Kant: Judgment, Misc

This essay explores Kant’s account of judging. In it, I argue for two central claims. First, Kant defines the act of judgment as the exercise of a particular type of authority. When a person makes a judgment, she makes a claim to speak for everyone, and not just herself. She puts something forward as true. Kant’s term for this discursive authority is “objectivity validity,” and he identifies this as the essential feature of judging. Second, the Categories and the Principles are (...) what authorize a person to put something forward as true. This means that the objective validity of a judgment is supplied by the rules of the understanding rather than by something outside the mind. (shrink)

One of the central and most distinctive theses of Kant’s philosophy of mathematics is that mathematical knowledge is synthetic. In this context, synthetic judgments are defined in opposition to analytic ones, whose predicate concept is “contained in” the subject. Kant’s thesis has often been attacked as indefensible, but just as frequently critics have complained that the thesis itself, and even the analytic/synthetic distinction on which it rests, are simply unintelligible. Thus, even prior to questions of its correctness, the Kantian doctrine (...) has been rejected as unclear, based on general skepticism that there is a real distinction of “containment”—or indeed any tolerably clear distinction at all—between analytic and synthetic judgments. (shrink)

Kant famously declares that “although all our cognition commences with experience, … it does not on that account all arise from experience”. This marks Kant’s disagreement with empiricism, and his contention that human knowledge and experience require both sensation and the use of certain a priori concepts, the Categories. However, this is only the surface of Kant’s much deeper, though neglected view about the nature of reason and judgment. Kant holds that even our a priori concepts are acquired, not from (...) sensation, but “originally,” because our mind has a fundamental capacity to judge that, upon sensory stimulation, generates the Categories through its basic logical functions of judgment. This “epigenesis” of reason and our fundamental capacity to judge that drives it is the topic of Longuenesse’s fascinating book, and the source of her title. (shrink)

Mental representations—like many other things—seem to have parts. However, it isn’t clear how to properly understand the idea of a part of a representation. In this paper I shed new light on how representations can have a mereology. In particular, it has been recognized that there is a mereological element to Kant’s distinction between two kinds of representations: intuitions and concepts. A concept depends upon its parts, whereas an intuition is prior to its parts. The paper thus focuses on an (...) exploration of how to make sense of the parts and wholes of intuitions and concepts. (shrink)

What, if any, is the relation between modal judgment and our capacity to make judgments at all? On a plausible interpretation, Kant connects what he calls the modality of a judgment to its location in a course of reasoning: actual inferential relations between that act of judgment and others. There is a puzzling consequence of this interpretation. It is natural to understand Kant as claiming that every judgment has some modality. However, if the modality of a judgment is its location (...) in a course of reasoning, then the implication is that every judgment must occur as part of a course of reasoning. But why think this? In this paper I propose an answer that draws on the relationship between judgment, judging for reasons, and the unity of consciousness. (shrink)

En las discusiones modernas sobre la posibilidad de las proposiciones sintéticas a priori, la teoría de la definición tiene una importancia capital, porque la mayoría de las teorías sostiene que los juicios analíticos están lógicamente implicados en una definición explícita (lo que restringe los enunciados de una definición completa y precisa a juicios de este tipo). Sin embargo, para Kant -el primer autor en señalar la distinción entre proposiciones analíticas y sintéticas-muchos juicios analíticos son obtenidos mediante análisis de conceptos que (...) no precisan ser determinados previamente por una definición. Por otro lado, para él no todo conocimiento a priori es analítico. La afirmación de que no todo juicio analítico se deriva de una definición y la posibilidad del conocimiento sintético a priori indican que Kant no consideraba, contrariamente a las teorías modernas sobre el juicio analítico, que la definición sea un fundamento esencial del conocimiento. In the modern discussions about possibility of synthetic a priori propositions, the theory of definition has a fundamental importance, because the most definition's theories hold that analytic judgments are involved by explicit definition (it limits sentences of complete and precise definition to this kind of judgments). However, for Kant -first author who pointed out the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions-many analytic judgments are made by analysis of concepts which need not first be established by definition. Moreover, for him not all a priori knowledge is analytic. The statement that not all analytic judgment is derived from definition and possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, indicates Kant didn't believe, contrary to modern theories about analytic judgment, the definition is an essential ground of knowledge. (shrink)

This is a critique of Michael Wolff's ideas on Kant and Aristotle. I criticize in particular his overestimation of Kant as a logician and his claim that Aristotle wants to offer proofs for his perfect syllogisms.

