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Show Rationality and the Structure of the Self, Volume II: A Kantian Conception 61 anything else only has content insofar as it contributes to the contents of judgments" (MIE 80). Actually this conclusion is a bit too strong to represent the full complexity of Brandom's interpretation of Kant, since he has previously characterized Kant's view of concepts as one according to which they have the form of rules, and hence specify "how something ought (according to the rule) to be done" (MIE 8). If concepts themselves specify how something ought to be done, then they have content independent of their role in judgment. Understanding, according to Brandom's Kant, is the conceptual faculty of grasping rules - "of appreciating the distinction between correct and incorrect application they determine" (ibid.). If understanding grasps the rules that constitute the concepts they form, then the understanding grasps content that its concepts already have; and those concepts themselves, rather than the judgments in which they figure, must be the "minimum graspable." Moreover, Brandom's Kant accepts the rationalistic, classificatory account of cognition, according to which intuitions are classified under concepts, against empiricist claims that not all awareness presupposes conceptual classification: (B) All awareness is understood as exhibiting the classificatory structure of universal or repeatable concepts subsuming particulars. … Kant denies apprehension without classification, insisting that there must be conceptual classification wherever there is any sort of awareness. Awareness of what is classified and of how things can be classified derives from awareness that consists in classifying (MIE 86). This is a fairly accurate gloss on Kant's insistence on the necessity of classification - or conceptualization - for conscious experience. If, as Brandom asserts, awareness for Kant is necessarily conceptual awareness, and conceptual awareness consists in classifying and subsuming particulars according rules that specify how these particulars ought to be classified, then concepts, not judgments, are "the fundamental unit of awareness or cognition, the minimum graspable." Thus Brandom's Kant does, after all, ascribe content, awareness, and minimum graspability to concepts independently of their role in judgment. Brandom interprets Kant's notion of necessity to mean "'in accord with a rule,'" (MIE 10) and hence to imply the "necessity" of conceptual specifications of how something ought to be done. He distances Kant's conception of necessity from that of contemporary discussions of modality on the grounds that Kant's concerns are fundamentally normative and practical rather than descriptive and theoretical (ibid.). Presumably Brandom's Kant would not find necessity in the conformity to just any rule conceptually specifying how just anything ought to be done. For example, it is not likely that there would be any necessity in the rule that specified that one's teeth ought to be brushed back to front rather than front to back. Nor would one © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
