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Page 1: Kant on Apperception and the Unity of Judgment∗

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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

Bell, David. (2001) ‘‘Some Kantian thoughts on propositional unity’’ Aristotelian Society

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,

et al., (Eds) (Oxford: Blackwell).

488 T. Rosenkoetter

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Guyer, Paul. (1987) Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press).

Hylton, Peter. (1984) ‘‘The Nature of the Proposition and the Revolt against Idealism’’ in

R. Rorty , et al., (Eds) Philosophy in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Linsky, Leonard. (1988) ‘‘Terms and propositions in Russell’s Principles of Mathematics’’

Journal of the History of Philosophy XXVI: pp. 621–642.

Rosenkoetter, Timothy. (Forthcoming 1) ‘‘A Puzzle for Kant’s Theory of Analytic Judgement’’.

Rosenkoetter, Timothy. (Forthcoming 2) ‘‘On Kant’s alleged anticipation of Frege’s account of

existence as a second-level concept’’.

Rosenkoetter, Timothy. (Forthcoming 3) ‘‘Truth criteria and the very project of a

transcendental logic.’’.

Russell, Bertrand. (1903) The Principles of Mathematics (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press).

Sleigh, R. C., Jr. (1990) Leibniz and Arnauld: a Commentary on Their Correspondence (New

Haven: Yale University Press).

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