What Were Kant’s Aims in the Deduction?

European Journal of Philosophy , 2018

In the A-preface of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant kindly warns his readers to pay special attention to the chapter on the “Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding.” Looking to mitigate the reader’s effort, Kant goes on to explain the chapter’s methodology, suggesting that the inquiry will have “two sides.” One side deals with the “objective validity” of the pure categories of the understanding; he calls this the “objective deduction.” The other deals with the powers of cognition on which the understanding rests; he calls this the “subjective deduction.” Having gone to such great lengths to outline his method ahead of time, it comes as no small surprise that the actual chapter offers no clear indication of where the two deductions are located. In this essay, I address this puzzle. On the way, I engage with both traditional and recent interpretations of the subjective deduction, arguing that they fail—in one way or another—to satisfy the criteria that Kant develops in the preface.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2010

In the transcendental deduction, the central argument of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant seeks to secure the objective validity of our basic categories of thought. He distinguishes objective and subjective sides of this argument. The latter side, the subjective deduction, is normally understood as an investigation of our cognitive faculties. It is identified with Kant’s account of a threefold synthesis involved in our cognition of objects of experience, and it is said to precede and ground Kant’s proof of the validity of the categories in the objective deduction. I challenge this standard reading of the subjective deduction, arguing, first, that there is little textual evidence for it, and, second, that it encourages a problematic conception of how the deduction works. In its place, I present a new reading of the subjective deduction. Rather than being a broad investigation of our cognitive faculties, it should be seen as addressing a specific worry that arises in the course of the objective deduction. The latter establishes the need for a necessary connection between our capacities for thinking and being given objects, but Kant acknowledges that his readers might struggle to comprehend how these seemingly independent capacities are coordinated. Even worse, they might well believe that in asserting this necessary connection, Kant’s position amounts to an implausible subjective idealism. The subjective deduction ismeant to allay these concerns by showing that they rest on a misunderstanding of the relation between these faculties. This new reading of the subjective deduction offers a better fit with Kant’s text. It also has broader implications, for it reveals the more philosophically plausible account of our relation to the world as thinkers that Kant is defending – an account that is largely obscured by the standard reading of the subjective deduction.

Kant’s Transcendental Deduction and the Theory of Apperception (De Gruyter), 2022

The deduction of categories in the 1781 edition of the Critique of the Pure Reason (A Deduction) has “two sides”—the “objective deduction” and the “subjective deduction”. Kant seems ambivalent about the latter deduction. I treat it as a significant episode of Kant’s thinking about categories that extended from the early 1770s to around 1790. It contains his most detailed answer to the question about the origin of categories that he formulated in the 1772 letter to Marcus Herz. The answer is that categories are generated a priori through a kind of intellectual “epigenesis”. This account leaves unexplained why precisely such and such categories should be generated. While this observation caused Kant to worry about the hypothetical status of the subjective deduction in 1781, he would come to acquiesce in the recognition that the ground of the possibility of categories is itself inscrutable. I call this his “methodological skepticism”.

Inquiry, 2018

This work examines Kant's remarkable decision to rewrite the core argument of the first Critique, the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. I identify a two-part structure common to both versions: first establishing an essential role for the categories in unifying sensible intuitions; and then addressing a worry about how the connection between our faculties asserted in the first part is possible. I employ this structure to show how Kant rewrote the argument, focusing on Kant's response to the concerns raised in an early review by Johann Schultz. Schultz's dissatisfaction with the original Deduction lies in its second part, and Kant's subsequent revisions are focused on providing a better answer to this how-possible question. The new Deduction offers a more direct and convincing account of how our faculties work together to make experience possible.

British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19 (3):473-496 (2011), 2011

This paper considers how Descartes's and Hume's sceptical challenges were appropriated by Christian Wolff and Johann Nicolaus Tetens specifically in the context of projects related to Kant's in the transcendental deduction. Wolff introduces Descartes's dream hypothesis as an obstacle to his account of the truth of propositions, or logical truth, which he identifies with the'possibility'of empirical concepts. Tetens explicitly takes Hume's account of our idea of causality to be a challenge to thereality'of transcendent concepts in general, a challenge ...

Revue Roumaine de Philosophie, 2024

What is Kant's justification of deductive reason at the most basic level? This article suggests reading the 'Critique of Pure Reason' according to this question. Since Leibniz, Wolff, and their fellow rationalists tried to justify deductive reason via their metaphysical principles, it makes sense that Kant, in proposing a 'metaphysics of metaphysics', proffered a justification of it by other, more sophisticated means. Here, I attempt to show that Kant's answer to this question clarifies for us both the general significance and the fine details of the 'Critique of Pure Reason'. I focus specifically on Kant's 'Amphiboly', transcendental reflection, table of judgments, and philosophical approach to truth itself. I preface the investigation with detailed criticism of recent scholarship regarding Kant, the principles of logic, and the table of judgments.

By taking into account some texts published between the first and the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that have been neglected by most of those who have dealt with the deduction of the categories, I argue that the core of the deduction is to be identified as the 'almost single inference from the precisely determined definition of a judgment in general', which Kant adumbrates in the Metaphysical Foundations in order to 'make up for the deficiency' of the A-deduction. Whereas the first step of the B-deduction is an attempt to show that the manifold of an intuition belongs to the 'necessary unity of self-consciousness' by means of the synthesis of the understanding, the second step has the task of showing that the very same synthesis is responsible for the spatio-temporal unity of the manifold. Thus, Kant's 'answer to Hume' is that no spatio-temporal objects of experience at all are merely 'given', independently of the conceptual activities of the understanding. Against the established view I substantiate the claim that with this 'almost single inference'of the second proof step the distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience consequently vanished from Kant's thinking.

The heart of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is undoubtedly the Transcendental Deduction: it serves as both core of the Analytic and necessary precursor to the Dialectic. After arguing for the ideality of space and time as the forms of outer and inner intuition, and offering us the Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories, Kant notes that the categories pose a problem that the forms of sensibility did not. It is easy to see how space and time have objective validity, or necessary application to the representations that make up experience, if it is only within space and time that objects can appear to us. What is not yet clear is whether it can be shown that the categories necessarily apply to experience. Kant expresses this as the problem of explaining how " subjective conditions of thinking should have objective validity " (A90/B122-123). One could obviously argue that the pure concepts are only necessary conditions for objects qua thought, not for the constitution of objects as objects. The specter thus arises of an unbridgeable gulf in the heart of Kant's system, between sensibility on the one hand, where things are given, and our understanding, which must think the given. This possibility—which is as great a concern as accounting for the relation between res cogitans and res extensa for Cartesian metaphysics—is the central issue that Kant must address in the Transcendental Deduction. Kant's project stands or falls with the success of the Deduction, so its exegesis must be of the utmost concern for any interpreter. As Kant puts it, " We must surrender completely all claims to insights of pure reason in its favorite field, namely that beyond the boundaries of all possible experience, or else perfect this critical investigation " (A89/B121-122). Whether it is possible to save the project of the Critique is not clear. Addressing this larger issue, however,

2012

In Part 1 of this paper, I offer an analysis of Kant’s arguments as presented in the revised, ‘B’ version of the Deduction. I will then, in Part 2, make some critical points and indicate how these might be dealt with – initially by reference to some insights from Gareth Evans. These will enable me to formulate a three stage reconstruction of Kant’s major argument, culminating in the experiential necessity of the Kantian categories. Detailed avenues of justification for this final stage will form the substance of Part 3 (again making significant use of ideas from Evans). I will then procede to a Conclusion