Abstract
Are there sensory states (“perceptions”) that, unlike mere sensory registrations, require an explanatory framework (“psychology”) that goes beyond biology? Based on a reconstruction of Kant’s a priori, transcendental psychology, contemporary Kantians answer this question in the positive but dramatically limit the scope of psychology. In contrast, naturalistically oriented deflationists answer it in the negative, thereby not giving psychology any explanatory role whatsoever. In his recent monumental book Origins of Objectivity, Burge argues against both of these approaches and seeks to develop an intermediate approach between them. This he does by embedding Kantian transcendental psychology in contemporary science of perception, thereby naturalizing the former and considerably broadening the scope of psychology. In this paper I critically examine Burge’s naturalized Kantianism, thereby defending transcendental Kantianism. To this end, I first outline Kantian transcendental psychology of perception, highlighting the features that distinguish it from biology. I then show how Burge naturalizes this psychology by embedding its most fundamental notions in contemporary science of perception. Based on all this, I conclude the paper by arguing for two closely related claims. First, that transformed into empirical psychology, Kantian transcendental psychology loses the features that distinguish it from biology. Second, that genuine perception starts at the high cognitive level for which transcendental psychology accounts and not at the rather low or elementary level on which Burge focuses.
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Notes
Notice that Kant himself does not concern empirical psychology, “the empirical doctrine of the soul,” as he also calls it—a science at all (see Kant 2004, 7–8; cf. Kant 1998, A 848–849/B 876–877—all references to Kant 1998 are given in the customary manner of pagination of its first (“A”) and second (“B”) editions). But this, of course, does not count against considering Burge’s move as yielding a conception that is broadly Kantian—all the more so as what he considers to be the Kantian conception is actually Kant’s view as reconstructed and developed by Strawson and his followers (see Sect. 2). While considering his view of perception as Kantian, Burge actually keeps silent as to what makes it Kantian. Indeed, showing this requires a lot of reconstructive work, which is part of the aim of Sects. 2 and 3.
Burge’s naturalization of Kantian transcendental psychology goes against the non-naturalistic grain of the latter. One may recall in this connection Sellars’ statement that “the aim of his work as a whole was to begin moving analytic philosophy from its humean [or naturalistic] phase into a kantian [or transcendental] one” (Brandom 2000, 32). Burge’s divergence from more traditional analytic neo-Kantianism is testimony to his originality and innovation.
While this fundamental claim is taken for granted by Kantians, it is contested by Burge (2010, part II, chap. 6, and part III). Indeed, the paper may be viewed as an extended defense of this claim against Burge. I will focus in my defense on ibid., part III, because the only claim Burge makes in his highly critical discussion of Strawson’s and Evans’ versions of the neo-Kantian account, which is relevant to the version of this account outlined below, is that the constraints they both put on perception involve over-intellectualization. But this claim is actually argued for in ibid., part III. This illustrates Nudd’s (2012, 158) claim—with which I agree—that “the second part of [Burge 2010] is best read in light of the rest of the book.”
While Kantians take as the most central distinguishing feature of concepts, for Kant, their judgmental character and generality, an alternative is to foreground his saying that concepts are rules for synthesis, which raises the question as to whether there are different accounts of concepts to be found in Kant (Allais 2009, 389). This exegetical issue, however, is unimportant for the purposes of the present paper.
