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Kant on Apperception and theUnity of JudgmentTimothy Rosenkoetter aa New York University, USAPublished online: 25 Oct 2006.
To cite this article: Timothy Rosenkoetter (2006): Kant on Apperception and theUnity of Judgment , Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy, 49:5, 469-489
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Kant on Apperception and the Unityof Judgment*
TIMOTHY ROSENKOETTER
New York University, USA
(Received 3 August 2005)
It is safe to say that more has been written in an attempt to come to terms
with Kant’s second-edition Transcendental Deduction (TD) than has been
written on any other similarly sized section of his theoretical philosophy. As
might be predicted from this fact, new contributions to the secondary
literature are often characterized by the slight revisions that they make to
earlier forays. Yet the array of available interpretations is sufficiently diverse
that a survey can easily lead one to despair of progress. A monograph which
systematically applies bold and in many cases unusual claims regarding
representation, objectivity, and apperception to the interpretation of the TD
is a particularly welcome addition in this context. What’s more, A.B.
Dickerson’s Kant on Representation and Objectivity (KR&O) paints an
attractive picture. Kant is reconstructed as having a sensible, even inviting,
position that lacks any obvious confusions or hopeless arguments.
Though KR&O is advertised as a study of the B-deduction, Dickerson
arranges pursuit of that goal so that he first lays out his positions on a number
of the core issues that confront any interpretation of Kant’s theoretical
project (chapters 1 and 2). This general interpretation is then put to the test of
making sense of the B-deduction (chapters 3 and 4). It is an ambitious work.
Indeed, one of its strengths is that its form and coverage make it appropriate
for use as one of the main secondary sources in a course on Kant’s theoretical
philosophy, something that cannot be said of most studies of the TD.
Furthermore, though it can and will be read with profit by specialists, this
*A.B. Dickerson. Kant on Representation and Objectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004).
Correspondence Address: Timothy Rosenkoetter, Department of Philosophy, New York
University, 1000 Washington Square East, Silver Center 503, New York, NY, 10003, USA.
Email: [email protected]
Inquiry,
Vol. 49, No. 5, 469–489, October 2006
0020-174X Print/1502-3923 Online/06/050469–21 # 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/00201740600937989
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book is sufficiently readable, and its author sufficiently patient in his
explanations, that it should not overwhelm talented undergraduates. This
ability to speak to both audiences is as much a virtue as it is a rarity.
Dickerson tells us that he intends KR&O to be a contribution to what
Robert Sleigh calls ‘‘exegetical history’’, rather than just ‘‘a variation on a
Kantian theme’’. As such, his ambition is to produce sentences ‘‘such that
we know what propositions those sentences express and those propositionsare the very ones our author accepted’’.1 With few exceptions Dickerson
quite successfully avoids producing terminology-laden sentences to which
we can attach no determinate proposition. However, I have more
reservations about whether they are in fact the propositions that Kant
accepted. In some cases my disagreements are relatively minor. There are
places where Dickerson has simplified to the point of distortion. (The
author’s quite successful efforts at producing a very readable work have
perhaps exacted a toll here and there.) But even in cases where I think thatDickerson’s interpretation is on the wrong track, it often manages to be
provocative in a way that can be quite useful in spurring those who disagree
to explain why it is wrong.
Dickerson belongs to the camp of interpreters that understands the TD
not as a response to skepticism but rather as ‘‘primarily an analysis of the
concept of human cognition’’ (p. 206). This should not, Dickerson hastens
to add, lead us to assume that its goals are modest. It aims to prove that if
our minds are ‘‘receptive in cognition’’ or ‘‘constrained by an independentreality’’, then our cognition must be governed by the categories (p. 208).
Dickerson’s most general take on the goal and method of the TD is not
particularly new or startling (though not for that reason any less welcome).
For this reason, I have chosen to focus the following discussion on the
‘background theory’ which Dickerson employs in his detailed interpretation
of the argument of the TD, since it contains several original theses that form
the basis for his detailed claims regarding the TD. Now, though I will be
passing over much of the latter, I want to stress that there is much that isinteresting and useful there. (Those who desire an informative overview
might begin with the master presentation of the argument in twenty-six steps
at p. 201.) Further, as Dickerson stresses, the success of the background
theory in accounting for details of Kant’s text has the potential to provide
evidence of its correctness. However, I believe that there are some questions
that are usefully posed in relative abstraction from Dickerson’s reconstruc-
tion of the argument.
I. Representationalism, pictures, and apperception
The starting point for Dickerson’s interpretation is his claim that Kant is a
representationalist. Kant clearly believes that objects produce representa-
tions in us, which when considered merely as modifications of our sensibility
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are termed ‘‘sensations’’.2 Kant is a representationalist, according to
Dickerson, because ‘‘these internal modifications or determinations are
then the immediate objects of awareness’’ (p. 6). Dickerson takes himself to
be opposing direct realist readings of Kant and he believes that this move
should not be controversial. The exegetical historian simply has no room to
maneuver on this point, for the language of Kant’s texts plainly indicates
that representations are ‘‘the objects of our mental acts—as objects of
consciousness or awareness…’’ (pp. 9–10). In the first of several straightfor-
ward analogies that Dickerson employs throughout the book, he compares
the Kantian subject to a viewer who is within a hollow globe of opaque
plastic. As the globe is depressed by external forces the subject can see
nothing but the internal surface of the globe.
It should be noted up front that Dickerson takes Kant’s representation-
alism to explain a commitment that he believes is Kant’s: that sensations as
such are intrinsically unavailable to the subject’s awareness because they are
not ‘‘self-revealing’’ (p. 85) and the subject, in relating to them, is aware of
them as objects (e.g., buckets and chairs) rather than as sensations. Thus, it
is more than a little misleading for Dickerson to refer (as he routinely does)
to sensations as ‘‘objects of consciousness or awareness’’ (pp. 9–10). Think
of them, instead, as the forever-hidden raw materials of consciousness.
If we are trapped within a globe with modifications of our sensibility (i.e.,
sensations) as our sole epistemological aid, how shall we account for our
knowledge—knowledge which is, at least in part, of independent objects?
Two historically influential strategies suggest themselves. First, one can infer
from one’s awareness of representations to their external causes (e.g.,
Descartes). Second, one can insist that objects are in fact identical to some
set of representations, so that an immediate awareness of objects is in fact
retained (Berkeley). At least part of what leads interpreters to deny or
downplay Kant’s representationalism, on Dickerson’s diagnosis, is their
understandable wish to avoid reading Kant as employing either one of these
models. Dickerson thinks that there is an unconsidered alternative open to
the representationalist. The key to seeing the alternative is an analogy with
pictures.
