Transcript Reading: Kant Part 3

When we last met, we were talking about Kant's theory of knowledge and how he addresses Hume's ideas. I want to continue with that since we are getting into the thick of things, and it's getting interesting. One of the things Kant points out, and to his credit, is that we experience space and time, but space and time are not perceptions in the human sense of an impression. For him, a sense impression refers to colors, tastes, touches, smells, and sounds. Space and time don't have any of those properties. For Hume, this presents a huge problem that he can't solve: How are things spatial and temporal? When he deals with this in his works, he says it's an idea that arises, for example, from three notes played in succession on the flute—one note follows the other, and that's what gives the idea of time. But that doesn't even work according to his own definitions and theory because, according to Hume, the only things in our minds are colors, tastes, touches, smells, and sounds, and succession doesn’t have any of these.

The succession of three notes isn't yellow, rough, cold, and doesn’t taste like orange. It doesn’t have any of the sensory properties Hume claims must be present in the mind as an impression, and yet, the only ideas we have, according to Hume, are copies of impressions. But succession isn’t a copy of any impression. The same goes for spatial arrangement. We experience things as being in front, behind, to the left, above, and so on, but these relationships have no color, taste, touch, sound, or tactile sensation. Even if you foolishly try to hit them, these concepts don’t belong in Hume’s theory. He can’t get them in because he has ruled them out with his idea that nothing is in the mind unless it's first in the senses. Kant, to his credit, rejects that idea. It’s not true that nothing is in the mind unless it’s first in the senses.

Not at all. Let’s start with space and time. They are certainly the ways our experiences are organized. They are modes or ways of organization, representing how we put together properties into certain shapes and maintain the existence of an object over a period of time. We can talk about what happened before we made something and after we burned it in the fire. Before and after don’t have any color, taste, or smell—they aren’t sensory properties. Kant wants to allow for all of that, and he says the clue to understanding this lies in the kinds of judgments we make when we talk about things. Judgments here mean statements, and if you recall, I mentioned earlier that there are many types of sentences, not all of which assert something true or false. But what characterizes a statement is that it asserts something is the case, making it either true or false, or sometimes partly true and partly false. That counts too, of course.

Now, here are the types of judgments (or statements) Kant notices we make. The first category is quantity. We make statements about quantity that are universal, like "All P is Q" (e.g., "All crows are black"). Particular judgments refer to specific cases, like "This crow is black." Singular judgments refer to individual cases, such as "George needs Aria."

Next, we have quality judgments. These judgments assert certain qualities, and Kant refers to the quality of the judgment itself. A judgment can be affirmative ("Yes, that's so"), negative ("No, it’s not"), or infinite. I find the idea of an infinite judgment strange, and I don’t think it fits well.

Moving to relation, Kant identifies categorical, hypothetical, and disjunctive statements. These are types of logical statements. A categorical proposition simply asserts, "P is Q." A hypothetical states, "If P, then Q" (the "if-then" structure). Disjunctive statements are of the form, "P or Q." The symbol for "or" in logic is often written out in English as "or." These are relational statements that describe how things are related: "If this, then that," or "this or that"—possibly both. We use "or" in a weak sense, meaning both options might be true, as opposed to the strong sense of "or," which means one but not both.

Lastly, we have modality, where a statement can be problematic, assertoric, or apodictic, based on Aristotelian logic. These are not terms we use every day. Problematic refers to something that is possibly true, but we aren’t sure. Assertoric describes a statement that asserts something is the case and it is true. Apodictic, a term not commonly used anymore, refers to something that is certainly true, such as a law ("One plus one is two") or a tautology ("Everything is either visible or it’s not").

Kant's point is that each of these types of statements is possible because of a corresponding kind of concept. According to Kant, "All knowledge demands a concept, though that concept may be quite imperfect or obscure. A concept is always, as regards its form, something universal that serves as a rule." In ordinary speech, we think of concepts as abstract properties that identify something or help us use it in a certain way. For example, I have a concept of my travel case—the one I pack my clothes in for travel. To distinguish it from others, I add a tag with my name, a property unique to my case (unless someone goes to great lengths to copy it). Prior to that, I may identify it by its green, rough cloth, which allows me to ignore the red, black, and yellow cases coming down the baggage chute.

