1

Kants judgments of perception and the ambiguity of his concept of intuition

Paul Redding
(Paper given at APA Pacific Division Annual Conference, March 2013)

Introduction
In his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Kant introduced a distinction that
seems to sit awkwardly, if at all, with what he says in the Critique of Pure Reason: the
distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience. All
our judgments, Kant says, are at first mere judgments of perception; they hold good
only for us.1 But some can be shown to have an objectivity that others lack: on
reflection it is thought that these judgments should be valid for all times for us and
for everyone else.2 These are judgments of experience, and reflection involves
bringing them under the pure concepts of the understanding, the categories. Thereby
a judgment as air is elastic3 will be seen to have a new relation, namely to an
object, a relation which ensures the judgment has objective validity.4 In contrast,
the merely subjectively valid judgments of perception that cannot be brought under
the categoriesjudgments such as the room is warm, the sugar sweet, the
wormwood nasty or bitter [widrig]5fail to be afforded this new status. They are
only the logical connection of perceptions in a thinking subject.6
Many have dismissed this doctrine because of the alleged inconsistency with
what Kant says elsewhere, and especially in the rewritten Transcendental Deduction
of the second edition of the Critique, published five years later.7 A few, however,
have attempted to square the doctrine with the critical philosophy, and prominent
among these has been Batrice Longuenesse, who points to Kants analyses of the
logical forms of judgment as providing the key to understanding the distinction.8 My
account is in the spirit of Longuenesses reading, although it differs on particular
points. Crucially, however, I argue that Kants account of the distinction between the
two judgment forms draws on an ambiguity in his notion of intuition that has been
noted within a variety of analytically inspired readings of Kant over the last half
century. This ambiguity brings into question Kants own project of basing critical
philosophy on the fundamental distinction between concepts and intuitions, but raises
the possibility that the distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of
experience might itself be sufficient for Kants purposes, relieving him of the need to
rely on a more basic intuitionconcept distinction.

1. Kants transcendental logic in the light of modern logic.

2
To get these issues into view we might start with Wilfrid Sellarss reading of Kant in
his Locke Lectures of 1966,9 where he points to the implications for Kants official
intuitionconcept distinction of the rewritten transcendental deduction of the second
1789 edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Sellars notes that Kant refers to the
relations of intuitions to their objects as immediate but remarks that this could be
construed in two ways, making the notion of intuition ambiguous or Janus-faced.
First, immediacy might be interpreted as holding between the intuition and an object
considered as the cause of the intuition,10 or immediacy might be construed as the
immediacy of a phenomenal content given to consciousness. Thought of in the latter,
phenomenal way, an intuition could be thought on the linguistic analogy of a
demonstrative pronoun, this.11
But Sellars now directs our attention to Kants discussion of the shaping of
intuition by the productive imagination, in the rewritten B Deduction.12 Here the
productive imagination is described as the understanding functioning in a special
way,13 clearly suggesting the involvement of concepts in the shaping of intuition.
And so rather than think of intuition on the model of a bare this, Sellars suggests the
model of a demonstrative concept, a this-such nexus.14 The intuition of a cube, for
example, is of this as a cube, though it is not a judgment and does not involve cube
in a predicative position.15 But this now blurs the distinction between a special subclass of conceptual representations of individuals and a radically different kind of
representation of an individual which belongs to sheer receptivity and is in no sense
conceptual.16
Around the same time, debates over the nature of Kantian intuitions resulted in
similar claims as to their ambiguity. In a series of papers in the 1960s, Jaakko
Hintikka suggested that intuitions be understood on the linguistic analogue of singular
terms standing in immediate relationship to their objects, this singularity contrasting
with the generality of objects.17 Charles Parsons, however, critical of Hintikkas
reduction of the phenomenal features of Kants intuitions to their functioning as
singular terms, questioned whether the criteria of immediacy and singularity
actually coincided.18 A few years later, Manley Thompson alluded to a parallel
ambiguity in Kants concept of concept. Sometimes Kant describes predication in the
traditional way as a relation between two concepts rather than the modern postFregean way, as holding between a concept and an object subsumed under it,19 and
yet elsewhere there is the strong suggestion of the modern conception of concepts as
corresponding to open sentences and their different uses as corresponding to
different quantifications of open sentences.20 Thompson claimed that there was a
tension in Kants project between the traditional Aristotelian understanding of
general or formal logic, and the purposes to which Kant had wanted to put logic in
the context of his transcendental logic. The general logic required by Kants
transcendental logic, wrote Thompson, is thus at least first order quantificational
logic plus identity but minus proper names or other singular terms that are in principle
eliminable.21 Here, Thompson seems to go down the same path as Sellars. If Kants

