Notes on <Kant's Transcendental Idealism> - The Intellectual Conditions of Human Knowledge
“Intellectual conditions of human knowledge” means the pure concepts of understanding, or categories in Kant’s term. The demonstration of the objective reality of these categories is the task of Transcendental Deduction. Before we do this, we ned to first identify them, this is covered in Metaphysical Deduction in CPR.
Pure Concepts of the Understanding
In case of concepts “pure” can’t be equated with a priori. “Pure concept” is a shorthand for “Pure concept of understanding”, they can be characterized as concepts that have their origin in the nature of human understanding, or express a fundamental law or function of the understanding.
It follows from Kant’s theory of judgment that there must be some concepts that are pure in this sense. The theory says first judgment is the fundamental act of thought, the function of judgment is not limited to the combination of given representations, it is also required to provide determinate representations in the first place. The second relevant feature is the role of concepts in judgment. Every act of judgment is also an act of conceptualization and vice versa. The unification of representations in judgment occurs by bringing these representations under a concept. Every judgment thus also makes use of some pre-given concept. We become aware of these concepts as presuppositions of the activity. Such concepts are the second-order concepts or rules for the generation of rules.
The first task is to determine what Kant means by “forms of judgment”. Judgments are functions of unity among our representations so the forms of judgment are the various ways in which the unity is possible. The forms are described as rules for the classification of judgments rather than as rules for judging itself, so they don’t seem to be the pure concepts that we are seeking.
How can the table of logical functions yield a set of pure concepts? The crucial point is the connection between judgment and conceptualization. Since every judgment is at the same time an act of conceptualization, it seems plausible to assume that each of the various forms or functions of judgment involves its own peculiar mode of conceptualizing given representations. In other words, to judge under a specific form is to conceptualize given representations in a determinate manner. So the ability to conceptualize or the possession of the appropriate concept is a necessary condition of the possibility of judging under a certain form.
Another important aspect of the theory of judgment is that every judgment involves the relation of given representations to an object, that is, the objective validity of the synthesis.
For example pure concepts of substance and causality are connected with the categorical and hypothetical forms of judgments. The pure concepts are the categorial rules through which objects of any ontological type must be conceptualized by a discursive intelligence. They are rules for the pure thought of an object.
Note here we are only talking about pure concepts themselves in their capacity as judgmental rules, not with the sensible conditions under which these concepts can be applied concretely to objects of possible experience.
It’s important to distinguish between a subject is thought within a given judgment and the manner in which something is thought as an object “in itself”. For example, the pure concept of substance is a rule for the conceptualization of the content of a categorical judgment. It expresses the necessity of conceiving the subject of such a judgment as a bearer of properties and as not itself a property of something else. This means in order to judge categorically, it is necessary to consider the subject as if it were a substance, not in the full-blown ontological sense, but in the sense that within the judgment it must be taken substantively. The rule that the subject is never a predicate of anything else is a rule within a given judgment. The ontological concept of substance arises from the attempt to think of some entity that must be conceived in this way in every judgmental context. Good evidence of this interpretation is given in the First Paralogism about the substantiality of the soul as a thinking being. Anything can be made to serve as the logical subject of a judgment and be conceived substantially but it does not justify the assumption that the subject is a substance in the ontological sense.
Another example is the hypothetical judgment. The judgments of the hypothetical form presuppose the concept of the relation of ground and consequent is not to be confused with the claim that they presuppose the concept of causality, like all of the pure concepts the relation of ground and consequent is a rule for the conceptualization of the manifold of intuition in general, when the corresponding function of judgment is applied to this manifold. The concept is a rule for the unification of thoughts in a judgment of the hypothetical forms, insofar as it is to be a judgment at all. By contrast the relation of cause and effect is a relation of event in human experience, such a relation involves reference to time and thus to the schema of the concept of causality.
The Metaphysical Deduction “Proper”
The “official” Metaphysical Deduction is intended to establish the agreement between the table of logical functions of judgment and that of the pure concepts of the understanding.
The same function which gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition. and this unity, in its most general expression, we entitle the pure concept of the understanding. The same understanding, through the same operations by which in concepts, by means of analytical unity, it produced the logical form of a judgment, also introduces a transcendental content into its representations, by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition in general. On this account we call these representations pure concepts of the understanding, which apply
a priorito objects - a conclusion which general logic cannot establish. [A79/B104-105]
The central claim is the identity of the understanding and its activity as considered in general and in transcendental logic. It is because general and transcendental logic deal with the same activity at different levels that Kant thinks it possible to move from the determination of the forms or functions of the former to those of the latter.
The identity of the understanding in its logical and its transcendental employment is the basis for Kant’s whole analysis. We can reduce all acts of the understanding to judgments, and the understanding may therefore be represented as a faculty of judgment.
The starting point of the “deduction” is the determination of the forms of judgment, a task which is assigned to logic. These forms must be taken to be the forms of all judgments(synthetic and analytic). Both analytic and synthetic judgments involve the unification of representation in one consciousness, and the logical functions of judgment are the forms or modes of this unification.
Insofar as the understanding produces judgments, it also produces the forms of judgment. The table of logical functions of judgment is supposed to contain a complete specification of these forms. The same understanding also introduces a transcendental content into its representations by means of the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition in general. What is this transcendental content? Strictly speaking it must be an extra-logical objective content, one that relates to object or objective reality. Thus to introduce a transcendental content into representations is just to relate them to an object. The key point is that the synthetic unity of the manifold is the form of the thought of an object in general.
If we assume that the understanding has such a transcendental function and it exercises it through the same operations by means of which it judges, then it follows that the logical function of judgment, which are forms in accordance with which the understanding unites its concepts in judgment, will also be the forms in accordance with which it unites the manifold of intuition in order to determine an object for judgment. This interpretation is implicit but there are multiple supporting texts in the Critique, for example in B143: “Now the categories are just these functions of judgment, insofar as they are employed in the determination of the manifold of a given intuition”.
However one problem is that Kant did not give proof for why the list of categories and function of judgments are complete.
This analysis does not carry with it any implications regarding the objective or empirical reality of these concepts. The basic point is that we cannot move directly from the premise that a given concept functions as a condition of judgments of a certain logical form to the conclusion that this concept has any applicability to the data of human experience. This is different from Transcendental Aesthetic. And this is why a Transcendental Deduction is necessary.