Concepts combine properties of an object into a thought unity. For individual things, concepts are never complete. I might get confused if someone puts a case on the belt that looks just like mine, complete with a tag that matches. I may mistakenly take it, only to find it’s not mine. This is because my concept of the case doesn't include every property, such as what’s inside. If it did, I’d know my case doesn’t contain gold bars or illicit drugs. So, a complete concept of an individual would include every property it has and every relationship it has to other things. Our concepts of individuals are always partial, but our concepts of classes of things are generally complete. For example, the statement "All crows are black" is true if no albino crows exist. If genetic research shows crows can only be black, we know the statement is true.

In summary, Kant argues that we have concepts that allow us to make judgments about space, time, and other properties that go beyond the mere sensory impressions Hume describes. These concepts help us understand the world in ways that Hume’s theory cannot account for. And sorry for my hesitation, but it's only okay if I can distinguish trees, suitcases, cars, or crows by making a concept of the class of them. Then, that can be a complete concept, because I’ve included all the properties that make the thing what it is. So, for example, all crows have this property, and only crows are things that have that property. But it has to be more than just black, right? We need all the defining characteristics of a bird, not just black, and then additional characteristics to distinguish it from blackbirds or other birds with similar names that are also black.

So, all right. Look. Kant wants types of concepts, and what I just read to you, which is why I went off on that sidetrack, is how we make concepts. He says a concept always serves as a rule. Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is a very daring hypothesis. What he’s trying to tell you is that we have rules in our minds for what counts as "this," "that," or "the other," and our minds have already organized this set of colors, tastes, touches, smells, and sounds spatially and temporally. Let’s say it’s a vase with a flower in it. That’s the example I was using before, so I’ll stick with it. We experience the vase with the flower in it, and we abstract the properties and put them together. That’s how we know this is a vase, because that’s how we form the concept of a vase. We include in that concept the properties the vase has, and it has all the necessary and sufficient properties to be a vase.

But Kant says, "Oh, but first, your mind has imposed order on this set of sights, tastes, smells, and sounds that exist somewhere, in some shape, at some time." The concept isn’t just what we form after abstraction. He says it’s a rule that turns our percepts into this form. Well, you’re getting this. Kant doesn’t deny that we experience vases and abstract the properties needed to identify or use them. Yes, we do that. But first, we unconsciously impose on what was already there—sights, smells, sounds, plus space and time—the form, shape, and utility of a vase, and all the other properties it needs to have to be a vase.

For example, you can put flowers into it. But if I show you something that looks like a vase, and you look over the top only to find it has a solid cover, and you can’t put anything into it, then it’s not a vase. So Kant is adding to, not subtracting from, the process. He’s not doing what Hume mostly did, which was to make you think you know something and then say, "Haha, you don’t!" That’s gone. You think you know it? "Oh yeah? What impression is it derived from?" Kant says no. He argues that the mind is doing a lot of unconscious work that you’re not aware of. The first two things it does are imposing space and time, and the next is imposing concepts, or what become concepts. After we experience something, we form a concept of it, but that concept of a vase was already imposed on all this sensory data, turning it into the thing you experienced.

That’s a big job. So, there are types of concepts that correspond to the types of judgments. If we can make statements in a certain form, it’s because that’s how we can express what we know. Under quantity, for example, he says we have a concept of unifying things and a concept of grasping a plurality of things. There are correspondences throughout, and I’ll get you that list in a second. But he’s going to say there are corresponding types of concepts for every type of judgment, and that’s why it’s possible to make those judgments.

So, sorry, Matt, I had some notes that fell on the floor, and I didn’t record myself groveling to pick them up. I want to tell you about the kinds of concepts that correspond to the types of statements we were looking at. And I want you to hear Kant’s own words about what’s going on here. The concept, as he’s already said, is a type of rule. Unity, plurality, and totality are one kind of rule.