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concept of concept is ambiguous, then this must have ramifications for his concept
of intuition, Hintikkas singular term reading fitting the modern open sentence
reading of concept, and the more phenomenal reading fitting the idea of what is given
to experience as an object conceived to be designated by a this such that forms the
subject of a traditional Aristotelian predication.22 Since this period, an increasing
number of interpreters, including Longuenesse, have been drawn to reading Kant in
the former proto-Fregean way.23
While one must be wary of any anachronistic reading back into Kant ideas that
are familiar now, neither should the limitedness of the logical resources available to
him be exaggerated. The idea of a judgment as holding not between two concepts but
between a concept and an object can already be found in Leibnizs reinterpretation of
the standard Aristotelian conception of judgment within his project of the universal
characteristic.24 Rather than thinking of the judgment in the traditional sense as the
joining of a universal-naming predicate to a substance-naming subject, Leibniz,
adopting an approach from Johannes Raue, treated the subject term as itself a
predicate, such that S is P was to be read as identifying terms S and P in the sense
of eachs being true of some third, a tertium commune, not named in the
judgment.25 This alternative non-Aristotelian analysis of judgment form was known
and debated within German scientific circles in the second half of the eighteenth
century, and Kant seems to have been well aware of these developments.26 It is not
surprising that we can recognize this Leibniz-Raue approach in those features of
Kants analyses of the logical form of judgment commented upon by Longuenesse.27
Longuenesse, portrays Kant as using the idea of intuition qua singular, nonconceptual representation to provide a non-Aristotelian logical deep structure for
judgments with an overtly Aristotelian S is P surface structure. Thus, in Kants
transcendental logic, the subject-predicate judgment is interpreted such that the
objects subsumed [as the contents of intuitions] under the subject-concept are also
subsumed under the predicate-concept.28 In various places Kant designates such
subsumed objects with the symbol x, and sometimes refers to the transcendental
object=x. Thus, for example, the judgment All bodies are extended can be
rendered: To everything x, to which the concept of body (a + b) belongs, belongs
also extension (b).29 This properly non-empirical or transcendental object x
which cannot be intuited by us but which in all of our empirical concepts in
general can provide relation to an object, i.e., objective reality.30 Kants
transcendental object = x, I suggest, is essentially Raues and Leibnizs tertium
commune. It cannot be intuited in the sense of being the object of a phenomenal
intuition despite the fact that it is precisely what is subsumed under a concept as the
content of an intuition in the Hintikkan singular-term sense. Kants acceptance of this
Leibniz-Raue conception of judgment structure is perhaps most explicit in a reflection
cited by Longuenesse: In every judgment, accordingly, there are two predicates that
we compare to one another, of which one is the logical subject, and the other is
called the logical predicate.31

