Abstract
Considering how Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception could be “naturalized,” this paper seeks to liberate the Kantian theory of experience from any foundationalist renderings that blur the lines between the empirical and transcendental, without compromising Kant’s attempt to investigate how the invariant structures of experience condition and supply rules for our knowledge of the world. This paper begins with an overview of the Transcendental Deduction’s apperceptive “I think.” We then consider Sellars’ Myth of Jones and Sellars’ notion of noumenal reality as a “limit concept” not in metaphysical but alongside pragmatist lines, where the “in-itself” is schematized as a regulatory ideal that normatively orients science as a self-correcting enterprise. Providing a successor-account to Sellars’ naturalization of Kant’s ‘I think,’ we seek to develop hard-transcendental and soft-transcendental pragmatic conditions to describe protocols for revision and integration, proffering an anti-dogmatic metaphysical stance that, true to Kant, expands our understanding of perception and linguistic licensing to include the kind of sensory and conceptual capacities associated with sapient experience.
Highlights
Premise: on the apperceptive ‘i think’Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, as it is developed in the B-Edition of the Transcendental Deduction (i.e., the “B-Deduction”), provides us with the apperceptive ‘I think’ that is able to accompany all our representations (B131-3)
Within a few pages of Sellars’ Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes, we find ourselves immersed in the problematic coordination between the receptivity and spontaneity of the faculties
For Sellars, we must distinguish between an object language, whose concepts serve to empirically describe features of the world, from metalinguistic claims which describe: (a) the invariant roles that specific concepts play within a linguistic economy, and which can be abstracted from their specific expression in a given language, e.g., semantic vocabulary—“Rouge” in French means “Red” in English; (b) the invariant features on whose basis discourse is possible, which would comprise “transcendental” claims proper, in the sense of describing invariant features of the framework of sapient experience, e.g., all sapient systems must be capable of inferential reasoning practices
Summary
Kant’s transcendental unity of apperception, as it is developed in the B-Edition of the Transcendental Deduction (i.e., the “B-Deduction”), provides us with the apperceptive ‘I think’ that is able to accompany all our representations (B131-3). The ‘I’ of Kant’s apperceptive ‘I think’ is not to be identified with the empirical body of the thinker—that is, the ‘I’ of the apperceptive ‘I think’ does not refer to a spatially extended object As it services rational psychology, Kant thinks that this ‘I think’ can accompany all our (other) thoughts about some p, and assumes that this ‘I think’ can reveal truths about the thing(s) that it thinks. The Duisburg Nachlaß does not treat apperception as some purely formal condition of all thoughts expressed by an empty ‘I think’ but instead as the consciousness that reveals the mind to itself as a thing that thinks. We will prod the transcendental unity of apperception into naturalist and realist territory while avoiding metaphysical dogmatism, keeping Kant’s rejoinder close at hand
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