The classical view of the relationship between necessity and apriority, defended by Leibniz and Kant, is that all necessary truths are known a priori. The classical view is now almost universally rejected, ever since Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam discovered that there are necessary truths that are known only a posteriori. However, in recent years a new debate has emerged over the epistemology of these necessary a posteriori truths. According to one view – call it the neo-classical view – knowledge (...) of a necessary truth always depends on at least one item of a priori knowledge. According to the rival view – call it the neoempiricist view – our knowledge of necessity is sometimes broadly empirical. In this paper I present and defend an argument against the neo-empiricist view. I argue that knowledge of the necessity of a necessary truth could not be broadly empirical. (shrink)

The exercise of judgement is an aspect of human endeavour from our most mundane acts to our most momentous decisions. In this book Wayne Martin develops a historical survey of theoretical approaches to judgement, focusing on treatments of judgement in psychology, logic, phenomenology and painting. He traces attempts to develop theories of judgement in British Empiricism, the logical tradition stemming from Kant, nineteenth-century psychologism, experimental neuropsychology and the phenomenological tradition associated with Brentano, Husserl and Heidegger. His reconstruction of vibrant but (...) largely forgotten nineteenth-century debates links Kantian approaches to judgement with twentieth-century phenomenological accounts. He also shows that the psychological, logical and phenomenological dimensions of judgement are not only equally important but fundamentally interlinked in any complete understanding of judgement. His book will interest a wide range of readers in history of philosophy, philosophy of the mind and psychology. (shrink)

En las discusiones modernas sobre la posibilidad de las proposiciones sintéticas a priori, la teoría de la definición tiene una importancia capital, porque la mayoría de las teorías sostiene que los juicios analíticos están lógicamente implicados en una definición explícita (lo que restringe los enunciados de una definición completa y precisa a juicios de este tipo). Sin embargo, para Kant -el primer autor en señalar la distinción entre proposiciones analíticas y sintéticas-muchos juicios analíticos son obtenidos mediante análisis de conceptos que (...) no precisan ser determinados previamente por una definición. Por otro lado, para él no todo conocimiento a priori es analítico. La afirmación de que no todo juicio analítico se deriva de una definición y la posibilidad del conocimiento sintético a priori indican que Kant no consideraba, contrariamente a las teorías modernas sobre el juicio analítico, que la definición sea un fundamento esencial del conocimiento. In the modern discussions about possibility of synthetic a priori propositions, the theory of definition has a fundamental importance, because the most definition's theories hold that analytic judgments are involved by explicit definition (it limits sentences of complete and precise definition to this kind of judgments). However, for Kant -first author who pointed out the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions-many analytic judgments are made by analysis of concepts which need not first be established by definition. Moreover, for him not all a priori knowledge is analytic. The statement that not all analytic judgment is derived from definition and possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, indicates Kant didn't believe, contrary to modern theories about analytic judgment, the definition is an essential ground of knowledge. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider the basis for Kant's praise of Wolff's general logic as "the best we have." I argue that Wolff's logic was highly esteemed by Kant on account of its novel analysis of the three operations of the mind (tres operationes mentis), in the course of which Wolff formulates an argument for the priority of the understanding's activity of judging.

The aim of Kant’s Sources in Translation is to retrieve the rich intellectual world that influenced Kant’s philosophical development. In its first stage, the series makes available the most important textbooks Kant used throughout his long teaching career. Many of these textbooks are in Latin or in German and remain inaccessible to Anglophone readers. Lacking this material, however, it is difficult to appreciate Kant’s originality and process of philosophical maturation, for readers are unable to understand what prompted Kant to introduce (...) a distinction, offer a qualification, attack a position, or develop a new thesis. This background is essential to understand the genesis of Kant’s thought. -/- This volume provides a translation of Georg Friedrich Meier’s Auszugaus der Vernunftlehre, the textbook that serves not only as the basis for Kant’s lectures on logic and related Reflexionen but is also crucial for studying the so-called Jäsche Logic of 1800, which is redacted from the marginal and interleave notes found in Kant’s personal copy of Meier’s book. Given the recent growth in scholarship on Kant’s logic, normative epistemology, and the psychology of belief, this volume makes a major contribution to contemporary debates in the field. (shrink)

Review of S. Lapointe: Bolzano’s Theoretical Philosophy, An Introduction.

