Book I: Analytic of Concepts
Chapter2, Section I
Of the Principles of a Transcendental Deduction in General
I. This section is otherwise entitled the Transcendental Deduction. Kant here stresses the necessity of a deduction of the concept of cause transcendentally, not from induction, since the empirical inference of causation only, as Hume proved, “[collects] from phenomena a law…that usually happens, but the element of necessity is not found in it.” So Kant concludes that the concept of cause must either have a priori foundations in the understanding, or be necessarily faulty.
a. Transcendental Deduction: an explanation of the manner in which concepts can apply a priori to objects [contra empirical deduction, or from experience and reflection].
i. Purpose: to show that the concepts of the understanding [categories] are a priori conditions of the possibility of all experience.
ii. Necessary to prove that “conceptions, which make up…cognition…are destined for pure use a priori, independent of all experience.”
1. Note: the purpose of the transcendental deduction doesn’t conflict with, but compliments, the reasons for its necessity. The categories describe thought as it exists a priori in the mind, and also, therefore, by opening up the intelligibility of phenomena to cognition, the conditions for the possibility of having experience. Note too, that Kant’s transition from judgments to categories implied that all reality is cogitated “propositionally,” or the relations between signs [representations] is the same as the relations between subjects and predicates in all propositions.
II. Recapitulation/Addendum:
a. What Kant calls a physiological explanation from experience (e.g., Locke) cannot be sufficient, since one cannot derive the a priori necessity of pure concepts from it, but only our possession of the concepts.
b. Geometry, as a pure a priori science, extends to external sensation in use [cognition of space]. Since the pure form of external sense is space, all “geometrical cognition” possesses immediate evidence (as pure a priori intuition is its foundation), and the objects of these cognitions (in form) are given a priori in the cognition itself.
i. Not so with pure conceptions (likewise of space), since they affirm predicates of objects in pure thought a priori, and therefore cannot appeal to intuition or sensibility (i.e., they are not presented with objects a priori in intuition).
c. The categories do not represent the conditions of objects given in intuition, and so it isn’t of immediate necessity that objects conform to them; nor that the understanding contain a priori the conditions of these objects
ii. I.e., Kant wishes to show how “the subjective conditions of thought can have objective validity,” and become conditions of the possibility of all cognition of objects.
Transition to the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories
III. Synthetic representation [synthesizing of a manifold of representations] and its objects can correspond and relate necessarily to each other in these ways:
a. Intuition: object makes representation possible
i. An empirical relation. A priori representation impossible since the object given sensibly, i.e., there is a causal connection through intuition; but the foundation for these a posteriori determinations of objects is given a priori in the mind (transcendental aesthetic).
b. Conception: representation makes object possible.
i. The representation alone doesn’t produce the existence of the object. The representation here determines the object a priori in cognition, relying on the a priori faculty of understanding. Only by means of representation, which determines according to the pure concepts of the understanding, can we cogitate the object.
IV. Given this (III), Kant asks: “Whether there do not exist a priori in the mind conceptions of understanding [categories, which determine the object in cognition], as conditions under which alone something, if not intuited [i.e., is not directly intuited, but exists in the mind as a representation of an object], is yet thought as an object?” -> Since this well be so:
a. All empirical cognition of objects conform to these concepts [categories], since if they are not presupposed, nothing can be an object of experience.
b. Conceptions of objects lie as a priori conditions at the foundation of all empirical cognition [union of intuition and sensation].
V. Categories: concepts of an object in general [abstracted from particular determinations], by means of which its intuition is contemplated as determined in relation to one of the logical functions of judgment.
a. The empirical intuition (the phenomena) is always contemplated as a subject, never as a predicate.
