Kant’s Transcendental Analytic, Part 1

critique of pure reason February 18, 2022

Understanding, Intentionality, and the Role of Concepts

Contents:

  1. Our Power of Understanding
  2. The Intentional Element in Kant’s Account of our Understanding and the Role of Concepts
  3. The Intending Mind and its Categorical Concepts
  4. References
  5. External Links

Our Power of Understanding

Perhaps the most central feature of Kant’s discussion of our cognitive processes is what he considers our “power” of understanding. He also describes this power as our “faculty of judgment” and of “thought” [B94]. In his section titled on “The Transcendental Clue to the Discovery of all Pure Concepts of the Understanding” in which the table of categories appears, he describes our power of understanding as being responsible for the synthesis of concepts, which produces knowledge in us. As Kant writes:

To bring this synthesis to concepts is a function which belongs to the understanding, and it is through this function of the understanding that we first obtain knowledge properly so called.”

B103

Furthermore, in B95 Kant relates the form of a judgment, which includes both subject-predicate and cause-effect forms, to the form of understanding (Verstandesform) itself,1 which is the basic form into which all our thinking must enter. He goes on to call it this the “function of thought” (die Funktion des Denkens). The categories of all thought enter into this function of thought in order to provide the basic structure of all our thought in general. This makes sense from the standpoint of traditional logic: it is not until we make a judgment of some sort, for example, that a certain individual can be identified as belonging to a certain species or that one thing follows from another that we can get the project of knowledge off the ground. Furthermore, it is not until those individual judgments are inter-related that we can start with a set of premises and arrive at a conclusion.

Becoming familiar with this power and how it functions will be the subject of investigation in what follows. However, because understanding is a cognitive process, we will examine our “power” of understanding as an intentional act of the mind.

Logical Syntax as the Key to Understanding the Derivation and role of the Categories

Transitioning from the Transcendental Aesthetic to the Analytic

1. In Kant’s Introduction to the Idea of a Transcendental Logic (B74), which immediately follows his discussion of space and time in the Transcendental Aesthetic, he takes up the project of determining the ultimate elements responsible for the unifying activity of the understanding (such as the universal quantification of some judgments, or their affirmative quality, their modality and relation). Just as Kant uncovered the a priori basis for synthesis in the Transcendental Aesthetic (the forms of space and time), so he will now in the Analytic begin setting forth the basic elements that underlie our capacity to produce well-formed logical propositions that can be affirmed as true or false. Such propositions are the means for working up a structure of knowledge out of an interdependent collection of propositions.

Understanding the elements necessary to form well-formed judgments presented in the “Table of Judgments,” in B95 (i.e. the table laying out the elements of judgments) has a greater significance than might at first be appreciated. As adverted to in the title of this section, such elements are the basic elements of logical syntax, the elements without with judgments in the logical sense could not be properly formed. It is by way of properly combining those elements, such as

  • quantifiers (being universal, particular, or singular),
  • qualifiers (affirmation, negation, infinite),
  • relations, such as being hypothetical (hence, conditional), categorical, or disjunctive)
  • or modalities, such as being problematic (hence possible), assertoric, or apodictic (hence, necessary)

that the mind is able to create propositions that it can recognize as being true or false and under what conditions, so that they may potentially apply to every way we might want to think about the relationships between terms and the things they represent. These structural elements of judgments are therefore the pre-conditions for the employment of the categories themselves. That being the case, the conditions necessary for forming judgments become important as necessary conditions for knowledge in any sense.

By reflecting upon this for a moment, it may become clear why Kant describes the quantity, quality, relation, and modality of judgments as “logical functions of the understanding.” Judgments are, for Kant, literal functions of the understanding. By running our concepts of things through well-formed judgments, the mind comes to structure what would otherwise be the indistinct matter of experience. As a result, we are able to produce statements having truth values, the building blocks for the structure of knowledge. This initial syntactical-structural function of the mind might be compared to Chomsky’s notion of a transformational grammar, with his “deep structure” mirroring Kant’s syntactical elements of judgments while his notion of a “surface” structure would be comparable to knowledge developed into the organized structures/schemes we use to think about the world and clarify relations among ideas.

