Abstract
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.
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Notes
Admittedly, such a Kantian characterization of the problem would not serve for all of Martin’s purposes, but since I will be focusing on Kantian themes, this specification will do here.
Here is a classic formulation of Leibniz’s predicate-in-subject account of judgment, from the essay “Primary Truths”:
Therefore the predicate or consequent is always in the subject or antecedent, and the nature of truth in general or the connection between the terms of a statement consists in this very thing, as Aristotle also observed. The connection and inclusion of the predicate in the subject is explicit in identities, but in all other propositions it is implicit and must be shown through the analysis of notions. [AG 31]
As Leibniz’s doctrine shows (indeed, in sharp relief!), the synthetic character of judgment in the present sense (i.e., the fact that every judgment is a synthesis of subject and predicate concepts) must be strictly distinguished from the sense of ‘synthetic judgment’ proper to Kant’s analytic/synthetic distinction. Leibniz’s predicate-in-subject principle claims that judgment is synthetic in the former sense (every judgment connects a predicate to a subject), even while it is the paradigm case of the view that judgment is non-synthetic (= analytic) in the latter sense (i.e., the predicate concept is “contained in” the subject for every true judgment).
Consider, for example, ‘God exists,’ ‘It’s raining,’ ‘There is no present king of France,’ ‘There are non-synthetic judgments,’ and (since we are in San Francisco) ‘There’s gold in them thar hills.’ In each case, the judgment operates not by combining a subject term with a predicate, but by identifying some subject term (of whatever form or complexity) and asserting (or denying) that there are such things.
Thus Kant,
Being is obviously not a real predicate, i.e., a concept of something that could add to the concept of a thing. It is merely the positing of a thing or of certain determinations in themselves. …The proposition God is omnipotent contains two concepts that have their objects: God and omnipotence; the little word “is” is not a predicate in it, but only that which posits the predicate in relation to the subject. Now if I take the subject (God) together with all his predicates (among which omnipotence belongs), and say God is, or there is a God, then I add no new predicate to the concept of God, but only posit the subject in itself with all its predicates, and indeed posit the object in relation to my concept. Both must contain exactly the same, and hence when I think this object as given absolutely (through the expression, “it is”), nothing is thereby added to the concept, which expresses merely its possibility. [A 598-9/B 626-7]
Martin (2006, pp. 49–55) actually distinguishes four different approaches for Kant in handling the force of the existence term in existential judgments (and thus the logical form of those judgments): Kant could (1) treat existence as a merely logical (not a real) predicate; (2) insist that ‘is,’ or ‘exists,’ is just the copula (not a predicate); (3) treat the existence claim as “positing” rather than predication; or (4) read ‘God exists’ as (in effect) a generalization about the domain of the actual, which then just locates God within the domain. I doubt that options (2) and (3) were really distinct in Kant’s mind. There are subtle issues about the fourth possibility and its relation to the first, but in the interest of simplicity, I here collapse the various considerations into the two broad groups discussed in the text.
Thus, the proposal is to treat existential judgments in something like the way Kant treats singular judgments. As I will emphasize below, for Kant the subject concept of a judgment can never be singular strictly speaking, or considered by itself, since all concepts (qua concepts) are general representations. Nevertheless, a subject term can be used as a singular name in the context of a judgment meant to pick out a single individual: “It is a mere tautology to speak of universal or common concepts—a mistake that is grounded in an incorrect division of concepts into universal, particular, and singular. Concepts themselves cannot be so divided, but only their use” (Logic §1, Ak. 9: 91). Similarly, the suggestion is, in existential judgment we take a form (categorical judgment) which in its basic logic consists of subject and predicate terms united by a copula, and give it a special use, in which no content accrues to the predicate term. Since it contributes no content, what is asserted (or “posited”) in the judgment is not the relation of inherence between predicate and subject contents, as in a standard categorical judgment, but instead the subject term itself, which is thereby treated as a claim or cognition, as something that obtains, rather than merely as a representation. Further discussion on this point is offered below.
Thus, “The matter of hypothetical judgments consists of two judgments…, and the representation of this kind of connection of two judgments to one another for the unity of consciousness is called the consequentia, which constitutes the form of hypothetical judgments” (Logic §15, Ak. 9: 105).
Martin (2006, p. 62) points out that this last formulation from the Critique was expressly rejected as a definition of judgment by Drobisch, on the grounds that, as a purely logical notion, judgment must be thought of as an operation or manipulation of representations, and no relation to an object can be an essential condition on something’s counting as a judgment. It seems to me that this objection somewhat over-reads the intentions behind Kant’s definition. His real point in the passage at A 68/B 93, to my eye, is just that a judgment, like a concept, is a mediate representation of whatever it represents. In the standard case (at least for first Critique purposes), where that representation counts as a cognition of an object, then a judgment is a mediate cognition of an object. Still, I agree that Drobisch is correct on the basic underlying point, and so does Kant, I think. His more official definitions of judgment (in the logic lectures, in the Logic, and in the B Deduction at B 140-2 (quoted below)) themselves stick with the more neutral terminology of ‘representation.’
