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Show Chapter II. Reason in the Structure of the Self 88 4.3. Kant on Horizontal and Vertical Consistency (VC)'s similarity to modus ponens is not accidental. Versions of both are to be found in Kant. But by contrast with my formulation of (VC), Kant attempts to insure satisfaction of the requirement of vertical consistency by proposing his Table of Categories as comprising a priori necessary conditions of any kind of judgment we might make. He tells us repeatedly that if a perception does not conform to the fundamental categories of thought that ensure the unity and coherence of the self, they cannot be part of our experience at all (1C, A 112, 122, and B 132, 134). This thesis may be viewed as the resolution of a Gedankenexperiment he earlier conducts at 1C, A 89-91, in 21 which he entertains the possiblity of unsynthesized appearance. In any case, his ultimate commitment to this thesis is clear. Kant describes these fundamental categories as "a priori transcendental concepts of understanding," by which he means innate rules of cognitive organization that any coherent, conscious experience must presuppose. The table of transcendental categories Kant offers in the Metaphysical Deduction is drawn largely from Aristotle, with his own considerable additional tinkering. The categories include substance, totality, reality, possibility, causality, and community, to name just a few. But some 22 commentators have rightly concluded that the most significant candidate for this elevated cognitive status is the subject-predicate relation in logic, from which Kant derives the relational category of substance and property in the Table of Categories (Kant regards this as the result of fleshing out the subjectpredicate relation or judgment form with transcendental content, i.e. the sensory data our experience presupposes rather than the sensations we perceive as a result of it (1C, A 70/B 95-A 79/B 105)). The idea, then, would be that organizing sensory data in terms of this relation is a necessary condition of experience. On this view, if we do not experience something in a way that enables us to make sense of it by identifying properties of it, we cannot consciously experience that thing at all. This neo-Kantian revision has the merit of plausibility over the archaic list of categories Kant originally furnished, for it is simpler and more noncommittal on the issue of to what extent our cognitive capacities are hard21 See Robert Paul Wolff, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968) for a discussion. 22 See, for example, P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1968), Chapter II.2. In hindsight Kant himself grudgingly admits that hypothetical and disjunctive syllogisms contain the same "matter" as the categorical judgment, but refuses to budge on their essential difference in form and function. See Kant's Logic, L, Paragraphs 24-29, 60, Note 2, especially Paragraphs 24, Note - 25; and Paragraph 60, Note 2. © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