So, prior to our experiencing anything, the concept is a rule for organizing the space-time sensory data—the data that’s given and already organized by space and time. And it does this by imposing other properties on it, because it’s a rule or a law for what counts as a vase, for example. Listen to what Kant says: "Just as appearances don’t exist in themselves, but only relative to the subject, insofar as it has senses—sight, taste, touch, smell, and sound—so too, the laws do not exist in the appearances (the objects), but only relative to this same being, insofar as he has understanding of them." So, a concept is two things. He’s not denying that after we experience something, we can consciously form a concept of it, keep that concept in mind, and apply it to things. So, if someone asks, "Would you please hand me the vase off the shelf?" I’m not going to grab the book instead. My experience organizes sights, tastes, touches, smells, and sounds that are temporal and spatial in such a way that it forms something like a vase. This has already been done unconsciously. In other words, the only thing we get out of our conscious experience is material that our minds have already unconsciously organized prior to or without our awareness. We are unconscious of this entire process, and the only thing that actually comes to us are the raw sights, tastes, touches, smells, and sounds, which are chaotic without that organization. That’s how all this is supposed to work.

However, I think there are some serious problems with this, which we’ll discuss after I finish the list for you. What are the quality concepts? Well, Kant thinks these correspond to reality, negation (denying something), assertion (affirming something), and limitation. For instance, if I have a concept that something is real, I can also have a concept that it is not. For example, "There is no vase on that shelf. I can’t hand you one because none are there," or "Hand me all 10 vases on the shelf," and I might say, "Sorry, there are only three." The limitation concept comes into play here.

Now, there are also concepts of relation, and this is important. One such concept is inherence in a substance. I would have thought Kant might discard the idea of substance, which I find objectionable, but he thinks that regarding things as inhering in other things, or requiring them for their existence, is a concept we clearly have—otherwise, we wouldn’t make statements that correspond to it. Philosophers and ordinary people alike think of things in terms of substances. For example, the walls of this room are brown, but brown isn’t a substance. It doesn’t exist on its own; it depends on the wood it colors. So, Kant is going to allow inherence in substance, as well as other relational concepts.

One of those is causality, which involves cause and effect. This is a huge concept for science, right? Hume thought he got rid of it all, asking: "Do you ever see anything called causality? What color is it? What sound does it make? Is it sweet, sour, hot, or cold?" You don’t have an impression of causality. Kant, on the other hand, says we have ideas of many things that aren't sensory impressions like sights, tastes, touches, smells, and sounds. The mind is pre-programmed to organize its experience this way, imposing cause and effect on certain relations—not all, but some. He also introduces reciprocity, the way two things can interact and affect each other. Neither one produces the other, but they produce effects in each other.

So Kant's three relational concepts are inherence, causality, and reciprocity, and with these, he brings all of science back into play. Newton’s laws, for instance, are no longer just a collection of statements with no basis in reality, as Hume left them. Kant’s framework allows them to fit into our theory of knowledge.

Finally, we come to modality, which deals with concepts like probability, possibility, and impossibility. Modality also covers existence versus non-existence, and necessity versus contingency. This can have several senses: something can be logically necessary, physically necessary, or necessary for life (bionic necessities). For instance, certain things are necessary for life—you must have this or you die. Contingent things, on the other hand, do not have to be. For example, "This vase is blue"—that may be true, but it’s not necessary. A vase doesn’t have to be blue to be a vase, but it’s a contingent truth that this particular vase is blue.

Hume referred to these kinds of truths as "matters of fact." Kant takes this framework and builds it into his theory, showing how the mind contributes all these elements, in addition to the bare sights, tastes, touches, smells, and sounds that come to it.

