Abstract

Kant claims that our knowledge of nature, which includes the laws and statements of natural science, "stands under," "is subject to," "conforms to" or "presupposes" the principles of pure understanding. The dissertation explores and explains the nature of this presupposition relationship. ;In chapter one five characteristics of the principles of pure understanding are identified. The principles are necessary for our knowledge of nature. The principles secure objective validity. The principles are the universal conditions of knowledge and yet allow that some knowledge of nature is developed empirically. The principles are rules. The principles are distinct from the Categories. Any adequate explanation of the presupposition relationship is expected to account for these aspects of the principles. ;The dissertation then proceeds in two parts. In part one several interpretations that have been given for the relationship are evaluated. It is argued in chapter two that the deductive model, in which 'p presupposes q' means 'q entails p', fails to meet condition , among others. In chapter three it is found that Brittan's interpretation, in which 'p presupposes q' means 'p is either true or false if and only if q is true,' ignores conditions and . In chapter four it is shown that Wolff's presentation of the principles does not explain conditions and . ;In part two a new interpretation for the presupposition relationship is given. In chapter five an analogy is developed between elements in Kant's transcendental philosophy and elements in Chomsky's transformational grammar. According to this analogy, the Categories, which Kant describes as the "forms of thought," are comparable to linguistic ordering rules, and the principles, which limit the Categories to the forms of sensible intuition, are likened to ordering rules rewritten to include lexical selection restrictions. The analogy provides a paradigm for presupposition; our knowledge of nature presupposes the principles of pure understanding in the same way that statements of a language presuppose the rules of that language. ;In chapter six the analogy is used to explicate the Category of quantity as "the aggregation of the homogeneous." In the process an interpretation of the analytic-synthetic distinction with respect to mathematical statements is developed. The chapter continues by showing that the principle of the Axioms of Intuition is the Category of quantity restricted by sensible intuition. Kant's discussion of phoronomy in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science is then related to the Critique of Pure Reason. The chapter concludes by demonstrating that Snell's law, a piece of our knowledge of nature, does presuppose the Axioms of Intuition. ;The argument of the dissertation is completed in chapter seven with an evaluation of the new interpretation. The conclusion is that the analogy not only explains the five features of the principles specified in chapter one but also shows how all these features are interrelated