to yield much of a harvest in the way of categories" (p. 81). But this point is irrelevant: if in fact it makes sense for us to formulate conditionals, a world that we can think of must be such that it makes sense to formulate conditionals in it (whether or not any of them are true), because in principle we expect that we can use conditionals to

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describe that world, and this independently of the possibility of defining the conditional sign in terms of, say, the negation and the disjunction signs. If such a definition is legitimate, it will constitute a significant logical advance and perhaps result in our downgrading causality from the status of a category to that of a predicable (see A82 B 108), but the essence of Kant's conclusion on the necessity of making sense of conditionals will remain untouched. 30 On the other hand, if Strawson's criticism does not hold water, it is not to say that we should share Kant's confidence in the viability of his method and definitiveness of his results. Part of the reason why he starts with judgments (instead of, for example, directly with objects) is that he considers general logic absolutely correct and hence thinks that anchoring his thought of objects to this logic will make it possible to extend such correctness to the results of his investigations. 3l What he did not appreciate (and could not have appreciated, since the issue only surfaced much later in the history of philosophy) is that it is perfectly compatible with the traditional framework he was utilizing here in an instrumental way to think that ordinary language-the language whose structure his (largely Aristotelian) general logic reflects-only offers a misleading, delusive reflection of the structure of our thought. 32 To put it in Gottlob Frege's words: Someone who wants to learn logic from language is like an adult who wants to learn how to think from a child. When men created language, they were at the stage of childish pictorial thinking. Languages are not made so as to match logic's ruler. Even the logical element in a language seems hidden behind pictures that are not always accurate. At an early time in the creation oflanguage there occurred, it seems, a tremendous exuberance in the growth oflinguistic forms. At a later time much of this had to be got rid of again and simplified. The main task of the logician is to free himselffrom language and to simplify it. (Letter to Edmund Husserl of October 30/November 1, 1906, in Frege [1980], p. 68; italics mine)

As a result of this general attitude, which makes him conclude that "the greatest difficulty for philosophy" is to be found in the unavailability of an appropriate linguistic tool (see, e.g., Frege [1923], p. 400), Frege made the structure of his conceptual notation (a "logically perfect language," as he calls it, for example, in Frege [1892], p. 169) substantially different from the structure of ordinary language. And many logicians have followed his lead in construct-

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ing a wealth of artificial (and allegedly more transparent) languages, thus generating the additional problem that one cannot trust any of them either, in view (at least) of how many of them there are and how much they differ with one another. 33 Needless to say, all of this is bad news for Kant: no matter how accurately his general logic represents the structure of ordinary language, it is consistent with the traditional paradigm to think that the structure of our thought is entirely otherwise. So whereas the detour through formal logic does, pace Strawson, advance us more than a single step, it does not give us any more certainty of the correctness of our results than direct consideration of objects would. And its results are always to be tested against our thought of objects anyway, to find out, for example, that the "categories" of modality are on a different level from the others. Kant's hurried attempt to close the issue ends up leaving it very much in the open. So it is less tortuous and clearer to begin with the thought of objects, as I did, and it is safer to refer to the criteria identified in this way (as, in effect, I did on p. 104) as some of the criteria one could come up with. There are enough of them by now to allow us to articulate our story further, and in any case the "clue" Kant takes from (general) logic yields no final resolution of the mystery. 34

4.

The human predicament

Let us return to (a)-(e), and begin to apply them to concrete cases. Suppose, for example, that I think of a winged horse. Then the winged horse is the intentional object of an act of thought of mine, and hence it may be interesting to see how well this intentional object fares with respect to (a)-(e). But the results of this experiment are desolating, according to Kant and according to common sense. 35 Consider (a). I can certainly intend to think of the winged horse as something over and above wingedness and horseness, something individual that has the properties of winged ness and horseness, but it is not clear that I can succeed in carrying out this intention. Kant certainly would not say so. The topic of real versus logical possibility is still relevant here: playing with concepts-and playing in ways that seem consistent-will never provide any guarantee that these concepts even can have an object. Thought in and by itself never allows us to get beyond concepts and make contact with objects, not even possible objects; for such a contact, more is required, namely, intuition. Later I will explore the significance of this further require-