2. Furthermore, it may be seen that the table of judgments is the basis for the table of categories. Each table is divided into four primary categories, each with the same headings (quantity, quality, modality, and relation) and each category has three subdivisions. But just as the table of judgments applies to the logical syntax of judgments in general, so the table of categories corresponds to the most basic ways that individual terms in a judgment may be characterized. Just as every judgment can be characterized as “universal,” “particular,” or “singular,” so every term that enters into a judgment must itself represent a “unity,” “plurality,” or “totality.” A moment’s reflection may be enough to see that unless the terms themselves had such characteristics, the judgments for which they provide the content could not either. A universal judgment must involve some idea of plurality; a singular, some idea of unity; and particular judgments must involve some idea of totality.

Pursuing this further, the reality, negation, and limitation of individual terms corresponds to the assertion, denial, and infinity of judgments. The final term, “infinity” may pose the greatest difficulty for seeing how this is so. The “infinity” of judgments corresponds to their extension as becomes clear in B96-97.2 Where the extension of a subject term cannot be determined, (such as when a judgment is made about the class of things that are “not-mortal,” for example)3 the content of the term itself makes the extent of the judgment indeterminate (it cannot, by its nature, be what Kant would regard as a “strictly universal” judgment).

It may be seen that Kant’s sense of what happens in the combination of terms in a logical context cannot be separated from the reality of what a term refers to. Thus, an assertion in the table of judgments corresponds to the “reality” of what a term refers to in the table of categories–to “what is” the case in a sense that readers of Aristotle’s Categories could recognize as grounding a judgment in the being of things, hence, our experience–while the denial of a judgment contains a reference to what is not the case by way of the relationships among the terms in the judgment. The “unendliche” (infinite) quality, characteristic of some judgments, can therefore be regarded as referring to cases where an attempt is made to make a judgment about what may be the case (“in reality”) for an indeterminate number of individuals. It will be left to the reader to consider the relationships between terms and judgments regarding the “meta-categories” of relation and modality, as these are far more straightforward.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty in seeing how the two tables are related, beyond the lack of familiarity with the term “infinite,” is the tendency to think of the Kantian categories in terms of the highest generic concepts in a way analogous to Aristotle’s categories. Once the judgment-term relationship is used as a focus, the relationship between the two can become clearer and reveal further insights into the organization and function of the two tables. There may very well be a story to be told about the relationship between judgments and terms leading up to Kant in the development of medieval logic. Terminist logic in particular (associated with names such as Ockham and Buridan), which focused upon the relationship between terms rather than judgments and considered terms in relation to their referents, may yield some interesting findings. There certainly does seem to be a tacit link back to the two main Aristotelian treatises on logic, the Prior and Posterior Analytics, with the first being concerned strictly with formal judgments and syllogistic arguments, while the latter considered the terms in judgments in relation to their material referents, a subject taken up by John of St. Thomas in his “Material Logic.”4

3. The text of B105 may serve deepen understanding of the relationship between the two tables and the function of our understanding. In particular, it tells us that the function of the understanding, which is to unify concepts, applies not only to the unification of concepts in judgments, but also to the application of concepts to objects. That is to say, the two tables, interpreted as lining up with judgments and terms, align with the role of the understanding.

For example, Kant writes In B105 that our understanding not only “gives unity to the various representations in a judgment,” but also “gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition.” He does not mean to say that our power of understanding is responsible for the unification of our sensory apprehensions or their schematic representation, which is clearly a function of the imagination,5 but that our understanding gives unity to such representations by the application of concepts to them. That this unifying activity has its basis in the categories themselves becomes clear where Kant goes on to say that our understanding “introduces a transcendental content into its representations,” by means of “the synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition in general” (B105,37-39).

