Kant: Theoretical Judgment

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)

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant appears to characterize analytic judgments in four distinct ways: once in terms of “containment,” a second time in terms of “identity,” a third time in terms of the explicative-ampliative contrast, and a fourth time in terms of the notion of “cognizability in accordance with the principle of contradiction.” The paper asks which, if any, of these characterizations--or apparent charactcrizations--has the best claim to be Kant’s fundamental conception of analyticity in the first Critique. It (...) argues that it is the second. The paper argues, further, that Kant’s distinction is intended to apply only to judgments of subject-predicate form, and that the fourth alleged characterization is not properly speaking a characterization at all. These theses are defended in the course of a more general investigation of the distinction’s meaning and tenability. (shrink)

Kant describes the understanding as a faculty of spontaneity. What this means is that our capacity to judge what is true is responsible for its own exercises, which is to say that we issue our judgments for ourselves. To issue our judgments for ourselves is to be self-conscious – i.e., conscious of the grounds upon which we judge. To grasp the spontaneity of the understanding, then, we must grasp the self-consciousness of the understanding. I argue that what Kant requires for (...) explaining spontaneity is a conception of judgment as an intrinsic self-consciousness of the total unity of possible knowledge. This excludes what have been called ‘relative’ accounts of the spontaneity of the understanding, according to which our judgments are issued through a capacity fixed by external conditions. If so, then Kant conceives of understanding as entirely active. Or, to put it another way, he conceives of this capacity as absolutely spontaneous. (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defends the mathematically deterministic world of physics by arguing that its essential features arise necessarily from innate forms of intuition and rules of understanding through combinatory acts of imagination. Knowing is active: it constructs the unity of nature by combining appearances in certain mandatory ways. What is mandated is that sensible awareness provide objects that conform to the structure of ostensive judgment: “This (S) is P.” -/- Sensibility alone provides no such objects, so (...) the imagination compensates by combining passing point-data into “pure” referents for the subject-position, predicate-position, and copula. The result is a cognitive encounter with a generic physical object whose characteristics—magnitude, substance, property, quality, and causality—are abstracted as the Kantian categories. Each characteristic is a product of “sensible synthesis” that has been “determined” by a “function of unity” in judgment. -/- Understanding the possibility of such determination by judgment is the chief difficulty for any rehabilitative reconstruction of Kant’s theory. I will show that Kant conceives of figurative synthesis as an act of line-drawing, and of the functions of unity as rules for attending to this act. The subject-position refers to substance, identified as the objective time-continuum; the predicate-position, to quality, identified as the continuum of property values (constituting the second-order type named by the predicate concept). The upshot is that both positions refer to continuous magnitudes, related so that one (time-value) is the condition of the other (property-value). -/- Kant’s theory of physically constructive grammar is thus equivalent to the analytic-geometric formalism at work in the practice of mathematical physics, which schematizes time and state as lines related by an algebraic formula. Kant theorizes the subject–predicate relation in ostensive judgment as an algebraic time–state function. When aimed towards sensibility, “S is P” functions as the algebraic relation “t → ƒ(t).”. (shrink)

By transcendental aesthetic, Kant means “the science of all principles of a priori sensibility” (A 21/B 35). These, he argues, are the laws that properly direct our judgments of taste (B 35 – 36 fn.), i.e. our aesthetic judgments as we ordinarily understand that notion in the context of contemporary art. Thus the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason, entitled the Transcendental Aesthetic, enumerates the necessary presuppositions of, among other things, our ability to make empirical judgments about particular (...) works of art. These presuppositions are sensible rather than intellectual because on Kant's view, all intellection that considers objects of any kind, whether abstract or concrete, must at base connect to actual, material objects with which we come into direct contact; and this we can do only through sensibility (A 19/B 33). Thus the following discussion explores what Kant claims must be true of us in order to make the sorts of aesthetic judgments we make, rather than any particular class or quality of aesthetic judgments itself. On Kant's view, what must be true of us in order to make aesthetic judgments is not different from what must be true of us in order to make any other kind of judgment about empirical objects. This last point is worth emphasizing, in order to correct an interpretation of Kant's account of aesthetic judgment in the Critique of Judgment that wrongly reads Kant as claiming that aesthetic judgments do not have to satisfy the same basic requirements of judgment that any other kind of judgment also must satisfy, such as the synthetic subsumption of such objects under certain necessary and hard-wired concepts of understanding, the internal coherence of such judgments with other, non-aesthetic ones of a more abstract and comprehensive character, the unified consciousness within which such judgments are intelligibly made, and the like. Of course Kant recognizes the special character of aesthetic judgments and unpacks it in the... (shrink)

