Kant's Transcendental Psychology / Edition 1

by Patricia Kitcher

Overview

For the last 100 years historians have denigrated the psychology of the Critique of Pure Reason. In opposition, Patricia Kitcher argues that we can only understand the deduction of the categories in terms of Kant's attempt to fathom the psychological prerequisites of thought, and that this investigation illuminates thinking itself. Kant tried to understand the "task environment" of knowledge and thought: Given the data we acquire and the scientific generalizations we make, what basic cognitive capacities are necessary to perform these feats? What do these capacities imply about the inevitable structure of our knowledge? Kitcher specifically considers Kant's claims about the unity of the thinking self; the spatial forms of human perceptions; the relations among mental states necessary for them to have content; the relations between perceptions and judgment; the malleability essential to empirical concepts; the structure of empirical concepts required for inductive inference; and the limits of philosophical insight into psychological processes.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195085631
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	09/30/1993
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	312
Product dimensions:	8.28(w) x 5.51(h) x 0.83(d)

About the Author

University of California, San Diego

Table of Contents

1.	What Is Transcendental Psychology?	3
	The "Dark Side" of the Critique	3
	Countercurrents: Reinhold to Austin	5
	Kant Against "Psychology,"	11
	Transcendental Psychology	14
	In Defense of Transcendental Psychology	21
2.	The Science of Sensibility	30
	What the Transcendental Aesthetic Is About	30
	Early Modern Theories of Spatial Perception	32
	Kant's Analysis of Spatial Perception	35
	Intuition, Matter, and Form	35
	Pure Forms (and Nativism)	37
	The Method of Isolation	39
	Distance, Extent, and Shape	40
	Touch: Leibniz Versus Berkeley	41
	Kant's Empirical Assumptions	43
	The Isolation Argument	44
	Two Arguments of the Metaphysical Exposition	45
	The Standard View	45
	The First Argument	46
	The Second Argument	48
	The Transcendental Exposition	49
	The Role of Geometry	49
	Geometry and the Space of Perception	50
	Parsons's Interpretation	53
	Kant's Results	54
	The Forms of Intuition and Contemporary Evidence	55
	Depth Perception	55
	Is the Space of Perception Euclidean?	56
	The Assumption of a Common "Outer Sense,"	57
	Is Spatial Perception Determinate?	58
	Discovering the Forms of Intuition	59
3.	Transcendental Psychology in the Transcendental Deduction	61
	What (If Anything) Happens in the Deduction Chapter?	61
	Representing Objects	65
	The Problem	65
	The Views of Leibniz and Christian Wolff	67
	Empiricism and Sensationism	67
	Associationism	69
	A Priori Necessary Synthesis	70
	What Is an Object of Representations?	70
	Unity and Synthesis	73
	What Is Synthesis?	74
	The Law of Association	77
	Associationism and Apriority	79
	Representations and Concepts	80
	Kant's Defensible Results	81
	Synthesis and the Productive Imagination	81
	Robert Paul Wolff on Rules of Synthesis	82
	The "Problem" of Early Cognition	83
	Constructing Representations of Objects and the "Binding" Problem	84
	Making Judgments About Objects	86
	The Problem of Judgment	86
	The Synthesis of Intuitions	88
	The "One-Step" Deduction	89
	Constructing Judgments	89
	The Objective and Subjective Sides of the Deduction	90
4.	Replying to Hume's Heap	91
	Troubles with Apperception	91
	Avoiding the Subjective Deduction	91
	Apperception as the Cogito	91
	Strawson and the Self-Ascription Reading	92
	The "Logical" Reading of Apperception	94
	Two Mistaken Assumptions	95
	Hume	95
	Hume's Problem	97
	Hume's Absence	97
	Kant's Knowledge of Hume's Position	98
	The Denial of Real Connection	100
	Synthesis and Apperception	102
	Connecting Cognitive States by Synthesis	102
	Transcendental Synthesis	103
	Apperception and Transcendental Synthesis	104
	Apperception	105
	Arguing for the Synthetic Unity of Apperception	108
	Apperception and Representation	108
	Judgments	110
	Kant's Functionalism	111
	Intuitions	113
	The Reply to Hume	114
5.	A Cognitive Criterion of Mental Unity	117
	Unity of Apperception as Mental Unity	117
	Synthetic Connection	117
	Connection and Connectibility	118
	The Plan of the Chapter	120
	Refining the Account of Synthetic Connection	121
	Is the Self the Combiner?	122