I have a lot of problems with quite a bit of this, and I want to pause and address them now, rather than cover more ground and have you try to remember things from further back. Let’s start with the arrangement we had, where I made the chart for you, thinking of the mind as a house and this as the blueprint. What comes into the house is chaotic sensory data, and that’s what’s fed in. I have a real problem with that, and maybe you do too.

If space exists only in minds, and it's a way that minds organize their sensations, how can we talk about the sensation—what Kant calls the chaotic sensory manifold—being outside our minds and then "coming in"? That’s spatial language, which assumes there's space in which our minds exist, as well as space for the things that are supposedly outside the mind. Isn’t that problematic in terms of what's inside the mind versus what’s outside it? After all, if space and time are merely forms that the mind imposes on sensory data, how can we speak of something being outside and then coming inside the mind? Shouldn’t there be no "inside" or "outside" when it comes to the mind?

This doesn't make sense because space and time, according to Kant, are forms of sensory intuition that impose themselves on chaotic sensory input and form it into something, like a vase. But we’re still using spatial language to explain this process, and yet space is supposed to exist only in relation to objects that have already been shaped by the mind. So isn’t Kant still relying on the very spatial distinctions he claims are imposed by the mind?

Then, there’s causality, which Kant says is one of the categories of understanding. Causality is supposed to be imposed on the experienced object, but how can we make sense of this unless the chaotic sensory data given to our experience is somehow the cause of the image we experience? Kant’s account seems to assume that the chaotic sense data comes from outside the mind, even though there’s not supposed to be an "outside," and that it causes our mental image. But if causality is something we impose on our experience, how can the data itself be the cause of the image? That explanation requires causality, but according to Kant, causality is something the mind imposes after we experience things. You can’t explain how the vase gets to be experienced in the first place using causality if causality is merely one of the categories the mind imposes on sensory data.

And I have other issues. The outside world is supposed to be chaotic, according to Kant, but if what we’re talking about are pure sights, tastes, touches, smells, and sounds, they don’t occur in time or space until the mind organizes them. If you subtract time, space, and all the categories of understanding, such as reality, negation, and causality, then how can such chaos even be sensory? In my view, sensory experiences have genuine properties that follow laws. For example, nothing can appear both blue and red at the same time to the same person. That’s a sensory law. There are also laws that concern feelings, and feelings, too, can occur in patterns or syndromes, which psychology makes great use of.

But how can something be a specific type of sensory property—like color, taste, or sound—if it’s completely chaotic? If there’s no order to the sensory input, then you can’t even have the order of the color spectrum, like red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. That’s an order we observe when light passes through a prism, or in a rainbow. But according to Kant, the sensory manifold is completely chaotic, so how can we even distinguish red from green, or hot from cold, or loud from soft? There has to be some inherent order for it to be sensory at all. If it’s total chaos, it can’t also be sensory.

This is where I find great difficulty with Kant’s scheme. It’s clever, but if what comes into the mind is truly chaotic, it can’t also be sensory. If this chaotic input is supposed to be what the mind forms into coherent experiences, isn’t that input itself the cause of the experience? Sometimes it seems like Kant almost recognizes this problem and tries to gloss over it. He’ll say things like "one thing gives rise to another," but what does that really mean in this context? That sounds to me like an attempt to cover up the issue of causality—saying one thing causes another. If the category of causality is only imposed once something is inside the mind, then the chaotic sensory data can’t be the cause of anything. But if it’s not, then what is? Why do these things occur in our minds? The objections that come to my mind are all of the same type: You can’t have your cake and eat it too. You can’t tell me that space, time, and all the categories are only in our minds, imposed by our minds, and yet talk as if they already exist in some real world outside of us, independent of our perceptions.

This is not unproblematic. Kant seems fixated on refuting Hume, and step by step, that’s what he’s doing. His big, clever move is to say that whatever isn’t a sensory impression—sight, taste, touch, smell, sound—is imposed by the mind itself. But how can he explain this if he removes causality from the picture? If causality is just something we impose with our categories of understanding, then how can we explain the cause of these sensory experiences entering our mind in the first place?