The normativity of discursive classification outlined here does not require that discursive classifiers have strict definitions of their classificatory categories but only that they have enough background knowledge of things belonging to these categories. Thus, to be capable of justifying the categorization of something as a tree, one must know things such as that trees are growing things, that they need soil and water, that they have leaves or needles, that they have roots, that they burn, etc. There is no fixed list of things of this type one must know in order to have the capacity at issue. But without enough knowledge about trees, one would not have a basis to classify something as a tree rather than as something else or to retract one’s categorization (cf. Stitch 1979; Davidson 2001, 98). It is also the case that discursive classifiers may rely in their classifications on communal knowledge of experts and justify them on this basis. Thus, while one may not have a clue as to what characterizes elms and distinguishes them from other kinds of tree—beeches, say—one may still justify one’s categorization of a given tree in a botanic garden as an elm on the basis of what appears on a tag prepared by experts and attached to the tree. But, while such indirect justification does not require background knowledge of what characterizes elms, it requires a lot of background knowledge concerning the institution of tags attached to trees in botanic gardens, the institution of expert knowledge, the reliability of the tags attached to trees in botanic gardens due to their intricate connections with expert knowledge, etc. So classifications by way of expert knowledge must involve non-expert knowledge as well as classifications that are based on such knowledge. It is also the case that discursive classifiers need not always be able to justify all aspects of their classifications. Thus, chicken sexers who are able to classify chicks as males or females by way of observing the chicks’ vents cannot always point out what it is about the vent that made them classify the chicks’ sex one way or another. But even in such cases, other aspects of the classification are justifiable: The chicken sexers at issue can still justify their classification as that of a male or female chick rather than kitten, say; they have background knowledge about the vents of chicks and in most cases can say what it is about the vent that made them classify the sex of the chick as they did, etc. Indeed, they can even justify to some extent their “non-justifiable” classification by saying that it is something about the vent that made them classify the chick as they did even though they can’t say exactly what this something is. I will ignore these fine—though important—points, since they leave intact the main point important for my purposes here.
Notice that this does not preclude creatures who cannot actually see the connections between their perceptual-cum-cognitive states, e.g., sufferers from complete loss of short- and long-term episodic memory as well as short-term semantic memory—from fulfilling the generality constraint. But it does imply that such creatures must be atypical members of their kind, i.e., that fragmented or disconnected consciousness in this sense cannot be the typical condition of any population of creatures fulfilling the generality constraint. Furthermore, it implies that the fulfillment of the generality constraint by such atypical creatures must be anchored in their counterfactual fulfillment of the requirement of unity of consciousness, i.e., in the ability they would have actually had to see the connections between the contents of their different perceptual-cum-cognitive states, had they regained their, e.g., short- and long-term episodic memory. It should also be noted that amnesia is usually not an all-or-nothing condition and that memory loss is usually not complete or total (Corkin 2002).
The notion of practical rationality assumed here is closely related to the notion underlying the rational choice explanatory framework (Elster 2007, chap. 11).
This is a most fundamental issue for a conceptualist account of perception of the sort outlined in this section, an issue that may have broad implications for the understanding of the nature of intentionality (Speaks 2005, 389–390). Indeed, the way it is dealt with may shape the conceptualist account as attested by the different ways McDowell (2009) deals with it (see also Ginsborg 2006, 2008). While Kant is almost universally regarded as the founder of conceptualism with respect to mental content and the nemesis of non-conceptualism (Hanna 2011, 333), there are also those who consider him a founder of non-conceptualism (e.g., Hanna 2005, 2011; see also Allais 2009). The controversy between conceptualists and non-conceptualists, it should be noted, is rather vexed, involving fundamental disagreements on most of the issues concerned both intra- and inter-camps (Hanna (2011) nicely illustrates this point). The Strawsonian reading of Kant, which constitutes the conceptualist framework outlined in this section, is a version of the neo-Kantian framework which Burge (2010, chap. 6) critically examines. Viewed from the perspective of the conceptualism/non-conceptualism controversy, my main aim in this paper is twofold. First, to show that Burge’s account is actually a naturalized version of the Strawsonian conceptualist reading of Kant, which seeks to render this reading non-conceptualist while remaining faithful to its most central insights. Second, to show that Burge’s naturalistic-cum-non-conceptualistic rendering of the Strawsonian conceptualist reading of Kant pulls the rug from under the central insights of the latter reading that Burge seeks to preserve: the Strawsonian conceptualist framework is a package deal and one cannot give up its conceptualism without surrendering its other central ingredients.