4
Thus Kant uses the distinction between formal and transcendental logics to
relate two different ways of thinking of the logical structure of the judgment.
Following Aristotle, qua merely logical forms, the judgment relates two terms, a
subject term and a predicate term, to each other. Considered at this level, an object is
just what is presented or named by the subject term: In every judgment there is a
subject and predicate. The subject of the judgment, insofar as it contains different
possible predicates, is the object.32 This object is an appearance, and on Sellarss
reading, it is what is given via the phenomenal content of an empirical intuition qua
this-such nexus. But intuitions can also be as interpreted, following Hintikka, as
properly singular terms, and so come to play a different functional role qua means via
which transcendental objects=x are subsumed, first under the subject term considered
as a predicate, and then under the second, predicate predicate. On this second
Leibniz-Raue account of the judgment structure, the object is no longer conceived as a
substance named by the subject term, but rather as whatever it is that is responsible
for the truth of the applicability of the S and P predicate terms, respectively.
This distinction now clarifies what is going on with the distinction between
judgments of perception and judgments of experience in the Prolegomena.

2. Judgments of Perception and Judgments of Experience

Kant says all empirical judgments start as judgments of perception, but not all can be
transformed into judgments of experience. Those that fail, then, fail to achieve the
new relation, namely to an object, achieved by judgments of experience.33 This idea
can suggest that judgments of perception are not really judgments at all, but rather,
just the sorts of Humean empirical associations that Kant otherwise carefully
distinguishes from judgments. Longuenesse, rightly I think, resists this reading. Here
we might call on Kants famous Copernican analogy which is surely central to his
critical philosophy and think of the judgment sugar is sweet as akin to the sun
moves, but to hold onto the idea of context-specific perceptual judgments, we might
compare these expressed in a Sellarsian way as this sugar is sweet and this sun
moves. When the pre-Copernican says the latter, we take that to express a judgment
about the sun, but one that only holds good for us earthlings, and not for every
possible viewerone located outside our galaxy, for example. This judgment is
surely in some relation to an objectthe sunit is presumably not in the right one,
from the point of view of objectivity and science. What would be crucial in making
judgments about the sun or sugar is not that the former simply looks to be moving nor
that the latter simply tastes sweet, but that I desire that I and everybody else must
[msse] always necessarily connect the same perceptions under the same
circumstances [denselben Umstnden] rather than that the judgment be limited to
the subject [or] to its state at a particular time.34

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In both examples of judgments of perception, the object here is a
perspectivally conditioned appearance identified by a subject term logically
connected with the predicate, with both terms relying on phenomenal presences. But
what such this S is P judgments need in order to have objective content is a relation
to some further transcendental object = x, something not tied to the subjects
phenomenal state as is what is picked out by a demonstrative. Thus to say that air is
elastic is to allude to something that is responsible for the phenomenal intuitions
associated with air and elasticity co-occurring in the circumstances in which they in
fact co-occur.35
One way of expressing the idea of the requirement of objectivity as involving,
as Kant says, the necessary connection of the same perceptions under the same
circumstances would be to say that the content of the judgment must be properly
propositional in the distinctly modern sense. Propositional content, as the content of
knowledge or belief, is now sometimes expressed by referring to the set of possible
worlds or possible situations in which the proposition holds true.36 If my knowledge
that the cover of this book, say, is crimson, then this knowledge, expressed as a
judgment of experience, must encompasses possibilities in which the book may not
look crimson, such as if I look at it in the moonlight, for example, when it might look
black.37 But there could be uses of this sentence where the phenomenal look is just
what I want to conveythere, possible contexts in which it did not look crimson
would be excluded from the meaning.38 Clearly for a subject to know in this way,
their knowledge cannot be limited to their particular state at a particular time. Here
it is worth reflecting on the difference between this approach to judgment and that
found in Aristotle who does not have this modern sense of a proposition. According to
Arthur Prior, Aristotle had thought of the default tense of the expression of
judgment as the actual present in contrast to the timeless present of the modern
conception.39 That is, while in modern thought one thinks of the propositional content
of a judgment, if true, as eternally true, this was not Aristotles view: He sits may,
for instance, be true. If he rises, it then becomes false.40 Aristotles attitude to the
logical structure of belief content is, we might say, pre-Copernican in the Kantian
sense, and with only the resources of traditional term logic he lacks the means to
conceive of empirical judgments that maintain their truth values from those that do
not.41 But there seems no reason not to think of such context-sensitive judgments as
judgmentsclearly, they are expressed as truth claims.
Kants commitment to Aristotelian logic at a formal or general level is crucial
here. Both judgment types share the same overt syntactic subjectpredicate form in
that both are at first mere judgments of perception.42 It is transcendental reflection
that is required to establish the possibility of difference. Judgments of experience, but
not perception, will be thought of as amenable to the lower, LeibnizRaue level of
analysis. Such judgments achieve a new relation as the object understood not
simply as defined by the subject term of the surface structure but as the common
third, the transcendental object=x. In contrast, in the case of my tasting the sugar,

