kant’s non-conceptualism, rogue objects, and the gap in the b deduction

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Kant’s Non-Conceptualism,Rogue Objects, and The Gap inthe B DeductionRobert Hanna aa University of Colorado at Boulder, USA

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To cite this article: Robert Hanna (2011): Kant’s Non-Conceptualism, Rogue Objects,and The Gap in the B Deduction, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 19:3,399-415

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Kant’s Non-Conceptualism, RogueObjects, and The Gapin the B Deduction

Robert Hanna

Abstract

This paper is about the nature of the relationship between (1) the doctrineof Non-Conceptualism about mental content, (2) Kant’s TranscendentalIdealism, and (3) the Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts ofthe Understanding, or Categories, in the B (1787) edition of the Critiqueof Pure Reason, i.e., the B Deduction. Correspondingly, the main thesis ofthe paper is this: (1) and (2) yield serious problems for (3), yet, in explor-ing these two serious problems for the B Deduction, we also discover somedeeply important and perhaps surprising philosophical facts about Kant’stheory of cognition and his metaphysics.

Keywords: Kant; non-conceptualism; transcendental idealism;transcendental deduction; freedom

Thus I had to deny scientific knowledge (Wissen) in order to makeroom for moral belief (Glauben). (CPR Bxxx; see also A828/B856)

I. Kant1

Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, daruber muss man schweigen.

L. Wittgenstein2

For objects, McDowell’s claim that the conceptual is unboundedamounts to the claim that any object can be thought of. Likewise forthe sort of thing that can be the case: the claim is, for example, thatwhenever an object has a property, it can be thought, of the objectand the property, that the former has the latter. . . . McDowell’sargument in any case seems to require the premise that everything(object, property, relation, state of affairs . . .) is thinkable. Thatpremise is highly contentious. What reason have we to assume thatreality does not contain elusive objects, incapable in principle of

International Journal of Philosophical Studies Vol. 19(3), 399–415

International Journal of Philosophical StudiesISSN 0967–2559 print 1466–4542 online � 2011 Taylor & Francis

http://www.informaworld.comDOI: 10.1080/09672559.2011.595188

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being individually thought of? . . . Although elusive objects belong tothe very same ontological category of objects as those we can singleout, their possibility still undermines McDowell’s claim that wecannot make “interesting sense” of the idea of something outside theconceptual realm . . . We do not know whether there are actuallyelusive objects. What would motivate the claim that there are none,if not some form of idealism very far from McDowell’s intentions?We should adopt no conception of philosophy that on methodologi-cal grounds excludes elusive objects.

T. Williamson3

I. Introduction

This paper is about the nature of the relationship between

(1) the doctrine of Non-Conceptualism about mental content,(2) Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, and

(3) the Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Under-standing, or Categories, in the B (1787) edition of the Critique ofPure Reason, i.e., the B Deduction.

Correspondingly, the main thesis of the paper is this: (1) and (2) yield seri-ous problems for (3), yet, in exploring these two serious problems for the BDeduction, we also discover some deeply important and perhaps surprisingphilosophical facts about Kant’s theory of cognition and his metaphysics.

II. Non-Conceptualism, Transcendental Idealism, and the B Deduction

The thesis of Non-Conceptualism about mental content says that not allmental contents in the intentional or representational acts or states ofconscious animals are strictly determined by their conceptual capacities,and that at least some mental contents are strictly determined by theirnon-conceptual capacities.4 Non-Conceptualism is sometimes, but notalways, combined with the further thesis that non-conceptual capacitiesand contents can be shared by rational human animals, non-rationalhuman animals (and in particular, infants), and non-human animalsalike. But in any case, Non-Conceptualism is directly opposed to the the-sis of Conceptualism about mental content, which says that all mentalcontents are strictly determined by conscious animals’ conceptual capaci-ties.5 Conceptualism is also sometimes, but not always, combined withthe further thesis that the psychological acts or states of infants and non-human minded animals lack mental content.

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES

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Now in a nutshell, Non-Conceptualism says that our cognitive accessto the targets of our intentionality is neither always nor necessarily medi-ated by concepts, and furthermore that our cognitive access to the tar-gets of our intentionality is sometimes wholly unmediated by concepts;and Conceptualism says that our cognitive access to the targets of ourintentionality is always and necessarily mediated by concepts. Here,then, is the fundamental philosophical issue: can we and do we some-times cognitively encounter things directly and pre-discursively (Non-Conceptualism), or must we always cognitively encounter them onlywithin the framework of discursive rationality (Conceptualism)?