I distinguish, then, between psychological and biological explanations of behavior in terms of certain components of the conceptual machinery deployed by the former but not by the latter type of explanation. In this, I follow Burge, who, considering the distinction between these types of explanation as of great significance, draws the line between them similarly (more on this in Sect. 3).
Similarly, the behavior of primitive organisms such as the E. coli could in principle be described in terms of folk psychological concepts of beliefs, desires, and intentions (Jonker et al. 2001). But these would be superfluous metaphorical ascriptions at best: it seems implausible and unnecessary to attribute such mental states to the E. coli as its behavioral success is readily explained in terms of the direct perception-action couplings in which sensed chemical gradients trigger different behavioral patterns such as tumbling or swimming (Haselager et al. 2008, 273–274).
This is, of course, a version of Burge’s famous anti-individualism. While in his earlier work he supported this view by thought experiments, he now takes these to be merely illustrative (ibid., 80) and considers anti-individualism to be supported by perceptual psychology. See ibid., chap. 3, 319–326, 407, 457, 468, 470, and 520.
Burge’s emphasis on the representational nature of perception situates him in the camp of the representative theory of perception. Indeed, he takes perceptual psychology to support this theory. See ibid., 385–395.
In basing the notion of perception on the notion of constancy, Burge’s account is closely related to ecologically oriented accounts of perception such as Noë’s (2004) according to which the mark of perception is the unfolding of the invariant structure of reality in the active exploration of variant appearances: “To see a circular plate from an angle, for example, is to see something with an elliptical [appearance], and it is to understand how that perspectival shape [or appearance] would vary as a function of one’s (possible or actual) movements with respect to the perceived object. We see its circularity in the fact that it looks elliptical from here. We can do this because we understand, implicitly, that circularity is given in the way how things look with respect to shape varies as a result of movement. This is an example of the way visual experience can acquire content thanks to our possession and exercise of sensorimotor skills” (ibid., 84). “Vision is a process of gleaning how things are, apart from how they appear, from the active exploration of structured looks space (e.g., the space of perspectival properties)” (ibid., 107). Noë’s account of perception, however, is closer to the Kantian account than Burge’s account insofar as, like the former and unlike the latter, it takes perceptual experience to be of necessity discursive (ibid., chap. 6). As he puts it, “the content of perceptual experience is conceptual […] in the sense that it can be judged. Perceptual experience raises the question of whether things are as the experience presents them as being. To have an experience, and to take it at face value, is to be presented with a possible way things might be. […] In perception you ‘entertain’ a judgeable content in the sense that the experience puts the question of whether the content holds into play. To have an experience is to be confronted with a possible way the world is. For this reason, the experiences themselves, although not judgments, are thoroughly thoughtful. Perception is a way of thinking about the world” (ibid., 189). Despite this difference between Burge’s and Noë’s accounts of perception, my criticism of the former that will be developed in the next section may also apply to the latter. For Noë’s account of discursivity rests on the very same feature—constancy of a sort—which relates his account of perception to Burge’s account and on which my criticism of the latter account will focus. A full discussion of this point, however, is beyond the scope of this paper.
Yet, another issue related to Burge’s account of perception is Allen’s and Bekoff’s (1997, chap. 8) suggested criterion for ascribing consciousness to animals, viz., the manifestation of an ability to adjust to a perceptual error while retaining the capacity to exploit the content of the erroneous perception. My criticism of Burge’s account that will be developed in the next section may be relevant to Allen’s and Bekoff’s criterion as well. But, again, I cannot dwell on this issue in the context of this paper.
Put somewhat differently: Representation and veridicality are constitutively associated (Burge 2010, 317). But all representation “is necessarily from some perspective or standpoint” (ibid., 51) which is constitutively associated with objectification (ibid., 397). Thus, veridicality is constitutively associated with objectification.