Contra Brandom (1994, pp. 79–80). In light of the full discussion at A 68-9/B 93, it seems to me that Brandom clearly reads too much into Kant’s claim that “the understanding can make no other use of concepts than that of judging by means of them” (A 68/B 93). Kant can perfectly well be claiming here that the way we put concepts into use is to make judgments, without actually anticipating the Frege context principle. In particular, the former thesis could be true without there being a fundamental difference in logical form between the kind of combination of representations effected by a concept and the kind effected by a judgment. Kant’s express claim at A 126 that treating the understanding as a faculty of concepts and conceiving it as a faculty of judgment amount to the same thing strikes me as a clear indication that he did not anticipate Frege in the way Brandom would have us believe.
It is worth noting that Kant’s insistence on the irreducibility of the higher judgment forms (and of the higher “extraordinary” forms of the syllogism which take such judgments as major premises) to the categorical case was one of the crucial marks separating Kant’s logic from that of his Wolffian predecessors. Wolff and his followers insisted that all judgments could be expressed in categorical form, and that all inferences could be expressed in the form of the categorical syllogism. Elsewhere (Anderson 2005), I have suggested links between this reduction program and the Wolffian ideal of recasting every truth as a conceptual one. If that is right, then Kant’s insistence on the irreducibility of the higher forms of judgment and the corresponding extraordinary syllogisms has deep going philosophical motivations connected to his analytic/synthetic distinction, and its deployment in the critique of Wolffian metaphysics.
See also the thought provoking version of a similar point in the Dohna-Wundlacken Logic, at Ak. 24: 763. The centrality of logical form in Kant’s philosophy of logic is thoughtfully explored by MacFarlane (2002).
In fact, Kant’s own discussion seems to fall into the same trap of exclusive attention to the categorical case, when he focuses on ‘is’ as the sole form of the copula to be considered, but I think that detail is not in fact essential to his point. Kant’s claim here is more happily taken as applying to the logical marker of judgmental form, whatever it is—be it the categorical copula ‘is,’ the hypothetical ‘if, then,’ etc. Any of these markers of judgmental form might be taken as a copula in an extended sense, and since Kant is clearly committed to the irreducibility of hypothetical and disjunctive judgment forms, presumably those judgments could not be restated as categoricals using ‘is’ without logical loss. Kant clearly attributes parallel roles to the categorical copula and the marker of hypothetical judgment form when he introduces hypothetical judgment in the logic: “What the copula is for categorical judgments, then, the consequentia is for hypotheticals—their form” (Logic §25, Ak. 9: 105).
For the classic discussion of this point, see Thompson (1973).
Conversations with Daniel Sutherland after I delivered this talk at the 2007 Pacific APA—and also some thoughts toward the end of Wayne Martin’s replies—have made me lean toward the conclusion that Kant would ultimately have to recognize existential judgment as a separate form. On the side of refusing to recognize such a separate form, there is of course some interest in preserving the clean architectonic structure of Kant’s table of logical forms of judgment (an interest which may carry limited force for Kantians other than Kant himself!), plus the thought, broached in the text above, that the synthetic combination of conceptual marks that we effect in a typical (synthetic) judgment of attributive predication really is the same type of logical act that would be required to bring marks together in a complex concept in the first place (e.g., the sort of prior synthetic unification of conceptual content envisioned in Kant’s discussion of the concept <red> at B 133-4n). But on the other side, favoring the logical differentiation of categoricals and existentials, is the observation that it should be possible to make categorical judgments without existential commitment. In that case, the act of positing the inherence of predicate in subject (the positing component of the categorical) must not be the same as the act of positing a term that comprised the same content as the subject-plus-predicate, which (qua existential judgment) would carry existential commitment—and this would remain so even if the logical act that just effected the synthetic combination of the relevant marks were the same in both cases. From this point of view, it appears that the issue here is bound up with the question of the existential commitment of categorical judgments in Kant, which is a vexed question. (To get a sense of the anomalies, recall that Kant recognizes the immediate inference from a universal (‘All S is P’) to a particular (‘Some S is P’) as valid. In that context, clearly, empty subject terms are not being recognized.) But since the line of thought driving Kant’s critique of the ontological argument provides forceful reasons to recognize the logical importance of empty terms, probably the balance of considerations would push Kant to recognize existential positing (and thus existential judgment) as a separate forms. Thanks to Daniel Sutherland, whose usual careful and probing analysis helped me to see my way a bit further into this thicket.
References
Works by Kant All citations to Kant are made parenthetically in the text, and use the pagination of the standard Akademie edition, cited below (except those to the Critique of Pure Reason, which use the standard (A/B) format to refer to the pages numbers of the first (=A) and second (=B) editions, respectively). Published works are identified by the abbreviations listed in parentheses. I have made use of the translations and editions listed below, in addition to the Akademie edition.
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Ricketts, T. (1996). Logic and truth in Frege. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplemental Volume 70, 121–140.
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Acknowledgments
My thanks are due first to Wayne Martin, whose splendid book prompted these reflections. I also benefitted from the contributions of my fellow panelists, Hans Sluga and Günter Zöller, as well as Martin’s highly illuminating response. Thanks also to Daniel Sutherland, and to David Hills, Krista Lawlor, and Thomas Ricketts for helpful conversations about these ideas.
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Anderson, R.L. Comments on Wayne Martin, Theories of Judgment . Philos Stud 137, 91–108 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9162-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-007-9162-4