Kant’s Transcendental Idealism is the two-part thesis that says that

(1) all the actual and possible objects of human experience are noth-ing but appearances or phenomena, not things-in-themselves ornoumena (CPR A369), and

(2) all appearances necessarily conform to the innate non-empiricalstructures of the human mind in the two-part sense that

(3) necessarily, if the human mind went out of existence, then all theappearances would also go out of existence, and

(4) the essential structures of appearances are type-identical to theinnate non-empirical structures of the human mind (CPR Bxvi,A11/B25, A92/B125-6; B125-6; Prol 4: 373 n.).

So if Transcendental Idealism is true, then all the actual and possibleobjects of human experience necessarily conform to the innate non-empirical structures of the human mind.

Now the Pure Concepts of the Understanding, or Categories, are aspecies of innate non-empirical structures of the human mind. More spe-cifically, the Categories are second-order concepts, derived from puregeneral logic, that partially determine the objective application of everyfirst-order or empirical concept (CPR A76-83/B102-13). The main thesisof the B Deduction is this: ‘the categories are conditions of the possibil-ity of experience, and thus are also valid a priori of all objects of experi-ence’ (CPR B161), i.e.

TD1: The Categories are necessary a priori conditions of the possi-bility of all objects of experience.

Kant argues for TD1 by arguing that the Categories are necessary a pri-ori conditions of the possibility of the experience of objects. Obviously,then, he can get to the conclusion that he wants only if the experience ofobjects is identical to the objects of experience, and this in turn is true

KANT’S NON-CONCEPTUALISM AND THE GAP

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only if Transcendental Idealism is true. Kant makes this point veryclearly in his philosophical correspondence:

You put the matter quite precisely when you say “The content(Innbegriff) of a representation is itself the object; and the activityof the mind whereby the content of a representation is representedis what is meant by ‘referring to the object’.” (PC 11: 314)

Beatrice Longuenesse aptly dubs this Kantian thesis ‘the internalization torepresentation of the object of representation’.6 So the B Deduction requiresthe truth of Transcendental Idealism, and more specifically it requires theinternalization to representation of the object of representation.

But Transcendental Idealism is a highly controversial thesis, to saythe least, and indeed I myself think that unqualified Transcendental Ide-alism is false.7 So that is one serious problem about the B Deduction.This problem can be avoided, however, if we remain officially agnosticabout Transcendental Idealism and then weaken the main thesis of theB Deduction as follows:

TD2: The Categories are necessary a priori conditions of the possi-bility of the experience of all objects.

For the purposes of this paper, I want to focus mainly on anotherserious problem about the B Deduction, which I call The Gap in the BDeduction. The Gap in the B Deduction is that the B Deduction issound only if Conceptualism is true, but Conceptualism is arguably falseand Kant himself is a non-conceptualist. If Kant is a non-conceptualistand Kant’s Non-Conceptualism is true, then there are actual or possible‘rogue objects’ of human experience – or what Timothy Williamson calls‘elusive objects’ – that either contingently or necessarily do not fallunder any concepts whatsoever, including the Categories. So if Kant’sNon-Conceptualism is true, then both TD1 and TD2 are false.

The preceding paragraph might seem completely bizarre to you. This isbecause Kant is almost universally regarded as the founding father of Con-ceptualism and the nemesis of Non-Conceptualism. As York Gunther puts it:

In his slogan, “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions with-out concepts are blind,” Kant sums up the doctrine of conceptual-ism.8

But as I have argued in several recent papers and books, not only doesthis famous slogan not mean what Conceptualists think it means; on thecontrary, Kant is most accurately regarded as not only the founder of


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Conceptualism but also and perhaps even more importantly as the foun-der of Non-Conceptualism alike.9 In the next section, I will briefly recapthat argument.

III. The Togetherness Principle and Kant’s Non-Conceptualism

According to Kant, judgements are complex conscious cognitions that

(1) refer to objects either directly (via intuitions) or indirectly (viaconcepts),

(2) include concepts that are predicated either of those objects or ofother constituent concepts,

(3) exemplify pure logical concepts and enter into inferences accord-ing to pure logical laws,

(4) essentially involve both the following of rules and the applicationof rules to the objects picked out by intuitions,

(5) express true or false propositions,(6) mediate the formation of beliefs, and(7) are unified and self-conscious.

