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Skepticism and Kant's b deduction by edwin mccann. He argues that the doctrine is internally incoherent. The book is Published by University of Illinois Press and north american philosophical publications.
Skepticism and Kant's b deduction by edwin mccann. He argues that the doctrine is internally incoherent. The book is Published by University of Illinois Press and north american philosophical publications.
Skepticism and Kant's b deduction by edwin mccann. He argues that the doctrine is internally incoherent. The book is Published by University of Illinois Press and north american philosophical publications.
Author(s): Edwin McCann Source: History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan., 1985), pp. 71-89 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of North American Philosophical Publications Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27743711 . Accessed: 01/04/2014 15:42 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . University of Illinois Press and North American Philosophical Publications are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History of Philosophy Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions History of Philosophy Quarterly Volume 2, Number 1, January 1985 SKEPTICISM AND KANT'S B DEDUCTION Edwin McCann KANT took skepticism very seriously. It was, he said, "a scandal to philosophy and to human reason in general"1 that skeptical doubt about the existence of external objects had not been overcome on satisfying philosophical grounds, and it was, accordingly, one of the main aims of the Critique to provide a refutation of skepticism. The variety of skepti cism with which Kant was most concerned is Cartesian skepticism, which he calls problematic or psychological idealism. Its two main elements are these: (i) we know that we exist as thinking substances in virtue of our awareness of our own perceptions or conscious states as states of such a substance, such awareness being a necessary condition of consciousness; and (ii) our perceptions or sensory experiences do not by themselves provide a basis for the belief that there are external objects.2 Kant's refutation of this doctrine seeks to show that it is internally incoherent, i.e. that anyone who buys (i) must reject (ii), or in other words, that if the Cartesian skeptic is to hold that we have self-knowledge of the sort described in (i) he must also hold that some at least of our perceptions are perceptions of external objects. The Deduction plays an important role in this internal refutation of Cartesian skepticism, together with such other important sections as the Analogies of Experi ence, the Refutation of Idealism (in B) and the Paralogisms. In this paper I will make use of this fact to organize an interpretation of the B Deduc tion. We will be able to make philosophical sense of the argument of the Deduction, it seems to me, if we look to its part in the overall attack on skepticism mounted in the Critique. The interpretation I will give here follows the basic outlines of Henrich's 1969 paper.31 see the B Deduction as a single extended argument carried out in two stages. In my interpretation, however, the hoary transcendental psychology in terms of which Kant tended to put his points is, as far as is possible, dispensed with; the argument is no longer seen to rely on such claims as that we have representations which contain an infinite given manifold of particular representations (the pure intuitions of space and time), that faculties of mind such as understanding and sensibility operate upon one another, that there are atemporal acts of transcendental synthesis that (in some sense) take place through the agency of the pure productive imagination, and so on. These claims would perhaps have been no more plausible or readily intelligible to Kant's philosophical 71 This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 72 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY targets (Descartes, Leibniz, Wolff, Hume, Berkeley) than they are to us today, so I take it to be a virtue of my interpretation that in exhibiting the recognizable philosophical strategy behind the argument it also shows how the argument can work against Kant's philosophical antagonists. I distinguish the two stages of the Deduction, then, in terms of the two different notions of self-consciousness that figure in them. In the first stage, Kant introduces the principle of apperception, which specifies a highly formal and abstract notion of self-consciousness. This self-con sciousness, however, does not amount to the determinate knowledge of oneself as an individual subject of conscious states that the Cartesian skeptic requires for self-knowledge, a fact that Kant exploits in the second stage of the Deduction and which turns out to be pivotal in the Refutation of Idealism. Before setting out my interpretation I should stress that although I organize it by considering the role the Deduction plays in an overall refutation of Cartesian skepticism I am not taking it that it is the central concern of the Deduction to refute skepticism, or that there is a full-dress refutation of skepticism contained in the Deduction, or again that the argument of the Deduction requires completion by the arguments of the Analogies and/or the Refutation of Idealism; such claims have been made by various of Kant's commentators. The aim of the Deduction is the more general one of establishing the objective validity of the categories, that is, to show that the basic concepts of the understand ing, the possession and use of which are necessary conditions of a being's having the ability to make judgments, are in fact applicable to the objects of our sensory experience, viz. objects in space and time.4 This will secure our right to claim knowledge of such objects through empirical judgments, which employ or presuppose such concepts?the quid juris of which Kant speaks in the introductory material to the Deduction.5 I If the Deduction as a whole has a central role to play in the overall refutation of Cartesian skepticism, the first half of the Deduction can be read as if it were concerned to refute a quite different sort of skepticism: a skepticism with regard to the intellect, as it were, of the sort that Hume developed.6 Here the skeptic's proposal would be that such notions as those of cause, substance, identity, object, and so forth, are mere actions' concocted by the mind to paper over contradictions in our beliefs about the things which we take our perceptions to represent. The difficulties arise, according to Hume, from our attempt to make these concepts, which like all concepts can be derived only from our sensory experience, apply to objects which are supposed by us to be 'specifically distinct' from our perceptions. Descartes and Leibniz had derived such a priori concepts from self-consciousness, construed as reflective awareness of a substantial self. As they told it, one got the concept of substance, for example, from one's immediate, intuitive awareness of the inner substance which is the subject of one's conscious states, i.e. the self.7 Hume's destructive argu This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SKEPTICISM AND KANT'S B DEDUCTION 73 ments against the account of self-consciousness as awareness of a substan tial self thus also undercut this derivation of a priori concepts, leaving them mere fictions resulting from the workings of custom on the imagi nation. We can see the first half of the Deduction as an attempt to reconstruct the connections between self-consciousness, the ability