Perception in Kant, McDowell, and Burge

The Philosophy of Perception and Observation. Papers of the 40th International Wittgenstein Symposium , vol. 25, edited by Christoph Limbeck-Lilienau and Friedrich Stadler, Kirchberg am Wechsel 2017, pp. 284-287. Perception in Kant, McDowell, and Burge Christian Helmut Wenzel Taipei, Taiwan | wenzelchristian@yahoo.com Abstract Kant sometimes compares human beings with animals and angels and grants human beings a middle position. But contrary to what one might expect, his transcendental philosophy does not apply well to animals or angels. The question of whether we share perception with animals has no good answer in his system that has to be taken as a single piece and does not allow for introducing steps of empirical, real developments. Differently from Kant, McDowell does compare human beings with animals, but he is not a transcendental philosopher and his attempts to find support in Kant are problematic. Although McDowell says that concepts go "all the way out" and Kant says the categories go "all the way down," which sounds similar, Kant talks of a priori categories, not empirical concepts. Burge is definitely not a transcendental philosopher like Kant. Up front he strongly relies on empirical studies, especially animal perception. Nevertheless, his quest into mental content introduces first-person perspectives that have a metaphysical flavor, and this makes - at least to me - comparisons with Kant tempting again. The Problem in Kant In the act of perceiving we are doing something. We are not just passive. Our eyes move, and so do our hands when we touch, feel, and handle an object. Seeing is always seeing-as, hearing is always hearing-as, and they depend on our use of language and our communicating with each other. But is seeing therefore always conceptual? How much do concepts play into perception? Are they always involved? The answers to these questions will of course depend on what we mean by “concepts.” Kant has a theory of concepts. For him imagination (Einbildungskraft) plays a mediating role between what he calls “intuition” (Anschauung) and “concept” (Begriff). But how exactly does this work? How free is imagination from concepts, and how much is it guided by them? Kant was certainly aware of the fact that perception is active. Thus he wrote in a footnote of the first Critique (1781): “Psychologists have hitherto failed to realise that imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself. This is due partly to the fact that that faculty has been limited to reproduction, partly to the belief that the senses not only supply impressions but also combine them so as to generate images of objects. For that purpose something more than the mere receptivity of impressions is undoubtedly required, namely, a function for the synthesis of them” (A 120). Thus for Kant, receptivity alone does not do it. Synthesis is required. But what kind of synthesis would that be? Kant famously said that intuitions without concepts are blind. Now perception is usually not blind, which is no wonder, because perception is more than intuition. Perception (Wahrnehmung) is by definition “appearance with consciousness” (Erscheinung mit Bewusstsein, A 120). It involves consciousness. We may be willing to accept that appearance without consciousness – appearance that is not even potentially conscious – may be called “blind,” and “nothing to us,” as Kant also says. But what are we buying into when we say that consciousness is involved? What are we buying into when we understand this within the Kantian framework? Will this lead us all the way to Kant’s notion of “apperception” with its “original synthetic unity”? Will it lead us to accept the deduction of the categories? The categories are of course not just any concepts. They are a priori concepts, and even as such of a special sort. They are not empirical, such as the concept of a chair, or the concept of a bird. When we see something as something, for instance as a chair, the empirical concept of a chair will be involved. But what can we say about the Kant- 284 ian a priori categories? When we do not know what a chairs is, we will see it as something or other, or we will at least try to do so. In this way I think the categories will be involved already, in seeing it as a physical object and this, one can argue, involves the categories. But what happens when a bird or infants sees the chair? Will the categories be involved in such cases? That would seem odd. Or are they involved to some kind of degree, or only some of them? I think that what Kant says about perception is meant for human perception and does not easily apply to perceptions that birds or infants have; the Kantian notion of perception does not work this way. It is more restrictive and more demanding. The Critique of Pure Reason talks about perception that rational beings like us have, not about animal perception. Kant at places goes up to angels, but he avoids going down to non-human animals or infants. The reason for this is two-fold, I think. On the one hand he is interested in the higher faculties, such as reason and the understanding. He wants to establish the understanding on firm grounds (in the Analytic), and at the same time he wants to limit it (in the Dialectic) to avoid confusion. This endeavor reaches far, too far for animals to matter. On the other hand, and this is the second reason I have in mind, Kant is interested in a priori justification (Geltung), not in the empirical development (Genesis), be it development in the agent (how experience develops), or of the agent (how an