The three leading features of this account are, first, Kant’s taking thecapacity for judgement to be the central cognitive faculty of the humanmind, in the sense that judgement, alone among our various cognitiveachievements, is the joint product of all of the other cognitive facultiesoperating coherently and systematically together under a single higher-order unity of rational self-consciousness (The Centrality Thesis); second,Kant’s insistence on the priority of the propositional content of a judge-ment over its basic cognitive-semantic constituents (i.e. intuitions andconcepts), over the inferential roles of judgements, over the rule-likecharacter of the judgement, over the conscious psychological states inwhich propositions are grasped as well as the non-self-conscious psycho-logical processes in which propositions are synthetically generated, andover beliefs in those propositions (The Priority-of-the-Proposition The-sis); and third, Kant’s background metaphysical doctrine to the effectthat judgements are empirically meaningful (‘objectively valid’) and true(‘objectively real’) if and only if Transcendental Idealism is correct (TheTranscendental Idealism Thesis).10

One of the best known and most widely quoted texts of the Critiqueof Pure Reason is this pithy slogan: ‘thoughts without content are empty,intuitions without concepts are blind’ (CPR A51/B76). This sloganencapsulates what I call The Togetherness Principle. The ‘togetherness’here is the necessary cognitive complementarity and semantic interde-pendence of intuitions and concepts:


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Intuition and concepts . . . constitute the elements of all our cogni-tion, so that neither concepts without intuition corresponding tothem in some way nor intuition without concepts can yield a cogni-tion.

Thoughts without [intensional] content (Inhalt) are empty (leer),intuitions without concepts are blind (blind). It is, therefore, just asnecessary to make the mind’s concepts sensible – that is, to add anobject to them in intuition – as to make our intuitions understand-able – that is, to bring them under concepts. These two powers, orcapacities, cannot exchange their functions. The understanding canintuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only from their unifi-cation can cognition arise. (CPR A50-51/B74-6)

What does The Togetherness Principle mean? The famous texts justquoted have led many readers and interpreters of Kant – e.g., WilfridSellars and John McDowell11 – to deny the cognitive and semantic inde-pendence of intuitions: intuitions without concepts either simply do notexist or else are wholly meaningless (i.e., neither objectively valid norrationally intelligible) even if they do exist. And this denial appears tobe supported by at least one other text:

The understanding cognizes everything only through concepts; con-sequently, however far it goes in its divisions [of lower concepts] itnever cognizes through mere intuition but always yet again throughlower concepts. (A656/B684)

But even so, this cannot be a correct interpretation of the famous textsat A50-1/B74-6, just because of what Kant says in these texts:

Objects can indeed appear to us without necessarily having to berelated to functions of the understanding. (CPR A89/B122, emphasisadded)

Appearances can certainly be given in intuition without functionsof the understanding. (CPR A90/B122, emphasis added)

Appearances might very well be so constituted that the understand-ing would not find them in accordance with the conditions of itsunity. . . . [and] in the series of appearances nothing would presentitself that would yield a rule of synthesis and so correspond to theconcept of cause and effect, so that this concept would be entirelyempty, null, and meaningless. Appearances would none the less


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present objects to our intuition, since intuition by no means requiresthe functions of thought. (CPR A90-1/B122-3, emphasis added)

That representation which can be given prior to all thinking iscalled intuition. (CPR B132)

The manifold for intuition must already be given prior to the syn-thesis of the understanding and independently from it. (CPR B145,emphasis added)

Concept differs from intuition by virtue of the fact that all intuitionis singular. He who sees his first tree does not know what it is thathe sees. (VL 24: 905)

In other words, according to these six texts, intuitions are non-conceptualcognitions, that is, cognitions that both exist and are objectively validwithout requiring concepts. But now we are in a dilemma. How then canthese two apparently contradictory sets of texts be reconciled?