By transcendental aesthetic, Kant means “the science of all principles of a priori sensibility” (A 21/B 35). These, he argues, are the laws that properly direct our judgments of taste (B 35 – 36 fn.), i.e. our aesthetic judgments as we ordinarily understand that notion in the context of contemporary art. Thus the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason, entitled the Transcendental Aesthetic, enumerates the necessary presuppositions of, among other things, our ability to make empirical judgments about particular (...) works of art. These presuppositions are sensible rather than intellectual because on Kant's view, all intellection that considers objects of any kind, whether abstract or concrete, must at base connect to actual, material objects with which we come into direct contact; and this we can do only through sensibility (A 19/B 33). Thus the following discussion explores what Kant claims must be true of us in order to make the sorts of aesthetic judgments we make, rather than any particular class or quality of aesthetic judgments itself. On Kant's view, what must be true of us in order to make aesthetic judgments is not different from what must be true of us in order to make any other kind of judgment about empirical objects. This last point is worth emphasizing, in order to correct an interpretation of Kant's account of aesthetic judgment in the Critique of Judgment that wrongly reads Kant as claiming that aesthetic judgments do not have to satisfy the same basic requirements of judgment that any other kind of judgment also must satisfy, such as the synthetic subsumption of such objects under certain necessary and hard-wired concepts of understanding, the internal coherence of such judgments with other, non-aesthetic ones of a more abstract and comprehensive character, the unified consciousness within which such judgments are intelligibly made, and the like. Of course Kant recognizes the special character of aesthetic judgments and unpacks it in the... (shrink)

In his table of judgements, Kant added infinity as a third quality. An infinite judgement ‘All S are non-P’ is said to differ from the affirmative ‘All S are P’ because it ascribes a negative predicate; and it differs from the negative ‘No S is P’ because it has a richer content. The present paper puts three interpretations of this surplus content to six tests. Among other things, it is examined whether these interpretations marry up with Kant’s solution to the (...) first antinomy, his conception of analyticity and the principle of complete determination. The unpleasant conclusion is that none of the interpretations can make its mark as the most adequate one. It thus remains unclear what Kant had in mind when positioning infinite judgements besides affirmative and negative ones. (shrink)

Fregean predicates applied to Fregean objects are merely defined by a `timeless' deductive order of sentences. They cannot provide sufficient structure in order to explain how names can refer to objects of intuition and how predicates can express properties of substances that change in time. Therefore, the accounts of Wilson and Quine, Prior and Brandom for temporal judgments fail — and a new reconstruction of Kant's transcendental logic, especially of the analogies of experience, is needed.