to make judg ments, and the possession and use of categorial concepts that Descartes and Leibniz developed, only now without the questionable account of self-consciousness which they used. In effect, the principle of apperception stands in for Descartes's attribute of thought; where it was the main function of the attribute of thought to capture all that is common or essential to thoughts or conscious states, the 1 think' of apperception "...serves only to introduce all our thought, as belonging to consciousness" (A341/B399-400). Like the attribute of thought, the principle of appercep tion lays down the general conditions of identity for thinking things in complete abstraction from any empirical facts about the constitution or history of any individual thinking things; most important, like the attri bute of thought, the principle of apperception does these things in terms of the ability to judge of any of one's conscious states that it is in fact a conscious state of one's own.8 Kant introduces the principle of apperception in connection with the problem of accounting for the peculiar unity of a judgment, which although it contains a single thought has a number of discrete elements. (Kant, like his predecessors, thinks of a judgment as a mental proposition of sorts, that is, a unified complex of mental representations.9) His prop osal is that this unity is just the unity embodied in concepts,10 which at bottom is the unity of the understanding itself. This sets the stage for the introduction, in Section 16, of the unity of apperception, "the highest principle in the whole sphere of human knowledge" (B135). Here is how he formulates the principle: It must be possible for the T think' to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me. (B131.) This principle clearly embodies the Cartesian/Leibnizean notion that self consciousness is a necessary condition of having conscious experience at all, and that self-consciousness is a matter of having the ability to judge of one's conscious states that they are one's own; it lays it down that nothing can be a conscious experience of mine which I cannot judge to be my perception or representation. The crucial point about this principle, which distinguishes its construal of self-consciousness from Descartes's and Leibniz's, is that it is analytic. Kant stresses this in sections 16 and 17; he notes, for example, that "This principle of the necessary unity of apperception is itself, indeed, an iden tical, and therefore analytic, proposition..." (B135.) There has been a fair This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 74 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY amount of confusion among commentators over this claim, some of them holding that Kant is somehow mistaken or confused or inconsistent in asserting it.11 One source of these commentator's confusions seems to be the mistaken notion that the principle is analytic of the notion of a representation.12 It is not; plainly, it is analytic of the notion of a represen tation's being my representation. (That's why it makes sense for Kant to add the phrase 'or at least would be nothing to me' in the statement of the principle quoted above.) Consider, for example, this passage from Section 17: Although this proposition makes synthetic unity a condition of all thought, it is, as already stated, itself analytic. For it says only that all my represen tations in any given intuition must be subject to that condition under which alone I can ascribe them to the identical self as my representations, and so can comprehend them as synthetically combined in one apperception through the general expression 7 think.' (B138; see also B132-3, B134, B135.) In the special sense of 'mine' explicated here, it does not follow that any representation that is in some sense a state of mine must be mine, Leibniz's petites perceptions, for example, would be both representations and states of mine, but would not be liable to self-ascription and so would not be conscious states, i.e. states of mine.13 The principle of apperception, useful analytic truth that it is, serves to explicate the notion of a self or subject of conscious states?Descartes's thinking thing. What it does not do, and is not meant to do, is to answer such questions as: what is the justification for my claim that my current conscious state is indeed my state? What confirms any claims I might make about the relative temporal positions of my states?14 What is the criterion by which I judge that a certain conscious state is mine? The last of these questions Kant would rightly reject as senseless; there is no such criterion precisely because there is no question of my having a conscious state that is not mine, and hence no question of my telling which states are mine.15 In the same way, there is no question about the justification of such a claim; we could say either that the notion of justifi cation doesn't apply here, or else that is is a necessary truth that to make such a claim sincerely is to be justified in believing it. And as regards the confirmation of claims about the temporal positions or temporal ordering of one's experiences, it is clear that on those very rare occasions in which such confirmation would be required what would serve to confirm such claims would be your memory of the experiences and their sequence together with yours and others' memories of the sequence of events in the external order, together with whatever independent evidence is avail able?last year's concert schedule, for instance, or the family photo album. The principle of apperception is certainly much too abstract to do any such thing as this, particularly in light of the fact, which Kant stresses, that the categories, which are the most determinate immediate expres sions of the unity of apperception, have no temporal content whatsoever.16 As we'll shortly be in a position to see, the suggestion that the pure unity This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SKEPTICISM AND KANT'S B DEDUCTION 75 of apperception by itself could have any consequences as regards the temporal position of oneself and one's states involves a confusion of the two notions of self-consciousness figuring in the two halves of the Deduc tion. In analytically elucidating the notion of the self in terms of the ability to judge of one's conscious states that they are one's own, Kant's principle of apperception does not involve the notion of self-consciousness as intui tive awareness of an inner substance which Hume scouted. The further explication which Kant gives of the identity of the self is also Humean, in the sense that it renders the identity of the self in terms of relations between its representations: ...the empirical consciousness, which accompanies different representations, is in itself diverse and without relation to the identity of the subject. That relation comes about, not simply through my accompanying each represen tation with consciousness, but only in so far as I conjoin one representation with another, and am conscious of the synthesis of them. Only in so far, therefore, as I can unite a manifold of given representations in one conscious ness, is it possible for me to represent to myself the identity of the conscious ness of these representations. (Section 16, B133.) To think of a particular representation as mine, then, is to think of it as able to go together with others of my representations, actual and possible, thus constituting a coherent stretch of experience. This does not very much constrain the possible representations which might go together with one of mine; such representations