The answer is that what Kant is actually saying in the famous textsat A50-51/B74-76 is that intuitions and concepts are cognitively comple-mentary and semantically interdependent for the specific purpose ofconstituting objectively valid judgements. This in turn correspondsdirectly to a special, narrower sense of ‘cognition’ that Kant highlightsin the B edition of the first Critique, which means the same as ‘objec-tively valid judgment’ (Bxxvi, Bxxvi n.). But from this it does not fol-low that there cannot be ‘empty’ concepts or ‘blind’ intuitions outsidethe special context of objectively valid judgements. ‘Empty concept’ forKant does not mean either ‘bogus concept’ or ‘wholly meaningless con-cept’: rather it means ‘concept that is not objectively valid’, and forKant there can be very different sorts of concepts that are not objec-tively valid, including rationally intelligible concepts of noumenalobjects or noumenal subjects. Similarly, ‘blind intuition’ for Kant doesnot mean either ‘bogus intuition’ or ‘wholly meaningless intuition’:rather it means ‘empirically meaningful non-conceptual intuition’.Therefore, despite its being true for Kant, according to The Together-ness Principle, that intuitions and concepts must be combined with oneanother in order to generate objectively valid judgements, neverthelessintuitions can also occur independently of concepts and still remainobjectively valid. And in particular, to the extent that intuitions arecognitively and semantically independent of concepts, and also objec-tively valid, they contain non-conceptual objective representational men-tal contents. So Kant’s Togetherness Principle is also perfectlyconsistent with his Non-Conceptualism.


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IV. The B Deduction Again

Here is a brief reconstruction of the B Deduction (CPR B129-169):

(1) Empirical judgements, or judgements of experience, are directedtowards objects of experience.

(2) Given Transcendental Idealism, the logical forms implicit in thepropositional contents of judgements of experience are necessarilymirrored in the representational contents of conscious perceptionsin order to constitute the cognition of objects of experience.

(3) These logical forms are Pure Concepts of the Understanding orCategories (i.e., second-order non-empirical concepts insofar asthey specifically apply to objects) that are originally derived frompure general logic, when construed as an exhaustive theory of log-ico-syntactic and logico-semantic forms of and in propositionalcontents.

(4) Since the spatiotemporal forms of intuition that necessarily governall conscious perceptions, and also the Categories that govern allpropositional contents of judgements, alike fall under the facultyof apperception, or rational self-consciousness, when apperceptionis directly combined with the faculty of the imagination and its fig-ural synthesis or synthesis speciosa (the combination of whichKant calls ‘the original synthetic unity of apperception’), and sinceTranscendental Idealism is true, it follows that the objectivity ofany object of experience is strictly determined by the forms ofintuition plus the Categories that are alike implicit in judgementsof experience about those objects and also literally imposed uponthose objects of experience by the faculties of the judging subjectin acts of judgement.

(5) Therefore the Categories necessarily apply to all and only theobjects of experience, and are objectively valid.

(6) Therefore the Categories are necessary a priori conditions of thepossibility of all objects of experience. (TD1)

This is certainly not the place to engage in a critical discussion of themany different possible interpretations of the B Deduction; nor is it theplace to relate the B Deduction to the A Deduction. For our purposesright now, the crucial points to notice are three.

First, as many commentators have noted, there is an intimate andindeed necessary connection between Kant’s theory of judgement andthe B Deduction. Without The Centrality Thesis and The Priority-of-the-Proposition Thesis, the argument could not even be valid, muchless sound. Kant’s conception of the objectivity of objects of experience,


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and the role that the categories play in determining this objectivity, bothdepend heavily on the assumption that all human cognition is centrallyjudgemental, and also on the further assumption that judgemental cogni-tion is essentially propositional.

Second, as many commentators have also noted, the conclusion ofthe B Deduction depends intimately and again indeed necessarily onKant’s conception of the role of the faculty of apperception or rationalself-consciousness in the nature of the judgement. Without Kant’s doc-trine that the unity of the proposition is strictly determined by thehigher-order self-representations introduced by the faculty of appercep-tion, it could not be the case that the pure concepts of the understand-ing, as logical forms, would necessarily carry over into the objects ofexperience, as constituting their objective structure.

Third and finally, as fewer commentators have noticed,12 the prob-lematic linchpin of the whole argument is in fact the antecedent of step(4), which asserts that the unity of the spatiotemporal forms of intuitionand the unity of propositional content in judgements is identically thesame unity, namely the unity literally imposed by the faculty of rationalself-consciousness in accordance with the categories, when it is directlycombined with the faculty of imagination and its figural synthesis. Inother words, according to Kant the spatiotemporal intuitional unity ofthe content of our conscious perceptual representations is necessarilyalso a fully logico-conceptual unity. If this claim were not true, then theunity of conscious perceptions of objects in space and time might be dis-tinct from the unity of judgements, and, assuming the truth of Transcen-dental Idealism, even though the categories necessarily applies to allobjects of conceptual and judgemental human experience, there mightthen still be some spatiotemporal objects of conscious perception towhich the categories either do not necessarily apply or necessarily do notapply: that is, there might be some ‘rogue objects’ of human intuitionalexperience that are not or cannot also be objects of human conceptualand judgemental experience, in the metaphysically robust sense that allthose objects of human intuitional experience turn out to be causallydeviant and nomologically ill-behaved, thereby falling outside the Cate-gories.

