Goodbye, Kant! by Ferraris Maurizio Davies Richard

Author:Ferraris, Maurizio,Davies, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-10-19T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 15. Judgments and principles

It is fairly natural to ask why Kant invested all this time and ingenuity if all he was aiming at was the theses of Substance and Cause. After all, they are just two of the three members of just one family of Principles, those of the Analogy of experience, which in turn corresponds to the categories of Relation.

The explanation seems in the end fairly straightforward. Given the dialectical freight that the theses of Substance and Cause are carrying, because they are independent of experience and make it possible, Kant could not simply appeal to a matter of fact, namely the use that physics suggests we make of them. Rather, in the terms of his naturalization, which is at the heart of the deduction, he had to demonstrate that, for the “I” to have certain experiences, the categories have to be derived from thought, that is, from judgments that are applied by means of the principles. And to do this, he had to, first, take on board what the logicians of his day regarded as the general forms of judgments. And he arrived at twelve of these. Second, he had to derive from them the same number of categories, lest he be accused of picking them up from experience. And, third, he had to manufacture twelve principles from their application that would hold for both science and experience.

As specifically regards the Principles, they are directly influenced by the physics of the Analogies of experience, which themselves reflect the basic positions of Newtonian science. The Principles combine both mathematics and physics not only in the Axioms of intuition, according to which every experience has a number, which is its extension, but also in the Anticipations of perception, according to which every experience has a magnitude, which is its intension. By Kant’s explicit admission, the Principles are not concerned with experience, but rather with the relation between the subject and what it knows in the Postulates of empirical knowledge in general; these Postulates correspond to the modal categories of the possible, the necessary, and the actual.

What is really striking in all this is the disproportion between the mass of argumentation and its conclusion. Setting aside that uneconomical use of the means, the real problem is to see whether Kant really reaches his end, namely to demonstrate that his substantive theses really do guarantee the minimum requirements for any experience whatsoever,1 and not that they merely make up the ingredients of a scientific approach to nature.2

Following the analogy with the Leica, it seems the latter. Kant takes himself to be describing an eye, but what he is really setting out are the workings of a camera with a variety of built-in focus meters, light meters, and exposure meters plus a couple of add-on features that don’t really do anything. Let us see how this is so.

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