Abstract

This dissertation is a determination of the nature and epistemological assumptions of Kant's philosophy of language. In Section 39 of the Prolegomena, Kant asserts that the search for the fundamental assumptions of human cognition is closely associated with the search for the basic rules of grammar. In spite of this claim, however, Kant has no treatise on language as such. He does have a theory of signs, though, contained in Sections 38 and 39 of Anthropology From a Pragmatic Point of View and expounded in my first chapter, "The Faculty of Designation." In my first chapter, I also argue that symbolic cognition, the substitution of signs for intuitions in the cognition of objects, is an aid to practical cognition, knowledge of the realm of value, but is a hindrance to theoretical cognition, knowledge of the realm of fact. ;In my second chapter, "Meaning," I maintain that Kant's theory of the cognition of empirical objects and events is, when interpreted in the light of his account of signs, his theory of meaning as well. Kant claims, in the Critique of Pure Reason, that every cognition of the empirical world must be analyzable into at least two elements: an intuition and a concept. I claim, in my second chapter, that every representation in human consciousness must contain at least two elements, one referred to sensibility and the other to thought, in order to be meaningful. ;"Kant's Representationalism: Causes, Consequences, and Applications," my third chapter, contains a brief account of the historical background from which Kant's theory of representations emerged, an account of those views themselves, and an interpretation of the relation between language and cognition implied by those views. In the latter portion of this chapter, I offer a brief sketch of grammar from a Kantian perspective as an illustration of the form a treatise on language by Kant could have taken. Finally, in the conclusion of this study, I present what I take to be Kant's most general conception of language in the light of his theories of signs, meaning, and representations