Kant wants to say that space and time, and the categories of understanding, are imposed on sensory data by the mind. But if all of this happens simultaneously, then you can’t say that space and time are imposed "before" or "after" anything else—they must already be there. And yet, Kant wants concepts to function as rules, right? Concepts that we form after experiencing things by abstracting their defining characteristics, and others that we need in order to use things in the way we wish. For instance, the concept of a vase—those rules are already imposed on the sensory data before we experience it. But how do we explain that without talking as if time already exists?

Kant himself raises this issue at one point. He asks how the purely logical categories of understanding can apply to the purely sensory forms of intuition. He’s walled off reality just like many philosophers from Descartes onward, struggling with the relationship between mind and matter, between the purely material and the purely logical or sensory. How can they interact? How can they be combined?

A purely sensory property, like sight, taste, touch, smell, or sound, seems utterly different from the logical categories—like reality, negation, limitation, unity, and plurality—that Kant lists. He argues that these categories exist as rules prior to our experience of a thing, and that they influence how we experience it. But how can that not be a causal relation? Aren’t these unconscious concepts the very things that cause the objects we experience to have the properties they do? You can’t say yes, because causality is one of the categories being imposed.

How can purely logical categories of the understanding be imposed on purely sensory data? Kant’s answer is that time is already "schematized" or arranged by the categories. But that response begs the question. In logic, begging the question means arguing in a circle. It’s like if someone asks how I know God exists, and I respond by saying, "The Bible says God exists, the Bible was inspired by God, and God cannot lie, therefore God exists." This is a circular argument because the premise assumes the conclusion is already true.

That’s exactly what Kant does here. He can’t say that time is already organized by the categories as a way to explain how logical categories apply to sensory data. He’s using the conclusion (that time is schematized) to support the premise. This is circular reasoning.

Interestingly, in Kant’s third book, he raises this question again and gives a different answer. He says there is something that mediates between the purely logical and the purely sensory, allowing them to interact, and he calls this "the imagination." So it seems Kant realized that his initial answer didn’t work, and he tried to provide a better explanation later on.

Of course, we’re not going to get to Kant’s third book in this introductory course. He wrote three major critiques: The Critique of Pure Reason, which is what we’re examining now in terms of his theory of knowledge and whether we can develop a theory of reality; The Critique of Practical Reason, which deals with ethics and how we can know ethical truths; and The Critique of Judgment, which explores aesthetics and how we account for experiences of beauty and art.

In any case, Kant presents a very bold and elaborate scheme—an architecture of the mind and how it works. But we haven’t finished discussing it yet, so let’s get back to it.

Here’s the chaotic sensory manifold—it’s essentially a whole lot of raw sensory data that comes in, which is then organized by space and time. Space and time, according to Kant, are the forms of sensory intuition or perception. So this chaotic manifold is organized spatially and temporally. And, just like before, let’s put our vase back into the example. But Kant says the data isn’t only organized spatially and temporally; it’s also structured by the categories of understanding. That is, in order for us to understand what we experience, it can’t just be organized by space and time—it also has to follow some logical or conceptual order. There are different kinds of this conceptual order, and we’ve already gone through the list of categories, which are also imposed on our sensory experience.

So, it ends up with measurable quantities and qualities that can be distinguished. These qualities can enter into relations, such as dependent things adhering to a substance, cause and effect, or reciprocity—where they interact back and forth with other things and affect them. All that is imposed by the mind, but we haven’t yet touched on the final set of ideas Kant introduces: the ideas of reason, sometimes referred to as pure reason. Now, I don’t think there’s such a thing as pure reason, but Kant introduces these ideas nonetheless. He provides more than one list of these ideas in different places, but that’s not a big deal; we can just assume he expanded on the list. The important thing is the nature of these ideas.