would merely have to fit together with it in a sequence of experience which has the continuity and regularity characteristic of experience of an order of substances whose qualities can be characterized either mathematically or dynamically and which stand in causal relations to one another?a world, that is, whose basic features are in accordance with the concepts of the understanding, or the categories. The sequence of one's actual experiences will of course be only one of these possible sequences; accordingly, the principle of apperception does not have to do with one's memories of previous actual experiences or one's predictions about future actual experiences. It is in this sense that the principle is abstract, or formal, and it is this that allows it to capture the general notion of a thinking thing or subject of consciousness. If it does not have much content, that is just what we should expect from a principle that is merely analytic.17 Like Hume, then, Kant makes the identity of the self to be a matter of relations among its conscious states or perceptions; unlike him, he makes it a matter of relations of representational content among possible experiences, and not causal or associational ones among actual experi ences. This fact is used by Kant as the basis for his argument in Sections 17-19 (of which an overview and recapitulation is given in Section 20) that the unity of apperception provides for the objectivity of judgment. As we have seen, it is the unity of apperception which underlies the unity of concepts; and the pure concepts, taken together, specify a general This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 76 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY concept of an object. As Kant writes in Section 17: Understanding is, to speak generally, the faculty of knowledge. This consists in the determinate relation of given representations to an object. An object is that in the concept of which the manifold of a given intuition is united. Now all unification of representations demands unity of consciousness in the synthesis of them. Consequently it is the unity of consciousness that alone constitutes the relation of representations to an object, and therefore their objective validity and the fact that they are modes of knowledge. (B137, slightly altered) The unity of apperception must be counted objective, then, and contrasted with the subjective or empirical unity of consciousness which is a matter of the association of ideas in actual experience?so Kant argues in Section 18, and in Section 19 he uses this to explain the possibility of our making judgments that can so much as purport to represent states of the world, i.e. judgments the truth or falsity of which depend on something outside the subjective order.18 On Kant's reconstruction, then, the concept of an object in general and the categorial concepts that partially specify it are a priori concepts which derive from self-consciousness, not in the way suggested by Descartes and Leibniz but instead as expressions of the unity of apperception. There is then, pace Hume, a genuine notion of an object which is not founded on the deliverances of sense and imagination, and which provides for the making of objective judgments; and there is, as well, a genuine notion of the self as something which is more than a bundle of associated percep tions, a thing the identity of which is a function of relations of content among possible experiences. These are the main results of the first half of the Deduction, and they are important results. They are limited, how ever, as Kant is quick to stress. The notions of self and of object in general that are developed in the first half of the Deduction are so abstract, amounting as they do only to highly formal notions, that they cannot by themselves give rise to knowledge of anything.19 Even so, the availability of this account of self-consciousness, linked as it is with the ability to make objective judgments, might hold itself out to the Cartesian skeptic as a possible line of defense against the argument of the Refutation of Idealism. For it might seem that self-con sciousness, as captured in the principle of apperception, would be enough for the self-knowledge to which the Cartesian skeptic is committed, but yet that it falls short of the fully determinate empirical consciousness that fuels the Refutation. I consider this in the next section, and in the final section will show how the second half of the Deduction undercuts this line of defense. II The argument of the Refutation takes off from "the mere, but empiri cally determined, consciousness of my own existence" (B275), where this This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SKEPTICISM AND KANT'S B DEDUCTION 77 is glossed as consciousness of my own existence as determined in time. What Kant means by these phrases is evidently this: to have such con sciousness of myself, I must think of myself as this particular individual, whose states (conscious states, that is, as I am representing myself solely as a self or subject of conscious states) each have a determinate location in the unique actual temporal order in which everything which ever actually exists must be determinately located and thus determinately temporally related to every other actual object or state. I think of myself in this way, for example, as the one who is now seeing words appear on a screen, who yesterday saw Super Bowl XVIII on television, and who twenty years ago saw Maury Wills steal three bases in one ballgame. Again, it is not my justification for these beliefs that is in question, but instead the possibility of my so much as thinking of myself in this way. The argument of the Refutation is hard to take in and harder to assess, given that it depends so heavily on the complicated arguments of the First Analogy. With the help of the remarks following the proof, and particularly the long footnote added to the Preface of the B edition, how ever, we can see enough of the outlines of the argument to serve our present purpose. In particular, we will be able to see why it is crucial to the argument that it begins with the fully determinate, empirical self-con sciousness of the sort just described. Kant had argued in the First Analogy that we cannot represent time as a single actual order embracing everything that exists or occurs unless we can represent something abiding through, and thus distinct from, time itself, something that retains its identity through alterations in its state; Kant calls this a beharrliches (Kemp Smith: a "permanent"). In the case of time, this abiding thing can be nothing other than space, or more exactly matter in space.20 In the Refutation the key issue is the representation of the self as existing in time, and this turns on the pos sibility of representing one's conscious states as being determinately located in time. These states, like the moments of time themselves, con tinually succeed one another and so need to be related to an abiding thing if their succession is to be seen as changes of state of an enduring self. Agreeing with Hume that we have no awareness of an inner object which could fill the bill, Kant argues that the only candidate is objects in space, i.e. actual material things external to oneself. These are the only things which are at the same time (i) available to my perception or awareness (indeed, Kant points out, immediately perceived) and (ii) able to be seen as existing as the same thing through changes of state, or from time to time, and particularly through changes in our perceptions of them. In order for me to represent my conscious