	Locke and Leibniz on Personal Identity	123
	The Issue	123
	Leibniz Versus Locke	123
	Moral Responsibility	125
	The Problem of Self-Consciousness	126
	Modern Mentalism, Wiggins, and Parfit	128
	Modern Mentalism	128
	Wiggins's Argument Against Mentalism	130
	Parfit's Denial of Personal Identity	131
	Objections Considered	133
	Is the Cognitive Criterion Too Weak?	133
	Is It Too Strong?	134
	Is It Too A Priori?	135
	Modularity	137
	Summary of the Account	138
	Apperception and Kant's System	139
	Too Many Selves	139
	The Ideality of Time	140
6.	Perceiving Times and Spaces: The Cognitive Capacity at the Center of the Deduction	142
	Cognitive Tasks, Apperception, and the Deduction of the Categories	142
	Perception: The Eighteenth-Century Background	147
	The Standard View	147
	Intellectual Theories of Perception	148
	The Synthesis of Apprehension in A	148
	A99	148
	A119-20	149
	Examples from the Politz Lectures	150
	The Case for the Synthesis of Apprehension	151
	A99 Revisited	152
	A Role for Concepts in Perception in A	153
	The Need for Nonreproductive Synthesis	153
	Perceptual Recognition	153
	Concept Application	153
	[paragraph] 26 in the B Deduction	155
	The Centrality of [paragraph] 26	155
	Perception as "Scanning an Image,"	156
	Perceiving Times and Spaces	157
	Differences Between the Editions	158
	P-Functions as Spatial and Temporal C-Functions	160
	Perceiving Objects by Perceiving Spatial and Temporal Arrays	161
	Kant's Long Argument	162
	Additional Considerations	162
	The Basic Argument	162
	Universal Applicability and Objective Validity	163
	The Argument from Apperception	166
	How the Argument Fails	167
	Defending the Long Argument Interpretation	169
	Some Advantages	169
	Henrich's Antipsychological Reading	170
	Allison's Apsychological Reading	171
	The Loss of Generality	173
	[paragraph] 26 as Completing the Argument of the Metaphysical Deduction	173
	How Serious Is the Loss of Generality?	174
	Transcendental Psychology in the Second Analogy	174
	Guyer's Interpretation	174
	Guyer's Objection to a Psychological Reading	177
	Versus Guyer's Antipsychologism	177
	What Kant Has Shown	178
7.	The Limits of Transcendental Psychology	181
	Kant's Paralogisms	181
	Puzzles of the First Paralogism	183
	Understanding the First Paralogism	187
	Identity Through Time	195
	Leibniz and the Simplicity of the Soul	198
8.	Cognitive Constraints on Empirical Concepts	205
	Kant and Cognitive Science	205
	Do We Employ Necessary and Sufficient Conditions?	207
	Difficulties with the Classical View	207
	Kant on Concepts and Concept Application	209
	Empirical Warrant and the Open-Ended Character of Experience	210
	When Should We Codify Our Concepts?	211
	Implications for Necessary and Sufficient Conditions	212
	Further Implications	213
	Empiricism and "Original Sim,"	214
	Quinean Empiricism	214
	Current Directions	216
	Concepts and Reasoning	217
	The Task of Inference	217
	Analytic and Synthetic Approaches to Concepts	217
	How to Carve Nature at the Joints	219
	The Structure of Concepts	221
	Examples of Dependency Relations	222
	Implementing the Demand of Reason	225
	Theoretical and Experimental Implications	227
	Conclusion	230
	Notes	231
	Bibliography	273
	Index of Cited Passages	283
	General Index	289

Editorial Reviews

"An excellent work, a must for everyone who is grappling with Kant's theory of empirical knowledge....A rich book."—Philosophical Review

"Kitcher's provocative study provides a valuable counterpoint to Richard E. Aquila's....Highly recommended."—Choice

"It seems very likely that [this book] will set the agenda for interpretations of Kant over the next few years."—Review of Metaphysics

"[This book] represents a bold break with the anti-psychologism dominant in Kant critics....This eminently readable book draws on historical and contemporary debates in both philosophy and psychology in defending what she says are Kant's important insights regarding perception, synthesis and personal identity."—Times Higher Education Supplement

"Perhaps the strongest feature of Kitcher's work, apart from its accessibility to modern readers who are not Kant specialists, is the clear way she argues for her interpretation of Kant....Kitcher's work deserves to be widely read by cognitive psychologists. Apart from its very readable account of Kant's work. It is an excellent example of clear thinking about what various research results do and do not show."—Contemporary Psychology

From the Publisher