In sum, our mind has various faculties, some of which are responsible for the reception of objects of contemplation, others for unifying them in various ways: first as momentary apprehensions, then into representations, some of which will serve as the representations of pure concepts. What Kant ultimately wants to do here is to tie the categories, which are the concepts in us whereby anything may become intelligible, to the very process of unifying representations together with concepts. To the extent that this is not possible or only partially attainable, our concepts of things will be less clear and distinct.

The Intentional Element in Kant’s Account of our Understanding and the Role of Concepts

For Kant, all acts of our understanding ultimately relate back to our sensations. This was alluded to at the beginning of the Transcendental Aesthetic:

“Objects are given to us by means of sensibility, and it alone yields us intuitions; they are thought through the understanding, and from the understanding arise concepts. But all thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.”

B33

Within this structure of mental acts (sensibility, intuition, understanding) each act of the mind has its corresponding object (sensation, representations, concepts). In order for the mind to understand anything by way of its concepts, the spontaneity of the act of understanding must be directed upon its ultimate object, the sensible objects it receives. That which does the understanding of its objects is the “I.” This is the sense in which the mind “intends” its objects, for Kant, by “understanding” them in relation to its (intentional) sensory objects at which our understanding is “aimed.”

The Kantian I is, in fact, an ancestor of the Cartesian “I.” It underlies our understanding as the ultimate ground of its unity and precedes even the category of unity itself inasmuch as it precedes judgment and is the foundation for our sense of self awareness and identity.6 Kant, for example, writes that it is the “vehicle of all concepts,” hence of all thought,7 but “serves only to introduce all our thought, as belonging to consciousness.”8 Finally, Kant’s sense of “consciousness” appears to coincide with what we might characterize as a general awareness inasmuch as Kant writes that the “I think” may accompany all our representations.9 It is in this sense that it is the foundation for any potential aspect of our experience to be taken up for consideration as part of our personal identity.

Thus, if we are to apply the concept of intentionality to Kant, there is a way to see his picture of the “aboutness” of our mental states as aiming at an object for each of the mental acts he discusses. Even in the case of the receptivity of sensible objects the thing in itself may be taken to be the intended object. But speaking of mental acts as having an intended object and consequently the “aboutness” characteristic of intentional acts apart from the foundation of the conscious “I” can be misleading. There is, for Kant, strictly speaking no conscious directedness of the mind apart from the I that thinks about its objects. Ultimately, if the intentionality of mental acts has any real meaning for us, it will be because they are conscious acts of the mind. The true core of “intending” as it applies to the mind is its foundation in consciousness and the capacity of the I to spontaneously intend its objects by thinking them.

The Intending Mind and its Categorical Concepts

It must likewise be the case that the I that intends its objects does so through the categories when attempts to understand them. Because every a priori categorical concept is present in us in such a way that it “holds of many representations,” it is possible to understand something beforehand about its particular appearances. But this is where things get interesting. Kant does not tell us that we “must” understand things according to the categories themselves. Rather, the relationship between the understanding and its concepts is a conditional one:

If our understanding makes use of certain categorical concepts, such as the cause-effect relationship, then, provided the judgment is well-formed and we understand how the concepts involved relate to their objects and can yield a truth value, the judgment can become intelligible for us and enter into what might be described as “the logical space of reasons,” to borrow an expression from Wilfrid Sellars.

That is to say, we are under no seemingly mechanical compulsion to think the objects of our thought through the lens of the categories. What compels us to make use of them is simply the fact that we can understand the world through them.