states as related to these outer objects in the appropriate way, and so to see both my perceptions or conscious states and the outer objects together with their changes of state (events) as contained in a single all-embracing order, the unique actual temporal order, I have to take it that some of my perceptions are genuinely of external objects. Thus "consciousness of my existence is at the same This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 78 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY time an immediate consciousness of the existence of other things outside me."21 This perhaps hardly even qualifies as a rough sketch of the Refutation, and so of course I won't be able to inquire here into the question of its plausibility or convincing force. What I hope my description to have shown is that it is essential to the argument of the Refutation that it start from the "mere, but empirically determined consciousness of my own existence." Now there might seem to be an out here for the Cartesian skeptic. Kant himself in the first note to the Refutation remarks the difference between the consciousness of oneself as determinately existing in time and the self-consciousness captured by the principle of appercep tion; by way of contrast, he remarks concerning the latter: Certainly, the representation T am,' which expresses the consciousness that can accompany all thought, immediately includes in itself the existence of a subject; but it does not so include any knowledge of that subject, and therefore also no empirical knowledge, that is, no experience of it. (B277.) Now it seems that the Cartesian skeptic could grant the whole argument of the Refutation and still maintain his position, for it is open to him to say that the self-consciousness involved in the T think' that functions as the premiss in the cogito argument is only the formal self-consciousness of the principle of apperception. Commitment to this sort of self-conscious ness need not commit one to the claim that some of one's perceptions must actually be of external objects, whereas commitment to the determi nate self-knowledge of the Refutation does, it is being granted, so commit one. This move would be all the more forceful if the results of the Deduction are obtained solely on the basis of the formal self-consciousness powering its first half. Ill Our consideration of the first half of the Deduction and of the Refutation has turned up two distinct notions of self-consciousness, with an attendant possibility for the Cartesian skeptic of sidestepping the argument of the Refutation. We shall see in this section that the results of the second half of the Deduction foreclose this possibility, for there Kant will argue that one cannot so much as think of oneself as a subject of conscious states, a thinking thing, without having the determinate self-knowledge which bases the argument of the Refutation. In this way, thought of oneself as a conscious being presupposes, or has as a necessary condition, such self-knowledge. A consequence of this will be that, on the supposition that we have self-consciousness of the sort recognized in the Cartesian/ Leibnizean tradition, we must hold that the pure concepts do actually apply to the objects of sensory experience. To show this is just to establish the objective validity of the categories, which is the main aim of the Deduction. The argument of the second half is set up in the latter part of Section This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SKEPTICISM AND KANT'S B DEDUCTION 79 24 (after the stars), where Kant raises a "paradox" about inner sense; it is ...namely that this sense represents to consciousness even our own selves only as we appear to ourselves, not as we are in ourselves. For we intuit ourselves only as we are inwardly affected, and this would seem to be contradictory, since we should then have to be in a passive relation to ourselves. It is to avoid this contradiction that in systems of psychology inner sense, which we have carefully distinguished from the faculty o? apper ception, is commonly regarded as being identical with it. (B153.) From what he says here and from his subsequent discussion of this paradox it seems that it might be either, or both, of the following: (a) in self-knowledge the self must at one and the same time be the subject and the object of its knowledge; and/or (b) in self-knowledge the self must be both active and passive in respect of the same act of knowledge, in that as it determines or affects the subject it is active and as it is the subject affected it is passive.22 Systems of psychology, Kant says, try to avoid this contradiction by identifying inner sense with apperception.23 How is this supposed to help? Assume that subjective feeling accompanies each state of mind, even those which purport to represent outer objects, so that there's something that it's like for me to be in that state. We needn't think that there is one characteristic feeling (one either in number or in kind) accompanying all our states, nor need we think of these feelings as representations (having cognitive content, as it were) of the states as belonging to me or of myself as the subject of them. Now if we say that feeling accompanying a representation makes it to be my state of mind and so is what I go on in representing this state as mine, we avoid the need to recognize the self as either producing or being represented in the contents of inner sense, and so we skirt the paradox. This proposed way out doesn't work, according to Kant, because it overlooks the distinction between inner sense and apperception. One cru cial aspect of this distinction is that whereas apperception is able to supply only the entirely formal concept of a thinking being a general, which applies indifferently to all thinking things and thus even to those (if any) with sensibilities which are quite different from our own, inner sense affords the representation of oneself as an individual subject of conscious states existing determinately in time. Kant aims in Section 24 to provide a resolution of the paradox which respects the difference between inner sense and apperception. It is, unfor tunately, particularly cryptic, even by Kantian standards. What he says in response to the paradox is this: What determines inner sense is the understanding and its original power of combining the manifold of intuition, that is, of bringing it under one apperception (upon which rests the possibility of the understanding itself). (B153.) And a little further on in that paragraph: This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 80 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY ...the understanding...in respect of the manifold which may be given to it in accordance with the form of sensible intuition, is able to determine sen sibility inwardly. (B153.) What is being said here? What, in particular, is it to "determine" sensi bility, and what could it be to do so "inwardly"? (A phrase much like it occurs in the last sentence of Section 24.) If we overlook the talk of the understanding as a faculty of mind (but under the title of imagination) acting upon the passive subject considered as the object of inner sense, or rather render this in a more acceptable way, we get the following. Outer objects can be said to determine sensi bility by causing us to have sensory experiences with particular content? we sense these objects not merely as objects in space but as this object in that particular place, having these or those determinate sensible qual ities. Kant's suggestion is that while the self, or understanding, can be said to