In this collection of essays Béatrice Longuenesse considers the three aspects of Kant's philosophy, his epistemology and metaphysics of nature, his moral philosophy and his aesthetic theory, under one unifying standpoint: Kant's conception of our capacity to form judgements. She argues that the elements which make up our cognitive access to the world - what Kant calls the 'human point of view' - have an equally important role to play in our moral evaluations and our aesthetic judgements. Her discussion ranges (...) over Kant's account of our representations of space and time, his conception of the logical forms of judgements, sufficient reason, causality, community, God, freedom, morality, and beauty in nature and art. Her book will appeal to all who are interested in Kant and his thought. (shrink)

'Mr Bennett, as was to be expected, has written a first-rate book on Kant's Analytic. It is vivid, entertaining, and extremely instructive. It will be found of absorbing interest both by those who already know the Critique and by those - if there are any such - who have a developed interest in philosophy, yet no direct acquaintance with Kant. These last it will surely drive to the text and, as surely, will drive them to approach it in a truly (...) philosophical spirit. Bennett's Kant is not a giant immersed, or frozen, in time. He is a great contemporary - a little out of touch, admittedly, with recent developments in mathematics and physics - but one with whom we can all argue, against him, at his side, or obliquely to him. And so Bennett does argue, continuously, fiercely, and fruitfully; and summons to join in the argument, at appropriate moments, those older contemporaries, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume, and those younger contemporaries, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Ayler, Quine, Quinton, Warnock, and others. This is splendid, and a necessary corrective to that extraordinary isolation in which Kant tends to be islanded, partly indeed, by his own unique qualities, but partly by oceans of the wrong kind of respect. Bennett, continuously engaging his great antagonist, shows the right kind.'. (shrink)

In this paper, I investigate Kant’s view of the cognitive role of perceptions, judgements, and the three categories of Quality in representing negative states of affairs. The paper addresses the following problem. In his account of empirical cognition, Kant seems to limit the legitimate application of the categories to things perceptually available to us, or, more generally, to positive cases. However, Kant also seems to hold that negative states of affairs, such as the absence of a thing, cannot be perceived. (...) This raises the question of how we can represent and make warranted empirical judgements about cases that lack positive instances given in perception. At worst, Kant’s view would imply that thoughts about negative cases are ‘empty’. In order to avoid such a consequence, I wish to draw attention to Kant’s holistic way of thinking. In particular, I shall argue that perception is a process-like temporal phenomenon, and that experience itself is not strictly about the here and now. The paper shows that the cognitive contribution of the categories, according to Kant, is most explicit in representing negative states of affairs, which requires overcoming the main limitation of sense perception, namely the incapacity of negative representation. Even so, positive representation can be seen cognitively primary for Kant. (shrink)

Kant soutient qu'une table complète et systématique des catégories peut être établie selon le « fil conducteur » des fonctions logiques du jugement. La première partie de cet article est une exposition de l'argument kantien. La deuxième partie est un examen de quelques-unes des objections formulées à l'encontre du « fil conducteur » de Kant. Je conclus que l'appropriation contemporaine de la doctrine kantienne des catégories est désormais divisée entre deux problèmes distincts : celui du contenu conceptuel (ou non) de (...) la perception, et celui des structures conceptuelles présupposées par une image scientifique particulière du monde. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie Jahrgang: 97 Heft: 1 Seiten: 34-65.

Kant famously claims his table of judgments is complete. However, Kant does not provide a demonstration of his claim of completeness. In fact, he does not seem to think that a proof of completeness is necessary. I argue that we can reconstruct a demonstration that Kant would accept once we reflect upon his notion of a disjunctive judgment.

Against the standard interpretation of Kant's ‘Copernican revolution’ as the prioritization of epistemology over ontology, I argue in this paper that his critique of traditional metaphysics must be seen as a farewell to the perfectionism on which early modern rationalist ontology and epistemology are built. However, Kant does not simply replace ‘perfection’ with another fundamental concept of normativity. More radically, Kant realizes that it is not simply ideas but only the relation of ideas that can be subject to norms, and (...) thus he shifts the focus from the reality of ideas to the validity of judgments. Section 1 of this paper clarifies the pre-Kantian role of the concept of perfection and examines Kant's critical response to that concept. Section 2 identifies Kant's point of departure from the Cartesian ‘way of ideas.’ Section 3 explains the key problem of his novel account of epistemic normativity. I conclude that Kant's anti-perfectionism must be seen as the driving force behind his ‘Copernican revolution’ in order to fully appreciate his mature account of epistemic normativity. (shrink)

Hence, this book's provocative claim: today's so-called logical empiricism owes much more to Kant's notion of science than to Hume's.