Interestingly and highly relevantly, Williamson has recently rediscov-ered the possibility of rogue objects, under the label of ‘elusive objects’,in his critique of John McDowell’s well known radically Conceptualistinterpretation of Kant’s philosophy of cognition and metaphysics inMind and World. Indeed, in this connection, we need only replace everyoccurrence of ‘McDowell’ with a corresponding occurrence of ‘Kant’ inthe text I quoted in the third epigraph of this paper, in order to makeexactly the same point I am making about the B Deduction:


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For objects, [Kant’s] claim that the conceptual is unboundedamounts to the claim that any object can be thought of. Likewisefor the sort of thing that can be the case: the claim is, for example,that whenever an object has a property, it can be thought, of theobject and the property, that the former has the latter. . .. [Kant’s]argument in any case seems to require the premise that everything(object, property, relation, state of affairs . . .) is thinkable. Thatpremise is highly contentious. What reason have we to assume thatreality does not contain elusive objects, incapable in principle ofbeing individually thought of? . . . Although elusive objects belongto the very same ontological category of objects as those we cansingle out, their possibility still undermines [Kant’s] claim that wecannot make “interesting sense” of the idea of something outsidethe conceptual realm . . . We do not know whether there are actu-ally elusive objects. What would motivate the claim that there arenone, if not some form of idealism very far from [Kant’s] intentions[i.e., subjective idealism]? We should adopt no conception of phi-losophy that on methodological grounds excludes elusive objects.

What makes this striking contemporary parallel possible is of course thefact that McDowell’s radical Conceptualism is nothing more and nothingless than the B Deduction taken all the way out to the limits of theworld.13

V. The Gap in the B Deduction: Blind Intuitions and SpontaneousRogue Objects

This last point about rogue or elusive objects fully reveals the Gap inthe B Deduction. In our discussion of the B Deduction, it was noted thatKant’s argument for the objective validity of the Categories will gothrough only if all the objects of human intuitional experience are neces-sarily also objects of human conceptual and judgemental experience, thatis, are necessarily also objects falling under all of the Categories, or atthe very least under the three Analogies of Experience, which collec-tively provide necessary and sufficient criteria for the objectivity of allobjects of conceptual and judgemental experience. But if this claim fails,then there can in principle be nomologically ill-behaved or rogue objectsof ‘blind’ or non-conceptual human intuitional experience that fall out-side the scope of all empirical concepts, all judgements of experience,and thus also outside of all the Categories, especially including the Anal-ogies of Experience.

Given Kant’s Non-Conceptualism, and the corresponding possibilityof blind or non-conceptual intuitions, there can be empirical intuitionsthat do not require empirical concepts, judgements of experience, or


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Categories. Since the intuitional experience of these objects does notrequire the correct application of empirical concepts, judgements ofexperience, or Categories, some of these intuitions could pick out nomo-logically ill-behaved or rogue objects that fell either contingently or nec-essarily outside the constraints of the Analogies of Experience.Examples of such nomologically ill-behaved or rogue objects wouldinclude objects of intuition that engaged in systematically counter-nomo-logical behavior (magic), purely random or indeterministic behaviour(pure chance), or spontaneous goal-directed behavior (life, conscious-ness, freedom).

The case of possible spontaneous rogue or elusive objects is espe-cially significant, precisely because Kant’s analysis of causation in theSecond Analogy of Experience and also his analysis of freedom in theThird Antinomy both explicitly entail the metaphysical possibility ofspontaneous events that necessarily do not fall under the mechanisticand strict deterministic causal laws of nature.