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ment, but for my present (negative) purposes it will be enough to quote one more clear statement on Kant's part of the "emptiness" of pure thought:' . Thus the object of a concept to which no assignable intuition whatsoever corresponds is = nothing. That is, it is a concept without an object (ens rat ion is), like noumena, ... or like certain new fundamental forces, which though entertained in thought without self-contradiction are yet also in our thinking unsupported by any example from experience, and are therefore not to be counted as possible. (A290-91 B347; last italics mine)36

The distinction between logical and real possibility is clearly relevant for criterion (d), too. No matter how long I analyze my concepts, there is never going to be any guarantee that they are really consistent. Once again, something more than thought is required for such a guarantee. As for (b), when objects lack a definite spatio-temporal location (as is the case for winged horses and all other such "objects of thought"), they also seem to lack definite conditions of identification. In the next chapter, I will elaborate on this theme; for the moment I will simply insist on its popularity. The medievals wondered how many angels danced on the head of a pin, and W. V. O. Quine (1948) expressed the same concern with respect to another major category of non-spatio-temporal creatures: merely possible entities. Take, for instance, the possible fat man in that doorway; and, again, the possible bald man in that doorway. Are they the same possible man, or two possible men? How do we decide? How many possible men are there in that doorway? Are there more possible thin ones than fat ones? How many of them are alike? Or would their being alike make them one? Are no two possible things alike? Is this the same as saying that it is impossible for two things to be alike? Or, finally, is the concept of identity simply inapplicable to unactualized possibles? But what sense can be found in talking of entities which cannot meaningfully be said to be identical with themselves and distinct from one another? (pp. 23-24)

Kant, of course, agrees: If we represent to ourselves a being of the understanding by nothing but pure concepts of the understanding, we then indeed represent nothing definite to ourselves, and consequently our concept has no significance.... (Prolegomena, p. 103; IV, p. 355)

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As for (c), it is virtually a truism of Kantian scholarship that conceptual analysis can never result in an extension of our knowledge, but at best in a clarification of it. We can never learn anything new about mere objects of thought (or objects insofar as they are thought); at best, we can become better aware of what we already (though perhaps obscurely) think about them. A couple of selfexplanatory quotes will bear this point: If we are to judge synthetically in regard to a concept, we must go beyond this concept and appeal to the intuition in which it is given. For should we confine ourselves to what is contained in the concept, the judgment would be merely analytic, serving only as an explanation ofthe thought, in terms of what is actually contained in it. (A 721 B749) Now in the whole domain of pure reason, in its merely speculative employment, there is not to be found a single synthetic judgment directly derived from concepts. For, as we have shown, ideas cannot form the basis of any objectively valid synthetic judgment. Through concepts of understanding pure reason does, indeed, establish secure principles, not however directly from concepts alone, but always only indirectly through relation of these concepts to something altogether contingent, namely, possible experience. (A 736-37 B764-65)

Finally, as for (e), consider my thought of a winged horse again. As it turns out, I represent this horse as white, but does that mean that I have to represent it as white? Not at all: I could just as well represent it as pink or blue. This object of thought does not manifest the "resistance" that is supposedly characteristic of real objects: virtually anything can be done to it, and it can go through virtually any change. If I wanted, I could even transform it into something that is not a winged horse. And, certainly, I can make it do anything I want and contradict any behavioral rule anybody proposes. Thus a tension surfaces between the inventiveness of imagination and the rule-directedness required by objectivity, which constitutes a further obstacle to counting my representation ofa winged horse as the representation of an object. Occasionally, Kant shows explicit awareness of such a tension, for example, in the following passage of the Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View: The realm of imagination is the proper domain of genius because imagination is creative and, being less subject than other powers to the constraint of rules, more apt for originality.... Yet every art needs certain mechanical basic rules-rules, namely, for making the

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The conclusions of our investigation point to an interesting predicament that seems to be essential to the human condition. A compact formulation of this predicament is as follows: (I)

Objects of thought do not fit our thought of objects

A more detailed (and probably more perspicuous) formulation is: (2)

Our representations of objects we merely think of do not satisfy the conditions that we think are necessary for representations to count as representations of objects.