agent evolves or develops). He considers rational beings, healthy and grown-up human beings, as we might say. But many passages in the first Critique do read like some kind of empirical description of how experience and cognition develop in time and in agents. This is particularly visible in the Deduction of the categories of the first edition, the so-called “A-Deduction.” Kant there describes a development that starts with appearance, becomes perception, and ends up being cognition. He talks of a “threefold synthesis,” which comes in stages and steps: apprehension, reproduction, and recognition. It then seems that concepts, and also the categories, enter only in the last step: recognition. Reading things in this way, one could try to make connections between the first two steps on the one hand, apprehension and reproduction, and perception in animals or infants, or dreams we have, on the other. But I think this will not fit the first Critique, because this book is not meant to be read as an account of some kind of empirical genesis, as Kant explicitly says. I think the first steps, contrary to what the readers might think on first Perception in Kant, McDowell, and Burge | Christian Helmut Wenzel blush, are not meant to be complete and self-subsistent. It looks as if they were, but they are not. Apprehension and reproduction, as meant in Kant, do not constitute some kind of perception that can be considered as real and existing independently of the categories. They do not lead to an actual perception of a chair that we have, or to a perception an animal might have. There are two reasons for this that must be understood in combination. First, what we see, or otherwise perceive, is not chaotic. This is just a fact. Second, the categories must fit to whatever the first steps provide. Otherwise they would not be applicable. Thus the world is already ordered in perception, and it is ordered according to the categories. Apprehension and reproduction thus lead to representations that are already ordered according to the categories. Here I mean not just the categories of quality and quantity, but also those of causality. The world as it appears is already causally ordered. This is true even when we do not think and just look around. The apple falls down. It does not fly up into the sky. Causality is not added in a second step to something that is already there, such as the perception of a falling apple, even if the A-Deduction seems to suggest this. McDowell and Kant Now John McDowell in Mind and World has argued against Gareth Evans, who suggested that we think of perception, or perceptual states, or perceptual experiences, as “informational states” with “non-conceptual content” upon which judgments can be based (Evans 227). McDowell’s position against Evans is that “one’s conceptual capacities have already been brought into play, in the content’s being available to one, before one has any choice in the matter” (McDowell 11). In other words, “the impressions on our senses that keep the dynamic system in motion are already equipped with conceptual content” (ibid.). McDowell tries to draw on Kant. But there is a fundamental difference between these two philosophers, which McDowell is not pointing out. Kant is thinking of a priori categories, while McDowell is, as far as I can see, thinking of empirical concepts. If we think of the Kantian categories and do so from the point of view of transcendental philosophy, we have a point in asking why perception already presents a world that is ordered according to the categories. This is because we do not take it for granted that the world itself is already so ordered. So why should perception be so ordered? Transcendental philosophy argues that it is via the categories as conditions of the possibility of experience that the objects of that experience are so ordered. Then, in a second step, we can argue that this consideration carries over to the objects of perception, as I have indicated above. We then have a point in demanding that the categories go “all the way out” (McDowell 69), that is all the way out to perception and its objects. Now McDowell talks of concepts going “all the way out,” but he does not have a priori concepts in mind. As far as I can see, McDowell does not take the position of Kantian transcendental philosophy. But if we do not take that transcendental position and think instead of the world in itself from a realist (a transcendental realist Kant would say) point of view, as being ordered independently of our experiencing it, I see no reason why not to accept the idea that perception presents a world in an ordered way without the Kantian categories, or any other concepts, being involved and going “all the way out.” Hence I see no reason to reject Evan’s picture. The point then is that McDowell would have a point and could lean on Kant, if he accepted Kant’s transcendental philosophy and thought of the a priori categories going “all the way out.” But as far as I can see this is not what he does. And he will not have a point, if he thinks of empirical concepts, which I think is what he does. Now how should we understand Kant’s talk of perception? I think that he introduces perception and synthesis in a didactic way and that this has often not been understood. He does not want to confront the reader up front with his idea that the categories go “all the way down to appearances” (A 125), as he says, and as we might put it parallel to McDowell’s dictum that concepts go “all the way out.” Instead, he develops his arguments in a way that begins with more ordinary and common-sense