For Kant, X is spontaneous if and only if X is a conscious mentalevent that expresses some acts or operations of a living, conscious crea-ture, and X is

(1) causal-dynamically necessarily unprecedented, in the two-partsense that

(2) living, conscious mental events of those specific sorts have neveractually happened before, and

(3) the settled empirical facts about the past together with the generalcausal laws of nature do not provide nomologically sufficient con-ditions for the existence or specific character of those living, con-scious mental events,

(4) underdetermined by external sensory informational inputs, andalso by prior desires, even though it may have been triggered bythose very inputs or motivated by those very desires

(5) creative in the sense of being recursively constructive, or ableto generate infinitely complex outputs from finite resources, andalso

(6) self-guiding. (CPR A51/B75, B130, B132, B152, A445-7/B473-5)

Furthermore, spontaneity can be either relative or absolute. Relativespontaneity requires inputs to the conscious mind, whereas absolutespontaneity allows the conscious mind to generate its own outputs withoutany triggering inputs. For example, human a priori cognition is only rela-tively spontaneous because it requires sensory inputs via empirical intui-tion, whereas an intellectual intuition, if it existed, would be absolutelyspontaneous because it could cause the objects of its thoughts to existjust by thinking them (CPR A19-22/B33-6, B71-2). Now according to


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Kant, the concept of a cause analytically entails the concept of its effect,and the general schematized pure concept of CAUSE says that some-thing X (the cause) necessitates something else Y (its effect) in timeaccording to a necessary rule or law. Or equivalently, according to Kant,to say that X causes its effect Y is to say that X is nomologically suffi-cient for Y in time (CPR B112, A144/B183). Then X is a relatively orabsolutely spontaneous cause of its effect Y if and only if

(1) X is nomologically sufficient for Y in time, and

(2) X is a living, conscious mental event that is necessarily unprece-dented, underdetermined by external sensory inputs and desires,creative, and self-guiding.

A very good and very striking example of relative spontaneity can befound in Kant’s discussion of the Second Analogy of Experience. ThereKant distinguishes between

(3) objective or law-governed temporal orderings of conscious percep-tions of changing states of things (Kant’s example is the successivepositions of a boat floating downstream) and

(4) subjective or arbitrary temporal orderings of conscious perceptionsof changing states of things (Kant’s example is the succession ofsensory objects of someone’s gaze flitting over a house).

Thus relative spontaneity is necessarily built into our conscious men-tal representation of any objective causal sequence, via what Kantcalls the ‘the subjective sequence of apprehension’, whose ordering isalways subjectively experienced as ‘entirely arbitrary’ (ganz beliebig)in the activities of our conscious attention, and not necessitated(CPR A193/B238). In other words, attentive human consciousness ininner sense is inherently nomologically ill-behaved, non-deterministic,and non-mechanistic, precisely because it is teleological and psychologi-cally free. And for precisely this reason, according to Kant, empiricalpsychology cannot ever be a genuine exact or mathematized science.

The empirical doctrine of the soul must always remain . . .removed . . . from the rank of what may be called a natural sci-ence proper. This is because mathematics is inapplicable to thephenomena of the inner sense and their laws. . . . It can, therefore,never become anything more than a historical (and, as such, as muchas possible) systematic natural doctrine of the inner sense, i.e., anatural description of the soul, but not a science of the soul. (MFNS 4:471, emphasis added)


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What about absolutely spontaneous rogue or elusive objects? The classof absolutely spontaneous rogue or elusive objects is one and the sameas the class of events that manifest transcendental freedom:

By freedom in the cosmological sense . . . I understand the fac-ulty of beginning a state from itself (von selbst), the causality ofwhich does not in turn stand under another cause determining itin time in accordance with the law of nature. Freedom in thissignification is a pure transcendental idea, which, first, containsnothing borrowed from experience, and second, the object ofwhich cannot be given determinately in any experience. . .. Butsince in such a way no absolute totality of [natural] conditionsin causal relations is forthcoming, reason creates the idea of aspontaneity, which could start to act from itself, without needingto be preceded by any other cause that in turn determines it toaction according to the law of causal connection. (CPR A533/B561, italics added)

In this way, it can be seen that the spontaneous rogue or elusive objectsthat are actually or possibly picked out by blind or non-conceptual humanintuitional experiences are not so very strange objects after all. In fact alland only the living, conscious, self-conscious, deliberative intentionalagents or persons are the spontaneous rogue or elusive objects that cannoteven in principle be brought under empirical concepts and the Analogiesof Experience.