Suppose that you are looking at a pencil drawing of Smokey the Bear.
What is the relation of Smokey to the various lines and shadings that make
up the drawing? It would be wrong to say that Smokey is identical to these
lines and shadings. After all, Smokey has a thick coat of fur and is wearing a
hat, whereas none of that is (or could be) true of the pencil markings.
Dickerson also insists that you do not infer from the pencil markings to
Smokey, for that assumes that Smokey is ‘‘a separate object that lies
‘behind’ or ‘outside of’ the configuration of lines…’’ (p. 14). Dickerson
instead wants to say—in a phrase that recurs again and again at key points
in the book—that Smokey is in the picture.
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Now if we substitute a Kantian subject’s sensations for the pencil-marked
paper in this example, we get Dickerson’s recipe for admitting Kant’s
representationalism while avoiding the pitfalls of Cartesian and Berkeleyan
strategies. We also get the key to the meaning of Kant’s terminology of
synthesis and apperception. The act of synthesis is the act of ‘seeing’ an
intentional object in one’s sensations. This is importantly different from the
atomistic model of synthesis that is, Dickerson would admit, most readilysuggested by many of Kant’s texts, as in his definition of ‘‘synthesis in the
most general sense’’ as ‘‘the action of putting different representations
together with each other [zu einander hinzutun] and comprehending their
manifoldness in one cognition.’’3 Synthesis is not accomplished through the
combination of independently intelligible pieces into a larger whole. This is
not to deny that the representational medium in which you see Smokey
contains a manifold composed of many different lines, variations in shading,
etc., and that it may be impossible to see Smokey unless your visualapparatus receives information from all of these lines. Dickerson’s claim is
only that your seeing Smokey is not properly understood as ‘‘the result of
‘adding together’’’ various smaller seeings (e.g., seeing his color, claws,
snout and ranger hat) (p. 125).
Now we must immediately note an obvious fact, which Dickerson does
not discuss. It may be the case that Dickerson is quite right to make holistic
claims about our seeing of certain objects in pictures, but it would seem that
there are seeings which are much more like combinations of ‘smaller’seeings. It may, for instance, be the case that my cognitive relation to a
depicted bear must be understood by starting with my seeing the whole bear
(color, texture, snout and all the rest). But perhaps if I next look at an
otherwise similar bear who is wearing a beret, my seeing of that bear will be
the result of something more like combining my seeing of a bear with my
seeing of a beret. Now, I have no idea whether this hypothesis accurately
describes our visual cognition, and my use of ‘‘something more like’’ as a
fudge should certainly give pause. What is important in the present context,however, is that Kant might recognize something like this distinction (i.e.,
between seeing a bear and seeing a bear-with-beret) in his account of
objective cognition. We will return to this point below. What is important in
the meantime is that on Dickerson’s reading, it is precisely a grasping of the
whole, prior to the grasp of any of the ‘parts’ (such as we find, I am
allowing, in the case of seeing a plain old bear) which Kant is trying to
express with his use of the term ‘‘synthesis’’.
How, then, does Dickerson propose to interpret apperception? In terms ofthe picture analogy, Dickerson would say that you perceive Smokey in the
picture by apperceiving the representational medium (the pencil marks, etc.)
(p. 87). Applying this to the cognizing subject we derive the claim that
apperception is that relation which a subject bears to her sensations by
virtue of which she cognizes objects ‘in’ them. These sensations are of course
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her own representations, but she is not relating to them or aware of them as
her own. Rather, she is relating to them as, e.g., a shovel or a bucket of
water (their intentional object). In short, ‘‘‘accompanying a representation
with the I think’ means ‘thinking about the object of that representation’’’
(p. 93). Readers even minimally familiar with the secondary literature on
Kant will recognize that this is a highly unusual take on apperception. Here
are two reasons.First, Dickerson’s account straightforwardly entails that it is impossible
to apperceive a representation without thinking of its object. This will be
thought by some to conflict with Kant’s account of analytic judgments, but
this depends on assumptions that are at least controversial.4 What will be
more widely regarded as problematic is the fact that Kant obviously allows
that subjects can think concepts without thereby involving any intuitions.
While it is open to Dickerson to deny that subjects are thereby apperceiving,
this would be difficult to square with textual evidence.5 So I assume thatDickerson would instead concede that all thinking of concepts is
apperceptive (and therefore refers to an object). But it is entirely unclear
what this could mean on Dickerson’s account in these limit cases. In the case
in which no intuition is involved there is no representation that is being
observed on the internal surface of my globe—surely we cannot conceive of
concepts in that way—and so there is nothing to apperceive as an object.6
Second, many interpreters will feel that Dickerson’s model does not
adequately reflect Kant’s understanding of pure apperception as (somevariety of) self-consciousness. Dickerson’s core position is that apperception
qualifies as self-consciousness only in the sense that it is a relation to one’s
own representations—though not, it is essential to repeat, as one’s own
representations. Apperception is self-awareness only in this attenuated
sense: ‘‘All perception involves apperception, or all awareness a certain sort
of self-awareness, just as seeing the depicted object [in a picture] involves
seeing the representational medium.’’7 Accordingly, Dickerson argues against
two of the most natural (and well-represented) rival interpretations,according to which apperception is Kant’s term for my ability either:
(A) to be aware that a representation is mine (or to ascribe it to
myself); or
(B) to make a first-person propositional-attitude judgment (‘I judge
that q’).
One of Dickerson’s worries about these more standard interpretations isthat they will make the TD (116, in particular) depend on the controversial
assumption that all finite cognizers have the capacity to do things that are
‘‘very sophisticated things’’ (p. 94). Dickerson cites with approval Guyer’s
objection that there very well could be subjects who judge about objects and
yet lack the abilities described in (A) and (B).8 Dickerson’s interpretation, as
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we have it here, can be couched in a simple motto: apperception is cognition,
not self-consciousness.
