Abstract
I criticize recent nonconceptualist readings of Kant’s account of perception on the grounds that the strategy of the Deduction requires that understanding be involved in the synthesis of imagination responsible for the intentionality of perceptual experience. I offer an interpretation of the role of understanding in perceptual experience as the consciousness of normativity in the association of one’s representations. This leads to a reading of Kant which is conceptualist, but in a way which accommodates considerations favoring nonconceptualism, in particular the primitive character of perceptual experience relative to thought and judgment.
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Notes
For a recent and very clear statement of the view that intuitions are conceptually determined, see Engstrom (2006, p. 17).
Allais, forthcoming. For support, Allais cites Michael Pendlebury's very helpful articulation of the contrast in his (1995).
I offer criticisms of the nonconceptualist reading as part of a more comprehensive discussion of Kant's account of experience in my (forthcoming). The present paper both draws on, and supplements, that discussion.
Cf. also B153: it is understanding "under the title [Benennung] of a transcendental synthesis of imagination" that determines inner sense.
Kant's identification, emphasized by McDowell, of the "function which gives unity to the synthesis of representations in an intuition" with the "function which gives unity to the different representations in a judgment" (A79/B104-105) can, I think, be read along similar lines.
As suggested by Rohs, who takes Kant's "limitation of spontaneity to understanding" in the second edition to be simply a mistake (2001, pp. 222–223).
The same conclusion is defended in Wenzel (2005).
Wenzel (2005) sees the same line of thought in a series of passages from the first edition Deduction.
Following Paton (1936, vol. I: 324n.), Allais emphasizes the contrast between the indicative "can" [können] in the first two formulations, and the subjunctive "could" [könnten] in the third. While I think the contrast is worth noting, I do not think that it affects the point at issue.
I defend and motivate this claim more fully in my (forthcoming).
I am here using "impression of redness" as shorthand for "impression of the kind caused by something's being red"; it should not be taken to imply that the impression as such has intentional content.
It might also be understood in terms of more recent psychological theories of how visual information is processed. Allais, for example, cites the visual system's "binding" of information from different processing streams as an instance of perceptual synthesis. It seems to me that this way of understanding synthesis is vulnerable to the same kind of worry that I go on to mention for the Humean model.
This has to be emphasized to distinguish my view from a possible version of nonconceptualism which would allow the kind of normativity I have been describing but deny that this entails that synthesis requires the understanding or concepts. Allais describes this view as one on which "the way we pre-conceptually synthesize introduces normativity, or proto-normativity, into the content of perception in a way which makes it possible to bring the normativity of concepts to the content of perception" and she cites my (1997) as an example. But the normativity I am invoking, both here and in the earlier article, is the normativity of concepts. My point is not that synthesis makes possible a consciousness of normativity which allows for the application of concepts as a separate, and subsequent, cognitive step. Rather, as I go on to claim in the text, the consciousness of normativity in the synthesis of the manifold just is the application of concepts to the objects we represent.
For more discussion of this point, see my (2006a).
On my version of conceptualism, then, concepts do not "restrict" or "limit" the contents of perception. A subject's stock of concepts, rather, is determined by which kinds of perceptions she is capable of having: as she acquires more habits of association, and thus becomes capable of a wider range of perceptual experiences, she thereby comes into possession of more concepts. It might be objected that my version thus fails to count as a genuine form of conceptualism. According to José Bermúdez, "the import of placing a conceptual constraint on perceptual content is to capture the idea that the type of perceptual experiences a perceiver can have is determined by the concepts he possesses... It follows from this that if we know what concepts a perceiver possesses, we will be able to define what might be termed a perceptual space limiting the colours, shapes, objects etc., that he can properly be described as perceiving" (1998, p. 56; the operative word here is "limiting"). I try to address this objection, and the related worry (raised in discussion by Robert Hanna) that the kind of view here ascribed to Kant is conceptualist only in a trivial sense, in my (2006b).
This attempts to address a worry Bermúdez raised in his penetrating comments at the APA symposium where this paper was presented: if understanding is the bare consciousness of normativity, how can it be responsible for the pure concepts? I take it to be responsible for the pure concepts in the same sense that it is responsible for empirical concepts: namely, by making the difference between an association of representations that is determined only by external natural laws, and an association of representations which the subject represents as according with a normative rule. This is a controversial view which deserves more defence that I can provide here.
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Acknowledgements
This paper was presented as part of a symposium at the 2007 Pacific Division Meeting of the APA. I am very grateful to José Bermúdez for his comments on that occasion. Thanks also to Lucy Allais, Stephen Engstrom, and Eric Watkins for helpful discussion.
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Ginsborg, H. Was Kant a nonconceptualist?. Philos Stud 137, 65–77 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9163-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9163-3