6
while intuition is present in the sense of phenomenal intuition, intuitions in the sense
of singular terms understood as referring back to some transcendental object=x are
lacking. There is nothing objective corresponding to the sweetness of sugar in the way
that there is something corresponding to the elasticity of air.43

3. Conclusion
I have suggested that disambiguating Kants concept of intuition in the manner of
Sellars allows us to understand how his distinction between judgments of perception
and judgments of experience may be compatible with his critical program in general,
but only at the cost of drawing on an ambiguity that, as Sellars points out, blurs the
distinction between intuitions and conceptsa distinction that is meant to be
foundational for whole critical philosophy as such. The crucial question here
becomes: what are the prospects for critical philosophy without a foundational
conceptintuition distinction?
In a sense this was the question facing those of Kants successors who were,
often for similar reasons to those evoked by Sellars, critical of the foundational role
Kant gave to the distinction between concepts and intuitions. But Kants distinction
between the sorts of judgments that he later described as judgments of perception and
judgments of experience actually predated his discovery of the conceptintuition
distinction, and in some pre-critical essays he criticized Leibniz for conflating two
types of judgment in a way analogous to the way he later criticized Leibniz for
conflating concepts and intuitions.44 As his critique of Leibniz was central to his
critique of pure reason, this raises the possibility of the critique itself resting on the
distinction of judgment forms without the need to further ground this in the concept
intuition distinction. I suggest that after Kant, Hegel thought that the essential features
of Kants revolutionary critique of metaphysics could be captured in this way, but this
is a topic that takes us well beyond the scope of this paper.

Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. With Selections

from the Critique of Pure Reason, revised edition, ed. and trans. Gary Hatfield
(Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2004), 18, Kants Gesammelte Schriften
(Berlin: Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1900-), vol. 4, p. 298.
Henceforth, references to the Academy edition will be given in square brackets as
[volume:page number].
2
Ibid., 18 [4:298]
3
Ibid., 19 [4:299]
4
Ibid., 18 [4:298]
5
Ibid., 19 [4:299]

