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Kant's Critical Project and How the Mind Fits Into It
-----------------------------------------------------

The major works so far as Kant's views on the mind are concerned are the monumental _Critique of Pure Reason (CPR)_ and
his little, late _Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View_, first published in 1798 only six years before his death.
Kant's view of the mind arose from his
The major works so far as Kant's views on the mind are concerned are the monumental __Critique of Pure Reason (CPR)__
and his little, late __Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View__, first published in 1798 only six years before his
death. Kant's view of the mind arose from his
[general philosophical project](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-development/) in CPR the following way. Kant
aimed among other things to,

Expand Down Expand Up @@ -165,3 +165,122 @@ structure (Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition). It must associate spatio-tem
spatio-temporally structured items (Synthesis of Reproduction in the Imagination). And it must recognize items using
concepts, the Categories in particular (Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept)_. This threefold doctrine of synthesis is
one of the cornerstones of Kant's model of the mind. We will consider it in more detail in the next Section.

The 'deduction of the categories' should now be complete. Strangely enough, the chapter has only nicely got started. In
the first edition version, for example, we have only reached about one-third of the way through the chapter. At this
point, Kant introduces the notion of transcendental apperception for the first time and the unity of such apperception,
the unity of consciousness. Evidently, something is happening (something, moreover, not at all well heralded in the
text)

We can now understand in more detail why Kant said that the subjective deduction is inessential. Since the objective
deduction is about the conditions of representations having objects, a better name for it might have been 'deduction of
the object'. Similarly, a better name for the subjective deduction might have been 'the deduction of the subject' or
'the deduction of the subject's nature'. The latter enquiry was inessential to Kant's main critical project because the
main project was to defend the synthetic _a priori_ credentials of physics in the objective deduction. From this point
of view, anything uncovered about the nature and functioning of the mind was a happy accident.

### Attack on the Paralogisms, 1st Edition

The chapter on the Paralogisms, the first of the three parts of Kant's second project, contains Kant's most original
insights into the nature of consciousness of the self. In the first edition, he seems to have achieved a stable position
on self-consciousness only as late as this chapter. Certainly his position was not stable in TD. Even his famous term
for consciousness of self, 'I think', occurs for the first time only in the introduction to the chapter on the
Paralogisms. His target is claims that we know what the mind is like. Whatever the merits of Kant's attack on these
claims, in the course of mounting it, he made some very deep-running observations about consciousness and knowledge of
self.

:::tip
To summarize: in the first edition, TD contains most of what Kant had to say about synthesis and unity, but little on
the nature of consciousness of self. The chapter on the Paralogisms contains most of what he has to say about
consciousness of self.
:::

### The Two Discussions in the 2nd-edition TD and Other Discussions

In other new material prepared for the second edition, we find a first gloss on the topic of self-consciousness as early
as the Aesthetic (B68). The mind also appears in a new passage called the Refutation of Idealism, where Kant attempts to
tie the possibility of one sort of consciousness of self to consciousness of permanence in something other than
ourselves, in a way he thought to be inconsistent with Berkeleian idealism. This new Refutation of Idealism has often
been viewed as a replacement for the argument against the Fourth Paralogism of the first edition.

Elsewhere in his work, the only sustained discussion of the mind and consciousness is, as we said, his little, late
__Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View__. By 'anthropology' Kant meant the study of human beings from the point of
view of their (psychologically-controlled) behaviour, especially their behaviour toward one another, and of the things
revealed in behaviour such as character. Though Kant sometimes contrasted anthropology as a legitimate study with what
he understood empirical psychology to be, namely, psychology based on introspective observation, he meant by
anthropology something fairly close to what we now mean by behavioural or experimental psychology.

Kant's View of the Mind
-----------------------

### Method

Turning now to Kant's view of the mind, we will start with a point about method: Kant held surprisingly strong and not
entirely consistent views on the empirical study of the mind. The empirical method for doing psychology that Kant
discussed was introspection.