In the Critique of Practical Reason Kant explicitly asserts thatrational personhood (Personlichkeit) itself is just

freedom and independence from the mechanism of nature regardedas a capacity of a being subject to special laws (pure practical lawsgiven by its own reason). (CPrR 5: 87, emphasis added)

Therefore we ourselves are the relatively and absolutely spontaneousrogue or elusive objects that are actually and possibly cognitively accessi-ble only through either

(a) blind intuitional experiences of inner sense in the wholly arbitraryordering of conscious perceptions, or else

(b) blind intuitional experiences of our own practical freedom orautonomy:

Practical freedom can be proved through experience. For it is notmerely that which stimulates the senses, i.e., immediate affects


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them, that determines human choice, but we always have a capacityto overcome impressions on our sensory faculty of desire by repre-sentations of that which is useful or injurious even in a moreremote way; but these considerations about that which in regard toour whole condition is desirable, i.e., good and useful, depend onreason. Hence this also yields laws that are imperatives, i.e., objec-tive laws of freedom, and that say what ought to happen, eventhough it never does happen. . .. We thus cognize practical freedomthrough experience, as one of the natural causes, namely a causalityof reason in the determination of the will. (CPR A802-3/B830-1,emphasis in italics added)

The consciousness of this fundamental law [of pure practical reason,which says: so act that the maxim of your will could always hold atthe same time as a principle of universal law giving] may be calleda fact of reason, since one cannot ferret it out from antecedent dataof reason, such as the consciousness of freedom (for this is not ante-cedently given), and since it forces itself upon us as a syntheticproposition a priori based on no pure or empirical intuition. . . Inorder to regard this law without any misinterpretation as given,one must note that it is not an empirical fact, but the sole fact ofpure reason, which by it proclaims itself as originating law. (CPrR5: 31, emphasis added)

Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admirationand reverence, the more often and more steadily one reflects onthem: the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me. Ido not need to search for them and merely conjecture them asthough they were veiled in obscurity or in the transcendent regionbeyond my horizon; I see them before me and connect them imme-diately with the consciousness of my existence. (CPrR 5: 161–2,emphasis added)

In other words, we actually, directly, and non-conceptually experienceourselves in inner and outer sense as the absolutely intrinsically valuable,exciting, and absolutely unique rogue or elusive objects – rational humananimals, or human persons – that make moral facts in particular and cat-egorically normative facts more generally manifest in the natural world.

Back now to the B Deduction. The crucial point about absolutelyspontaneous rogue or elusive objects, i.e., human persons capable offreedom, is that all empirical concepts, all judgements of experience, allschematized Categories, especially including the Analogies of Experi-ence, and thus all the strict deterministic causal laws of mechanisticnatural science cannot apply to such objects, insofar as they are also


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causal-dynamic events that happen in the natural world. That is a directimplication of Kant’s metaphysical Incompatibilism about free will anduniversal natural Determinism, as fully spelled out in the Third Antin-omy and the Critique of Practical Reason.14 So in virtue of Kant’sIncompatibilism together with his Non-Conceptualism, not only is it truethat the Categories do not necessarily apply to all objects of conscioushuman perception or intuitional experience (because of the metaphysicalpossibility of magical rogue or elusive objects and pure chance rogue orelusive objects), but also it is true that the Categories necessarily do notapply to all actual and possible spontaneous rogue or elusive objects likeus (because of the metaphysical actuality and possibility of the incompat-ibilistic living, conscious free will of human persons). Therefore the BDeduction decisively fails.

VI. Conclusion

Suppose that I am correct that there is a serious Gap in the B Deductionbecause the B Deduction is sound only if Conceptualism is true,but Conceptualism is arguably false and Kant himself is a Non-Conceptualist, precisely due to the dual possibility of blind ornon-conceptual intuitional experiences and relatively or absolutely spon-taneous rogue or elusive objects. From that it would immediately followthat the B Deduction is deeply unsound. Nevertheless, we could againdeploy the strategy of weakening the main thesis of the B Deduction,and preserve something of philosophical importance. More precisely, wecould start with TD2, and then weaken it as follows:

TD3: The Categories are necessary a priori conditions of the possi-bility of the experience of all and only the objects represented byobjectively valid judgements.