Received accounts of nineteenth-century thought make little or no room for the substantial contributions of the Bohemian philosopher Bernard Bolzano . This thesis constitutes a sustained attempt to show that this omission is a serious mistake, that Bolzano is more rightly treated as one of the major figures of western philosophy. To his contemporaries, Bolzano was known primarily as a teacher, religious leader, and social reformer. Outside of central Europe, though, he became known primarily through his logical and mathematical writings. (...) The thesis focuses primarily on the latter, showing in detail how Bolzano's methodological work advanced revolutionary changes in both mathematics and logic, with effects which would be felt throughout philosophy. (shrink)

I propose a unified reading of Kant's third critical work, The Critique of Judgment, as a sustained argument that "purposiveness without a purpose" is the a priori, transcendental principle of judgment, a "subjective" yet necessary condition for the practice of judging and for the possibility of experience. I argue that Kant's principle of purposiveness is a temporal-formal structure of the subject's judging activity, a structure of anticipation that unites present and past moments as "towards" the future. Such purposiveness is a (...) necessary principle of judgment, I argue, for it enables the judging subject to unify the contingent, heterogeneous information "given" in experience not only as homogeneous but also as empirically heterogeneous. For Kant, we must be able to judge purposively without a purpose, if we are to be able to form empirical concepts or understand particulars in our experience. But purposiveness is a "merely subjective" principle, according to Kant, because it guides the subject's activity but does not and cannot characterize objects or ground objective claims. The function of purposiveness as a principle by which the judging subject can unify the heterogeneous as heterogeneous is, I argue, exhibited in the unity we attribute to organisms in teleological judgment, and instantiated most purely or clearly in the act of aesthetic appreciation. Thus for Kant, in aesthetic experience the subject reveals its nature as projectively temporal, utterly distinct from objects, governed by anticipation and history, not chronology and mechanism. (shrink)

Cognitive agency - the idea that our judgments and beliefs are manifestations of agency on our part - is a deeply entrenched aspect of our self-conception as persons. And yet it has proven hard to give a satisfying account of what such agency might consist in. In this paper I argue that getting clear about Kant’s notion of spontaneity might help us make progress in that debate. In particular, I argue that the very same assumption - namely, that agency must (...) be understood on the model of production - has been holding us back in both areas. (shrink)

In her book Kant and the Capacity to Judge, Be ´atrice Longuenesse makes two apparently incompatible claims about the status of the categories in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. On the one hand, the categories, in her words,?result from [the] activity of generating and combining concepts according to logical forms of judgment? and are thus?in no way prior to the act of judging?. On the other, they guide the unity which must be produced in the sensible manifold before any combination (...) of concepts into judgments can occur. Longuenesse?s strategy for rendering these two claims compatible is to draw our attention to the various roles the categories play as conditions of empirical judgment. This paper suggests that her arguments do not support the thesis that the categories themselves are generated out of acts of judging. Her insistence upon the priority of the capacity to judge may therefore claim more than is warranted. (shrink)

This article reconstructs Kant's view on the existential import of categorical sentences. Kant is widely taken to have held that affirmative sentences (the A and I sentences of the traditional square of opposition) have existential import, whereas negative sentences (E and O) lack existential import. The article challenges this standard interpretation. It is argued that Kant ascribes existential import only to some affirmative synthetic sentences. However, the reasons for this do not fall within the remit of Kant's formal logic. Unlike (...) traditional logic and modern standard quantification theory, Kant's formal logic is free from existential commitments. (shrink)

I argue that Patricia Kitcher's Kant-inspired account of self-consciousness overintellectualizes the requirements for rational cognition. Kitcher claims that a person can only believe something on the ground of another belief if she is able to recognize the grounding belief as grounding the first belief and as one of her own. I criticize this claim by arguing that (i) someone can believe something for a certain reason without recognizing this reason as a reason (the possibility of unreflected reasons), and that (ii) (...) she can recognize something as a reason for something else without being able to self-ascribe either her original belief or the belief that grounds it (the possibility of reflected but not self-conscious reasons). (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Kant-Studien Jahrgang: 105 Heft: 3 Seiten: 394-405.

Elqayam & Evans' (E&E's) critique of normativism is related to an inherently philosophical question: Is thinking a normative affair? Should thinking be held accountable towards certain norms? I present the historical and philosophical origins of the view that thinking belongs to the realm of normativity and has a tight connection with logic, stressing the pivotal role of Kant in these developments.