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)

The consensus view in the literature is that, according to Kant, definitions in philosophy are impossible. While this is true prior to the advent of transcendental philosophy, I argue that with Kant's Copernican Turn definitions of some philosophical concepts, the categories, become possible. Along the way I discuss issues like why Kant introduces the ‘Analytic of Concepts’ as an analysis of the understanding, how this faculty, as the faculty for judging, provides the principle for the complete exhibition of the categories, (...) how the pure categories relate to the schematized categories, and how the latter can be used on empirical objects. (shrink)

In his lectures on general logic Kant maintains that the generality of a representation (the form of a concept) arises from the logical acts of comparison, reflection and abstraction. These acts are commonly understood to be identical with the acts that generate reflected schemata. I argue that this is mistaken, and that the generality of concepts, as products of the understanding, should be distinguished from the classificatory generality of schemata, which are products of the imagination. A Kantian concept does not (...) provide mere criteria for noting sameness and difference in things, but instead reflects the inner nature of things. Its form consists in the self-consciousness of a capacity to judge (i.e. the Concept is the ‘I think’). (shrink)

Geometry is an a priori science. However, its apriority is saddled with problems. The aim of this paper will be to show 1) how Kant understands that the contents of geometry are synthetic a priori judgments in the Critique of Pure Reason, and 2) if it’s still relevant to study Kant’s theory of geometry after the challenges posed by non-Euclidian theories of space. With respect to point 1: Kant understands geometry as the discipline that objectifies the pure intuition of space. (...) Every geometric concept is built upon the pure intuition of space through a synthetic ostensive process. Furthermore, the pure intuition of space is the form of external experiences. Thus, geometry and external phenomena share a common ground – pure space. This common ground is what provides an answer to the question of the possibility of mathematics as a universal and a priori science. With respect to point 2: the relevance of studying Kant’s theory of geometry lies not only in the fact that geometry can serve as an example to philosophy based on the fact that it establishes its propositions a priori, but also because the object-study of geometry – the pure intuition of space– forces the reader to review Kant’s thoughts about sensibility and its relation to space. The analysis of Kant’s theory of geometry then amounts to studying Kant’s theory of sensibility. (shrink)

This paper offers a new interpretation of Kant's puzzling claim that the B-Deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason should be considered as having two main steps. Previous commentators have tended to agree in general on the first step as arguing for the necessity of the categories for possible experience, but disagree on what the second step is and whether Kant even needs a second step. I argue that the two parts of the B-Deduction correspond to the two aspects of (...) a priori cognition: necessity and universality. The bulk of the paper consists of support for the second step, the universality of the categories. I show that Kant's arguments in the second half of the B-Deduction aim to define the scope of that universality for possible experience by considering the possibilities of divine intellectual intuition, of non-human kinds of sensible intuition, and of apperception of the self. In these ways Kant delimits the boundaries of the applicability of the categories and excludes any other possible experience for human beings. (shrink)

Among Kant's innovations in the understanding of logic (‘general logic’) were his claims that logic had no content of its own, but was the form of the thought of any possible content, and that the unit of meaning, the truth-bearer, judgement, was essentially apperceptive. Judging was implicitly the consciousness of judging. This was for Kant a logical truth. This article traces the influence of the latter claim on Fichte, and, for most of the discussion, on Hegel. The aim is to (...) understand the relations among self-consciousness, reason and freedom in the idealist tradition. (shrink)