Now if Dickerson’s interpretation of apperception were as simple as it
first seems, then it would qualify as ‘‘at most…a variation on a Kantian
theme’’ (p. 10) rather than as exegetical history, for the weight of textual
evidence against such a reading is simply overwhelming. It is just not tenable
to claim that the only sense in which apperception constitutes or involves a
form of self-consciousness is that the apperceiving subject is entering into a
reflexive relation with its own representations (though not as its own
representations). Fortunately, though it provides the core of Dickerson’s
account, the foregoing has abstracted from one important claim. In order to
avoid confusion, let’s call the foregoing rationale for why Kant would be led
to associate apperception with self-consciousness the ownership rationale.9
Of course, it competes directly with (A) and (B), which provide
straightforward rationales of their own. Understanding Dickerson’s more
plausible interpretation of apperception will require isolating a further
rationale for that association. We will see, however, that shining light on this
rationale will have the effect of making it less clear whether Dickerson’s
interpretation of apperception really is fundamentally different from the
propositional-attitude interpretation (i.e., (B)) that he criticizes. Explaining
this further rationale will require that we return to the analogy with pictures.
Early on Dickerson draws attention to the familiar fact that a subject’s
accurate apprehension of all of the lines (etc.) in a representational medium
does not suffice to guarantee that she will see what is depicted in the picture.
This ‘‘conceptual gap’’ is especially clear in the case of ‘trick’ pictures or
pictures in which a face is hidden in the midst of many distracting lines, but
it holds in principle for all pictures (pp. 20–21). Dickerson’s preferred way
of expressing this point is to say that a representational medium, in order to
depict, must be a picture for me. Correlatively, he points to certain errors
that are apt to arise if we consider pictures from (what he refers to as) a
third-person perspective. If I consider your relation to a representational
medium without adopting your standpoint I may err in the intentional
object that I ascribe to you. More seriously, I may even fail to grasp that the
medium is a picture—unless, that is, I adopt a first-person standpoint
toward the medium and it also becomes a picture for me. Dickerson is,
however, most interested in the sort of general error that a theorist of
pictorial representation might make by adhering rigidly to a third-person
standpoint. Two types of error are possible, analogues of which we
encountered above in the guises of Descartes and Berkeley. It is natural, on
the one hand, for the third-person observer to understand the observing
subject as relating to two separate things (in a suitably broad sense of
‘things’): representational medium and depicted object (p. 18). This misses
their intrinsic connection. More deleterious, however, is the error of simply
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identifying representational medium and depicted object. This is the result
of failing to allow the medium to become a picture for oneself.
Now, turning back to our main topic, we find Dickerson using these
points about pictures to argue that a representation is not merely a
modification of the subject but ‘‘something more like the subject’s
perspective or point of view upon the object of the representation. To be
conscious of my representation as representing is thus for it to come tofunction as a point of view for me, or for it to become my view onto
something. In this way a representation as it were intimates the ‘point’ from
which that point of view is had…’’ (pp. 82–83). This would seem to give
Dickerson a new rationale for why Kant would have been led to associate
apperception and self-consciousness. I will call it the point of view rationale.
It is not ‘‘a dubious piece of introspective reportage’’ but rather the
‘‘conceptual point’’ that it is impossible for me to cognize my sensations as
an object without having some awareness that this cognition is from my
point of view (p. 82). At the same time, this is not to make the subject into
‘‘a further object within the field of the point of view’’ (p. 83). Nor has
Dickerson given back what he denied Kant in rejecting (A).10
While I think that Dickerson’s remarks on pictures can be made fruitful in
understanding Kant; and while I think that there is much to be said for the
point of view rationale, it seems to me that Dickerson’s attempt to support
that rationale by recourse to the picture analogy is confused. The basic point
is the following. It is consistent with Dickerson’s observations concerning‘seeing in’ a representational medium that I could see a particular set of
pencil markings as Smokey the Bear without having any clue that this is my
particular view on these markings. It might help to vivify this possibility if
we imagine a subject for whom seeing the markings as Smokey is
‘automatic’—a subject for whom, in other words, there could be no
question of whether the markings are Smokey or Bambi, or whether they are
nothing but meaningless scribbling (i.e., no intentional object is cognized). I
suspect that Dickerson has been misled because it is easy for human subjectsto vary their relation to (at least some) pictures so that at one moment they
see only some pencil markings and at the next moment they see an object in
those markings. His discussion also evokes the possibility that multiple
observers could become aware that they have differing cognitive relations to
the same representational medium (e.g., one sees nothing in it and the other
sees Smokey). Now, perhaps it would be impossible for these subjects not to
realize that their seeing an object in the medium is in each case ‘my view’ on
something which admits of alternative interpretations. After all, they areaware that other subjects (or themselves at different times) are interpreting
the medium differently. Perhaps awareness of the possibility (or actuality) of
conflicting interpretations—including the limit case of not seeing an
intentional object in the medium—brings with it awareness that one’s own
interpretation is a point of view. Or perhaps not (in which case, so much the
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worse for Dickerson’s case). In either case, however, there is no reason to
suppose that the former sort of awareness (let’s call it awareness of divergent
interpretations) belongs essentially to the experience of pictures. Thus, there
seems to be no reason to suppose that a subject lacking self-consciousness
would not be able to see Smokey in a picture. This is, in effect, to turn a
variation of Guyer’s objection against Dickerson: the ability to have ‘my
point of view’-thoughts is a relatively sophisticated ability, and nothing inDickerson’s thesis that cognizing objects is analogous to seeing pictures
shows that the former requires a capacity for self-consciousness.
Looking closer, we see that the problem is even more serious. It is not just
that the picture analogy fails to show that cognizers must have some
intimation that their cognitions are, in each case, from ‘my point of view’. If
anything, the analogy points in the opposite direction. This is because it is a
pillar of Dickerson’s reading of Kant that our spontaneous use of concepts,
which Dickerson understands as the imposition of content that is not given,can qualify as objective only if all finite judgers would judge identically
given identical inputs (sensations) (cf. p. 73). Dickerson suggests that we
think of Kant’s cognizers as applying a function (made up of the sum total
of the categories) to given arguments (sensations). This function cannot
derive its objective validity from the fact that it mirrors reality, for it does
not. Yet the resulting cognitions will nonetheless be objective so long as all
possible finite cognizers are applying the same function.11 Hence, Kantian
subjects are on Dickerson’s reading analogous to a group of subjects who,no matter what pencil markings (etc.) are laid before them, always agree as
to which objects they see in the representational medium. This is to say that
far from providing a reason to think that cognizing subjects will possess an
awareness of divergent interpretations, the picture analogy, when combined
with Dickerson’s understanding of Kantian objectivity, gives us reason to
expect that cognizers will precisely not be provided with the conditions
which might be expected to render unavoidable an awareness that their
cognitions reflect a point of view.12
What is emerging, I would suggest, is that Dickerson incorrectly locates
the point in Kant’s project to which the putative first-person nature of
seeing in a picture is relevant. There is a sense in which all acts of finite
cognition arise from a point of view, but that point of view is not my point
of view as opposed to yours. Instead, all acts of finite cognition together
reflect a single point of view. To the extent that finite cognition is analogous
to seeing in a picture, thinking about this analogy may help elucidate the
nature of Kant’s transcendental idealism.13 As Dickerson briefly suggests,reading Kant as a phenomenalist may be tantamount to holding,
incorrectly, that facts about Smokey the Bear are reducible to statements
about the spatial arrangements of pencil markings (p. 74). What could
benefit from more investigation—this is not a topic that Dickerson tries to
pursue here—is how this defense depends on conceiving of transcendental
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philosophy itself as adopting a first-person perspective as opposed to the
perspective of ontology.14 Dickerson quotes the following passage from the
A-edition Paralogisms: ‘‘it is obvious that if one wants to represent a
thinking being, one must put oneself in its place, and thus substitute one’s
own subject for the object one wants to consider’’.15 He then comments:
‘‘Since the Critique is itself a representation of a thinking being…, Kant’s
remark is an instruction for reading the book’’ (p. 18). Well put. Theimplications of this thought await development.
