Andrew Stephenson

The essays in this volume explore those aspects of Kant’s writings which concern issues in the philosophy of mind. These issues are central to any understanding of Kant’s critical philosophy and they bear upon contemporary discussions in the philosophy of mind. Fourteen specially written essays address such questions as: What role does mental processing play in Kant’s account of intuition? What kinds of empirical models can be given of these operations? In what sense, and in what ways, are intuitions object-dependent? How should we understand the nature of the imagination? What is inner sense, and what does it mean to say that time is the form of inner sense? Can we cognize ourselves through inner sense? How do we self-ascribe our beliefs and what role does self-consciousness play in our judgments? Is the will involved in judging? What kind of knowledge can we have of the self ? And what kind of knowledge of the self does Kant proscribe? These essays showcase the depth of Kant’s writings in the philosophy of mind, and the centrality of those writings to his wider philosophical project. Moreover, they show the continued relevance of Kant’s writings to contemporary debates about the nature of mind and self.
Contents:
0. Introduction
Anil Gomes and Andrew Stephenson
1. Kant, The Philosophy Of Mind, And Twentieth Century Analytic Philosophy
Anil Gomes
2. Synthesis And Binding
Lucy Allais
3. Understanding Non-Conceptual Representation Of Objects: Empirical Models Of Sensibility’s Operation
Katherine Dunlop
4. Are Kantian Intuitions Object-Dependent?
Stefanie Grüne
5. Intuition And Presence
Colin McLear
6. Imagination And Inner Intuition
Andrew Stephenson
7. Inner Sense And Time
Ralf M. Bader
8. Can’t Kant Cognize Himself? Or, A Problem For (Almost) Every Interpretation Of
The Refutation Of Idealism
Andrew Chignell
9. A Kantian Critique Of Transparency
Patricia Kitcher
10. Judging For Reasons: On Kant And The Modalities Of Judgment
Jessica Leech
11. Kant On Judging And The Will
Jill Vance Buroker
12. Self and Selves
Ralph C. S. Walker
13. Subjects Of Kant’s First Paralogism
Tobias Rosefeldt
14. The Lessons Of Kant’s Paralogisms
Paul Snowdon

This essay considers Kant’s theory of modality in light of a debate in contemporary modal metaphysics and modal logic concerning the Barcan formulas. The comparison provides a new and fruitful perspective on Kant’s complex and sometimes confusing claims about possibility and necessity. Two central Kantian principles provide the starting point for the comparison: that the possible must be grounded in the actual and that existence is not a real predicate. Both are shown to be intimately connected to the view encoded in the Barcan formulas, and Kant’s views on what he distinguishes as three different kinds of modality are then considered in light of this connection.

With Anil Gomes and A. W. Moore. For Kant, the human cognitive faculty has two sub-faculties: sensibility and the understanding. Each has pure forms which are necessary to us as humans: space and time for sensibility; the categories for the understanding. But Kant is careful to leave open the possibility of there being creatures like us, with both sensibility and understanding, who nevertheless have different pure forms of sensibility. They would be finite rational beings and discursive cognizers. But they would not be human. And this raises a question about the pure forms of the understanding. Does Kant leave open the possibility of discursive cognizers who have different categories? Even if other discursive cognizers might not sense like us, must they at least think like us? We argue that textual and systematic considerations do not determine the answers to these questions and examine whether Kant thinks that the issue cannot be decided. Consideration of his wider views on the nature and limits of our knowledge of mind shows that Kant could indeed remain neutral on the issue but that the exact form his neutrality can take is subject to unexpected constraints. The result would be an important difference between what Kant says about discursive cognizers with other forms of sensibility and what he is in a position to say about discursive cognizers with other forms of understanding. Kantian humility here takes on a distinctive character.

This paper draws out and connects two neglected issues in Kant's conception of a priori knowledge. Both concern topics that have been central to contemporary epistemology and to formal epistemology in particular: knowability and luminosity. Does Kant commit to some form of knowability principle according to which certain necessary truths are in principle knowable to beings like us? Does Kant commit to some form of luminosity principle according to which, if a subject knows a priori, then they can know that they know a priori? I defend affirmative answers to both of these questions, and by considering the special kind of modality involved in Kant's conceptions of possible experience and the essential completability of metaphysics, I argue that his combination of knowability and luminosity principles leads Kant into difficulty.