And, to get closer to a Kantian formulation, we could say: (3) Through thought alone no objects are given.

That is, thinking of an object offers no guarantee that the object is really there. It is not the first time that I mention this conclusion. The same conclusion was central in the discussion conducted in Chapter 1 on the constitutional limitations of philosophical reflection, in particular, on the impossibility on the part of this (conceptual) activity to reach the level of Kantian Erkenntnis. But now we can see more clearly the rationale for the conclusion in question, and we can begin to articulate what else is needed (besides thought) to bridge the gap to real possibility and real knowledgeY Let us return to a passage already mentioned in the last chapter. At A19 B34 Kant says that we intuit an object only if the object is given, and then continues: "This again is only possible, to man at least, in so far as the mind is affected in a certain way." "[A]ny credible empirical theory," I said in commenting upon this passage, "must explain my representation of, say, a table ... as a consequence of ... the existence of a table and its action on my representative faculties" (p. 63; last italics added). Now this requirement on the credibility of an empirical theory becomes more transparent. One major problem with my representation of a winged horse is that I construe myself as its author, and as a consequence tend to think that I can freely operate with it, that I am not forced, bound up by any rules constraining me to do or expect certain

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things and not do or expect others. More generally, if! can construe a representation r as due entirely to my representational power, I will not attribute to r the necessitated character I attribute to representations that I construe as the result of an affection on the part of something other than me, and hence, given the way I think of objective (and non-objective, or subjective) representations, I will tend to discount r as merely subjective. I have thus come full circle in my discussion of criteria of objectivity. I started out with necessitation on p. 94, and I am back at it again. But, as often happens with such recurrences, the present is not exactly a recurrence of the same thing. By now, the notion of necessitation has been loaded with at least two distinct functions and is ready to fragment under such weight in the interest of a clearer exposition. On the one hand, objective representations are necessitated in that they necessitate one other, or follow one another according to definite rules: this is what I decided to call regularity. On the other, they are necessitated in that they are forced on the subject, which is left with no choice as to their occurrence or non-occurrence: call this sense imposition. It is imposition that figures prominently in the passage from AI04-5 quoted on pp. 93-94: there Kant talks of the object preventing our modes of knowledge from being haphazard or arbitrary, and of its determining them a priori in some definite fashion. In the passage from Al97 B242-43 quoted on pp. 97-98, however, the two senses become intertwined: Kant talks in one and the same breath of the relation to an object necessitating us and of representations being necessitated in a certain order. The reason for this entanglement was suggested on p. 99: ultimately, Kant wants to rewrite imposition as regularity-that is, as will become clear in Chapter 5, he wants to give the former (more) empirical content by correlating it with the latter. But note that this operation is going to be a rewriting of one thing as another, and that however "serviceable"J8 it will make the notion of imposition, and however much it will make it possible to use this notion in a meaningful way, the operation will not cancel the difference between the two senses of necessitation, or indeed the way in which, at least motivationally, necessitation as imposition is more basic than necessitation as regularity. The ultimate evidence any realist will cite of the existence of things other than the subject is that these things hit and sting and scratch and inflict pain, that we cannot simply wish them away but have to work around them. Identifying regularities in their behavior