determine sensibility, it does not do it as an object does, but instead as a sort of necessary condition of there being inner intuitions at all. Rather than making an inner intuition into a representation of a particu lar, individual self, what the "principle of the understanding," i.e. the unity of apperception, does is provide for a given representation's being used as a representation of a self, that is, being taken as a state of a conscious subject. Kant has a very important point here; what he is doing is challenging the assumption that we are immediately aware of our inner states as inner states, that is, that these states simply present themselves to our awareness as inner states, or modes of thought. His claim is that to see them as such we have to represent them as states of a conscious subject, or self, and for this we need to invoke the general concept of a self as this is set out by the principle of apperception. This helps us to understand the general statement of the resolution of the paradox towards the end of Section 24: How the T that I think can be distinct from the T that intuits itself (for I can represent other modes of intuition as at least possible), and yet, as being the same subject, can be identical with the latter; and how, therefore, I can say: "I, as intelligence and thinking subject, know myself as an object that is thought, insofar as I am given to myself beyond what is in intuition, and yet know myself, like other phenomena, only as I appear to myself, not as I am to the understanding"?these are questions that raise no greater or less difficulty than how I can be an object to myself at all, and more particularly, an object of intuition and of inner perceptions. (B155, altered in accordance with the Akademie edition.) The T that I think, the T as intelligence and thinking subject, is of course the T of apperception, which as the pure concept of a thinking thing in general is over and above what is given in intuition; it is nevertheless represented in inner intuition precisely because it is the general condition of any intuition's being inner, i.e. any perception or state of mind, what ever its content, being taken as a conscious state or experience. We have This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SKEPTICISM AND KANT'S B DEDUCTION 81 in this not only a resolution of the paradox of self-knowledge but an answer to the problem raised by Pistorius (which it was perhaps the main aim of Section 24?after the stars?to provide): that Kant makes the self to be nothing but appearance, and in so doing leaves nothing to which appearances may appear. For insofar as the self cannot be given in intui tion but is instead captured by the principle of apperception, it exists as more than appearance; but it is nevertheless that which appears in inner intuition, in the sense that the principle of apperception provides the condition of seeing a representation as an inner state. If Section 24 stressed that apperception as well as inner intuition is necessary for self-knowledge, Section 25 stresses the reverse. "On the other hand," Kant begins Section 25 by saying, in the transcendental synthesis of the manifold of representations in gen eral, and therefore in the synthetic original unity of apperception, I am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am. This representation is a thought, not an intuition...the consciousness of self is thus very far from being a knowledge of the self, notwithstanding all the categories which constitute the thought of an object in general through combination of the manifold in one apperception. (B157 8.) This distinction is the one drawn in the First Note to the Refutation, quoted above on p. 14; it plays an especially important role in the Paralogisms. Let me quote the opening "general remark" in the B edition Paralogisms, just for an example: I do not know an object through my merely thinking, but only through my determining a given intuition with respect to the unity of consciousness, in which all thinking consists, can I ever know an object. Consequently, I do not know myself through being conscious of myself as thinking, but only when I am conscious of the intuition of myself as determined with respect to the function of thought. (B406, slightly altered.) And towards the end of the B Paralogisms he has this to say: Thought, taken by itself, is merely the logical function, and so pure spon taneity, of combination of the manifold of a merely possible intuition; it does not exhibit the subject of consciousness as appearance, and this because it takes no account whatsoever of the mode [Art] of intuition, whether it be sensible or intellectual.... For the categories are those functions of thought (of judgment) as already applied to our sensible intuition, such intuition being required if I wish to know myself. Now if I would be conscious of myself merely as thinking, and I set aside how it is that my own self [mein eigenes Selbst] is given in intuition, the T think' (but not insofar as I think) will be mere appearance to me; in the consciousness of myself in mere thought I am the being itself, although through this nothing of myself is thereby given for thought. (B428-9, slightly altered.) This distinction is invoked at many places in the Paralogisms, and is indeed connected with what Kant identifies as the principal mistake of the "Rational Psychologist" (the quarry of the Paralogisms); seeking to This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 82 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY derive the substantiality, simplicity, and so forth, of the self from the mere concept of a thinking thing, and yet dimly aware that intuition is required for genuine knowledge of anything, as opposed to mere thought of it, the Rational Psychologist goes wrong: From all this it is evident that rational psychology owes its origin simply to misunderstanding. The unity of consciousness, which underlies the categories, is here mistaken for an intuition of the subject as object, and the category of substance is then applied to it. But this unity is only unity in thought, by which alone no object is given, and to which, therefore, the category of substance, which always presupposes a given intuition, cannot be applied. Consequently, this subject cannot be known. (B421-2.) This point, that for genuine self-knowledge I need to have intuitions, is absolutely crucial for the argument of Section 25, although it is discussed most fully in the Paralogisms. As Kant says at the outset of Section 25, in the part quoted above, and as he also notes in the Paralogisms,24 the only sense in which I get knowl edge of my own existence from pure apperception is that I know that something exists which is the subject of my conscious states. I don't know the first thing about its nature; I don't know, for example, whether thought or consciousness are essential to it, or whether it is by its nature material, or immaterial, or some third kind of thing. Most important, I can't see what it would be for it to exist as an individual thing, with a determinate spatiotemporal location and history. But if apperception does not yield an intuition of the self, and if inner intuitions do not give the self as an object?Kant being in full agreement with Hume on this score?then what are the intuitions to which the concept of the self must be applied if genuine self-knowledge is to be possible? Or to put it another way?how does the formal conception of the self, which in itself has no connection with anything in space and time, come to represent an empirical self with a determinate position in space