Let’s take a step back and review our progress. One of the primary
sources of the originality of Dickerson’s approach is that while most
commentators take apperception to be one aspect of a whole objective
cognition, Dickerson insists that apperception be identified with the whole
of cognition itself.16 Any comprehensive account of Kantian cognition must
present apperception as some sort of self-consciousness; otherwise it will not
be textually supportable. Dickerson attempts to show that the model ofobjective cognition that he has brought over from the picture analogy
provides a direct explanation for the self-conscious quality of apperception.
If this were successful—I have argued that it is not—then the interpreter
would not need to introduce a ‘notionally separate’ source for self-
consciousness. That is, on Dickerson’s model, any explanation of the self-
consciousness of objective cognition will simply amount to an account of
objective cognition itself. Beneath the surface of this account—and
supporting this approach to apperception—I detect what I will callrepresentation-positivism, i.e., the position that anything which makes a
contribution to an objective cognition must itself be a representation,
understood as an internal object along the lines that we see in Dickerson’s
treatment of sensations. On this model, anything of cognitive significance is
either a representation (internal object) or an entire cognition. While
Dickerson is able to show that some interpretative advantages accrue to
those willing to take Kant’s representationalism seriously, I believe that his
example demonstrates the perils of going beyond this and applyingrepresentation-positivism to Kant. This will become clearer in the next
section.
I believe that we ought to admit that apperception is for Kant notionally
separate from objective cognition. Consider an interpretation that connects
pure apperception closely to a subject’s consciousness of its own action.17
A controlling idea for this account would be that merely being in a state is
not an action. As such it is not something for which one could take
responsibility. However, subjects are able to relate to an identical contenteither as a state (in inner sense) or as something that they are thinking—
understood as an action that they are performing and therefore as an action
that they are responsible for performing correctly. What kind of action is
thinking? It is the action that aims ultimately at truth. So, once we observe
that for Kant the truth of a cognition is its correspondence to that
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cognition’s object, we can explain why the ‘grain size’ of judgment is
privileged and plays a special role in Kant’s account.18 Namely, the
fundamental building block of all judgment—‘I think of object x as F’ (this
claim will be explained in the next section)—is the ‘smallest’ unit which can
either correspond or fail to correspond to an object.
This account can also motivate the association of apperception with an
awareness that the resulting cognition is a point of view on the objects.Namely, it is plausible that in order for an act to count as an assertion the
subject must be aware that its negation might instead be the case.19 This is
not to say that the subject must hold that this assertion represents nothing
more than her own idiosyncratic ‘point of view’ about which judging action
is correct. Instead, the subject is taking a stand that this is the correct action
with the awareness that it is in principle possible that ‘x is not F’.
This model is neutral with respect to Dickerson’s claim that seeing in
pictures is a good model for objective cognition. However, it parts companywith him by admitting that there can be acts of apperception in which there
is no cognition of an object. As I said above, I think that this view is forced
upon us by Kant’s texts. Yet while intuitions are not involved in all
apperception, I will explain in the following section why I join Dickerson in
maintaining, not uncontroversially, that intuitions are an ineliminable
constituent in what is properly considered the central act of cognizing
subjects, judgment. Furthermore, Dickerson is correct to see that intuitions
are necessary to the central act of cognition if Kant is to have a satisfactoryaccount of the unity of judgment. This will be a result of the next section.
II. Apperception and the unity of objective cognitions
We have seen how Dickerson combines the claim that Kant espouses
representationalism with a set of observations concerning pictures to arrive
at a novel interpretation of Kant’s key notion of apperception. Let’s now
shift our attention to the other main piece of background theory thatDickerson deploys in his interpretation of the TD. It is the hypothesis that
Kant’s conception of apperception allows him to solve a problem, which is
variously termed ‘‘the representationalist equivalent of the semantic problem
of the ‘unity of the proposition’’’ and ‘‘the representationalist parallel of the
semantic question of what it is to understand a complex sign’’.20 This
problem—which I will henceforth simply call ‘‘The Problem’’—structures
Dickerson’s reading of 1116–19 of the TD. In simple terms, what Kant is
supposed to be doing in those sections is contrasting a picture of objectivecognition, as holistic apperception allows us to conceive of it, with a picture
of cognition as mere building up through the addition of simple,
independently intelligible representations, i.e., the picture that is typical of
empiricist models. Kant’s insight, we are told, is that the philosopher ‘‘must
take the holistic route of explaining the properties of the parts by appeal to
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the properties of the whole’’ (p. 119). Contrary to empiricist atomism, ‘‘the
starting point for my conscious experience is my consciousness…of the
complex unity as a whole’’ (p. 126).