With Richard Evans and Marek Sergot. This paper formalizes part of the cognitive architecture that Kant develops in the Critique of Pure Reason. The central Kantian notion that we formalize is the rule. A rule, as we interpret Kant, is not a declarative conditional stating what would be true if such and such conditions hold. Rather, a Kantian rule is a general procedure, represented by a conditional imperative or permissive, indicating which mental acts must or may be performed. These mental acts are not propositions; they do not have truth-values. Our formalization is related to the input/output logics, a family of logics designed to capture relations between elements that need not have truth-values. In this paper, we introduce KL 3 as a formalization of Kant's conception of rules as conditional imperatives and permissives over mental acts. We explain how it differs from standard input/output logics, geometric logic, and first-order logic, as well as how it translates natural language sentences not well captured by first-order logic. Finally, we show how the various distinctions in Kant's much-maligned Table of Judgements emerge as the most natural way of dividing up the various types and sub-types of rule in KL 3. Our analysis sheds new light on the way in which normative notions play a fundamental role in the conception of logic at the heart of Kant's theoretical philosophy.

A novel solution to the knowability paradox is proposed based on Kant's transcendental epistemology. The 'paradox' refers to a simple argument from the moderate claim that all truths are knowable to the extreme claim that all truths are known. It is significant because anti-realists have wanted to maintain knowability but reject omniscience. The core of the proposed solution is to concede realism about epistemic statements while maintaining anti-realism about non-epistemic statements. Transcendental epistemology supports such a view by providing for a sharp distinction between how we come to understand and apply epistemic versus non-epistemic concepts, the former through our capacity for a special kind of reflective self-knowledge Kant calls 'transcendental apperception'. The proposal is a version of restriction strategy: it solves the paradox by restricting the anti-realist's knowability principle. Restriction strategies have been a common response to the paradox but previous versions face serious difficulties: either they result in a knowability principle too weak to do the work anti-realists want it to, or they succumb to modified forms of the paradox, or they are ad hoc. It is argued that restricting knowability to non-epistemic statements by conceding realism about epistemic statements avoids all versions of the paradox, leaves enough for the anti-realist attack on classical logic, and, with the help of transcendental epistemology, is principled in a way that remains compatible with a thoroughly anti-realist outlook.

It is often claimed that anti-realism is a form of transcendental idealism or that Kant is an anti-realist.1 It is also often claimed that anti-realists are committed to some form of knowability principle to the effect that all truths (or at least all truths of a certain class) are knowable and that such principles have problematic consequences.2 It is therefore natu- ral to ask whether Kant was committed to any such principle, and if he was, whether this leads him into similar difficulties. Both transcenden- tal idealism and anti-realism aim to provide a middle way between re- alism and idealism. A logical proof published by Frederic Fitch in 1963 (though first conveyed to him by Alonzo Church in 1945) appears to show that anti-realism fails in its aim because it collapses into idealism. Can a related proof show that transcendental idealism collapses in the same way? I argue that, initial appearances to the contrary, it cannot.
The paper is in two parts. In the first part, I set up the problem and, in the second part, I solve it.
In §1.1, I present evidence that suggests Kant is indeed committed to a knowability principle and I show that a Fitch-Church style proof can be constructed on this basis. Kant does not think that all truths whatsoever are knowable, but it can seem as though he is commit- ted to the claim that all empirical truths are knowable, and on mod- erate background assumptions this entails that no empirical truth is unknown. In §1.2, I show that with a few additional assumptions we can also prove that all a priori truths are knowable and that no a pri- ori truth is unknown. This is an interesting result with more general philosophical lessons concerning how certain classes of truth relate within a framework of knowability. But it is a little unfair to Kant. Ar- guably, we ought to further restrict our candidate Kantian knowability principle to what I call purely empirical truths, and doing so blocks the seepage into the a priori realm. However, this move would still leave Kant forced to concede that there are no unknown purely empirical truths, which is hardly more palatable.
Thus in the second part of the paper I explore an alternative route. The evidence for Kantian knowability relies on interpreting Kantian experience as a form of knowledge. This is a standard view, but it is not always correct. Sometimes Kantian experience is something more like final science. In §2.1, I explain this conception of experience and apply it to the case at hand. Because, for Kant, experience so conceived is an unachievable epistemic ideal, it expresses no knowability prin- ciple to define truth in terms of it. Arguably, however, this proposal would still leave Kant committed to the claim that all purely empirical truths can be the objects of justified belief, and it has been objected that this kind of principle remains just as susceptible to Fitch-Church style reasoning.3 In §2.2, I argue that Kant has exactly the resources needed to rebut such an objection.
Kant’s theory of truth has both realist and idealist aspects and is in a way anti-realist. But Fitch-Church style reasoning alone cannot show us that the theory is absurd.