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is allegedly the best course of action in dealing with these things, and possibly without such an identification we will be unable to transform our primordial "sense" of their existence and otherness and resilience into something that we want to call 'knowledge', but without that primordial sense there would be no occasion even to begin to worry about it. Consistently with these considerations, the "free" character of my representation of "objects of thought" seems to be the determinant factor in their defective performance vis-a-vis the other criteria of real objecthood listed on p. 104. For if an object of thought can be manipulated in any arbitrary way, I cannot say with definiteness which object it is, nor can I be sure that it will satisfy even the minimal requirement of logical consistency. And if the "object" is one that I am totally responsible for, how can I possibly find out anything about it that is not already (perhaps implicitly) contained in my "construction" of it? Or, to give what is essentially an alternative formulation of the last point, does not the object in the end reduce to my thought of it, that is, to the concepts that I utilize in generating (a representation of) it? If all that there is to the object is due to my activity, how can I legitimately postulate the presence in it of an ontological residue of this activity, of something intrinsically different from those conceptual tools in which the activity finds expression? In the next chapter, I will explore the relations between the two senses of necessitation in some detail. For the moment, I limit myself to emphasizing that the predicament identified on p. 112 issues in an important limitation on (the conceptualization of) human experience: what humans can construe as due entirely to their own mental activities they can hardly construe as satisfying their ordinary criteria of objectivity. According to Kant, this limitation is one that we do not share with all beings, but we probably share with allfinite beings. Of God, on the other hand, we can think that He has an intuitive understanding, that is, "[a]n understanding in which through self-consciousness all the manifold would eo ipso be given" (8135). Among English commentaries to the Critique, H. W. Cassirer's (1954) may be the one that makes the most of Kant's doctrine of intuitive understanding (or intellectual intuition). For example, in commenting upon the A51 875 passage where Kant says that "[t]he understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing," Cassirer says:

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The point which Kant makes here is that thinking by itself cannot make us aware of anything at all. Whatever idea we may conceive, we can never be sure whether anything in reality corresponds to what we are thinking. It is in this respect that our intelligence differs radically from one which would proceed by way of intellectual intuition, or intuitive understanding. The latter type of intelligence would indeed have the capacity to become assured of the actual existence of its objects, solely by virtue of the fact that they had been brought before the mind. In the case of the human intelligence, on the other hand, there is only one guarantee of existence, namely, that something should be sensibly given to us. (pp. 56-57)

And elsewhere in the book Cassirer utilizes this doctrine to account for (among other things) the necessity of a priori synthesis (p. 74) and of the categories (p. 89), as well as the nature of transcendental idealism (pp. 47, 218).39 On the other hand, the doctrine in question has come under attack, for example, by Robert Pippin (1982). He says: [Kant is involved in] a complex, multilevel defense of one of the basic principles of his whole epistemology: his critique of intellectual intuition, and the "discursive" theory of the understanding central to that critique. That is, if we are looking for some justification of Kant's claim that sensory awareness is not, considered by itself, a mode of knowledge, but only the material of knowledge, a very broad answer to such a query surely must involve his theory of the necessity of synthesis in all knowledge. Kant will argue in great detail that there cannot be a determinate awareness of "unity" in sensation, that there must be judgment or synthesis for such awareness to occur, and finally that there must be, a priori, rules for such judgments. (p. 28)

But, Pippin asks, why must it be so? Even if we admit that awareness of a sensory manifold is not equivalent to an awareness of an object as sensed, why shouldn't we describe the relation between sensations and the concepts used to describe them in terms of some "awareness" of recei ved determinate impressions, instead of in terms of the subjective activity, synthesizing and judging Kant will later use? What is his basic argument against the classical and rationalist conception of a passive intuition of sensible form, Plato's noesis, Aristotle's nous pathetikos, or Leibniz's petites perceptions? (p. 35)

This question is an important one, and Pippin's reference to the "multilevel" character of Kanfs response is appropriate. For to say that there must be a passive component to our cognitive relations