In an earlier article (see J Gen Philos Sei (2010) 41: 341-355) I have compared Aristotle's syllogistic with Kant's theory of "pure ratiocination". "Ratiocinia pura" („reine Vernunftschlüsse") is Kant's designation for assertoric syllogisms Aristotle has called 'perfect'. In Kant's view they differ from non-pure ratiocinia precisely in that their validity rests only on the validity of the Dictum de omni et nullo (which, however, in Kant's view can be further reduced to more fundamental principles) whereas the validity of non-pure ratiocinia (...) additionally presupposes the validity of inferences which Kant calls consequentiae immediatae. I have argued that Kant's view is in some (not in all) essential features in accordance with Aristotle's view concerning perfect syllogisms and certainly leading to a tenable and interesting logical theory. As a result I have rejected not only the interpretation of Aristotle adopted by Theodor Ebert, but also the objections he has raised against Kant's logical theory. As far as Aristotle is concerned, Ebert has attempted to defend his position in the first part of his reply to my article published in J Gen Philos Sei (2009) 40: 357-365, and I have argued against this defence in issue 1 of the J Gen Philos Sei (2010) 41: 199-213 (cf. Ebert's answer in the same issue pp. 215-231). In the following discussion I deal with Eberts defence of his criticism of Kant published in the second part of his reply to my article (see J Gen Philos Sei (2009) 40: 365-372). I shall argue, that Kant's principle 'nota notae est nota rei ipsius' and his use of technical vocabulary stand up to the objections raised by Ebert. His attempts to prove that Kant's logical theory is defective are based on several misinterpretations. (shrink)

The paper assesses Martin's recent logico-phenomenological account of judgment that is cast in the form of an eclectic history of judging, from Hume and Kant through the 19th century to Frege and Heidegger as well as current neuroscience. After a preliminary discussion of the complex unity and temporal modalities of judgment that draws on a reading of Titian's "Allegory of Prudence" (National Gallery, London), the remainder of the paper focuses on Martin's views on Kant's logic in general and his theory (...) of singular existential judgment in particular. The paper argues against Martin's key claims of the primacy of formal logic over transcendental logic and of the synthetic nature of judgment in Kant. It also takes issue with each of the four interpretations of singular existential judgment in Kant offered by Martin: existence as logical predicate, as copula, as thesis and as logical subject. (shrink)

Is our judgement of the truth-value of propositions subject to the will? Do we have any voluntary control over the formation of our beliefs – and if so, how does it compare with the control we have over our actions? These questions lead into interestingly unclear philosophical and psychological territory which remains a focus of debate today. I will first examine the classic early modern discussions in Descartes, Spinoza and Hume. Then I will review some relevant themes in Kant, including (...) some lesser-known material from his lectures on ‘Logic’. Kant’s critical philosophy makes important appeal to the notion of ‘spontaneity’ or mental activity, but I argue that there are five different kinds of spontaneity in Kant which need distinguishing. I hope thus to achieve some clarification of the differences between theoretical judgements and practical decisions. (shrink)

I defend the thesis that Kantian analytic judgments are about objects (as opposed to concepts) against two challenges raised by recent scholars. First, can it accommodate cases like “A two-sided polygon is two-sided”, where no object really falls under the subject-concept as Kant sees it? Second, is it compatible with Kant’s view that analytic judgments make no claims about objects in the world and that we can know them to be true without going beyond the given concepts? I address these (...) challenges in two steps. First, given Kant’s distinction between an object in general = x from an object of sensible intuition, I argue that analytic judgments are about objects in the former sense, no matter whether the purported objects can be given in our intuition. Second, using Kant’s method of representing certain logical relations of concepts with such figures as circles, I construct a model to show that analytic truths are truths about objects in general = x and yet can be determined solely by the intensional relation between the given concepts plus certain Kantian-logical laws. Analytic truths are thus shown as formal in the Kantian sense that they do not presuppose the purported objects as givable in our intuition. This account of the formality of analytic truths captures Kant’s diagnosis of the Leibnizian illusion that we can make material claims about the world by analytically true judgments. (shrink)