There is, indeed, a striking parallel to be found between the difficulties
faced by representationalists when trying to account for the cognition of an
object and the difficulties faced by Bertrand Russell in The Principles of
Mathematics (1903), whose case Dickerson invokes. The problem that
Russell faced was to account for the difference between a proposition such
as ‘A is different from B’ and a mere list of its constituents, {A, difference,
B}. The reason the challenge took just this form—why Russell should have
expected that the proposition would be reducible to a list—is that he
recognized only one ontological category (‘‘terms’’), whose independence
and lack of intrinsic relatedness make them object-like.21 Given this
preference for ontological parsimony, Russell was unable to find anything
to account for the unity of a proposition. As Peter Hylton helpfully
describes Russell’s bind, ‘‘[his] attitude…was that any component of the
proposition would be—well, just one more component with the same status
as the others’’.22 Now, the problem that Frege faced in accounting for the
unity of the proposition is importantly different, for the simple reason that
he was willing to analyze propositions into two irreducibly different
constituents (concept and object), one of which is unsaturated or
uncompleted and as such intrinsically requires an object, which is saturated,
for its completion. Unlike Russell circa 1903, who could offer nothing even
approaching a solution to the problem of the unity of the proposition,
Frege’s analysis of propositions into concept and object at once makes
obvious progress.23 While that move does not eliminate all problems in
accounting for unity, the important points for our purposes are that the
problems Frege encounters are of a different sort, and they are of a sort that
Kant did not take himself to face.24
The difficulty with reading the TD as containing Kant’s solution to
Russell’s problem is that Kant, unlike Russell circa 1903, recognizes two
irreducibly different kinds of objective representations: intuitions and
concepts. To the degree that intuitions and concepts are such as to form a
unity when combined, Kant’s approach to The Problem will be more like
Frege’s than it is like Russell’s. Accordingly, though Locke and Hume faced
the representationalist parallel of Russell’s problem, Kant may not have. It
all depends on whether concepts, which are classed along with sensations
and intuitions as representations, are the same sort of ‘things’ as these
sensible representations.25 If they are, then it is a mistake to read Kant as
anticipating, in however rudimentary a fashion, Frege’s approach. While it
would be sanguine to deny that Kant sometimes treats concepts as if they
were just another representation upon which the subject can gaze, there are
also discussions in which Kant attempts to break free from the empiricists’
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approach to concepts. I will be working with material from this more radical
strain in what follows.
How, then, might concepts and intuitions be ‘made for each other’—and
Kant, to that degree at least, be anticipating Frege? Let’s suppose that a
judgment is unified by an act that acts upon intuitions and further that
concepts in some sense are such acts. Hylton made a similar suggestion in an
early, groundbreaking article, to which we read this reply:
…this does not solve the unity problem, for what representational
content does this special element—this ‘act’—contribute to the unified
whole? If that content is specifiable independently of the whole—as the
presupposition of representational atomism demands—then this
special element is simply a further representation (call it what you
will).26
Though I think that there is at least one other commitment that is
motivating Dickerson’s reaction here,27 it is clear that he is also treating
Kant as representation-positivist, for whom both intuitions and concepts,
whatever their other differences, must as representations both be ‘‘immediate
objects of awareness’’ with a certain representational content (p. 96).28 It is
difficult to make sense of how concepts function along these lines, and so
concepts more or less drop out of his account of cognition. It is a symptom
of this absence that Dickerson provides no account of how Kantunderstands analytic judgments or the mere thought of a concept
unconnected to intuition.
None of this shows, of course, that Kant has an entirely unproblematic
account of conceptual content! However, worries about its shortfalls should
not lead us to attribute to Kant a ‘blank holism’ consisting in the claim that
the grasp of the whole (whatever it is) is prior to the grasp of the parts
(whatever they are). Kant’s attempt to account for judgment by analyzing it
into concept and intuition does indeed bear some resemblance to Frege’sanalysis employing concept and object; and in both cases the specific
‘structure’ provided by these twin notions is…well…important. The
cognition-swallowing conception of apperception that Dickerson attributes
to Kant leaves him unable to do justice to this structure.
This is reflected in the striking fact that nothing in Dickerson’s arguments
provides a genuine explanation for why the holistic demand for the priority
of our grasp of the whole should be satisfied with a whole that is the ‘size’ of
a judgment—as opposed to alternative wholes such as that of a syllogism, atheory, or even an entire life’s experience. It might at first seem that the fact
that judgment is the proper grain size is explained by the fact that (i) it is
apperception that solves The Problem, together with the fact that (ii) the
apperception of a sensation just is the cognition of an object, and that (iii)
any such cognition is a judgment. The problem with this response (which I
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take to be Dickerson’s) is that apperception in its role in (i) has come apart
from apperception in its role in (ii)–(iii). As a consequence, Dickerson’s
de facto treatment of them as one and the same apperception is purely
stipulational. This will be clearer if we consider one of the arguments with
which Dickerson motivates his holistic approach.
The guiding question in this particular discussion is how we can
understand a complex representation whose content is vblue and redw.To demonstrate that an atomistic approach will not suffice, Dickerson asks
us to imagine a subject who has a representation of blue as well as a
representation of red.
There would be a point of view on blue (where this exhausts the field
of awareness) and a point of view on red (where this exhausts the field
of awareness), but there would be no unified point of view on, or
awareness of, blue and red together (p. 118).
The demonstration is completed with the claim that whatever else I might
try to add in order to unify these separate representations, it will be ‘‘simply
yet another separate point of view needing to be unified with the others’’
(p. 118). Clearly, this argument can be run identically if we replace blue and
red with two judgments or even with one’s experiences before and after the
age of 40—much as Dickerson’s points about seeing in a picture were made
so that they applied identically to seeing a bear and seeing a bear-with-beret.Yet since the TD most definitely does not demonstrate that one’s grasp of
one’s whole life is prior to one’s grasp of its pieces, something is amiss. I
would suggest that Dickerson is here running together the question of what
makes for a unified awareness (or point of view) in general (answered by (i))
with the question of what makes for a unified cognition of an object
(answered by (ii)–(iii)). I doubt that Kant attempts to solve the former
problem in any general way. The latter problem he attempts to solve, I
would argue, specifically at the level of the judgment.This brings me to a general claim regarding The Problem: Kant’s
approach to the problem of the unity of representations cannot be fully
understood without an understanding of his approach to the problem of the
unity of a judgment. We must be able to understand Kant’s grounds for
holding (iii) and should not accept otherwise unsupported assurances that
an objective cognition is equivalent to an act of judging. This is because
judging is not an empty term, to which Kant may attach whatever sense he
pleases. Rather, the Metaphysical Deduction has provided an a priori
account of what judgment is and the forms that it can take. That account
must fit with the account that he has given of the unity of representations in
the cognition of an object. At first glance the prospects look decidedly
unpromising. After all, Kant is working with a conception of judgment
that allows it to fit into traditional syllogistic logic. Yet it is well known that
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traditional logic is based upon a symmetric understanding of the role that
subject- and predicate-terms play in judgment. In addition, judgment first
becomes an issue for traditional logic when there is a question of combining
concepts, which are understood as independently intelligible atoms of
meaning. (Similarly, the syllogism only becomes an issue when there is a
question of combining independently intelligible judgments. Each level
presupposes the lower level as in itself intelligible raw material for its higher-level operation.) In contrast, if Kant is to earn the right to a Frege-style
solution, then concepts must be essentially unsaturated or uncompleted;
concepts must be such as to make a unity only when completed by an
intuition. Accordingly, judgment must be prior to both concept and
syllogism.