Otherwise put, TD3 says that the Categories apply to all and only thesemantic contents of judgements that can be explained and justified bythe exact (i.e. mathematical and natural) sciences and the mechanisticmetaphysics of universal natural Determinism. But what about all theblind intuitional experiences and rogue or elusive objects that fall essen-tially outside the nets of empirical concepts, judgements of experience,and the Categories, especially including the Analogies of Experience?Exactly the right thing to say here, I think, is what Wittgenstenstein saidat the very end of the Tractatus: ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereofone must be silent’. In other words, there are certain irreducibly living,conscious, personal, and moral facts in the world that just cannot be cog-nized by the exact sciences, and about which the sciences must therefore


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remain silent, or else fall into metaphysical illusion. Or as Kant put thevery same point:

Thus I had to deny scientific knowing (Wissen) in order to makeroom for faith (Glauben). (CPR Bxxx; see also A828/B856)

Thus the B Deduction had to fail, given Kant’s other deeper and largercognitive and metaphysical commitments. Against that deeper and largerKantian cognitive and metaphysical backdrop, then, it seems to me thatthe B Deduction is a sound argument for TD3. So even if Kant is wrongabout Transcendental Idealism and wrong about TD1 and TD2, he canstill be right about TD3. And I do think that he actually is right aboutTD3. So even fully granting the problematic possibility of rogue or elu-sive objects and The Gap in the B Deduction, it is still possible todefend an important and substantive Kantian thesis about the objectivityof judgements of experience.

University of Colorado at Boulder, USA

Notes

1 For convenience I refer to Kant’s works infratextually in parentheses. Thecitations include both an abbreviation of the English title and the correspond-ing volume and page numbers in the standard “Akademie” edition of Kant’sworks: Kants gesammelte Schriften, edited by the Koniglich Preussischen(now Deutschen) Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: G. Reimer [now deGruyter], 1902–). For references to the first Critique, I follow the commonpractice of giving page numbers from the A (1781) and B (1787) German edi-tions only. I generally follow the standard English translations from the Ger-man texts, but have occasionally modified them where appropriate. Here is alist of the abbreviations and English translations of the works cited:

CPR – Critique of Pure Reason, trans. P. Guyer and A. Wood, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1997.CPrR – Critique of Practical Reason, trans. M. Gregor, in Immanuel Kant:Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 133–272.PC – Immanuel Kant: Philosophical Correspondence, 1759–99, trans. A.Zweig, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967.Prol – Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics, trans. J. Ellington, Indianapo-lis, IN: Hackett, 1977.VL – ‘The Vienna Logic’, in Immanuel Kant: Lectures on Logic, trans. J. M.Young, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 251–377.

2 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. C. K. Ogden(London: Routledge Kegan Paul, 1922/1981), p. 189, prop. 7.

3 T. Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), pp.16–17.


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4 See e.g., J. Bermudez and A. Cahen, ‘Nonconceptual Mental Content’, StanfordEncyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2010 Edition) [online], Edward N.Zalta (ed.), Available from: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2010/entries/content-nonconceptual/; G. Evans, Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Clarendon/Oxford University Press, 1982), esp. chs. 4–6; and Y. Gunther (ed.), Essays onNonconceptual Content (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003).

5 See, e.g. J. McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1994); J. McDowell, Having the World in View (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2009); S. Sedivy, ‘Must Conceptually Informed PerceptualExperience Involve Non-conceptual Content?’, Canadian Journal of Philoso-phy, 26 (1996), pp. 413–31; and B. Brewer, Perception and Reason (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1999).

6 B. Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, trans. C. Wolfe (Princeton,NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 20, 108.

7 See R. Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2006), ch. 5.

8 Y. Gunther, ‘Introduction’, in Y. Gunther (ed.), Essays on NonconceptualContent, pp. 1–19, at p. 1.

9 R. Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2001), esp. chs. 1, 2 and 4; R. Hanna, ‘Kant and Nonconcep-tual Content’, European Journal of Philosophy, 13 (2005), pp. 247–90; R.Hanna, ‘Kantian Non-Conceptualism’, Philosophical Studies, 137 (2008), pp.41–64; and R. Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature, ch. 2.

10 See ‘Kant’s Theory of Judgment’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(Summer 2009 Edition) [online], Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Available from:http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/kant-judgment/.

11 See e.g. W. Sellars, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, in W. Sellars,Science, Perception, and Reality (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), pp.127–96; W. Sellars Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968); and McDowell, Mind and World.

12 But see P. Kitcher, Kant’s Transcendental Psychology (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1990).

13 See McDowell, Having the World in View, chs. 1–3.14 See Hanna, Kant, Science, and Human Nature, ch. 8; and R. Hanna, ‘Free-

dom, Teleology, and Rational Causation’, Kant Yearbook 1 (2009): pp.99–142.


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kant’s non-conceptualism, rogue objects, and the gap in the b deduction

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