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to objects is not at all to say that there must be an active component as well, and that the material "received" from the object must be "synthesized." 'Two complementary but independent necessities are postulated by Kant, the necessity of receptivity and the necessity of spontaneity, and in the presence of so many (apparently unjustified) assumptions the tendency of most commentators is to take a historicalline of explanation. Thus, for example, Pippin himself seems to think that Kant, largely on account of Leibniz's influence, thought of sensations as unstructured and was then forced to attribute to the activity of the understanding (that is, to synthesis or judgment) any structure that experience might reveal. 40 I am not in a position to address both of these necessities properly,41 but I can address one of them, in a way that will help me highlight and summarize the main thrust of the present section. Begin with the Copernican revolution once more: what is conceptually primary is not objects but consciousness. When things are put in this way, there is the danger of making it too easy for oneself For I can certainly think of my conscious experiences as mediated (or even made possible) by some conceptual abilities, and hence I may try to explain whatever regularity my consciousness and its objects show in terms of those abilities. That is, I can say (roughly): this is a world that I can understand and (to some extent) predict because it is a world I can think of, and it is a world I can think of because it is a world of thought. That this impression of great simplicity is misleading is revealed by the predicament I discussed in the previous pages: objects of (human) experience can be conceptualized as "real" objects only if they can be construed as distinct from the mind and as "affecting" the mind. So these objects must have, over and above the regularities that follow upon their being objects of thought, some characters that qualify them as independent entities, and there is a problem, of course, concerning how they can show both those regularities and these characters. As we wiIl see, this problem constitutes one of the major themes of the Analytic, but, leaving it aside for the moment, the relevant conclusion now is that we cannot construe ourselves as knowing objects if we cannot construe ourselves as being able to be affected by objects in a passive way. Another way of saying that I can be affected by objects in a passive way is to say that I have the possibility of being affected by objects in a passive way. And another way of saying the latter is to say that I have the faculty of being affected

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by objects in a passive way. In Kant's jargon, this "faculty" is called sensibility,42 and saying that sensibility by itself does not account for "the unity" of the object is only a colorful way of saying that (4)

I am passively affected by the object

is logically independent of (5)

I perceive the object as one.

Of course, this logical independence does not imply that I can ever in fact construe myself as "being passively affected by an object" without also construing myself as "perceiving the object as one." As it turns out, Kant seems to think quite the opposite. 43 What the logical independence in question does imply is that I can, by that process of logical abstraction which is (as we know) so essential to philosophical activity, distinguish the two "faculties" and consider them separately, if I find this practice conducive to clearer exposition. 44 Thus, to some extent, what creates problems here may be a reification of Kant's "faculty talk." If sensibility is thought of as a specific entity, then by following Kant's characterization we should think of this entity as purely passive and of its products as completely unstructured, a~d the question would arise of what justifies Kant in postulating all this ontology. But sensibility is not to be thought of that way, and in general Kant's faculty talk is not to be reified. § 216 of Baumgarten's Metaphysica (partially paraphrased on p. 34, above) suggests that talk of faculties is simply modal talk: talk of what a substance can or cannot do. The very word lacultas' is introduced by Baumgarten in the locution "possibilitatem agendi seu facultatem." And that this suggestion must be taken seriously within Kantian scholarship is indicated by Kantian comments such as (from Refl. 3585, on § 216 of the Metaphysica): "The internal principle of the possibility of acting is the faculty, for example [as in a] machine" (XVII, p. 73). Kant's reference to a machine here is especially interesting. For we certainly do not think that a record player has the faculty of playing rock music in anything but the sense that it (is made in such a way that it) can play rock music,45 and in view of passages like the preceding one, there is no need to attribute any other view of faculties to Kant, whether it be faculties of machines or of human beings. 46

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This is as far as I can go here. Undeniably, at the very moment when the necessity of receptivity becomes better understood, the necessity of spontaneity emerges as more puzzling than ever. But we must put that puzzle on the back burner for now, since time is not ripe for its solution.

5 Experiencing Objects Yet for man the invisible needs to be represented through the visible (the sensuous); yea, what is more, it needs to be accompanied by the visible in the interest of practicability and, though it is intellectual, must be made, as it were (according to a certain analogy), perceptual. Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. p. 180; VI, p. 192

1.

