Notes on <Kant's Transcendental Idealism> - Discursivity and Judgment
- Discursive Knowledge and Its Elements: Concepts and Intuitions
- Kant’s Theory of Judgment
- The Analytic - Synthetic Distinction
This chapter will discuss the specific conditions in support of Kant’s claims for epistemic conditions in transcendental idealism. We will examine the account for the discursive nature of human cognition and theory of judgment underlies it.
Discursive Knowledge and Its Elements: Concepts and Intuitions
The intuitive intellect grasps its object immediately, without any conceptualizations and without being affected by objects. Therefore it is creative: its act of intuition produces its object. This is the kind of intuition pertains to God. This is show that human cognition is not the only logically possible kind of cognition.
Concepts is a general representation of what is common to several objects, it is something universal which serves as a rule. Kant also claims that the only use which the understanding can make of these concepts is to judge by means of them.
Kant also distinguishes between the pure and empirical concepts, and between content and form of a concept. Only the latter distinction is relevant here.
Kant defines intuition as “singular representation” and refers immediately to its object. Hintikka claims that only singular is essential and immediacy is only corollary, however this ignores the presentational function of intuition, only through immediacy can intuition present a particular object to mind.
Sensible intuition only provides raw data for conceptualization. As Kant’s famous formula about his epistemology said:
Intuitions and concepts constitute the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concept without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuitions without concepts can yield knowledge.
However, as shown in later chapters, we want to distinguish between the determinate or conceptualized intuition and indeterminate or unconceptualized intuitions. Also it’s important to distinguish between mental content, an object and an act sense of “intuition”.
Kant’s Theory of Judgment
Kant claims that we can reduce all understanding to judgments, and understanding can be represented as a faculty of judgment. One problem is that he defines judgment as meaning both act of judgment and the product in a variety of ways. There are two accounts in CPR, one way is to equate making a judgment with forming a complex concepts, another takes every judgment to involve the cognition of an object and thus have “objective validity”.
Concepts and Judgment: The Initial Account
The first account is to make explicit the identification of discursive knowledge with judgment. Every judgment involves an act of conceptualization and vice versa. Since no concept relates to object immediately, and judgment is the mediate knowledge of an object.
The subject concept in Kant’s illustration relates immediately to intuition, and only mediately to the object. The intuition provides the sensible content to the judgment, while the concept provides the rule in accordance with which the content is determined. It is precisely by determining this content that the concept is brought into relation with the object. Then the subject goes through a second determination with predicate. Kant’s claim that all judgments are functions of unity among our representations is intended to underscore the point that every judgment involves a unification of representations under a concept. Function here means task or work. The essential task of the act of judgment is to produce a unity of representation under a concept.
For judgment “body is divisible”. The logical subject body functions as a real predicate. And the predicate divisible does not add any further determinations to the subject beyond what is already established by the characterization of it as a body. Theses judgments are called analytical judgments.
Judgment and Objectivity: The Second Account
The objectivity of judgment is the focal point of discussion in the second edition of Transcendental Deduction. Kant is first concerned with the distinction between “objective unity” of self consciousness, which involves categories and “subjective unity”, which is related to the reproductive capacity of the imagination.
The distinguishing characteristic of the relation of representations in a judgment is seen to lie in its objectivity. It is an “objective unity” and it is correlated with the objective unity of apperception. Every judgment involves “that unity through which all the manifold given in an intuition is united in a concept of the object”. A judgment can be described as a relation that is “objectively valid”, that can be distinguished from a relation of the same representations that would have only subjective validity, as they are concerned according to laws of association. Objective validity is a definational feature for Kant.
It’s obvious that objective validity can’t be equated with truth. Following Paruss on this point, the claim that the judgment has objective validity means every judgment has a truth value.
The Analytic - Synthetic Distinction
The introduction contains two different but purportedly equivalent version of the distinction. Analytical judgments are those in which predicate B belongs to subject A, synthetic judgments are the ones where B lies outside of concept A.
According to second version, the analytic judgments add nothing through the predicate to the concept of the subject, merely breaking it up into those constituent concepts that have all along being thought in it. Synthetic judgments add to the concept of the subject a predicate which has not been in any wise thought in it.
Later Kant made explicit what is implicit in the entire discussion, that the law of contradiction is the principle of all analytic judgments.
There are some difficulties concerning the criteria to decide whether one concept is contained in another. On the phenomenological criteria, it is decided by introspection, that is, we reflect on what is being thought in a given concept. According to the logical criteria, it is resolved by considering whether the contradictory of the original judgment is self-contradictory. An obvious problem is those two criteria do not always produce the same result.
Analytic judgments provide a formal extension of knowledge by explicating what is implicit in the concept. Synthetic judgments provides a material extension.
The Problem of the Synthetic a priori
Kant claims that the possibility of synthetic a priori judgments is the central problem of metaphysics. And past philosophers failed to identify the problem. The question is an epistemological rather than logical question. To ask whether a given judgment is a priori is to ask how it is known, how it is grounded or legitimated.
The problem of synthetic a priori is, that of explaining how a non-empirical, extra-conceptual and extra-logical grounding of a judgment is possible. Kant’s clearest response is contained in “On the Progress of Metaphysics”. If there is synthetic a priori judgments, there must both be a priori intuitions and concepts.
Synthetic a priori judgments requires intuition for the same reason that any synthetic judgments does. And it is precisely because of the impossibility of providing an intuition to the judgments of transcendent metaphysics that Kant holds that these judgments are ungrounded. The limits of our sensibility are at the same time the limits of our world.
Why is it necessary to introduce the pure, yet sensible intuition? The reason is clear: the insufficiency of empirical intuition to ground synthetic a priori judgments. Because of the particularity of empirical intuitions they can’t express the universality and necessity that is thought in a pure concept.
Final question is whether pure intuitions, construed as representations, function as ingredients in synthetic a priori judgments in the same way that empirical intuition function in synthetic a posteriori judgments. The answer is yes. The question of how pure intuitions are possible and what it can contain or represent are the main concerns for the next chapter.