Gap? What Gap?—On the Transcendental Unity of Apperception and the Necessary Application of the Categories

Abstract

In this chapter, I address the problem, raised in some recent Anglophone Kant literature (Van Cleve 1999; Gomes 2010; Stephenson 2014) and going back to Stroud (1968), of an alleged ‘gap’ in Kant’s argument in TD for the necessary application of the categories to objects of experience that needs bridging, and show that it is based on a misunderstanding about the principle of the unity of apperception and its inherent objective validity. The ostensible gap is construed in terms of the difference between, on the one hand, arguing that we must apply categories in order to be able to think of, experience, or perceive objects and, on the other, arguing that the categories must so apply. Put in more general terms: The truth of our conceptual scheme does not imply the truth about objects. The claim here is that Kant argues for the necessary conditions of our conceptual scheme only, but fails to show that the categories are actually exemplified by the objects of our experience. The charge of a gap will be rebutted in an in-depth formal analysis of Kant’s argument for the necessary and (formally) sufficient conditions of experience. Both the claim that there is an apparent gap and the solutions for bridging it proposed by the aforementioned authors are rejected. Van Cleve’s and Gomes’s readings of Kant reveal a realist bias and at heart misapprehend the idealist thrust of the Critical turn. These authors are thus the main targets of my refutation in this paper. To reinforce my contention that there is no gap between the unity of apperception and the object of cognition, I also consider Van Cleve’s phenomenalist claim that the existence of objects is dependent on the subject and hence that appearances are merely “virtual objects”. I argue that, suitably amended, phenomenalism about appearances facilitates an understanding of the intimacy between apperception and object, i.e. Kant’s subjectivism, without this resulting in a deflationary reading of Kant’s empirical realism about spatiotemporal objects or indeed in an eliminative ontological idealism à la Berkeley. In short, the right sort of phenomenalist reading of Kant’s idealism will show that one need not worry about any gaps in Kant’s argument in TD.