| OCR Text |
Show Chapter XI. Xenophobia and Moral Anomaly 458 understand, we reflexively seek to enlarge our understanding by searching for further data by which to explain it. Kant then goes on to say in the same passage that this logical principle becomes a transcendent one through our assumption that if dependent explanatory rules and experiences are given, then the whole series of them, ordered in relations of subsumption of the sort that characterize a coveringlaw theory, must be given as well; and that this series is not itself dependent on any further explanatory principles. We have already seen in Chapter V.5.2 that Kant's substantive moral theory satisfies this condition as well. Kant's point is that we assume that any limited explanation of experience we have is merely part of a series of such explanations that increase in generality and inclusiveness, up to a maximally inclusive explanation of all of them, just as the criterion of vertical consistency requires. Thus, he argues, we regard each such partial experience of the world we have as one among many, all of which are unified by some higher-level theory. And later, he says that [t]he transcendental concept of reason is none other than that of proceeding from a totality of conditions to a given conditioned. Now since only the unconditioned makes the totality of conditions possible, and conversely the totality of the conditions is itself always unconditioned; so a pure concept of reason in general can be explained through the concept of the unconditioned, so far as it contains a basis of the synthesis of the condition (1C, A 322/B 379). ... concepts of pure reason ... view all experiential knowledge as determined through an absolute totality of conditions (1C, A 327/B 384; also see A 311/B 368, B 383-385, A 409, A 509). What he means is that we regard any particular phenomenon as embedded in a systematically unified series of such phenomena, such that if we can explain some partial series of that kind, then there is an entire series of which that partial series is a part that we can also explain; and such that that more inclusive explanation explains everything there is about the phenomenon to explain. So Kant is saying that built into the canons of rationality that structure our experience is an inherent disposition to seek out all the phenomena that demand an inclusive explanation, and to test its inclusiveness against the range of phenomena we find. These remarks support 5.(B) because they imply that the innate cognitive concepts that structure and unify our experience invariably, necessarily outstrip our empirical conceptions of it. Kant is saying that it is in the nature of our cognitive limitations - i.e. that we can only have knowledge of sensebased experience - that the explanatory scope of the innate concepts that structure and unify it necessarily exceeds that sensory basis itself. This means that we view any experience in implicit relation to other possible experiences of its kind, and finally in relation to some systematic explanation that makes sense of all of them. In the end, he thinks, we are so constructed as to require © Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation Berlin |