and time? The answer, although very much compressed, is found in the remainder of Section 25; it is here, I maintain, that we find the actual argument of the second step of the Deduction.25 It runs: Just as for knowledge of an object distinct from me I require, besides the thought of an object in general (in the category), an intuition by which I determine that general concept, so for knowledge of myself I require, besides the consciousness, that is, besides the thought of myself, an intuition of the manifold in me, by which I determine this thought. I exist as an intelligence which is conscious solely of its power of combination; but in respect of the manifold which it has to combine I am subjected to a limiting condition (entitled inner sense), namely, that this combination can be made intuitable only according to relations of time, which lie entirely outside the concepts of understanding, strictly regarded. Such an intelligence, therefore, can know itself only as it appears to itself in respect of an intuition which is not intellectual and cannot be given by the understanding itself, not as it would know itself if its intuition were intellectual. (B158-9.) Here 'determining the thought' of myself is analogous to what it was in This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SKEPTICISM AND KANT'S B DEDUCTION 83 the case of objects: it involves tying the general concept of the self down to a particular individual?myself. And, Kant is saying, to represent myself as this individual thinking thing, as opposed to conceiving of a thinking thing generally, I represent myself as the thinking thing having this particular manifold of intuition, that is, as the subject of this (or these) individual conscious state(s). The suggestion that it is by a sort of inner ostensi?n of representational states that we pin down the individual identity of the self can seem suspiciously close to the idea that the identity of the self is simply given in inner intuition, the view of self-knowledge which Kant rejects in Sec tion 24. There is an important difference between them, however, one which can be summed up by notion that for Kant the intuitions concerned need not be, and in general will not be, inner intuitions. On the view Kant rejects, the requisite intuitions must be essentially inner intuitions, in the sense that they must simply present themselves as thoughts or inner states, and that they have their own, primitive identities which we immediately grasp and from which we can derive the identity of the self that has them. Just as Kant rejects the notion that our inner states are simply immediately recognized as such, so too he rejects the notion that the individual identity of these states is a brute datum somehow given to us. This is a shrewd insight, for it is no less easy to think that we can individuate mental states sheerly by our awareness of them than it is to think that some immediately discernible (indeed, impossible to overlook) feature of them gives them out as thoughts or conscious states, and these natural misapprehensions conspire to hide the problems involved in coming up with a fully developed account of self-knowledge which respects the strictures Hume rightly placed on such an account. The key phrase in the quotation above, which hints at the account Kant will provide, is the one in which Kant talks of "making this combi nation intuitable." By "this combination" he means the unification of diverse representations (intuitions) into a single complex one, as in an empirical judgment. The categories are, of course, the most general means of such unification, and the principle of apperception itself is the most fundamental expression of this unity. (The allusion to "an intelligence which is conscious solely of its power of combination" is thus a reference to the formal notion of a conscious subject as defined by the principle of apperception.) Now what can Kant have in mind when he talks of making such combination intuitable? Evidently, he means that we can be aware of the combination of the manifold of representations by being aware of its outcome, i.e. the empir ical judgments which are the products of the combination. These would involve the application of the categories to objects of sensible experience, i.e. objects in space and time, which are the objects given to us in intuition. This reading is confirmed by the footnote to this passage (B158-9n.), where Kant argues that while I cannot represent the activity or spon taneity of the understanding, in virtue of which "I entitle myself an This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 84 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY intelligence," simply as such, I can represent it indirectly, as it is reflected in the determinate products of this activity, viz. the particular empirical judgments I make. The categories, as the pure concepts of the understand ing, in their turn express the unity of the understanding itself, as this is captured by the principle of apperception. In this way, I can link up the principle of apperception with a given manifold of intuition by applying concepts to that manifold, that is, by making judgments about objects in space and time on the basis of my sensory experiences. This being so, those experiences can now be represented as mine, i.e. as states of a conscious subject, irrespective of their particular content?they can, in short, serve as inner intuitions. I want to highlight two points about this account of self-knowledge. The first is that the manifold of intuition that is said, both here and in the Paralogisms, to be required for self-knowledge is not necessarily a manifold of inner intuitions from the outset. This might best be put by saying that inner intuitions are not a separate species of intuition from outer ones; outer intuitions, which purport to represent objects outside us in space, can serve as inner intuitions when this representative purport is overlooked for the moment and the intuitions are considered simply as representations, states of mind. When Kant says in the First Note to the Refutation that "...inner experience is itself possible only mediately, and only through outer experience." (B277),26 it is this point he is getting at, this and the related one that we are able to think of ourselves as having a determinate existence in time only through our representing our inner states as being so located, which in turn requires that we place them in the single objective spatiotemporal order. To represent the indi vidual identity of our inner states, then, we need to take at least some of them to be genuinely of outer objects, as was argued in the Refutation; to see them as inner states, we need to connect them up with the principle of apperception, and it is a condition of doing this that the categories applied to the representational content of these states. The second, and for the purposes of the overall argument of the Deduc tion more important point is that it is a result of this account that one cannot so much as think of oneself as (let alone know oneself to be) a thinking thing or self without having the determinate self-knowledge which provides the basis for the argument of the Refutation of Idealism. Whereas the general concept of a thinking thing itself does not presuppose such self-knowledge, and perhaps even the possession ofthat concept does not, the application of the concept to one's individual self?the thought of oneself as a thinking thing?does. We thus have our answer to the Cartesian skeptic's proposed way around the Refutation. And we also have, what is no less important, the conclusion