Sometimes he held such study to be hopeless. The key text on psychology is in The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural
Science. There Kant tell us that “the empirical doctrine of the soul … must remain even further removed than chemistry
from the rank of what may be called a natural science proper”. (In Kant's defence, there was nothing resembling a single
unified theory of chemical reactions in his time.) The contents of introspection, in his terms inner sense, cannot be
studied scientifically for at least 5 reasons.

1. Having only one universal dimension and one that they are only represented to have at that, namely, distribution in
time, the contents of inner sense cannot be quantified; thus no mathematical model of them is possible.
2. “The manifold of internal observation is separated only by mere thought”. That is to say, only the introspective
observer distinguishes the items one from another; there are no real distinctions among the items themselves.
3. These items “cannot be kept separate” in a way that would allow us to connect them again “at will”, by which Kant
presumably means, according to the dictates of our developing theory.
4. “Another thinking subject does not submit to our investigations in such a way as to be conformable to our purposes” -
the only thinking subject whose inner sense one can investigate is oneself.
5. “Even the observation itself alters and distorts the state of the object observed”. Indeed, introspection can be bad
for the health: it is a road to “mental illness” ('Illuminism and Terrorism', 1798, Ak. VII:133; see 161).

In these critical passages, it is not clear why he didn't respect what he called anthropology more highly as an
empirical study of the mind, given that he himself did it. He did so elsewhere. In the Anthropology, for example, he
links 'self-observation' and observation of others and calls them both sources of anthropology

Whatever, no kind of empirical psychology can yield necessary truths about the mind. In the light of this limitation,
how _should_ we study the mind? Kant's answer was: transcendental method using transcendental arguments (notions
introduced earlier). If we cannot observe the connections among the denizens of inner sense to any purpose, we can study
what the mind _must_ be like and what capacities and structures (in Kant's jargon, faculties) it _must_ have if it is to
represent things as it does. With this method we can find universally true, that is to say, 'transcendental'
psychological propositions. We have already seen what some of them are: minds must be able to synthesize and minds must
have a distinctive unity, for example. Let us turn now to these substantive claims.

### Synthesis and Faculties

We have already discussed Kant's view of the mind's handling of space and time, so we can proceed directly to his
doctrine of synthesis. As Kant put it in one of his most famous passages, “__Concepts without intuitions are empty,
intuitions without concepts are blind__”. Experience requires both percepts and concepts. As we might say now, to
discriminate, we need information; but for information to be of any use to us, we must organize the information. This
organization is provided by acts of synthesis.

> By _synthesis_, in its most general sense, I understand the act of putting different representations together, and of
> grasping what is manifold in them in one knowledge
If the doctrine of space and time is the first major part of his model of the mind, the doctrine of synthesis is the
second. Kant claimed, as we saw earlier, that three kinds of synthesis are required to organize information, namely
apprehending in intuition, reproducing in imagination, and recognizing in concepts. Each of the three kinds of synthesis
relates to a different aspect of Kant's fundamental duality of intuition and concept. Synthesis of apprehension concerns
raw perceptual input, synthesis of recognition concerns concepts, and synthesis of reproduction in imagination allows
the mind to go from the one to the other.

They also relate to three fundamental faculties of the mind. One is the province of Sensibility, one is the province of
Understanding, and the one in the middle is the province of a faculty that has a far less settled position than the
other two, namely, Imagination

The first two, apprehension and reproduction, are inseparable; one cannot occur without the other. The third,
recognition, requires the other two but is not required by them. It seems that only the third requires the use of
concepts; this problem of non-concept-using syntheses and their relationship to use of the categories becomes a
substantial issue in the second edition, where Kant tries to save the universality of the objective deduction by arguing
that all three kinds of syntheses are required to represent objects.

Acts of synthesis are performed on that to which we are passive in experience, namely intuitions (_Anschauungen_).
Intuitions are quite different from sense-data as classically understood; we can become conscious of intuitions only
after acts of synthesis and only by inference from these acts, not directly. Thus they are something more like
theoretical entities (better, events) postulated to explain something in what we do recognize. What they explain is the
non-conceptual element in representations, an element over which we have no control. Intuitions determine how our
representations will serve to confirm or refute theories, aid or impede our efforts to reach various goals.

#### Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition

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