On Kant's Term "Experience"

Philosophia, 2017

The issue of the nature of cognitive experience has been a subject of lively debate in recent works on epistemology, and the philosophy of mind. During this debate, the relevance of Kant to contemporary theories of cognition has been rediscovered. However, participants in this debate disagree whether Kant was a conceptualist or a non-conceptualist, with regard to the character of intuitions. The central point of controversy concerns whether or not Kant’s sensible intuitions involve understanding and have a conceptual content. In this paper, I show that, despite their disagreements, both sides share a number of common presuppositions, which have determined a biased framework for the reading of Kant. My principal aim in this article is to reconcile the case for conceptualism with those interpretations which argue that intentionality and conceptuality can be separated. To achieve it, I present my own reconstruction of Kant’s theory of cognition, relying essentially on Kantian considerations found in the B-version of the Transcendental Deduction, and offer a new interpretation of Kantian conceptualism.

2013

Discussions about not conceptualism, i.e. on the possibility or even the necessity of the existence of mental representations that may refer to or describe the world without using concepts, have been frequent in contemporary philosophical debate about perception and cognition. In this paper I intend to examine some central points of this discussion in the light of Kant's theory of the experience as developed in the Critique of Pure Reason, with the dual aim of exploring how Kant's proposals may help to elucidate or even decide some of the crucial issues involved in this debate, and, conversely, how the analytical and conceptual refinement produced by this contemporary debate can provide some clues for the interpretation of Kantian philosophy. Special attention will be devoted to the works of Wilfrid Sellars and Robert Hanna. I Conceptualism and Non-Conceptualism Non-conceptualism consists in the thesis that perceiving beings may represent the world (refer to or describe obje...

2014

Chapter from the Teleology of Reason

2016

The Philosophical Quarterly, 2017

Philosophers' Imprint, 2015

It is often claimed that anti-realism is a form of transcendental idealism or that Kant is an anti-realist.1 It is also often claimed that anti-realists are committed to some form of knowability principle to the effect that all truths (or at least all truths of a certain class) are knowable and that such principles have problematic consequences.2 It is therefore natu- ral to ask whether Kant was committed to any such principle, and if he was, whether this leads him into similar difficulties. Both transcenden- tal idealism and anti-realism aim to provide a middle way between re- alism and idealism. A logical proof published by Frederic Fitch in 1963 (though first conveyed to him by Alonzo Church in 1945) appears to show that anti-realism fails in its aim because it collapses into idealism. Can a related proof show that transcendental idealism collapses in the same way? I argue that, initial appearances to the contrary, it cannot. The paper is in two parts. In the first part, I set up the problem and, in the second part, I solve it. In §1.1, I present evidence that suggests Kant is indeed committed to a knowability principle and I show that a Fitch-Church style proof can be constructed on this basis. Kant does not think that all truths whatsoever are knowable, but it can seem as though he is commit- ted to the claim that all empirical truths are knowable, and on mod- erate background assumptions this entails that no empirical truth is unknown. In §1.2, I show that with a few additional assumptions we can also prove that all a priori truths are knowable and that no a pri- ori truth is unknown. This is an interesting result with more general philosophical lessons concerning how certain classes of truth relate within a framework of knowability. But it is a little unfair to Kant. Ar- guably, we ought to further restrict our candidate Kantian knowability principle to what I call purely empirical truths, and doing so blocks the seepage into the a priori realm. However, this move would still leave Kant forced to concede that there are no unknown purely empirical truths, which is hardly more palatable. Thus in the second part of the paper I explore an alternative route. The evidence for Kantian knowability relies on interpreting Kantian experience as a form of knowledge. This is a standard view, but it is not always correct. Sometimes Kantian experience is something more like final science. In §2.1, I explain this conception of experience and apply it to the case at hand. Because, for Kant, experience so conceived is an unachievable epistemic ideal, it expresses no knowability prin- ciple to define truth in terms of it. Arguably, however, this proposal would still leave Kant committed to the claim that all purely empirical truths can be the objects of justified belief, and it has been objected that this kind of principle remains just as susceptible to Fitch-Church style reasoning.3 In §2.2, I argue that Kant has exactly the resources needed to rebut such an objection. Kant’s theory of truth has both realist and idealist aspects and is in a way anti-realist. But Fitch-Church style reasoning alone cannot show us that the theory is absurd.

A Little Philosophy: Kant, 2020

In the Critique of Pure Reason of 1781 and revised in 1787, Kant explains that the forms of appearance from which sensations can be understood are not themselves the empirical sensations.[6] Human experience will determine the method and forms by which particular things are understood by what Kant calls pure intuition.[7] Concerning human experience, Kant reasoned categories are applied to objects not because the objects make the categories possible, but rather because categories themselves provide and constitute necessary conditions for the representation for all possible objects of experience.[8]