Was Kant a Methodological Interpretationist?

Abstract

This paper examines Kant’s interpretive role of categories (Verstandesbegriffe) on the basis of his assertion in the Prolegomena § 30, where Kant claims that the role of categories is to spell out appearances in order to read them as experience. Kant’s metaphor of “spelling” or even “reading” is just a colloquial expression for the complexities of interpreting reality. The explanatory models that result from the relationship of the categories to the world of experience are conditions of our understanding and cognition of reality. I think we cannot simply hypostatize structures within a reality per se, but we should more sophisticatedly speak only of the hypothetical basic constitution of reality. Indeed, reality as such can only be conceived interpretatively, and the particular epistemological model itself can only be articulated from a higher meta-level of interpretation. We could also say that Kant is concerned with interpretations in the sense of applying given schematic forms or schemata in our use of language, i.e., that he is concerned with scheme-interpretation or schema-impregnation, insofar as the activity of the understanding consists essentially in interpreting experience by means of given schemata. In this paper, Kant’s theory of experience interpretation is supplemented by a more sophisticated distinction of different levels of interpretation and presented in the form of diagrams.