Kant's Subjective Deduction

British Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (3):433-460 (2010)
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Abstract

In the transcendental deduction, the central argument of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant seeks to secure the objective validity of our basic categories of thought. He distinguishes objective and subjective sides of this argument. The latter side, the subjective deduction, is normally understood as an investigation of our cognitive faculties. It is identified with Kant’s account of a threefold synthesis involved in our cognition of objects of experience, and it is said to precede and ground Kant’s proof of the validity of the categories in the objective deduction. I challenge this standard reading of the subjective deduction, arguing, first, that there is little textual evidence for it, and, second, that it encourages a problematic conception of how the deduction works. In its place, I present a new reading of the subjective deduction. Rather than being a broad investigation of our cognitive faculties, it should be seen as addressing a specific worry that arises in the course of the objective deduction. The latter establishes the need for a necessary connection between our capacities for thinking and being given objects, but Kant acknowledges that his readers might struggle to comprehend how these seemingly independent capacities are coordinated. Even worse, they might well believe that in asserting this necessary connection, Kant’s position amounts to an implausible subjective idealism. The subjective deduction ismeant to allay these concerns by showing that they rest on a misunderstanding of the relation between these faculties. This new reading of the subjective deduction offers a better fit with Kant’s text. It also has broader implications, for it reveals the more philosophically plausible account of our relation to the world as thinkers that Kant is defending – an account that is largely obscured by the standard reading of the subjective deduction.

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Nathan Bauer
Rowan University

Citations of this work

A Peculiar Intuition: Kant's Conceptualist Account of Perception.Nathan Bauer - 2012 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 55 (3):215-237.
Kant’s Deduction and Apperception: Explaining the Categories.Dennis Schulting - 2012 - London and Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave-Macmillan.
Kant's subjective deduction: A reappraisal.Ryan S. Kemp - 2018 - European Journal of Philosophy 26 (3):945-957.
The Subjective Deduction and Kant’s Methodological Skepticism.Huaping Lu-Adler - 2022 - In Giuseppe Motta, Dennis Schulting & Udo Thiel (eds.), Kant’s Transcendental Deduction and the Theory of Apperception. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter. pp. 341-60.

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References found in this work

Mind and World.John Henry McDowell - 1994 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Critique of practical reason.Immanuel Kant - 1788 - New York,: Liberal Arts Press. Edited by Mary J. Gregor.
Empiricism and the philosophy of mind.Wilfrid Sellars - 1956 - Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science 1:253-329.
Critique of Pure Reason.I. Kant - 1787/1998 - Philosophy 59 (230):555-557.
Practical philosophy.Immanuel Kant - 1996 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by Mary J. Gregor.

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