notions of perception and synthesis, so that it reads as if it were a description of some kind of genesis and temporal development from perception to cognition. I believe Kant thinks that in this way, starting with common-sense notions, he will not put off the reader but win him and lead him gradually to the insight that these common-sense notions need to be modified from a transcendental point of view. The reader will realize, so Kant hopes, that the categories must be involved “from the start,” that is, that there is no perception without them. This then is not the ordinary notion of perception. If other creatures do not have the Kantian categories at their disposal, they will not have that kind of perception either. We then also cannot say that we share perception with animals or infants. That might leave us dissatisfied, but I think this is how it is. This reading of mine is not a generally accepted one. In the German Kant scholarship, I believe Peter Rohs (2001) would not subscribe to it, whereas Hansgeorg Hoppe (1998) might. The problem of how the categories should be understood regarding perception is an old one that for instance Vleeshauwer (1936), Paton (1936), and Beck (1978) have already discussed. Burge and Kant Instead of going into the text of the first Critique and argue for my reading of Kant as introducing terms in didactic ways (for this see Wenzel 2005), I rather like to say something about Tyler Burge and Kant. Bringing Kantian considerations into contemporary discussions has always been tempting to me. But it is often very problematic. Burge is not a transcendental idealist. He is a realist, a “transcendental realist” Kant would say. As I understand him, he believes that the world is structured and ordered independently of our experiencing it. It is so structured in itself. Now the point of his “anti-individualism” is that our mental states are what they are dependently on the world outside, the world around us. The content of our mental states depends on this environment and also on other people. This dependency extends beyond the here and now into the past and the future. Not everything that is part of an individual’s mental state is directly accessible to that individual. This is crucial for Burge and something we do not find in Kant. Sometimes others know better and can spell out aspects of the mental content of that individual’s mind that this individual cannot spell out. We can also apply this consideration to ourselves. But then we cannot spell out those details. We cannot spell out what we cannot spell out. We are not Baron von Münchhausen. But at least we can realize that we depend on others and the environment in subtle ways regarding our mental states and their contents. Importantly, this applies to perception and perceptual mental states already. It works already without language, pre-linguistically. 285 Perception in Kant, McDowell, and Burge | Christian Helmut Wenzel Differently from Burge, Kant is a transcendental idealist and thinks he can offer an explanation for why the world is ordered the way it is, especially why there is a necessity to causality. He offers such an explanation by relying on the categories, which are derived from our logical functions of judging that are in turn tied to language. Where language comes from is not explained or even problematized. These categories then go all the way through to perception, in fact all the way to appearance (Erscheinung), as we have seen. But the argument depends on language and judgment. Burge’s argument does not. Simply put, Kant thinks top-down, Burge thinks bottom-up. For both, Kant and Burge, there is something very basic that works in perception already. In Kant it is the role the categories play in our having representations. For Burge it is the role the environment plays, including our interacting with it, other people, the past, and the future. In Kant, the categories are a priori. They are subjective conditions that make objectivity possible. They are often understood, or misunderstood, as being “inside” of us and projected outside. In Burge, the environment is empirical. It offers infinite detail and makes our mental states possible. It is understood as being “outside” of us. After all, it is called an environment. Both inside and outside understandings have to be taken with a grain of salt, because the categories are also part of the objects outside of us, and the environment is, at least partly, part of us, because it partly constitutes our mental states. We are more outside from the start than one might think. Both also talk of “affection” in perception. But following Kant, we cannot say anything about what affects us if we abstract from time and space and the categories. Abstracting from these, we are left with the thing in itself that we cannot say anything about. Now Burge simply has no such theory of categories and does not think about the world considered independently of them, or beyond them. What matters to Burge is that we can say something about what affects an individual and determines its mind also by going beyond what that individual can make explicit to itself, or by itself. But that does not contradict Kant. It has nothing to do with Kant’s thing in itself. In Burge’s antiindividualism it is merely important that when considering an individual’s mental states there is a way of realizing that there is something that is part of that state and that goes beyond that individual’s knowledge and is also not to be found within that individual’s brain. A basic difference between the two is that Kant relies on what he calls “elements,” namely time, space, and the categories, and that he relies on them to build a system. Kant offers a more constructivist picture, but it might also appear to be more closed. Burge relies on no such transcendental elements and he does not develop any such system. In his view, Kant over-intellectualizes things. What might be worse, some philosophers after Kant have overintellectualized things even without being transcendental philosophers. Here is another way of comparing the two. Burge does not believe in the mind-body or mind-brain identity. Our mental states go beyond our brains and beyond our bodies. The mind cannot be reduced to the brain, nor can it be reduced to behavior. This is part of his anti-individualism. In Kant things get more complicated when we ask such questions. Brain and body are objects in space and as such they are objects “outside us” (außer uns, A 22/ B 37). To be more precise, we “represent” (vorstellen) them as outside of us. Kant understands “außer uns” logically as being different from us. In Kant all reflection goes through representation, not so in Burge. Transcendentally we do 286 not have any location in space. But maybe empirically we do? This seems problematic for the following reason. We cannot be identical to our brains or bodies, because we represent them as “outside of us,” that is, we represent them as being different from us. If we were our brains, we would be mistaken in so representing them. But then again, what if we are mistaken? Thus one might arrive at the view that Kant’s transcendental philosophy leaves this as an open possibility. Maybe we are our brains and we mistakenly represent ourselves as being different from them. Kant also uses the word “Gemüth,” which is usually translated as “mind,” and here things get complicated again. He says: “By means of outer sense, a property of our mind [Gemüth], we represent to ourselves objects as outside us, and all without exception in space” (A 22/B 37). The brain would be such an object that we present as being “outside us.” Might it be possible that this mind (Gemüth) is the brain? An answer to this question is not obvious. But even if the mind is the brain, we are not our brain, at least if we are not mistaken in so representing it, because we represent it as “outside of us.” For both Kant and Burge, statements of mind-brain identity theorists such as Paul Churchland, who says that Leibniz did not know how to see thoughts in the brain, as he did not know how to see them in a mill, because he, Leibniz, did not have the insight of modern neuroscience (Churchland 192), would fall victim to criticisms. Certainly we today know more now about the brain than Leibniz did. But Burge would say that Churchland forgets about the neuroscientists and what it took for them to learn how to individuate brain states. It took an environment. For a neuroscientist to have ideas about the brain requires more thatn the brain of that neuroscientist. Churchland does not think deep enough, Burge might say. Kant on the other hand would say that the brain is an object for us, or at least that we represent it as an object for us, which requires time and space and the categories as subjective conditions of experience. Abstracting from these conditions, the brain will be a thing in itself about which we cannot say anything. But not abstracting from them will lead us into transcendental philosophy. What we know about the brain will depend on the conditions of experience and on our representing the brain to us as an object outside of us. Hence again, we are not our brains, unless we are mistaken in so representing them. Thus adopting transcendental philosophy seems to undercut the mind-brain identity thesis. Might Kant also say that these requirements of experience undercut Burge’s views about externalism? Burge relies on the environment and thinks of it as being ordered independently of our experiencing it. But Kant’s categories might still fit. It is just that in Burge’s picture they do not come first and play no necessary, a priori, and constitutive role. Burge does not go the Kantian way. He assumes the environment and not the categories. Thus, Burge’s view seems more compatible with Kant in comparison with Churchland’s view, because he simply does not make the mind-brain identity claim that Paul Churchland is making. Literature Burge, Tyler (2007) Foundations of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burge, Tyler (2010) Origins of Objectivity, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Churchland, Paul (1996) The Enigma of Reason, the Seat of the Soul; A Philosophical Journey into the Brain, MIT. Perception in Kant, McDowell, and Burge | Christian Helmut Wenzel Evans, Gareth (1982) The Varieties of Reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDowell, John (1994) Mind and World, Harvard: Harvard University Press. Hoppe, Hansgeorg (1998) „Die transzendentale Deduktion in der ersten Auflage” in Georg Mohr and Marcus Willaschek (eds.) Klassiker Auslegen, Immanuel Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Akademie Verlag, 159-188. Rohs, Peter (2001) “Beziehen sich nach Kant die Anschauungen unmittelbar auf Gegenstände?”, Akten des 9. Internationalen Kant Kongresses, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 214-228. Kant, Immanuel (1781/1787/1929) Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, translated by Norman Kemp Smith, McMillan. Wenzel, Christian Helmut (2005) “Spielen nach Kant die Kategorien schon bei der Wahrnehmung eine Rolle? Peter Rohs und John McDowell”, in Kant-Studien 96, 407-426. 287