Inhaltsverzeichnis/Table of ContentsThemenschwerpunkt/Special Topic: Bolzano & KantGastherausgeber/Guest Editor: Sandra LapointeSandra Lapointe: IntroductionSandra Lapointe: Is Logic Formal? Bolzano, Kant and the Kantian LogiciansNicholas F. Stang: A Kantian Reply to Bolzano’s Critique of Kant’s Analytic-Synthetic DistinctionClinton Tolley: Bolzano and Kant on the Place of Subjectivity in a WissenschaftslehreTimothy Rosenkoetter: Kant and Bolzano on the Singularity of IntuitionsWaldemar Rohloff: From Ordinary Language to Definition in Kant and BolzanoWeitere Artikel/Further ArticlesChristian Damböck: Wilhelm Diltheys empirische Philosophie und der rezente Methodenstreit in der analytischen PhilosophieBernd Prien: (...) Socially Constituted Actions and ObjectsDaniel Enrique Kalpokas: Two Dogmas of CoherentismJon Cogburn & Jeff W. Roland: Strong, therefore Sensitive. Misgivings about DeRose’s ContextualismAndre Abath: Brewer’s Switching ArgumentEssay-Wettbewerb/Essay CompetitionAmadeus Magrabi: The Value of Feelings for Decision-MakingStefan Reining: Do Pain-Accompanying Emotions Mislead Us?—Considerations in the Light of Reactive Dissociation PhenomenaPeter Königs: Patriotism. A Case Study in the Philosophy of EmotionsBesprechungsaufsatz/Review EssayChristopher Gauker: What Do Your Senses Say? On Burge’s Theory of PerceptionDiskussion/DiscussionGeorg Brun: Adequate Formalization and De Morgan’s ArgumentBuchnotizen/Critical Notes. (shrink)

Martin offers an intriguing account of nineteenth century challenges to the traditional theory of judgment as a synthesis of subject and predicate (the synthesis theory)--criticisms motivated largely by the problem posed by existential judgments, which need not have two terms at all. Such judgments led to a theory of "thetic" judgments, whose essential feature is to "posit" something, rather than to combine terms (as in synthetic judgment). I argue, however, that Kant's official definition of judgment already implicitly recognizes the importance (...) of positing, and that its (otherwise confusing) abstract generality actually affords Kant's own logic an adequate way to accommodate existential judgments within the traditional synthesis theory. Preservation of a synthetic account of judgment is also found to be independently important for Kant's larger aims in the theory of cognition. (shrink)

In Kant’s logical texts the reference of the form S is P to an “unknown = x” is well known, but its understanding still remains controversial. Due to the universality of all concepts, the subject as much as the predicate is regarded as predicate of the x, which, in turn, is regarded as the subject of the judgment. In the CPR, this Kantian interpretation of the S-P relationship leads to the question about the relations between intuition and concept in judgment. (...) In contrast to intuition, if no concept, due to its universality, refers immediately to an object, how should one understand the relations of S and P to one another, as well as their relations to intuition, which corresponds to the possible individuality of the object in general = x? To answer this question, it is necessary to understand Kant’s notion of extension, and to prove its irreducibility to the Port-Royal notion of extension as well as to the Fregean one. (shrink)

In the Introduction to the Transcendental Dialectic, of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant presents a conception of error. In the (Jäsche) Logic, he also deals with the problem of error, albeit in a different way. This paper aims to highlight this difference and arguing that, in the (Jäsche) Logic, error is explained more consistently and suitably than it is in the Transcendental Dialectic. It begins by considering judgment as the place of truth, falsehood and error, and inquiring into the (...) cognitive faculties that take part in its framing. These faculties, whose roles cannot be interchanged, are the sensibility, passive and receptive, and the understanding, active and spontaneous. Erroneous judgment springs from the unnoticed influence of sensibility on understanding, which makes the understanding hold merely subjective grounds of judgment to be objective ones. In the Transcendental Dialectic, this unnoticed influence is conceived in such a way that sensibility is, in a certain sense, held to be the determining ground of error, as if it were an active faculty, whereas in the (Jäsche) Logic that influence is conceived in such a way that the understanding itself is regarded as the source and author of error. This author agrees with the conception of the understanding as submitted to prescriptive laws, which is contained in the very definition of Pure General Logic, as a science of the a priori laws of how the understanding ought to think. (shrink)

Thomas Ricketts has developed a powerful interpretation of Frege on judgment, truth and logic. Recently, Ricketts has modified his reading, holding that judgment is an act of knowledge-acquisition; this rules out incorrect judgment. I argue that Ricketts goes too far here. I criticize the textual basis for Ricketts's new view, and show that the interpretive problems which led him to this change can be met without such extreme measures. Thus, I defend Ricketts' earlier view against his own later modification. Along (...) the way I discuss Kant and Brentano on judgment, and I explore Fregean argument concerning the objectivity of truth. (shrink)