Ibid., 18 [4:298]. Kant uses logical in the sense of belonging to general

(i.e., Aristotelian) logic to which he opposes real in the sense of belonging to
transcendental logic.
7
In 19 of the B Deduction, Kant explicitly criticizes the traditional
explanation of a judgment as a representation of a relation between two concepts.
He goes on to claim that a judgment is nothing other than the way to bring given
cognitions to the objective unity of apperception. Only in this way does there arise
from this relation a judgment, i.e., a relation that is objectively valid. Immanuel
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B 1402. That is, this seems to
suggest that judgments per se are judgments of experience, with there being no
place for subjectively valid judgments of perception. For classic dismissals of the
distinction see Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kants Critique of Pure
Reason (Bassingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, original publication 1918), p.
288, and Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), p. 101.
8
Batrice Longuenesse, Kant and The Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and
Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans.
Charles T. Wolfe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), ch 7.
9
Published as Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian
Themes (Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgview, 1992).
10
It might be interpreted along causal lines, telling us that intuitions are
generated by the immediate impact of things in themselves on our receptivity. An
intuition is caused by its object. Ibid., p. 2
11
On the other hand, immediate relation can construed on the model of the
demonstrative this. On this model, which I take to be, on the whole, the correct
interpretation, intuitions would be representations of thises and would be conceptual
in that peculiar way in which to represent something as a this is conceptual. Ibid.
12
Ibid., p. 4.
13
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 1512.
14
Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, p. 5.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., p. 6.
17
Jaakko Hintikka, Kants New Method of Thought and his Theory of
Mathematics, Ajatus, vol 27 (1965), Kant and the Mathematical Method, The
Monist, no. 3 (1967), both reprinted in Jaakko Hintikka, Knowledge and the Known:
Historical Perspectives in Epistemology (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974), pp. 12634, and
16083, and On Kants Notion of Intuition (Anschauung), in T. Penelhum and J
MacIntosh (eds), The First Critique: Reflections on Kants Critique of Pure Reason
(Belmont, CA.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1969, pp. 3853. Hintikka played down
the association of intuitions with sensory knowledge, with the claim that intuitions
were not necessarily very intuitive In Kant and in his immediate predecessors, the
term intuition did not necessarily have anything to do with appeal to imagination or
direct perceptual evidence. In the form of a paradox, we may perhaps say that the
intuitions Kant contemplated were not necessarily very intuitive. For Kant, an
intuition is simply anything which represents or stands for an individual object as
distinguished from general concepts. Hintikka, Kants New Method of Thought,
p. 130. In the final section of the paper, Hintikka suggests that it was Kants
Aristotelian assumption that we can have knowledge of particulars only in sense-

perception, an assumption with which Kant was unfaithful to his own principles,
that introduced the misleading suggestion in which intuitive content was tied to
passively received sensory content. Ibid., p. 132. In a later article, Hintikka explains
that insofar as there is a reference to imagination or sensation contained in Kants
concept, it is supposed to be an outcome of his arguments, not a presupposition of
those arguments. Jaakko Hintikka, Kants Theory of Mathematics Revisited, p.
201. I think Hintikka underestimates Kants commitment to his Aristotelian notion of
formal logic and the consequences for thinking of the nature of perceptual objects that
this brings with it.
18
Charles Parsons, Kants Philosophy of Arithmetic, in S. Morgenbesser, P.
Suppes, and M. White, eds. Philosophy, Science, and Method (New York: St.
Martins Press, 1969), pp. 56894, republished in Mathematics in Philosophy:
Selected Essays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 113115. One might
think that the criterion of immediate relation to objects for being an intuition is just
an obscure formulation of the singularity condition. But it evidently means that the
object of an intuition is in some way directly present to the mind, as in perception,
and that intuition is thus a source, ultimately the only source of immediate knowledge
of objects. By the immediacy criterion Kants conception of intuition resembles
Descartess, while by the singularity criterion and his insistence on a nonintuitive
conceptual factor in all knowledge, Kants theory of intuition differs from that of
Descartes. Ibid., p. 112.
19
Manley Thompson, Singular Terms and Intuitions in Kants Epistemology,
The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 26, no. 2 (1972), pp. 31443, p. 325.
20
Ibid., p. 323.
21
Ibid., p. 334.
22
Thus Thompson first notes that demonstrative pronouns in contrast to proper
names seem to be more plausible candidates for linguistic representations of Kantian
intuitions. But commenting on sentences of the type This is F he notes that in its
normal use such a sentence may be said to have in effect the form This G is F, and
so ends with the suggestion that a concept acquires a singular use when it is
presented by a general term used as a substantive and preceded by a demonstrative
adjective. Ibid., p. 328.
23
See, for example, David Bell, Freges Theory of Judgement (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1979); Robert Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic
Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), Mary Tiles, Kant: From General to
Transcendental Logic, in Dov. M. Gabbay and John Woods, (eds.), Handbook of the
History of Logic: Volume 3, The Rise of Modern Logic: From Leibniz to Frege
(Amsterdam, Elsevier, 2004), pp. 85130.
24
Leibniz first introduced this analysis in his early Dissertatio de arte
combinatoria of 1666 where, following Raue, he renders Socrates is the son of
Sophroniscus as Whoever is Socrates is the son of Sophroniscus. Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz, Smtliche Schriften und Briefe, Academy Edition (Darmstadt and
Berlin, 1923), series, VI. vol. I, pp. 18283. That is, the name Socrates becomes a
predicate is Socrates applied to the third designated by the pronoun whoever.
25
This is a move that, according to Ignacio Angelelli, can be expected to
delight the Fregean reader. Ignacio Angelelli, On Johannes Raues Logic, in
Ingrid Marchelwitz and Albert Heinekamp (eds). Leibniz Auseinandersetzung mit
Vorgngern und Zeitgenossen. Stuttgart: Franz SteinVerlag, 1990. The origins of the
doctrine of the tertium commune are in medieval debates about the nature of

transubstantiation. Leibniz had used it extensively to defend the coherence of the

doctrine of the trinity. See especially, Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibniz on the Trinity
and the Incarnation: Reason and Revelation in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven,
Yale University Press, 2007).
26
Kant knew the outlines of Leibnizs ars characteristica combinatoria, on
whose utopian nature he commented in an essay of 1755 (Nova dilucidatio, Kant
1900, I, 390) in terms that seem to anticipate analogous statements by Ploucquet and
Lambert. Moreover, his logic-corpus, as well as his works and correspondence,
provide evidence that (1) he was well acquainted with the combinatorial calculus of
syllogistic moods; (2) he used Eulers (whom he quotes) circular diagrams to
designate concepts, judgments, and syllogisms; (3) he know the linear diagrams of
Lambert, with whom he corresponded; (4) he probably had some knowledge of
Segners and Ploucquets works; and (5) he actively promoted the diffusion of
Lamberts posthumous works containing the latters algebraic calculus. Mirella
Capozzi and Gino Roncaglia, Logic and the Philosophy of Logic from Humanism to
Kant, in Lina Haaparanta, (ed) The Development of Modern Logic (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009), p. 146. Importantly, Leibniz discusses Raues approach to
judgment in Dissertatio de arte combinatorial which, as in the quote above, Kant
mentions in A new elucidation of the first principles of metaphysical cognition in
Theoretical Philosophy, 17551770, ed. and trans. D. Walford and R. Meerbote
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 89.
27
Batrice Longuenesse, Kant and The Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and
Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans.
Charles T. Wolfe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
28
Ibid., p. 86.
29
Kant, Jsche Logic, 36, quoted in Longuenesse, Kant and The Capacity to
Judge, p. 87.
30
Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 109.
31
Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments, P. Guyer and C. Bowman (eds), P.
Guyer and F Rauscher (trans.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), note
4634, p. 149 [17.616], emphasis added. This is quoted by Longuenesse, Kant and the
Capacity to Judge, p. 107.
32
Kant, Notes and Fragments, note 6350, (JulyAugust 1797), p. 3878 [18, p.
676]. Longuenesse quotes these sentences (p. 55, fn. 29), and comments: An object
in the logical sense is thus whatever is thought under the subject-concept of a
categorical judgment, where the subject-concept is a complex concept, to which many
different predicates may be attributed, and she opposes this object in the logical
sense to the object discussed in the Transcendental Deduction which is the
appearance or undetermined object of an empirical intuition. But I think this is
misleading. As for the logical object, Kant here just says that the subject is the
object, he doesnt describe the object as thought under the subject concept.
Longuenesse here seems to mix the idea of classical subjectpredicate structure with
the Leibniz-Raue idea of subject-predicatepredicate-predicate structure, which
must be kept distinct. On my reading, the logical object just is the appearance; it
is the sort of content captured by the this-such subject term of a categorical
empirical judgment as understood by Sellars.
33
Kant, Prolegomena, 18, 4:298.
34
Ibid., 19.

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35

Longuenesse, I submit, often fails to note the non-phenomenal dimension of

intuitions qua logical singular terms. For example, when she notes that the Critique
tells us that, as a singular object, what is represented by the term x can be object
only of a sensible intuition this reads as if the intuition the singularity condition
and immediacy condition understood phenomenally coincide. But Kant says that the
transcendental object cannot be intuited by us, which suggests that the intuition
understood as representing the object in this sense is not phenomenally immediate.
She mentions the debate between Hintikka and Parsons (Longuenesse, Kant and the
Capacity to Judge, p. 220 note 15), and sides with Parsons and treating the two
defining characters of intuitionimmediacy and singularityas inseparable, but
without noting the fact that Parsons questions the identity of these two conditions. In
contrast I want to construe Parsons reading as in line with that of Sellars and
Thompson, and so as insisting on the ambiguity involved here.
36
For a classic statement, see for example, Robert Stalnaker, Possible Worlds,
in Ways a World Might Be: Metaphysical and Anti-Metaphysical Essays (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003). Stalnakers attitude to the ontology of possible
worlds could be broadly construed as Kantian in contrast to the somewhat
Leibnizian modal realism of David Lewis.
37
Or, of a blue tie being viewed under a new type of lighting, as in Sellarss
famous story of John the tie salesman in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.
Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, with an Introduction by
Richard Rorty and a Study Guide by Robert Brandom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1997), III, The Logic of Looks.
38
In terms of possible worlds semantics, this might be captured by saying that in
the latter case all the worlds in which the sentence would be true would necessarily
include my experiencing the colour of the book in just this way. C.f., Jaakko Hintikka,
The Logic of Perception in Models for Modalities: Selected Essays (Dordrecht: D.
Reidel, 1969).
39
As Prior expresses it, Instead of statements being true and false at different
times, we have predications being timeless true or false of different times. Arthur N.
Prior, Time and Modality: Being the John Locke Lectures for 1955-6 delivered in the
University of Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 30. According to Prior, the
idea of timelessly true or false propositions only started to become the dominant view
in the nineteenth century, and it wasnt until the turn of the twentieth century that it
became the standard view within both traditional approaches to logic with Keynes,
Venn and Johnson and the new logic championed by Russell (ibid., p. 116).
40
Aristotle, Categories, in Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, trans.
H. P. Cooke and Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1938), 4a17-23. See also Metaphysics, 1051b8-18. In contemporary thought, the bare
assertion a certain man is sitting would be strictly understood as incomplete and as
short for something like a certain man sitting at time t1, with that proposition
remaining true even when the man later stands. But for Aristotle, the belief is
complete as it is, and changes truth value with time.
41
Aristotles ancient critics in this regard were the Stoics, who developed an
explicitly propositional logic in opposition to Aristotles syllogistic.
42
Kant, Prolegomena, 18, [4:298], emphasis added. Kant repeats this idea
twice more.
43
We might say that there is no analogue of the kinetic theory of gases in the
former case.

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44

Immanuel Kant, Attempt to introduce the concept of negative magnitudes

into philosophy (1763), in Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 17551770. Here Kant
distinguishes logical from real negation in criticizing Leibniz. Logical negation is
essentially the external negation of propositional calculus, while real negation is
based on the term negation of Aristotelian logic. Significantly, the term negated
predicates he discusses in this work are phenomenally rich and evaluative distinct
polar opposites like his discussion of the sweet and bitter/nasty in the
Prolegomena. Kants critique of Leibnizs treatment of negation here reaches back to
his criticisms of the project of a characteristica universalis in A new elucidation
of 1755).