First Assessment: Kant’s Programme

Abstract

If we read the first Critique from the perspective opened up through the modern philosophy of language, the ‘Introduction’ to our text already reveals an important shared point of departure: for Kant the fundamental medium of knowledge and the very site of truth and error (B 350) lies in the articulated unity of the ‘judgement’ which is characterised by the specific linguistic form of the subject-predicate proposition. The propositional character of judgement – the fact that one here asserts something about something – is regarded by Kant as self-evident, and he effectively treats the terms ‘judgement’ and ‘proposition’ as equivalent (B 3, 11 f., 387, 764). And there are three other aspects which his own approach emphasises in common with the philosophy of language: the communicability of objective judgements, the intersubjective validity of such judgements for ‘all human reason’, and the prospect of universal agreement (e.g. B 848 f.).