of the Deduction?the objective validity of the categories. Anyone committed to the claim that we have knowledge of ourselves as individual subjects of conscious states?and all parties to the dispute are committed to this?is thereby committed to the claim that the concepts This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SKEPTICISM AND KANT'S B DEDUCTION 85 of the understanding actually have application to the objects of sensory experience, for only on such a supposition is self-knowledge possible. IV My aim in this paper was to lay out the argument of the Deduction in B so as to make apparent the basic philosophical strategy behind the details of the text. This I hope I have done. It is not part of my present purpose to evaluate the argument from any of the several points of view from which it might be judged. I do want, however, to make a couple of observations about the argument, mainly in partial support of my interpretation but also perhaps as an aid in starting to think about the cogency of the argument itself. As I've presented it, the argument of the Deduction works as part of an internal refutation of Cartesian skepticism. (Recall that we have understood Cartesian skepticism broadly, so that it might be taken to provide the core of the position Kant calls "transcendental realism," which he takes to be the main antagonist to his own transcendental idealism and which he associates with the names of such diverse figures as Leibniz, Wolff, Descartes, Berkeley, and Newton.)27 This has its advantages and its disadvantages. On the plus side, the fact that Kant can help himself to premisses supplied by his opponents obviates the need for him to argue for them. Kant has been criticized, for example, for not seeing the need to establish that self-consciousness is a necessary condition of conscious ness;28 this criticism is based on a misunderstanding, as we are now in a position to see. His targets are all committed to this claim, and their several treatments of self-knowledge are based on it; it would have been otiose of Kant to argue for it in this context. Kant does not, therefore, need to defend the conception of self-consciousness and its relation to conscious experience on which his anti-skeptical argument is based, nor need he back up any speculations about psychological mechanisms involved in cognition; these latter speculations do not play a real role in his argument, as we have seen, but to the extent that Kant appeals to them he has the sanction of the practice of his targets, most notably Wolff, Crusius, and Tetens, if not as to details then at least as to general strategy. It seems to me that a number of the other gaps which critics have found in his arguments can be explained in the same way. On the minus side, the argument gains convincing force at the expense of full generality. It is keyed directly to certain features peculiar to Carte sian skepticism, particularly the strong claim about self-knowledge which is one of the view's main commitments. There is thus no hope, if we follow my interpretation of the argument, of finding in Kant the resources for once-and-for-all, starting-from-scratch refutation of skepticism in gen eral. This is not too bad a result, since as far as I know there is no interpretation of Kant's arguments on which he might have the reason able hope of proving, on the basis of entirely uncontroversial premisses, This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 86 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY that there are external objects. I don't think Kant would be fazed by this, since I don't think he tried to show, and he certainly didn't succeed in showing, that there is some general requirement that we believe that there are external objects, say as a condition of our having experience. It is common in the literature to take so-called 'transcendental arguments' to have something like this as their aim, and it is almost equally commonly shown that such arguments cannot deliver even this result. What we have in Kant, then, is nothing more, but also nothing less, than a reasonable claim to have provided an internal refutation of the most well-worked out version of skepticism available at the time, as this figured in a set of positive philosophical views which constituted the going alternatives in the eighteenth century. Insofar as the views of Descartes, Leibniz, Berkeley and Hume retain their interest today, so far will Kant's arguments maintain their claim on our attention.29 University of Southern California Received February 24,1984 NOTES 1. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, tr. N. Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929), Bxxxix n. All quotations are taken from this edition, in some cases with slight alterations. 2. See B274. In calling this view Cartesian skepticism I do not mean to imply that Descartes is, in the end, a skeptic, or that this view is unique to Descartes. It was also accepted by Leibniz, and following him, Wolff. For Leibniz, see M. Furth, "Monadology," in Leibniz: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. H. Frankfurt (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), especially sections 1-3; for Wolffs "consistent dream-theory" see L. W. Beck, Early German Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 266-71. 3. See D. Henrich, "The Proof-Structure of Kant's B Deduction," Review of Metaphysics 22 (1969): 640-59. For leading earlier interpretations see N. Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan, 1918), pp. 284-91; H. J. Paton, Kant's Metaphysic of Experience (London: Allen & Unwin, 1936), Vol. I, pp. 498-546 (esp. p. 501); H. de Vleeschauwer, La d?duction transcendentale dans l'oeuvre de Kant (Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux, 1937), Vol. 3, pp. 1-41, 85-274 (esp. pp. 24-8, 150-56, 231-5); E. Adickes, ed. Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Berlin: Mayer & Muller, 1889), pp. 139n. 140n., p. 149n. Most recent commentaries don't make any explicit textual claims about the structure of argument in the Deduction; an exception is R. Wolff, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 183-202. Wolff seems to suggest that the B Deduction is a single argument (p. 183), but his account slides over the difficult textual problems which give rise to the standard two-or-more deductions view of the B Deduction. See pp. 641-5 of Henrich's paper for his criticism of such views. 4. In Leibniz's and Wolffs terminology, this is to give a real definition of the categories, i.e. one that shows that a concept has actual instances. See Bxxvi n., A242-3 and A242n., A243-4/B301-2 and B302n. For a helpful discussion see L. W. Beck, "Analytic and Synthetic Judgments before Kant" in his Essays on Kant and Hume (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978). This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SKEPTICISM AND KANT'S B DEDUCTION 87 5. See Sections 13 and 14 of the Deduction (as numbered in B): A84-94/B116-29, and especially A89-91/B122-3. 6. For the differences between the two sorts of skepticism see Margaret Wilson, "On Kant and the Refutation of Subjectivism," in L. W. Beck, ed. Proceedings of the Third International Kant Congress (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1972), pp. 597-606. See Kant's remark on Hume's views at B127, and compare A764-6/B792-4. 7. See, e.g., Leibniz's New Essays concerning Human Understanding, tr. P. Remnant and J. Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), Preface, p. 51 and II.2, pp. 110-11. For a similar claim in Descartes see the Third Meditation, Haldane and Ross, trs. and eds. The Philosophical Works of Descartes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1911), Vol. I, p. 165 [Adam & Tannery, Vol. IX, p. 35]. For more references and for discussion see Robert McRae, "Innate Ideas" in R. J. Butler, ed. Cartesian Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1972), esp. pp. 33-42, and R. McRae, Leibniz: Perception, Apperception, and Thought (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1976), pp. 93-7. Note that this material tends to undercut Bennett's claim that Descartes and Leibniz do not make 'intellectual capacity' a requirement for self-consciousness. (Bennett, Kant's Dialectic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 32-4.) 8. See in particular Descartes's reply to Hobbes, HR II, 64; AT VII, 175-6. (Note that in this passage Haldane and Ross misleadingly translate the same phrase ("ratio communis") using two different ones ("common nature" and "common term")). For Kant's claim that the principle of apperception's T think' is the Cartesian one, see B422n., A347/B405, A354-5; and also A342-3/B400-1, A346/B404, A370, B418-19, B428-30, B157n. 9. See A67-9/B92-4, A77-9/B102-5, B133 and B133n. 10. See B131 in addition to the references in note 9 above. 11. A number of commentators have made this claim; two among them, widely separated in time, are Edward Caird, The Critical Philosophy of Immanuel Kant (Glasgow: James Maclehose & Sons, 1889), Vol. I, p. 427, and Paul Guyer, "Kant on Apperception and A Priori Synthesis," American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 17 (1980), pp. 208-9. 12. See, e.g., J. Bennett, Kant's Analytic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 103, and J. Hartnack, "B132 Revisited" in Beck, Proceedings of the Third International Kant Congress, pp. 288-94. In "Kant on Apperception and A Priori Synthesis" (p. 209) Guyer makes the same mistake, saying that the principle amounts to the claim that "...I cannot have a representation which I cannot recognize as my own," or "...whatever is to count as a representation at all must be fit for self-ascription." Curiously, he goes on to say that the principle, read this way, is synthetic; but he gives no reason for thinking it anything other than an analytic (partial) specification of the notion of a representation. Much of the criticism Guyer gives of Kant's views on apperception is vitiated by the recognition that they are based on this mistaken interpretation. 13. What Kant calls intuitions thus have some of the features of Leibniz's petites percep tions; recall Leibniz's claim that the only conscious perceptions are the ones that can be self-ascribed. See Leibniz, New Essays, Preface, pp. 55-8; II.1.14 and 15, pp. 115-17; II.9.1 and 4, pp. 134, 161-2. Compare Kant's letter to Herz of 26 May 1789, in S. Zweig, tr. and ed. Kant: Philosophical Correspondence 1759-99 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967), pp. 153-4 [Akademie edition vol. 11, pp. 51-2]. 14. Paul Guyer, in his review of Dieter Henrich's Identit?t und Objektivit?t, Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979), p. 164, takes this to be the question which the principle of appercep tion is formulated to answer. In addition to what I say about this suggestion in the text This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 88 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY QUARTERLY of my paper, consider how odd the suggestion is that this is a problem which is weighty enough (supposing that there is a problem here at all) to motivate the very strong conclu sions of the Deduction. 15. P. F. Strawson makes this point in The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966), pp. 164-5. 16. They hold, he points out, for any judging beings who have sensible intuitions, whether like or unlike ours. See B148, B150-1, B153-5, and B 163. 17. Hence I disagree with Bennett, Kant's Analytic, pp. 117-25. Kant does not talk at all about memory, or the ability to make judgments about past experience, in the Deduction; and more important, he explicitly denies, as we have just seen, that the principle of apperception has any temporal content whatsoever. 18. The A Deduction contains a fuller discussion of this point than does the B; see A104-10. 19. Kant makes this point in connection with our knowledge of objects in Sections 21, 22, and 23 of the Deduction, and in connection with self-knowledge in the Paralogisms. 20. Cp. Note 2 to the Refutation, B277-8. 21. B276; see also Bxl n. 22. Kant's discussions of the paradox here is no doubt connected with a (perhaps the) broader concern of Section 24: the response to a problem raised by Pistorius in his 1784 review of the Prolegomena. Erdmann quotes Pistorius as writing that if our inner represen tations {innere Vorstellungen) give us not things in themselves but only appearances, then "there will be nothing but illusion (Schein), and nothing remains to which anything appears." (B. Erdmann, Kant's Kriticismus in der ersten und in der zweiten Auflage der Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Leipzig: Leopold Voss, 1878), p. 107. Kemp Smith discusses the matter briefly in his Commentary, p. 323. 23. Kant no doubt has in mind Tetens's Philosophische Versuch ?ber die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung (1777-8); see Beck, Early German Philosophy, pp. 412-25, esp. 419-20. 24. See A346/B404, A400-1, B412-1, B412-13, and especially B420 and B422n. 25.1 am aware that Kant presents the second step of the Deduction in Section 26; see Henrich's account in "The Proof-Structure of Kant's Transcendental Deduction," pp. 645-6. His presentation of the argument there is, however, shot through with the bad psychology we've been trying to see beyond. Whatever force there is in that argument, therefore, derives from the arguments of Sections 24 and 25 as I've presented them, Section 26 being an abstract, psychologized compendium of them. 26. See also the last sentence of the introduction to the Refutation, B275; the last sentence of the Proof, B276; the footnote to the First Note, B276-7n.; and the footnote to the Preface in B, Bxxxix-xli n. 27. See, e.g., A26-9/B42-4, B69-71, A368-78, and A491-2/B519-21 on transcendental realism, and A388-9 and A739-69/B767-97 (esp. from A758/B786 on) on the value of skepticism in curbing the claims of rationalism. A very helpful discussion of these matters is L. W. Beck, "Kant's Strategy," in T. Penelhum and J. Macintosh, eds. The First Critique (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1969), pp. 4-17. 28. See, e.g. Guyer, "Kant on Apperception and A Priori Synthesis," pp. 209-211. 29. A number of different versions of this paper were read to colloquia at the University of California at Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, the University of Michigan, Northwestern University, Cornell University, the University of Massachusetts at This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions SKEPTICISM AND KANT'S B DEDUCTION 89 Amherst, Princeton University and Columbia University. I received many helpful criti cisms from these sessions; I have especially to thank Henry Allison, Isaac Levi, Charles Parsons, Sam Scheffler, Hubert Schwyzer, and Allen Wood. Colleagues and friends read various versions and offered valuable comments; I am most grateful to Tyler B?rge, Joshua Cohen, Burton Dreben, Michael Friedman, Dieter Henrich, David Hills, Peter Hylton, Hilary Putnam, John Rawls, Barry Stroud, and Margaret Wilson. This content downloaded from 132.248.184.4 on Tue, 1 Apr 2014 15:42:18 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions