Kant/Rorty

How do Pragmatists view Kant? Rorty’s answer may be drawn from several of his essays: for Rorty, as for Dewey and other pragmatist philosophers, Kant is the sort of philosopher who belongs to the era of “classical” philosophy. He represents a way of doing philosophy that sought foundations, a ground for truth, in something fixed and permanent outside the flux of our construction of conceptual schemes. For Rorty, the search for such a concept of “truth” as an ideal that occupies all our attention is a mistake. What we should be searching for instead are ways to initiate and continue an open-ended, Socratic-style conversation that makes a good faith effort to solve problems that stand in the way of greater human happiness. Such a conversation would attempt to secure our beliefs about the world and ourselves in the facts of our experience past any doubt that might raise a challenge to it. But the scheme of beliefs thus generated would not be hindered or held up by the ongoing attempt to discover a foundation in something beyond itself. The aim of scheme-construction for the pragmatist is more readily applicable to our more pragmatic concerns. Because the pragmatist theorizes with an eye to positive social outcomes, the pragmatist is typically more modest and more reasonable his or her aims than the schemas of classical philosophy would allow for, but does so by throwing out foundationalism as a basis for our theorizing.¹

This kind of approach to philosophical thinking has seemed to many philosophers to have turned its back on philosophy itself. But, for Rorty, the anti-essentialist and anti-foundationalist aspects of the pragmatic approach merely drive us back to the question of what philosophy ought to take itself to be. Certainly not the search for an unattainable absolute that shelves all our other concerns. Having commended Dewey’s “naturalized historicism,” which emphasizes the interconnectedness of individual and society, he goes on to write,

In this historicist vision, the arts, the sciences, the sense of right and wrong, and the institutions of society are not attempts to embody truth or goodness or beauty. They are attempts to solve problems–to modify our beliefs and desires and activities in ways that will bring us greater happiness than we have now.”

The World Well Lost, p. 16

Yet because Rorty’s critique of classical philosophy involves an argument in favor of a radical shift in philosophical methodology, he regards the positive aims of this approach as following from an abandonment of the classical approach. Indeed, he takes skepticism concerning its most important and most explicitly Kantian features, the concept/intuition and a priori/a posteriori distinctions to have been important for overcoming its deficiencies.

Nevertheless, it might be wondered if Rorty has not swept away something potentially salutary for humanity with his reforms. It might be wondered, for example, if the transcendental approach itself, i.e. regardless of whatever we might think about Kant’s own formulation of it, should be dismissed as an approach to discovering more adequate conceptual schemes, perhaps even as a way to justify the search itself. It may quite legitimately be argued that while Kant argues in favor of his transcendental system as though it were the final word, in the end he does advocate for an approach to knowledge that takes our hypotheses, of which his formulation of transcendentalism is one, to be steppingstones toward confirmation and testing.² Finally, apart from the usefulness of our schemes, we seem to have a real desire to ground them in what we believe to be true in a sense that transcends our own time and circumstances. It may be that such a desire is a characteristic of our humanity regardless of whether we think of the pursuit in Sisyphean or Promethean terms.

In what follows, we will explore the claims of pragmatism against the foundations of Kantian classical thought. In particular, we will take a look at a paradox Rorty believes lies in wait for the philosopher who follows in the Kantian tradition and will arrive at a more nuanced assessment of just how Kantian transcendentalism and pragmatism might interact. Rorty’s position is that the twain may never meet, but there are good reasons for thinking that this may not be so.

Contents

• Rorty v. Kant
• Objective Givenness
• The Limits of Kantian Transcendentalism
• Conclusion

Rorty v. Kant

In his essay, “The World Well Lost,” Rorty notices a tension within Kant’s transcendentally grounded epistemology between (a) the mere receptivity of sensible objects as an initial step in our cognitive processes and (b) the further notion that our concepts shape our perception of the things we perceive. The tension between these two can be drawn out as follows: the mere “receptivity” referred to here is intended to bring out the idea that there is an initial step in our cognition, prior to our application of concepts to their objects, in which objects are simply there to be interpreted³ by the application of one conceptual form or another. Accordingly, there would be an initial, “objective,” neutral ground against which to test the correctness of our concepts and theories. Hence there would be a way to understand “perceiving a percept ‘p’ as involving a process (1) from an initial reception of a stimulus to (2) an interpretive moment that follows upon it where we come to see “a” in some particular way.⁴

For most of the history of Western Philosophy such a schema has been taken for granted, in that it is often assumed not only that these two moments exist, but that we have epistemic access to the givenness of objects in our perception in the prior step (1). According to such a view, it is only afterward that, by way of a second cognitive act, we apply our concepts to sensible objects. By being able to return to the moment of bare perception, as it were, we can consider our perception of things “objectively.” However, the aforementioned tension arises as soon as we consider how we might be able to think about anything we might perceive without thinking about it in a certain way. The notions of givenness and objectivity find themselves pulled apart once the problem of what knowing even the most elementary facts about our experience actually entails. For Sellars, it meant abandoning the notion of givenness.⁵ Sellars’ point was essentially this: that although we can indeed contemplate an initial step in which we receive an object, such an object cannot become an object of contemplation for us unless we consider it as something. For Sellars, in order for an object to become an object of contemplation in an epistemic sense, that is, to enter the space of reasons, it must be capable of being treated propositionally. Thus, at a very basic level, even the facts we might want to state about our perceptions (e.g. “this is red”) will involve propositional content. But even such apparently neutral content, must involve conceptualization and an implicit claim to consistency with other elements in the web of our beliefs. That is to say, even factual claims will involve an implicit appeal to the broader contents of a scheme of knowledge.

The attack on givenness does, in fact, represent an important turning point in the history of 20th Century philosophy. It is the basis for the turn to pragmatism and the pragmatic theory of truth according to which knowledge is not conceived in terms of yielding us access to the truth and “reality” of things, but is thought of rather as the best that our current theories can do to explain why and how things work and has value for us insofar as it serves our purposes. For classical philosophy by contrast, a foundation in givenness is what anchors our concepts to the things they are about and is the basis for an epistemic aspiration: the development of knowledge toward a single conceptual scheme that would translate our perceptions not merely into coherent concepts, but into their essential “reality,” a cherished ambition of classical Greek thought that has come to be seen as the very goal of the development of knowledge itself. Such a condition for knowledge, at any rate, has traditionally been understood as a basic part of Plato’s vision of the kind of knowledge philosophers should aspire to and one that Aristotle tried to secure through his notion of “nous.”⁶

For pragmatists, the challenge is, rather, how we can make sense of knowledge without any foundation. It is to think about perspectival truth as forming a system of ideas that ultimately serves our practical (pragmatic) interests and that furthermore does not rely upon a substantive theory of truth such as the correspondence or coherence theories, but in terms of whether it, in a very down to earth sense “works” in those cases where we employ it, whether to test it or to apply it to a particular purpose. All this underlies the perspective Rorty develops in “The World Well Lost.” Following Sellars, he argues that we cannot take on (a) and (b) as genuine cognitive moments and claim that we have an unproblematic epistemic access to the givenness of objects.⁷ He points out further that a lack of givenness implies that conceptual scheme in the classical sense is impossible, since the foundation for such a scheme will always be implicitly compromised by the scheme-relative nature of even its most basic concepts. Rorty writes as follows:

The notion of alternative conceptual frameworks thus contains the seeds of doubt about the root notion of ‘conceptual framework,’ and so of its own destruction. For once the faculty of receptivity and more generally the notion of neutral material becomes dubious, doubt spreads easily to the notion of conceptual thought as ‘shaping’ and thus to the notion of the World-Spirit moving from one set of a priori concepts to the next.”

The World Well Lost, 4

The possibility of “alternative conceptual frameworks” follows from the possibility that we cannot arrive at a neutral ground from which to develop our scheme-structuring concepts. As long as there is no neutral ground that stands as the “reality” to which we must adequate our concepts, we are always going to be locked into the project of developing a schema based upon a way of seeing the world relative to our personal history, social context, the things we decide are important, etc., rather than upon the world “as such.” Hence our schema can never reflect the objective reality of things “as such.” It is this world, the one Rorty believes we never really had any access to, but that philosophers have sought as an ideal that he considers well lost.

Objective Givenness

The following dilemma can thus be drawn from Rorty’s discussion that will help to focus the claims of pragmatism against Kantian transcendentalism: if (a) we understand perception as an act of merely receptive “intuition” that allows the object of our perception to stand as objectively given, we are left with an objective basis for the development of alternative conceptual schemes. However, such an understanding of perception runs contrary to the notion of givenness that many philosophers (as well as Kant himself) find questionable. We might therefore decide (b) to deny that there is any phenomenal given in order to avoid this conclusion. But if we do so, we are left without any basis for the development of a scheme of ideas at all, since by abandoning any notion of givenness, we have removed any objective basis for the application of our concepts to the objects we perceive. It might be added that if we push option (b) to its ultimate conclusion, we lose the objective basis for the correction and adequation of our concepts to the world.

Hence, we are either left (a) with the possibility of building a schema upon a foundation that is inherently questionable or (b) its denial and the loss of any basis for building up a schema of knowledge at all. The difficulty of siding with option (a) can be brought out by considering what it entails: the view that we have access to an objectivity that appears to us as truly neutral, in a sense, prior to any theorizing about the world at all would amount to a “view from nowhere”–not merely a contradiction in terms, but an impossibility. Either option leaves us with no way to build a true schema of knowledge as classically conceived by a tradition that reaches back to the origins of western philosophy when its initiators began asking what knowledge was. Considering that Kant wanted to both construct a conceptual scheme that yielded the possibility of objectively true knowledge (insofar as it is founded upon transcendental principles) but ended up highlighting the way that concepts are necessary for even the most basic kinds of knowledge,⁸ it would appear that he finds himself in precisely the kind of dilemma Rorty maps out.

It appears that there are two ways a Kantian might answer Rorty or a pragmatist who follows Rorty. They are as follows:

1. By understanding the way in which a transcendental framework for conceptual scheme yields objectivity
2. By understanding Kant’s transcendental argument as a hypothesis–which was his intent–that need not lead to the abandonment of transcendental turn as a path to arriving at a schema that would be able to tell us what the limitations of our cognitive capacity actually are.

The first two points have already been discussed to some extent in a prior article entitled Kant, Davidson, and Conceptual Schemes. To state the argument developed there that corresponds to the first of the two, it can be said that whereas the given for a Sellarsian guarantees that the objectivity of the objects of our perception is compromised by our concepts, this is emphatically not the case for a Kantian transcendentalist. They can be understood “objectively” because, as representations, they are structured by the very conditions necessary for understanding them. Those conditions are of course the categories and the forms of perception that work together to yield an a priori basis for understanding them.

As an example, consider what Kant says about time in B50 (Section 6 of the Transcendental Aesthetic, >>Die Schluesse aus Diesen Begriffen<<). After telling us that he regards time as the form of inner sense of ourselves and our inner states, and cannot be a determination of outer appearances, he goes on to say that outer states can represent time by way of analogy. Thus, if someone draws a line, the points on the line can be taken to represent successive moments in time. Time as a concept (e.g. succession, simultaneity, etc.) is applied to such objects (mediately). But because all representations are determinations of the mind, all representations are necessarily represented as occurring in a particular way, which we recognize as time-relations (e.g. successively) as an a priori condition of their appearance.⁹ Thus, even in the mere act of drawing a line, the succession of points necessarily occur in time according to a certain relation of time to one another. As soon as we reflect upon the relationship underlying of their occurrence, i.e. succession, we come to understand something foundational to the movement and change of all objects whatsoever that can be represented to us. Kant concludes,

What we are maintaining is, therefore, the empirical reality of time, that is, its objective validity in respect of objects which allow of ever being given to our senses. And since our intuition is always sensible, no object can ever be given to us in experience which does not conform to the condition of time.

B52

The way in which objects are represented to is such that they can only be perceived in a certain way, in space and time, and understood according to categorical concepts (such as unity, plurality, totality; reality, negation, and limitation), which provide the necessary basis for developing such concepts as succession and simultaneity. But what ties everything together and gives it its ultimate significance, is that because the basis for the intelligibility is present in the objects themselves, they can be said to have an empirical reality.

This sense of “reality” is tied up with the veridical sense of truth: i.e., as corresponding to what is “really there” or in another way of speaking, as “fully adequate” to its being as a particular object, in a sense that goes back to Plato (as mentioned above). In this way, Kant, through his transcendental turn founds the basis for a return of the classical sense of knowledge. A final point is that inasmuch as such conditions are the conditions for human knowledge, the way opens up to a “public” kind of objectivity: in that they may be made intersubjectively available for correction. The transcendental turn hands us the keys to objectivity, to considering the reality of objects as representations. Once they are in hand, publicity may come along for the ride, inasmuch as our way of perceiving and knowing objects applies not just to each individual, but to a human way of understanding our experience.

This kind of objectivity, of course, cuts directly against the grain of pragmatist thought, which, it may be recalled, does not allow that sort of veridical objectivity to emerge, even in a purely representational sense, and takes Kant to be one of its classical opponents. Indeed, it does so with good reason, for what pragmatists want to claim is quite the opposite, that conceptual schemes can be founded on the basis, not of some neutral reality that belongs to things to which we have access, but to a necessarily perspectival foundation. It may be considered that if the basic idea behind the transcendental turn is considered on its own merit, apart from the specific way in which Kant tries to articulate its principles (his particular forms and categories), if it brings us toward principles that genuinely structure our ways of seeing and understanding our experience a priori, then Kant has provided a legitimate reply. Rorty’s dilemma falls by the wayside: since there is no need to contest our epistemic access to the kind of objectivity Kantian transcendentalism outlines once the basic idea that the mind structures reality is considered as a starting point for knowledge.

This brings us immediately to our second point, that Kant’s Copernican turn was based upon a shift in methodology: that of letting reason take the lead rather than waiting for our senses to propose the answers, as exemplified by the geometrical method. How else, it might be asked, might we have developed a priori principles of objects? Certainly not through any amount experience; certainly not through any amount of inductive reasoning toward universal concepts. The principles of geometry were not conceived after an arduous comparison of all existing triangles to discover their common attributes. Rather, progress was achieved by simply laying down structuring principles of the mind’s own creation before applying them to our experience, so that our reason may take the lead over our senses. This leads to a way of thinking about knowledge that is, in fact, quite congenial to the pragmatist model: as growing by a process of laying down hypotheses and testing them.

What must be seen is that the particular categories Kant develops and the forms of perceptible experience he discusses are themselves put forward as part of his hypothetical approach to this same process of developing our knowledge. After pointing out that the Copernican “geometrical” procedure described above can be applied to metaphysics, Kant writes,

This attempt to alter the procedure which has hitherto prevailed in metaphysics, by completely revolutionising it in accordance with the example set by geometers and physicists, forms indeed the main purpose of this critique of pure speculative reason. It is a treatise on method, not a system of system of science itself. But at the same time it marks out the whole plan of the science, both as regards its limits and as regards its entire internal structure.”

Critique of Pure Reason, B xxii (Preface to the Second Edition)

Gaining this kind of perspective on the Critique yields a broader vision of what the turn toward a transcendental perspective actually entails: hopefully not merely a narrow-minded assessment of the particular merits Kant’s choice of categories (though more may be argued in their favor than is sometimes assumed, often in error), but a sense that the principle, “the mind structures reality,” can be utilized to give us a better sense of what we might take to be the truly grounding principles that shape all genuine knowledge. Within this perspective, it is ultimately neither the senses nor a set of Platonic Forms that provide a foundation for knowledge, but the transcendental perspective itself. If Kant was successful at holding back the tide of Humean skepticism that threatened to overwhelm any genuine philosophizing, it will be because he has found a way to reintroduce genuine knowledge into our field of inquiry.

The Limits of Kantian Transcendentalism

Inasmuch as Kant is seen as a “classical” philosopher” he is understood as a writer whose ultimate aim was to produce one final conceptual scheme of schemes. While Sellars and Rorty both recognize that Kant is an important figure in the progress toward recognizing a false sense of objective givenness in classical philosophy as a genuine problem, Rorty nevertheless sees him as a philosopher whose work is compromised by the fact that he opened the door to alternative conceptual schemes:

The notion of alternative conceptual frameworks thus contains the seeds of doubt about the root notion of ‘conceptual framework,’ and so of its own destruction. For once the faculty of receptivity and more generally the notion of neutral material becomes dubious, doubt spreads easily to the notion of the World-Spirit moving from one set of a priori concepts to the next.”

The World Well Lost, p. 4

Kant saw his own argument as having given us a framework within which knowledge becomes possible as genuine knowledge. But it should be asked whether the attempt to make Knowledge possible necessarily precludes the development of alternative conceptual schemes.

Within the framework of the Critique, a mathematical theorem is justifiable as Knowledge (for us) to the extent that it is structured by the pure forms of thought and so becomes inherently intelligible for us. Otherwise, it does not count for Knowledge at all. Theorems that are meant to apply to the physical world, by contrast, must obey not only the same internal, self-certifying logic, but also be testable, hence falsifiable.¹⁰ Kant gives us a set of concepts that make genuine a priori knowledge possible, but what does not emerge in the Critique is a set of principles of the natural world that structure our experience as such. Such forms could only emerge as concepts developed by a combination of experience and the forms of thought (i.e. their synthesis) and that synthesis cannot occur in such a way that the forms that make our thought potentially intelligible are able to determine in advance the content of such concepts.

Having made genuine knowledge possible, Kant opens the search for Knowledge to an open-ended, but also productive field of inquiry–one not doomed from the very start by skeptical arguments against any possibility of genuine knowledge. What Kant does in the Critique is show us where our genuinely a priori concepts originate: certainly not from our experience, but rather from the way the mind itself structures our way of understanding it. Furthermore, he shows us how our perception of the world may become intelligible in light of such concepts. When the mind receives an object, it does so by shaping the raw material of sensation, which is done by the mind’s application of the forms of space and time to such objects. But the recognition that the application of a priori concepts to our experience cannot determine in advance how we will go on to interpret the content of our experience (e.g. we may develop new instruments to see further into the universe or new ways of testing hypotheses that bring purely speculative realms of science within reach), leads to the consideration that the schemas we do develop might be “as relative to our chosen conceptual scheme as our description of everything else.”¹¹ The recognition of this possibility, in turn, leads to the conclusion that even within a Kantian framework, the way we describe objects in the world is partly a matter of our current scheme of knowledge. The recognition that our concepts shape the way we perceive things bears this out: since, if the concepts we apply to things are ultimately part of a schema of knowledge, our schema of knowledge will affect the way we understand what we perceive. There is nothing in the Critique that serves to limit the possibilities for further expansion and refinement of those concepts.

Conclusion

It was said at above that Kant attempts to arrive at a way to ground the possibility of knowledge, that is, to provide a foundation for the kind of knowledge that classical philosophy always aimed to achieve. Yet, it may now be realized that in understanding Kant’s relationship to classical philosophy, it is the possibility rather than the necessity of such knowledge that was truly established in the Critique of Pure Reason. Even if his project is deemed to have been successful only in the broader sense of having initiated research into the cognitive foundations of our possible ways of understanding experience, he can only be thought of as having provided us with a basis for certifying the truth of a priori knowledge and the conditions under which it may be applied to our experience. Such an understanding of our own cognitive processes secures the basis of our cognition past Humean skepticism, not what we may in fact come to understand.

There is a way in which Kant’s focused engagement with the phenomena associated with the experience of understanding is a development of the Cartesian concept of the natural light. For Descartes, the natural light of our intellect certifies that we know something by merely reflecting on the fact that it appears impossible to doubt its truth. This is both a way to identify a priori propositions and an answer to the problem of how we may know that we know something (the “kk” problem). It is a foundation for knowledge that arrives with its own justification. In the same way, Kant turns to the inner experience of true understanding to certify that a priori propositions provide us with a basis for understanding how the mind itself is determined to operate. By looking beyond such propositions to the basis for structuring them in the first place, Kant finds the basis for the construction of the logical forms that make any understanding of them possible (e.g. their logical quantity (“all,” “none,” “some”), quality (affirmation, denial, or open-endedness), relations and modes). In doing so, he hopes to arrive at a grounding for knowledge that both takes Cartesian intuitionism as its epistemic foundation and opens a path to its analysis in terms of the basic elements of a priori propositions.

But in doing so, does he not simply push the foundation problem back a step further to the development of logic? The (mostly) approved answer given by the history of philosophy is that Kantianism cannot escape the problem of its own historical situatedness in the formulation of its principles. One might argue, in other words, that the development of logic is itself something entirely contingent. In that case, the structural elements of logical judgments that Kant takes to be a clue to the derivation of the elemental categories would themselves be merely contingent.

This seems to pose a genuine problem for Kant. In the Second Preface, for example, he goes so far as to say that logic reveals to us the principles of Knowledge. This is clearer in the original than in Kemp-Smith’s translation. Kant writes,

die Grenze der Logik aber ist dadurch ganz genau bestimmt, dass sie eine Wissenschaft ist, welche nichts als die formalen Regeln alles Denkens…ausfuerlich darlegt und strenge beweiset.

The boundary of logic is therefore quite well determined: it is a science which makes evident and strictly proves nothing other than the formal rules of all thought.

Bix

The conclusion he reaches in the quote that logic as a body of knowledge has reached the point of having determined its boundary, its field of investigation, is in fact drawn from the lack of any real development in logic since the time of Aristotle. Might we have developed different logics and thought in fundamentally different ways, or must any system of logic obey certain fixed rules? We certainly have progressed beyond the Aristotelian logic of Kant’s time and many alternative systems of logic have been developed. Nevertheless, the structural basics of quantity, quality, and mode do appear to be fundamental across systems of formal logic, even in non-western logics. Indeed, it seems possible to argue along lines introduced by Kripke and Putnam that any system that did not include such elements could not even be identified as a formal system of logic at all.¹²

Yet, the brute fact of incorrigibility itself, which has a kind of law-like nature, cannot but indicate something to us about our cognitive processes and reveal to us certain conditions that produce the phenomenon we call “understanding” in us. For that reason, it does appear that Kantian transcendentalism is a legitimate way to assess certain fundamental features of human cognition even if it can also be legitimately argued that the logical systems we are accustomed to emerged as a matter of contingent historical development. What Kant accomplishes for epistemology that Descartes does not is to give us a sense of how to derive a priori knowledge from its sources within the structural principles of cognition itself, which are, arguably, revealed more clearly by logic than anything else.

But a further point is that in drawing such a conclusion, it follows that there is a way to understand Kant, who has been deemed a philosopher in the “classical” sense discussed above, as having given us a far more dynamic picture of knowledge than might at first be appreciated. While the Critique aspires to develop a transcendental framework that illuminates for us the limits of our understanding and provides a justification for a priori knowledge, it nevertheless also provides us with a framework that is consistent with pragmatist’s picture of the open-ended development of empirically grounded conceptual schemes. Such schemes are not based upon an objective given, but upon the corrigibility of the very assumptions they make in the development of their theories about the way the world works (including the way our understanding operates).

References

• Immanuel Kant, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1929), trans. Norman Kemp Smith, Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, Boston, 1965. Available online here.
• Richard Rorty, “The World Well Lost” in Consequences of Pragmatism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Full text available here.
• Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, edited by Robert Brandom, (Harvard University Press.; Cambridge, MA; 1997).