In the Transcendental Ideal Kant discusses the principle of complete determination: for every object and every predicate A, the object is either determinately A or not-A. He claims this principle is synthetic, but it appears to follow from the principle of excluded middle, which is analytic. He also makes a puzzling claim in support of its syntheticity: that it represents individual objects as deriving their possibility from the whole of possibility. This raises a puzzle about why Kant regarded it as (...) synthetic, and what his explanatory claim means. I argue that the principle of complete determination does not follow from the principle of excluded middle because the externally negated or ?negative? judgement ?Not (S is P)? does not entail the internally negated or ?infinite? judgement ?S is not-P.? Kant's puzzling explanatory claim means that empirical objects are determined by the content of the totality of experience. This entails that empirical objects are completely determinate if and only if the totality of experience has a completely determinate content. I argue that it is not a priori whether experience has such a completely determinate content and thus not analytic that objects obey the principle of complete determination. (shrink)

The transcendental aesthetic -- Arithmetic and the categories -- Remarks on pure natural science -- Two studies in the reception of Kant's philosophy of arithmetic: postscript to part I -- Some remarks on Frege's conception of extension -- Postscript to essay 5 -- Frege's correspondence: postscript to essay 6 -- Brentano on judgment and truth -- Husserl and the linguistic turn.

Abstract: Kant follows a substantial tradition by defining judgment so that it must involve a relation of concepts, which raises the question of why he thinks that single-term existential judgments should still qualify as judgments. There is a ready explanation if Kant is somehow anticipating a Fregean second-order account of existence, an interpretation that is already widely held for separate reasons. This paper examines Kant's early (1763) critique of Wolffian accounts of existence, finding that it provides the key idea in (...) his mature model of existential judgment, which is in fact sharply opposed to the Fregean strategy. By relating this to Kant's theory of judgment in general—in particular, to his claim for an isomorphism between the assertoric function of judgment and the category of existence—a preliminary case is made that absolute positing, far from being a marginal special case, accomplishes the primary function of judgment. This argument shows the importance of distinguishing between contexts in which Kant is treating judgment as a vehicle for inference (e.g. pure general logic) and contexts in which he is treating it, more robustly, as the cognition of an object. (shrink)

I argue in this thesis that the topic of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is an epistemology of metaphysics. This has important consequences for how the argumentative structure of the work should be understood. While the Critique constitutes an indispensable part of Kant’s philosophy in general and his ethics in particular, it is doubtful whether it is fully successful as it stands. In a footnote to his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science Kant hints at an alternative argumentative strategy to (...) establish the claims of the Critique, but he seems not to have developed this in the subsequent 2nd edition of the Critique. In this thesis I present a critical reconstruction of this alternative argumentative strategy applied to the central topics of the Transcendental Analytic. I claim that it is the aim of the Transcendental Analytic as a whole to provide a justification for the claim that pure concepts – Categories – are validly applied to objects of experience. Following Kant’s hint in the footnote to the Foundations, I argue that this can be established directly from an analysis of the forms of empirical judgements, and that claims about space and time as forms of intuition and considerations about the nature of human sensibility, are redundant. This reconstruction offers a profoundly Kantian, yet robustly realist way of resolving important philosophical problems. (shrink)

This paper argues that Kant, in his Critical period, did not have a coherence theory of truth. The paper outlines three coherence theories of truth and two coherence theories of empirical truth that Kant might have adopted. The three theories of truth are incompatible with Kant's texts. The two theories of empirical truth are compatible with the texts. However, there are no convincing reasons to hold that Kant adopted those theories.

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)

Kant's theory of judgment establishes the conceptual framework for understanding the subtle relationships between the experimental scientist, the modern instrument, and nature's atomic particles. The principle of purposiveness which governs judgment has also a role in implicitly guiding modern experimental science. In Part 1 we explore Kant's philosophy of science as he shows how knowledge of material nature and unobservable entities is possible. In Part 2 we examine the way in which Kant's treatment of judgment, with its operating principle of (...) purposiveness, enters into his critical project and underlies the possibility of rational science. In Part 3 we show that the centrality given to judgment in Kant's conception of science provides philosophical insight into the investigation of atomic substances in modern chemistry. (shrink)