First, we have the idea of the self. Hume famously argued that we don’t really have a coherent idea of the self because we can’t identify any particular sights, tastes, touches, smells, or sounds that make up the self. Kant disagrees and argues that the self is one of these ideas of reason. These ideas are not concepts we can directly prove or explain their nature. Instead, they are ideas that any rational person will eventually come up with. People talk about their "self" or themselves, as distinct from others and from everything else. But can we prove the self or explain its true nature? No. These ideas of reason don’t work that way; they can't be proven or disproven.

Kant makes a distinction between ideas and concepts. Concepts allow us to grasp the properties and parts of something, to use or identify it, and to make inferences about it. For example, we form a concept of a suitcase by understanding its parts and how it functions, and that allows us to pick out our suitcase at an airport. The concept is something we abstract from experience, but ideas like the self are different. They’re not based on abstraction but are instead limiting ideas, meaning they provide a boundary for our understanding but can’t be fully grasped through concepts or logic.

One of Kant’s examples to back this up is his famous antinomies—where he offers two opposing proofs, both of which are logically sound. For instance, he offers a proof that space is infinite and another that space is not infinite, and insists that both are valid. This demonstrates that logic doesn’t apply to ideas like space and time the same way it applies to concepts of experience. The same applies to time—Kant provides similar opposing proofs about time’s nature.

Another significant idea of reason is the thing-in-itself, which refers to the idea of an external world independent of our perceptions. Hume had cleverly pointed out that, while we might rationally conclude we can’t know the external world, we inevitably go back to believing in it shortly after. Kant agrees: the idea of a world existing independently of us is something that naturally arises in everyone, even though we can never prove that our perceptions truly represent it.

Kant also discusses the idea of God, but he emphasizes God not as the creator of the world but as a moral judge. He believes that God is not the one creating the world we experience (since our minds are creating that world from chaotic sensory data) but is instead the perfect moral being who will judge us all in the end. This is related to another natural human belief: that there should be a correspondence between doing good and receiving rewards, and doing evil and receiving punishment. However, in our experience, the good often suffer, and the wicked are often rewarded. Kant argues that this natural moral intuition leads us to the idea of a perfect moral judge—God—who will ensure justice is served in the next life.

Another key idea of reason is freedom. Kant is a strong advocate for free will and free thought. He believes that humans need to be free in their reasoning, not just in their choices, in order to be morally responsible. Free reasoning is essential for arriving at conclusions based on reasoned judgment, which is necessary for knowledge. Knowledge requires certainty, which can only be attained through reasoning, whether by demonstrating reasons or recognizing something as self-evident.

These ideas of reason—self, the external world, God, and freedom—can’t be proven true or false. They are imposed on our experience, not derived from it. Our sensory perceptions give rise to thoughts about these ideas, but we can't directly prove them. However, Kant would argue that we can’t live without these ideas because they provide practical value—they help us organize our experience and make sense of the world in ways that go beyond simple sensory perception.

Looking at the history of philosophy after Kant, we see that his division of knowledge laid the groundwork for later philosophical movements. For instance, in the late 19th and 20th centuries, positivists would argue that knowledge is derived either from sensory perception or from logic. Meanwhile, pragmatists would reject the pursuit of absolute truth altogether, claiming instead that what matters is the practical usefulness of our beliefs and concepts.

Kant's division between concepts (which can be proven) and ideas (which cannot) feeds into this tension in later philosophy, where some thinkers sought certainty while others gave up on the notion of truth entirely, focusing instead on practical consequences. Kant's point is that ideas of reason like the self, God, and the external world are crucial for human life and thought, but they cannot be subjected to the same kind of logical or empirical scrutiny as concepts.

Finally, Kant’s notion of God as a postulate—a hypothesis we adopt for moral reasoning—illustrates his approach to ethics. While we can know moral rules and distinguish right from wrong, we also recognize that moral justice is not always carried out in this life. Therefore, we adopt the hypothesis of a moral judge who will ensure that justice is ultimately served. This idea is crucial to Kant’s moral philosophy and his belief in the moral order of the universe.

We’ll stop here with the ideas of reason. Next, we’ll tackle a summary comparison and move on to Kant’s ethics.