2. 1. The unintelligibility argument.
Kant’s claims that we cannot know the thing in itself calls for the question: how can Kant then claim that they exist? It surely seems at first blush that this is an absurd stance, but as we will see, the whole argument is based on a misunderstanding of Kant’s transcendental method of reflection.
Kant’s account of transcendental reflection is given in the following passages:
Reflection […] is the consciousness of the relation of given representations to our various sources of cognition. […] The first question prior to all further treatment of our representation is this: In which cognitive faculty do they belong together? […] [A]ll judgments, indeed all comparisons, require a
reflection, i.e., a distinction of the cognitive power to which the given concepts belong. The action through which I make the comparison of representations in general with the cognitive power in which they are situated, and through which I distinguish whether they are to be compared to one another as belonging to the pure understanding or to pure intuition, I call
transcendental reflection. (A260-1; B316-7.)
[T]ranscendental reflection is a duty from which no one can escape if he would judge anything about things
a priori. (A263, B319.)
Transcendental reflection is thus the action through which the conditions of experience are exposed. As Westphal aptly puts it: “Kant uses transcendental reflection to identify several of our key cognitive capacities by identifying several of our key cognitive incapacities.” (KTPR, 2.) The basic idea is, then, that Kant is simply charting the borders of what can and what cannot be cognized by finding out the necessary conditions for our cognition, i.e. the conditions without which no cognition in general would be possible.
From this it is relatively easy to see that Kant is merely maintaining that we could not possibly know anything about any objects that did not fulfil these necessary conditions – a claim that is true on the basis of the definition of ‘necessary condition of cognition’.
Thus Kant is not, as such, making a claim about the thing in itself, but about the capabilities of our cognition.
Now there are, however, other problems involved with this part of Kant’s view. One could ask, and indeed many have, about the grounds of Kant’s claim of the existence of such objects. It is one thing to accept that we cannot know anything about such objects that do not exhaust the requirements set for possible knowledge, but quite another thing to claim that these hypothetical objects actually exist.
This is where the transcendental reflection again steps in. Let us follow Kannisto’s footsteps here. Surely enough, we experience. Now this is only possible if there is something to experience. If what we experience, on the other hand, were fully the production of our cognition, then we could not err – and the possibility of error is a necessary condition of knowledge (or, it could be asked, what would knowledge mean without the possibility of error?). (Kannisto, 321-2.) Such a view would also fail to account for why things (seem to) persist even when we do not perceive them, or why we seem to share our world.
This leads Kant to the claim that something external to us causes these experiences – hence the thing in itself. (Ibid, 322.) In short: Kant is not making claims about the noumenal realm, but of the borders of the phenomenal realm. He is, so to speak, arguing from a box that because something comes into the box, something must be outside the box. Therefore, his claims here are not inconsistent at all, and arguments stating otherwise arise from the failure to understand Kant’s transcendental method.
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Originally Posted by blp