On this nest of questions Dickerson makes a single significant move,
contained in the suggestion that judgment for Kant ‘‘is primarily an
awareness of things as being thus and so, rather than an awareness that
things are thus and so’’ (p. 25). This suggestion preempts any uncomfor-
table questions regarding the unity of judgments per se, since it simply
identifies judgment with the representation of an object. I believe that
Dickerson is on the right track—judgments are for Kant essentially
cognitions of objects—but that this solution does not come so easily.
Dickerson connects the above suggestion with the supremely unconvincing
claim that Kant simply lacked ‘‘any clear understanding’’ of a judgment as
something that can be the content of a ‘that’ clause. Yet rather thansimply dispose of the issue by denying that Kant had any comprehension
of the difference between ‘Some F are G’, on the one hand, and the
cognition of an object as F&G, on the other hand, the challenge is to
assess whether Kant’s undeniable characterizations of judgment as the
former really are as threatening as they at first seem to the project of
finding unity in Kantian judgment. I will conclude with an all too brief
sketch of this challenge.
There is an obvious tension between the ways in which Kant conceives ofjudgment in discussions that fall within the purview of general logic, and the
ways in which he comes to describe judgment when he is trying to make
sense of our cognition of objects. As a paradigm case of the former, consider
the definition of judgment in the Jasche Logic:
(C) ‘‘A judgment is the representation of the unity of the consciousness
of various representations, or the representation of their relation
insofar as they constitute a concept.’’29
Because vtwo-sided polygonw is unimpeachable qua concept, it follows
that ‘two-sided polygons are two-sided’ qualifies as a judgment. Now
consider 119 of the TD, which opens with what I take to be a direct denial
that a definition such as we find in (C) is adequate:
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(D) ‘‘I have never been able to satisfy myself with the explanation that
the logicians give of a judgment as such: it is, they say, the
representation of a relation between two concepts.’’30
Kant then proceeds to explain that ‘‘a judgment is nothing other than the
way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception’’.31 The
ensuing explication of this remark makes clear that judgment cannot beunderstood apart from objects. A judgment asserts that the representations
in the subject- and predicate-terms are ‘‘combined in the object’’. This
discussion recalls the definition of judgment that Kant had published the
year before as ‘‘an action through which given representations first become
cognitions of an object’’.32
Uncovering a Kantian solution to the problem of the unity of judgment
would require making the case that this latter, object-centered conception of
judgment is the fundamental, non-derivative sense of judgment for Kant.More specifically, it would require that the two following claims be
substantiated:
(E) No more than one concept is required for judging; and
(F) No genuine judgment is possible without a corresponding
intuition.
Each of these claims is contradicted by straightforward textual evidence, yeta case can also be made for each. Part of the appeal of (F) is that its denial
seems to accord too trivial a role to intuition, as if intuitions were merely
‘additional evidence’ for the truth of an independently intelligible relation of
concepts. In embracing (F) one is instead according a semantic role to
intuition. Of course, (F) is contradicted by any presentation of judgment as
consisting in the mere relation of concepts as in (C). Yet Kant’s own
discussions in contexts such as 119 provide some grounds for discounting
these latter characterizations. A full defense of (F) would require workingout a theory of analytic judgments according to which they are something
other than judgments in the strict sense.33
(E) receives immediate support once we consider that Kant denies that
judgments such as ‘God is existent’ are properly understood as predicating
a concept of God. Kant analyzes the genuine logical form of such
judgments as the absolute positing of a single concept (vGodw). So if
existential judgments are genuine judgments, then there is something
misleading about Kant’s routine practice of speaking as if all judgmentsrequire at least two concepts. Indeed, when we look closely at the
Metaphysical Deduction’s canonical definition of a judgment as ‘‘the
mediate cognition of an object, hence the representation of a representa-
tion of it’’, we see that it contains no justification for the necessity of two
concepts in a judgment. This is because a concept that refers to an object
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via an intuition is already ‘‘the representation [5concept] of a representa-
tion [5intuition] of [an object]’’. Of course, there still remains much to be
explained, starting with why Kant nonetheless presents the normal form of
a categorical judgment as containing both subject- and predicate-terms.
Here a hint is given by Kant’s connecting of the categorical judgment-form
to the category of substance, once the former is conceived as something
more than just a way to relate concepts. Once this change is made—once I
take my judgment to be constrained by an object—it is no longer arbitrary
whether a concept belongs to the subject-term or the predicate-term.
Nonetheless, no particular concept belongs essentially to the subject-term
of such a categorical judgment. That is, any particular concept that is used
in the subject-term can be moved to the predicate-term (‘The stone is hard’
becomes, e.g., ‘The object is hard-stone-ish’). Now if we repeat this
operation, then in the limit case no intensional content will be expressed
by the ‘concept’ in the subject-term.34 All that will be left is the direct
referential connection provided by intuition. Substance will always remain
an I-know-not-what:
I cannot cognize something of a thing other than through judgments,
and predicates always underlie these…But that we cannot comprehend
the substantial, but rather merely the accidents, comes from this:
because we are much too short-sighted, and because the understanding
can think only through concepts, and concepts are nothing more than
predicates.35
The simplest building blocks of all objective cognition are judgments which
subsume an intuition under a single concept:
The categorical judgments are the basis of hypothetical and disjunctive
ones. Since we cannot cognize anything without judgments, and even
each concept is a judgment, the categorical judgments constitute an
essential condition of experience.36
It is clear, I hope, that I have been able to do no more than point in the
direction that a full Kantian account of the unity of judgment would have to
travel. It would be no small undertaking. It should further be borne in mind,
in all fairness to Dickerson, that it is probably not a project that can be
undertaken wholly within the confines of exegetical history. Kant provides
some surprising fertile materials to work with, but it is equally clear that he
did not fully appreciate the tensions inherent in his attempt both to retain
principles of traditional logic and to justify his claim that ‘‘we can…trace all
actions of the understanding back to judgments…’’—and not originally to
concepts.37
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Notes
1. ‘‘A variation on a Kantian theme’’ is Dickerson’s term (2). The rest of the quotes are
from Sleigh (1990:4), where the typical sort of interpretation that the TD receives is cited
as a paradigm case of unacknowledged failure: ‘‘lucid where Kant is lucid, degenerating
to mere paraphrase just where one most wants help’’.