Certain important consequences follow from this way of interpreting Kant. In particular, it poses a corrective to a popular conception of Kant that regards him as having conceived of the mind as “determined” by the use of the categories according to a hardware-software analogy. The categories are not part of the hardware of the mind, but only follow as a consequence of its “wiring,” so to speak. The categories are fundamental concepts of the mind in the sense that they are fundamental to understanding the world of our experience as an a priori consequence of the way the mind in fact works through the logical-syntactical structure of judgments. But they are not innate concepts in the sense Locke argued against, that we might have them as fully formed ideas in us at birth. After all, Kant tells us at the beginning of the introduction to the Critique that all our knowledge begins with experience.

On the above reading, it would then not be the case that the human mind is somehow locked into a certain way of seeing the world through categorical concepts that it cannot avoid. As Hume recognized, the very concept of causality can be misunderstood and misapplied. Hume’s argument was that we mistakenly think that causal relationships are necessary. Kant was certainly well aware of his argument to that effect. Kant’s way of dealing with it is to notice that when the concept is appropriately applied to its objects, it produces a certain understanding of synthetic, hence experiential, relations that make natural science a priori possible. The proper use of causality as a tool of the understanding makes natural science possible because it aligns with the mind’s native capacity for causal reasoning. Nevertheless, we do not “have to” utilize the concept of causality at all in forming our judgments about the world, but it so happens that if we choose to do so, the results that follow can contribute to the development of knowledge.

This way of reading the Critique therefore opens it up to the contingencies of history in the development of our concepts in way that is consistent with earlier authors such as Hume and Locke. There is a way in which our experience might be thought of as a background against which our concepts are applied according to different methods of understanding our experience, such as deduction or induction or the scientific method, that can be misapplied, but when used properly, produce judgments that can enter the “space of logical reasons” due to certain fundamental features of the mind itself rather than the features of its concepts.

This conclusion implies that further methods of reasoning may be developed, but if they are successful, it will be because they have found a way to proceed that is in harmony with the mind’s natural way of understanding things that is not itself due to habit or custom. The mind, it might be said, is the background against which our attempts to refine and assist our capacity to reason about the world take shape. Just as our understanding adequates itself to our experience through the refinement of its concepts, so do the methods of reason and the rational schemes it develops gradually adequate themselves more fully to our understanding. The Critique of Pure Reason is itself such a scheme.

Notes

  1. “Wenn wir von allem Inhalte eines Urteils ueberhaupt abstrahieren, und nur auf die blosse Verstandesform darin achtgeben, so finden wir, dass die Funktion des Denkens in demselben unter vier Titel Gebracht werden koenne, deren jeder drei Momente unter sich enthält” (B95). ↩︎
  2. “Vergeleichen wir dagegen ein einzelnes Urteil mit einem gemeingültigen, bloß als Erkenntnis, die Grosße nach, so verhält sie sich zu diesem wie Einheit zur Unendlichkeit.” ↩︎
  3. B96-97 ↩︎
  4. See “The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas: Basic Treatises,” Translated by: Yves R. Simon, John J. Glanville, G. Donald Hollenhorst, Preface by: Jacques Maritain, University Chicago Press, 1955. Text available here: The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas: Basic Treatises : John of St. Thomas. ↩︎
  5. See Transcendental Deduction A, 100-102 and the chapter on schematism beginning at B176. For a fuller discussion of the relationship between images and schemata, see Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: Schematism (Transcendental Analytic Book II). ↩︎
  6. See B131 and B399 ↩︎
  7. B131 ↩︎
  8. B399 ↩︎
  9. B131 ↩︎

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.
  • David Hume, Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Oxford University Press, 1975.
    • An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in The Empiricists, Anchor Books, 1974.
  • Locke, John. The Works, vol. 1 An Essay concerning Human Understanding Part 1. Rivington, 1689.
  • “The Material Logic of John of St. Thomas: Basic Treatises,” Translated by: Yves R. Simon, John J. Glanville, G. Donald Hollenhorst, Preface by: Jacques Maritain, University Chicago Press, 1955.

Tags:

You may also like...

Leave a Reply