Abstract
In this paper, I propose a new nonconceptual reading of the B-Deduction. As Hanna correctly remarks (Int J Philos Stud 19(3):399–415, 2011: 405), the word “cognition” (Erkenntnis/cognitio) has in both editions of the first Critique a wide sense, meaning nonconceptual cognition, and a narrow meaning, in Kant’s own words “an objective perception” (A320/B377). To be sure, Kant assumes the first meaning to account for why the Deduction is unavoidable. And if we take this meaning as a premise of the B-Deduction, then there is a gap in the argument since the categories are certainly not conditions for non-conceptual cognition (Kantian nonconceptualism). Still, I believe it is not this wide meaning but rather the narrow one that figures in any premise of the B-Deduction. Thus, in the reading that I am proposing, categories are not conditions for representing something (I call this the intentionality thesis), or even conditions for representing something objectively (I call this the objectivity thesis). Instead, they are conditions for the recognition that what we represent through the senses exists mind-independently. In the first step of the B-Deduction, this cognition in the narrow sense takes the form of the propositional thinking (transcendental apperception) that the nonconceptually represented object of the sensible intuition exists objectively. In contrast, in the second step of the B-Deduction, this cognition in the narrow sense takes the form of the apprehension (figurative synthesis) of what our human senses represent nonconceptually as existing objectively.
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Notes
Two prominent names in the recent nonconceptualist trend in the Kantian scholarship are Hanna (2011, 2013, 2015) and Allais (2009). Also worth mentioning are the recent works of McLear (2011) and Tolley (2012). The prominent names that arise in the conceptualist reaction are Wenzel (2005), Ginsborg (2008), Grüne (2011), and Gomes (2014). But we cannot forget that all of the major names in the Kantian scholarship have been conceptualist readers of Kant: Allison (2015), Longuenesse (1998), Strawson (1966), and so on.
Allais (2009) seems to follow Hanna here since, for her, the B-Deduction aims to show that the categories are necessary conditions for the possibility of thinking of something as an object of self-consciousness rather than a condition for perceiving or apprehending something as an object (see, 2009: 405).
I use “refer to” and “represent” alternately to mark the difference between representationalists and relationalists. The former claims that perception has a content of its own: it projects satisfaction conditions that are or are not fulfilled. Bermudez and Jose (1998) is the best example here. The latter claims that perception is just a relation that puts the subject in direct contact with the world. The prominent name here is Campbell (2011). In the case of Kant’s interpretation, both Hanna and Allais seem to assume the relational view.
I do not need to reiterate here that in my view any reading of this note that implies a rereading of the entire Transcendental Aesthetic is self-rebutting.
Before Longuenesse, Waxman (1991) suggested a similar reading of the same footnote. According to him, “once it is recognized that Kant explicitly ruled out only conceptual understanding and the spontaneity of thought, the B160 note should cease to occasion any qualms on this score” (1981: 82). Like Longuenesse, he also claims that only through a synthesis of imagination not belonging to the senses are space and time first given as intuitions. Moreover, he also equates the formal intuitions of Sect. 26 with space and time described in the “Transcendental Aesthetic,” which result from a “pre-conceptual” determination of the sensibility by the understanding (1981: 82).
Think about non-rational animals like dogs. They certainly represent space as a mind-independent entity; otherwise, we could not make sense of their complex behaviors in space. However, dogs do not apprehend space that they represent as existing mind-independently. Thus, their nonconceptual representation of space does not fall under categories.
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Works of Kant
References to Kant’s works are given in the German Academy edition: Gesammelte Schriften, herausgegeben von der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 29 vols. (Berlin: 1902–1983; 2nd ed., Berlin: De Gruyter, 1968, for vols. I–IX). They are indicated as follows: abbreviation of the title of the work, followed by AA., volume, and page. For the Critique of Pure Reason, the references are shortened, in keeping with current practice, to the pagination of the original edition, indicated by A for the 1781 edition and B for the 1787 edition.
KrV.: Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1781). Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
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de Sá Pereira, R.H. A nonconceptualist reading of the B-Deduction. Philos Stud 174, 425–442 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0690-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0690-7