Notice that an association of information-theoretic notions with success and failure by way of supplementing these notions with a notion of biological function will not do. The main reason for this is that there is a root mismatch between representational error and failure of biological function. Biological functions have to do with fitness, which is a practical value. But accuracy, or representational success, is not in itself a practical value. Indeed, error need not be a failure or frustration of any independently identifiable biological function nor need representational success fulfill any biological function. Thus, an animal’s representation of danger might be reliably inaccurate but still serve the animal’s biological needs. It follows that truth and accuracy cannot be assimilated to contribution to practical success such as fitness, nor can falsity and inaccuracy be assimilated to practical failure or failure to contribute to fitness. See ibid., 299–303.
My use of this imaginary case as my main illustrative example in this section rather than a well-known case from the scientific literature, e.g., the size and spatial constancies exhibited during hunting by the Northern Leopard Frog (Ingle 1968, 1998; Ingle and Cook 1977) or the color constancy exhibited by the Common Toad (Neumeyer 1998, 337), is related to two of the main purposes of the section, viz., a conceptual clarification of the notion of constancy, and an examination of the space of possible bases for ascribing the feature it captures. For these purposes, it does not really matter whether I use an example of the first rather than of the second type. Indeed, while the first major basis, I examine (Sect. 4.2.3) features in the scientific literature (and thus may be illustrated by the case of the Northern Leopard Frog, say), the second major basis (Sect. 4.2.5) is merely hypothetical (at this stage) and to the best of my knowledge has not featured in the scientific literature. So in any case, my discussion would require the examination of imaginary-cum-hypothetical cases.
For an excellent overview of this view, see Cohen (2015).
See, e.g., the citations at the beginning of Sect. 3.
See Sect. 3 and footnote 14.
Strong constancy must be characterized then in terms of both stability and instability of perceptual responses. Unfortunately, there is at present no adequate and fully general characterization of this sort. See Cohen (2015, Sects. 3 and 4); see also Noë (2004, 127–129). It is also the case that many philosophers and psychologists working in the area of perception have tended to be so impressed by the constant (stable) aspects of our perceptual responses that they have played down, dismissed, or, more frequently, just ignored the inconstant (unstable) aspects of our perceptual responses to the same scenarios (Cohen 2015, 637n10).
This claim presupposes a crucial assumption—“no-filtering”—to which I shall return in Sect. 4.2.4.
See footnote 5.
These criteria need not meet, of course, the exacting standards demanded of a satisfactory criterion of identity for abstract mathematical objects like sets. Nor should it be expected that ordinary unreflective users of this sortal to be able to articulate explicitly the criteria governing their use. Indeed, their implicit application of these criteria may be discerned in their ability to respond in principled ways to appropriate questions concerning the identity or persistence of deer subjected to various sorts of changes. See Lowe (1989, 20).
This central assumption of Burge, which reflects his commitment to the autonomy of psychology from the mechanisms studied by neuroscience (see, e.g., Burge 2010, xiii and 27–28; see also Boone and Piccinini 2016, Sect. 2), may be contested by proponents of the recent more integrative view of psychology and neuroscience according to which the explanation of cognition must involve the integration of representational and computational functions of structures across multiple levels of organization (Boone and Piccinini 2016). Although I tend to agree with Burge concerning this assumption, arguing for it is beyond the scope of this paper. Nevertheless, this does not weaken my case against Burge, since he is committed to the assumption at issue.
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Acknowledgments
Earlier versions of the paper were presented at two international conferences - “Kant’s Conception of Empirical Knowledge” held at the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies, and “Mind and Body” organized by the Edelstein Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Technology, and Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I would like to thank the participants in these events, especially Andrew Chignell, Michael Friedman, Katharina Kraus, Tobias Rosefeldt, and Yaron Senderowicz, for their helpful comments. For their valuable comments, thanks are also due to an anonymous referee for Acta Analytica and to two further anonymous referees who reviewed this paper at an earlier stage.
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Levin, Y. Transcendental Kantianism, Naturalized Kantianism, and the Bounds of Psychology. Acta Anal 32, 465–488 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-017-0321-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-017-0321-8