2. On this point see the so-called Stufenleiter passage (KrV A320/B376). I will use the
translations of Kant’s works in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant
and cite according to the following abbreviations: KrV 5 Critique of Pure Reason
(according to the Guyer-Wood 1998 translation); MAN 5 Metaphysical Foundations of
Natural Science (Friedman 2002 translation, as contained in Theoretical Philosophy after
1781); Jasche Logic (Young 1992 translation, as contained in Lectures on Logic); and
individual metaphysics by name (Ameriks-Naragon 1997 translation, as contained in
Lectures on Metaphysics). Reference will be made, where appropriate, to the standard
Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften (Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 1902ff) according to the pattern ‘Ak. 29: 276.’
3. KrV A77/B103.
4. It conflicts with Kant’s account of analytic judgments if they do not (or, perhaps, need
not) refer to objects. I argue for the former, more stringent claim in Rosenkoetter
(Forthcoming 1).
5. Cf., e.g., KrV A123; B131 ft. in connection with 116; and Metaphysik Mrongovius 29:
889.
6. Surprisingly, Dickerson does not even come close to addressing this nest of issues, so the
reader is left to guess how he might try to make sense of (e.g.) the thinking of a concept
for which no intuition can be available (i.e., a real-impossibility). Perhaps, in line with a
passage from Kant’s letter to Beck (July 3, 1792, Ak. 11: 347), the concept could be
considered as ‘‘subjectively given’’ with respect to this particular act of thought (because
its constituent concepts [Merkmale] have been made available by prior acts of that
subject’s objective cognition). Then, though the concept could not be considered a
modification of sensibility (i.e., the result of direct causal impingement), it could be
treated as a modification of our capacity for representation [Vorstellungsvermogen] and
Dickerson could hold that in apperceiving it we refer it to an object5x. This might be a
promising line for Dickerson to take, though it should be noted that the ‘seeing in’-
analogy plays no role in cases such as these in which there is no intuition to explain the
referring of the representation to an object.
7. KR&O 89, italics added.
8. Guyer (1987:141).
9. The clearest instance of Dickerson supplying the ownership rationale for Kant’s
association of apperception and self-consciousness is to be found in the way he contrasts
his position with Andrew Brook’s, which he cites as the interpretation of apperception that
is closest to the one he is offering. Brook writes that apperception is the ‘‘process of
forming objects of awareness’’ (1994:37). The obvious difference between their readings is
that Brook finds Kant’s association of apperception and self-consciousness to be
unmotivated and misleading. Dickerson diagnoses the source of (what he regards as)
Brook’s error as follows: ‘‘Brook fails to take Kant’s representationalism seriously, and
treats him as being some sort of direct realist. In other words, Brook thinks that for Kant
representations are states of awareness, rather than the immediate objects of awareness.
Brook is thus not in a position to see that for Kant all cognition must involve the reflexive
grasp of our own representations, and thus self-awareness of a special sort—namely,
apperception’’ (KR&O 96, final italics added; cf. also 89, quoted above, and 97).
10. While the ownership rationale cannot be supported by exclusive attention to pictures—
since the representational medium of a picture is in general something other than
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oneself—Dickerson tries to provide something like a free-standing argument for the
point of view rationale in the case of pictures, only then exporting that argument to the
case of Kantian objective cognition. Unfortunately, Dickerson does not clearly
distinguish the point of view rationale from the ownership rationale. I make a point
of separating them not just because they are different, but also because, as I will now
argue, Dickerson’s case for ascribing an awareness of point of view to Kantian subjects
is flawed. This leaves him with only the ownership rationale.
11. I lack the space to discuss this central pillar of Dickerson’s background theory. Note
that it is a reductive account of objectivity in the sense that agreement between all
possible finite subjects is by itself sufficient for objectivity. This raises all sorts of
interesting questions, including why then the principle of non-contradiction and
judgments of taste are not objective in the same sense. I argue in passing against a
reductive account of objectivity in Rosenkoetter (Forthcoming 3), and also provide an
alternative to Dickerson’s associated interpretation of Kant’s objection to Berkeleyan
idealism (cf. p. 59).
12. It might be argued, alternatively, that apperceiving subjects will be aware that their
cognitions are a point of view on objects because they can switch back and forth between
awareness of their sensations as sensations and cognizing those same sensations as
objects. Whatever the merits of this suggestion, it is most definitely not available to
Dickerson, for a pervasive element of KR&O is its identification of consciousness (or
awareness) with cognition (or awareness of an object). This is also, it must be said, one of
its more unsatisfactory features, for a clear argument for the equivalence is never
provided. Indeed, the reader who is new to Kant could read the book attentively without
having any clue that there is a real question as to whether (objective) ‘‘cognition’’ is an
accurate gloss for ‘‘conscious thought’’ (KR&O 90). Inexplicably, Dickerson never even
cites the locus classicus for the division of the genus Vorstellung, the Stufenleiter-passage
(KrV A320/B376), in connection with this issue. This is all the more damaging because
according to that text there are representations that are perceptions (‘‘representations
with consciousness’’) and yet are not ‘‘objective perception[s]’’ (cognitions), namely:
sensations.
13. It is a great virtue of Dickerson’s model that it can explain nicely Kant’s penchant for
presenting transcendental idealism as the doctrine that objects are ‘‘mere representa-
tions’’ (e.g., A369). We can read Kant as really meaning that objects are what we cognize
in our representations (in our sensations). To the extent that this strategy can succeed
with a number of such passages, this will be an interpretative coup, since they seem at
first to point univocally toward phenomenalism.
14. The distinction between first-person and third-person viewpoints shows up as the
distinction between: (i) the single point of view of all finite subjects, for whom a
particular sensation is object O; and (ii) a point of view from which that sensation is
merely a modification of the subject and the function which maps it to O is merely one
function among many possible functions, none of which has intrinsic claim to objective
validity. The objects in view from (i) are phenomena. To attempt to cognize from (ii) is
to judge about ‘‘things [Dinge] in general’’. This is the project which bears ‘‘the proud
name of an ‘ontology’’’ (KrV A247/B303).