Space and time

We know by now that I can only construe an object of experience as real if I can construe it as (a) other than me and (b) affecting me in ways that are not entirely under my control. Let us focus on (a). A more explicit reformulation of it is that a necessary (conceptual) condition of the reality of an object of experience is for the object to have characters that allow me to distinguish it from me. Or, in yet other words, a necessary condition for me to be able to construe an intentional object 0 as real is that I can (construe myself as being able to) count how many things are mobilized in an experience I have of o. If it is two things (0 and I), this necessary condition is satisfied; if it is just one (the I), the reality of 0 is in question. When things are put in this way, it is possible to make a further distinction between two abilities jointly involved in (construing oneself as) satisfying (a): the ability of counting things and thereby establishing that more than one object must be referred to in accounting for an experience one is having (or, perhaps less misleading at this stage of the game, for an experience that is being had), and the more specific ability of identifying-among the objects thus counted-that particular object which is the I. I will now direct my attention to the first ability; in the next section I will turn to the second one. In the Prolegomena, Kant says: "Arithmetic achieves its concept of number by the successive addition of units in time ... (p. 30: IV, 119

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p. 283). The suggestion is made in this passage that a temporal dimension is all that our experience needs to find room for the notion of counting. And it is a suggestion that has been pursued in a systematic way by some philosophers of mathematics. L. E. J. Brouwer (1981), for example, characterizes the First Act of Intuitionism as the act of [c]ompletely separating mathematics from mathematical language and hence from the phenomena of language described by theoretical logic, recognizing that intuitionistic mathematics is an essentially languageless activity of the mind having its origin in the perception ofa move of time. This perception of a move of time may be described as the falling apart of a life moment into two distinct things, one of which gives way to the other, but is retained by memory. If the twoity thus born is divested of all quality, it passes into the empty form of the common substratum of all twoities. And it is this common substratum, this empty form, which is the basic intuition of mathematics. (pp. 4-5; italicized in the original)

According to Kant, we cannot even think of consciousness as lacking this temporal dimension: Time is a necessary representation that underlies all intuitions. We cannot, in respect of appearances in general, remove time itself, though we can quite well think time as void of appearances.... (A31 B46)

Thus, it would seem, we cannot even conceive the possibility that we are not able to count the objects we are aware of. But of course we know that this is not true. I pointed out in Chapter 4 that objects of (pure) thought give us a lot of counting problems: how many angels, how many possible men in the doorway, and so on. Where, then, is the complication? Suppose once more that I think of a winged horse, and then five minutes later I think of a winged horse again. At that point you ask me how many winged horses I have thought of in the last five minutes, and I hurriedly answer, "Two." Later, however, as I reflect upon it, I realize that my answer was unjustified, and that what I should have said instead was, "At most two." For I have not verified (and there may be no way of verifying) that the winged horse I thought of first was not the same winged horse I thought of later. Only after verifying that could I have added "At least two" to my answer, and make it what it was originally, that is (in effect), "Exactly two."

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The problem is a general one, and in fact it is irrelevant that there be one and the same conceptual specification ("a winged horse") for the object(s) of thought one is trying to count. It was suggested on p. 111 that I would be facing essentially the same difficulty if I thought of a winged horse and then of a pumpkin, since I would not be in a position to know that the winged horse had not turned into the pumpkin. As pointed out, for example, by Strawson (1959), there are "two sides, or aspects, of identification," which "might be called the distinguishing aspect and the reidentifying aspect" (p. 51). To put it in terms of counting, suppose that your problem be that of assigning a natural number n to a set S of objects that occur to you in succession during a finite time. If you can clearly distinguish one occurrence from the next one (that is, if you can handle successfully the first side, or aspect, of identification), then you can put an upper bound on the value of n; suppose that this upper bound is m. This conclusion, however, does not authorize you to assign the number 111 to S, because all that you know by now is that there have been m occurrences of members of S, and this is logically compatible with S having any number p of members, where 1