Against a view currently popular in the literature it is argued that Kant was not a naïve realist about perceptual experience. Naive realism entails that perceptual experience is object-dependent in a very strong sense. In the first half of the paper I explain what this claim amounts to and I undermine the evidence that has been marshalled in support of attributing it to Kant. In the second half of the paper I develop in some detail an account of Kant's theory of hallucination and explain why no such account is available to someone who thinks that veridical perceptual experience is object-dependent in the naïve realist sense. Kant's theory provides for a remarkably sophisticated, bottom-up explanation of the phenomenal character of hallucinatory episodes, and although it has been little studied, it is crucial for gaining a proper understanding of his model of the mind and its place in nature.

There is a tension at the heart of Lucy Allais' new account of Kant's transcendental idealism. The problem arises from her use of two incompatible theories in contemporary philosophy – relationalism about perception, or naïve realism, and relationalism about colour, or more generally relationalism about any such perceptual property. The problem is that the former requires a more robust form of realism about the properties of the objects of perception than can be accommodated in the partially idealistic framework of the latter. On Allais' interpretation, Kant's notorious attempt to balance realism and idealism remains unstable.

In this paper I offer an interpretation of Kant's theory of perceptual error based on his remarks in the Anthropology. Both hallucination and illusion, I argue, are for Kant species of experience and therefore require the standard cooperation of sensibility and understanding. I develop my account in a conceptualist framework according to which the two canonical classes of non-veridical experience involve error in the basic sense that how they represent the world as being is not how the world is. In hallucination this is due to the misapplication of categories and in illusion to the misapplication of empirical concepts. Yet there is also room in this framework for a distinction in terms of cognitive functionality between the level of experience, which is merely judgementally structured, and that of judgement proper, which involves the free action of a conscious agent. This distinction enables Kant to allow for the otherwise problematic phenomenon of self-aware non-veridicality.

This essay reassesses the relation between Kant and Kripke on the relation between necessity and the a priori. Kripke famously argues against what he takes to be the traditional view that a statement is necessary only if it is a priori, where, very roughly, what it means for a statement to be necessary is that it is true and could not have been false and what it means for a statement to be a priori is that it is knowable independently of experience. Call such a view the Entailment Thesis. Along with many Kant scholars, Kripke thinks that Kant endorses the Entailment Thesis. Thus Kripke and many others take his arguments against the Entailment Thesis to tell against Kant and to mark an important point of disagreement with him. I will argue that this is a mistake. Kant does not endorse the Entailment Thesis that Kripke and many others attribute to him. He does endorse two quite different theses concerning the relation between necessity and the a priori, as he conceives them. One is a matter of definition and the other is a very substantial philosophical thesis indeed—to establish it is the aim of the entire Critique of Pure Reason. But Kripke’s arguments against the Entailment Thesis tell against neither of Kant’s theses, as they involve crucially different conceptions of necessity and the a priori. This superficial lack of disagreement masks deep disagreements, but these result from divergent views regarding matters such as realism, modal epistemology, and philosophical methodology; views which Kant does a lot, and Kripke very little, to argue for.

With Anil Gomes. The aim of the Analytic of Concepts is to derive and deduce a set of pure concepts of the understanding, the categories, which play a central role in Kant’s explanation of the possibility of synthetic a priori cognition and judgment. This chapter is structured around two questions. First, what is a pure concept of the understanding? Second, what is involved in a deduction of a pure concept of the understanding? In answering the first, we focus on how the categories differ from the pure forms of sensibility and examine whether they are known only to be the pure forms of human thinking or rather the forms of discursive cognition as such. In answering the second, we draw a distinction between the application and the exemplification of the categories and use it to identify different ways of understanding Kant’s project in the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. These questions connect because the answer to the first determines how we should understand the kind of entitlement which is to be established in the Deduction.

In this paper I return to the question of whether intuition is object-dependent. Kant's account of the imagination appears to suggest that intuition is not object-dependent. On a recent proposal, however, the imagination is a faculty of merely inner intuition, the inner objects of which exist and are present in the way demanded by object-dependence views, such as Allais's relational account. I argue against this proposal on both textual and philosophical grounds. It remains inconsistent with what Kant says about how the imagination functions and is ultimately incompatible with the relational account it is supposed to support. Kant's account of the imagination remains a serious obstacle for the view that intuition is object-dependent.