15. KrV A354.
16. While this approach brings with, as Dickerson is able to show, some advantages in the
interpretation of 1116–20, it coheres far less well with 115. This is made all the more
important, I would argue, because in 115 Kant seems to be telling us why he is
investigating apperception in those later sections. It frames the sections which
Dickerson interprets. 115 is, as its title indicates, ‘‘on the possibility of combination
[Verbindung] in general’’. We learn that ‘‘combination is the representation of the
synthetic unity of the manifold’’. As such, understanding the possibility of combination
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will require understanding: the manifold, its synthesis, and its unity. Kant focuses on the
latter: ‘‘The representation of this unity cannot…arise from the combination; rather, by
being added to the representation of the manifold, it first makes the concept of
combination possible.’’ The unity in question is (we learn first) not the category of unity
but (as we learn in 116) original apperception. Now, the purpose of this recitation is to
point out that Kant seems to find it helpful (and quite possibly necessary) that the three
elements of combination be distinguished. On Dickerson’s reading, however, combina-
tion, synthesis, and this original unity (apperception) are indistinguishable.
17. Cf. esp. KrV A546/B574.
18. Cf. KrV A68f/B93f.
19. To relate this point to the terms of the above discussion: whereas there is no reason to
think that awareness of divergent interpretations belongs essentially to the ability to see
something in a picture, it is plausible that a subject is not asserting if she does not realize
that what she is judging true might be false.
20. KR&O, 107 and 1 (italics added in the former and elided in the latter).
21. The following discussion draws on both Hylton (1984) and Linsky (1988).
22. Hylton (1984:382).
23. Dickerson quotes relevant texts from both Russell and Frege, but does not address the
two versions of the problem separately.
24. What is important if we are engaged in exegetical history is that there is no reason to
think that Kant was bothered by the representationalist parallel of the problems that
bedevil Frege’s concept-object approach to propositional unity. What are those
problems? The immediate cost of Frege’s progress over Russell—Russell is unwilling
to bear this cost and demurs—is that Frege must admit that we cannot judge about
functions, for doing so would require that we be able to convert them to objects, and if
that is possible then we find ourselves facing the question that Russell could not answer.
What’s more, even if one is willing to accept this consequence, further problems arise
when we try to use the metaphors of completeness and incompleteness to explain why a
first-level concept and a second-level function can together form a unified proposition.
All that can be said is that the latter is being completed (or saturated) by an incomplete
(unsaturated) thing. As Linsky remarks, ‘‘It is as though putting one unsaturated sponge
with another would produce a saturated pair of sponges. The metaphors…cast no light
whatever’’ on this second-level case (1988: 265). Now, two counterexamples to my claim
that Kant did not confront these problems suggest themselves: existential judgments and
analytic judgments. It could be argued, namely, that Kant understood analytic
judgments as judgments about concepts. I argue against this reading in Rosenkoetter
(Forthcoming 1). Second, existential judgments would indeed require a second-level
concept if Kant had handled existential judgments in Frege’s manner as the predication
of the second-level property of a first-level concept. I argue that Kant has a different
analysis of existential judgments—an analysis which avoids second-level concepts
altogether—in Rosenkoetter (Forthcoming 2).
25. It would be superficial to pretend that the Stufenleiter classification of concepts as
representations answers this question. This is not primarily because Kant may be using
terminology loosely. The deeper issue is that Kant, in contrast to Russell and Frege,
understands all of the entities at issue (concepts, intuitions, and that which results from
their unification) as belonging to the subject rather than to an independent ontological
realm. Consequently, they have at least that subjectivity in common, and the question of
their difference is less stark than is the parallel issue between Frege and Russell, which
Linsky describes in terms that are felicitous for our discussion: ‘‘For Frege, there is no
concept corresponding to Russell’s ‘terms’—there is no single widest word in the
philosophical vocabulary…There is nothing which both functions and objects are’’
(1988: 247). Note that the very classification of concepts and intuitions as both
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belonging to the genus of representation is plausibly a classification from (what was
above termed) a third-person standpoint, the standpoint of ontology. Both are
modifications of the subject as opposed to something independent of the subject. It is
worth considering whether from the standpoint of first-person theory (i.e., transcen-
dental philosophy) there is anything which both concepts and intuitions are.
26. KR&O 143, italics added. As far as I can see, Hylton is making no hidden
‘‘presupposition of representational atomism’’, i.e., an assumption in his text that is
not captured in my gloss of that general position. Consequently, it is difficult to read this
as anything other than the stubborn demand a la Russell that no more than a single
category be recognized.
27. Namely, Dickerson is failing to distinguish two varieties of holism. Hylton’s Kant can
subscribe to a weak variety by holding that a subject cannot understand G, and cannot
use G in analytic judgments, if it has not first cognized an object using G or its
constituent concepts, an act which requires intuition. In this weak sense the contribution
of a concept G to an objective cognition is indeed ‘‘not specifiable independently of the
whole’’. Yet it seems clear that Kant took this bow towards holism to be entirely
consistent with claiming that the contents of these acts (concepts) are in some sense
specifiable independently of particular objective cognitions. This raises interesting
philosophical issues, but I cannot assess here how problematic his account of conceptual
content is.
28. One is reminded that Russell circa 1903 ‘‘thought of analysis as almost analogous to
physical decomposition’’ (Hylton 1984: 376). Dickerson’s attribution of representation-
alism to Kant has the effect of turning sensations into objects from the third-person
perspective of ontology. Dickerson defends his Kant against the charge of reifying
representations by arguing that since sensations are not entities ‘‘that could exist
independently of the mind’’ they are not ‘‘object[s] per se’’ (KR&O 8). The category of
object per se is wider than this.
29. Jasche Logik 117, at p. 597 in the Young translation.
30. KrV B140.
31. KrV B141; following quote, B142.
32. MAN Ak. 475f, at p. 190 in the Friedman translation.
33. I attempt this in Rosenkoetter (Forthcoming 1). See also David Bell’s brief comments on
‘‘so-called analytic judgments’’ in (2001: 9).
34. We could instead say that the remaining intensional content is nothing more than the a
priori intensional content provided by the concept of substance. That just shows that the
categories are not like other, non-formal concepts. They cannot be understood by
grasping an intensional content that is separable from this formal feature of judgments.
On the current discussion, see KrV A147/B186f and MAN Ak. 475, at p. 189 in the
Friedman translation.
35. Metaphysik L2 Ak. 28: 563, at p. 328 in the Ameriks-Naragon translation.
36. Metaphysik Mrongovius, Ak. 29: 770, at p. 178 in the Ameriks-Naragon translation,
italics added.
37. KrV A69/B94.
References
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Supplementary Volume LXXV: pp. 1–16.
Brook, Andrew. (1994) Kant and the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Frege, Gottlob. (1969) Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege P. Geach,
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Guyer, Paul. (1987) Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University
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