With Anil Gomes. Recent debates in the interpretation of Kant's theoretical philosophy have focused on the nature of Kantian intuition and, in particular, on the question of whether intuitions depend for their existence on the existence of their objects. In this paper we show how opposing answers to this question determine different accounts of the nature of Kantian cognition and we suggest that progress can be made on determining the nature of intuition by considering the implications different views have for the nature of cognition.

'Marcus Willaschek has written an excellent book on Kant’s account of reason as the sourceof metaphysical speculation in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason. There are insights on every page and it will be essential reading for Kant scholars, especially but not only those who work on the theoretical philosophy. Willaschek’s writing and presentation make for an exceptionally clear, accessible read, so the book will also be useful for students. It will be of interest to those working on the history of metaphysics and metametaphysics more generally, and it may also be of interest to contemporary metaphysicians and metametaphysicians. The book should become a standard in its field.'

In this extended critical discussion of 'Kant's Modal Metaphysics' by Nicholas Stang, I focus on one central issue from the first chapter of the book: Stang’s account of Kant’s doctrine that existence is not a real predicate. In §2 I outline some background. In §§3-4 I present and then elaborate on Stang’s interpretation of Kant’s view that existence is not a real predicate. For Stang, the question of whether existence is a real predicate amounts to the question: ‘could there be non-actual possibilia?’ (p.35). Kant’s view, according to Stang, is that there could not, and that the very notion of non-actual or ‘mere’ possibilia is incoherent. In §5 I take a close look at Stang’s master argument that Kant’s Leibnizian predecessors are committed to the claim that existence is a real predicate, and thus to mere possibilia. I argue that it involves substantial logical commitments that the Leibnizian could reject. I also suggest that it is danger of proving too much. In §6 I explore two closely related logical commitments that Stang’s reading implicitly imposes on Kant, namely a negative universal free logic and a quantified modal logic that invalidates the Converse Barcan Formula. I suggest that each can seem to involve Kant himself in commitment to mere possibilia.
https://virtualcritique.wordpress.com/2017/07/02/andrew-stephenson-on-nicholas-stangs-kants-modal-metaphysics/

'This eagerly awaited book is an important addition to the literature on Kant’s
transcendental idealism and is sure to generate a lot of discussion. Drawing
together her influential previous work alongside substantial new material, Allais
presents a comprehensive and novel account of Kant’s signature doctrine, its
structure, nature, and purpose, as well as Kant’s master argument for the view.
Allais’s interpretation is textually well supported and philosophically sophisticated.
The overarching aim, as the subtitle of the book suggests, is an account
of transcendental idealism that fully respects both Kant’s idealism and his
realism, and one of the best things about the book is how it takes various
extant interpretations to task for failing in this regard...'

I discuss three elements of Dennis Schulting's new book on the transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the understanding, or categories. First, that Schulting gives a detailed account of the role of each individual category. Second, Schulting's insistence that the categories nevertheless apply 'en bloc'. Third, Schulting's defence of Kant's so-called reciprocity thesis that subjective unity of consciousness and objectivity in the sense of cognition's objective purport are necessary conditions for the possibility of one another.

'The self, the ‘I think’, my existence as an intelligence, the thinking subject, apperception,
the person—all of these and the relationships between them form the subject matter of
Arthur Melnick’s brilliant new book on Kant. Indeed, every one of these notions is
brought into play by the end of the very first paragraph of the preface. This is a difficult book, primarily suited to the specialist, yet its difficulty only rarely lies in unclarity or
confusion. The theory of the self that it outlines and explores is as subtle, intricate and
forcefully argued for as it is original, stimulating and highly controversial...'

In this book, Henry Allison, one of the world’s foremost Kant scholars,
presents a detailed study of the central epistemological and metaphysical
theories of the Treatise. Following the first book of Hume’s early masterpiece
almost section by section, page by page, Allison dedicates chapters not
only to the much discussed issues of causation, induction, scepticism, and
personal identity, but also to Hume’s often neglected views on space and
time and to his unforgiving history of philosophy. But the unique interest
of Allison’s book does not lie in its diligence in this respect; rather it lies in
the book’s constant Kantian refrain, a refrain that provides an unrelenting
critical perspective from which to assess Hume’s theoretical philosophy.