!!!!!!!!!!!!KANT AND THE PROBLEM OF THE REGULATIVE !!

Thomas Moore !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

!!!!!!!!!!© Copyright 2020 by Thomas Edwin Moore !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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!!Curriculum Vitae !!Thomas Moore grew up in Clarksville, TN, before attending high school in Nashville, TN at

Montgomery Bell Academy. Thereafter, he attended St. Hugh’s College, Oxford, where he

received a B.A. in Literae Humaniores in 2014. He began his graduate studies at Brown

University in the fall of 2014 and received the degree of Ph.D. upon defending the present

dissertation on April 9, 2020. His publications include “Kant’s Deduction of the Sublime”,

published in Kantian Review in September 2018 and “Kant’s Path from Systematicity to

Purposiveness”, forthcoming in the Proceedings of the 13th International Kant Congress.

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!Acknowledgements !Over the course of my graduate studies, I have engaged numerous people in countless enlightening conversations about the topic of this dissertation and Kant’s philosophy more generally. In the main text I have tried to record the suggestions individuals have made over the years which I have found particularly helpful, although it is doubtless that I have omitted several along the way. Here I want to acknowledge the individuals whose criticisms, suggestions, and support have been not only helpful, but indispensable, for this work. In that sense, the feedback of the individuals here acknowledged can be said to have been constitutive, and not merely regulative, of the present work. !Many of the most fruitful conversations occurred at conferences focused on Kant’s philosophy. A version of Chapter 2 was presented in May 2018 at the 4th Biennial of the North American Kant Society in Vancouver, where I was fortunate to have Colin Marshall comment on my paper. His comments were central to my understanding the problem I discuss in the chapter better and to my arriving at a more clear expression of my own view. A few months later, I presented an updated version of the same chapter at the Third International Doctoral Workshop of the Kant-Gesellschaft in Graz, Austria. The conversations I had there with UCSD graduate students Claudi Brink and Max Edwards were extremely helpful, although we disagreed on much! At the 13th International Kant Congress in Oslo in August 2019, I presented a version of Chapter 4. On that occasion, I received a very helpful question from Reed Winegar, who also asked an incisive question at a conference in Southampton in 2016 on a Kant paper unrelated to the present dissertation. !Much of the work on Chapter 3, along with substantial revisions of Chapter 4, was undertaken within the beautiful confines of the reading room of the Staatsbibliothek on Unter den Linden in Berlin. This work took place during a research stay in Berlin in summer 2019 funded by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). I am grateful to Tobias Rosefeldt for sponsoring my DAAD application to study at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. I received detailed comments on Chapters 2 and 3 from Tobias Rosefeldt during my stay and had the chance to meet other Kantians at HU every week at the Kolloquium zur klassischen deutschen Philosophie. Andrew Chignell was also kind enough to provide detailed comments on Chapter 2 during my time in Berlin. I also enjoyed many fun and insightful conversations with UCSD graduate student Brian Tracz. My stay in Berlin would not have been possible without the hospitality of a former Oxford classmate, Ina Ruckstuhl, and her parents Eva and Berno, who extremely kindly provided me with a spacious and beautiful apartment at Keithstrasse 10 in Schöneberg. !At Brown, it was a privilege to have another Oxford friend, Sam Meister, as a colleague and roommate. He came to know my dissertation in detail and his comments at the Brown Dissertation Workshop were always incisive and helpful. I am also grateful for the detailed comments Marcus Willaschek provided on Chapter 2 after his visit to the Brown History of Philosophy Roundtable in Fall 2019.

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!I reserve the greatest thanks for my dissertation committee, consisting of Paul Guyer, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, and Charles Larmore. Over the years, I have spent countless hours with each of these distinguished scholars discussing the topic of my dissertation. They have always been generous with their time and encouraging of my work. My primary advisor, Paul Guyer, aided by his encyclopedic knowledge of Kant, always provided insightful and challenging feedback and helped me think through tough problems as they arose. Without his support, this dissertation would have been much worse than it is. !Last but not least, I wish to thank my mother, who has been tirelessly supportive throughout my educational journey, even with no end in sight. !I dedicate this dissertation to another supportive and influential woman in my life, my grandmother Rebecca Miller, who passed away on April 29, 2020, three weeks after I completed and defended this work. !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Table of Contents !Introduction 9 !Chapter 1: The Problem of the Regulative in Kant’s Critical Philosophy !Introduction 16 1.0 The Epistemological Reading of the Principles of the Understanding 22 1.1 Hume’s Worries and the Second Analogy 24 1.2 The Arguments of the Second Analogy 26 1.3 Experience As Regulative 31 2.0 The Problem of the Regulative 37 2.1 The A Priori Certainty of the Unity of Apperception 39 2.2 Empirical vs. A Priori Synthesis 41 Conclusion 43 !Chapter 2: Necessity and Systematicity in the Critique of Pure Reason !Introduction 46 1.0 The Regulative/Constitutive Distinction 49 1.1 Kant’s Understanding of “Constitutive” 50 1.2 Applying the Regulative/Constitutive Distinction to the Principles of the Understanding 56 1.3 Problems for Alternative Accounts 59 2.0 The Status of the Principle of Systematicity in the Appendix 70 2.1 Solving the Puzzle 76 2.2 Two Notions of Experience 79 Conclusion 92 !Chapter 3: Empirical Concepts without Reason !Introduction 94 1 The Three Logical Operations of the Understanding 99 2 Problems for the Basic Account 107 3.0 Natural Order and Transcendental Affinity 116 3.1 Systematicity and the Structure of Concepts 118 3.2 Transcendental Affinity 124 3.3 Challenges to Kant’s Account of Affinity 129 Conclusion 138 !Chapter 4: Kant’s Path from Systematicity to Purposiveness !Introduction 140 1.0 Systematicity and the Deduction of Ideas of Reason 146

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1.1 The Argument from Empirical Chaos 148 1.2 The Second Step of the Deduction of Ideas of Reason 153 2.0 The Deduction of the Principle of Purposiveness 160 2.1 Purposiveness and Empirical Concept Formation 162 2.2 The (New) Argument from Empirical Chaos 163 Conclusion 169 !Conclusion 171 !Works Cited 174 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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!9

!INTRODUCTION !!In the final section of the 1770 Inaugural Dissertation, Immanuel Kant identifies three principles

which he names “principles of convenience (principia convenientiae)” (2:418). Kant explains 1

that we employ these principles “for the simple reason that if we abandoned them, our

understanding would scarcely be able to make any judgments about a given object at all” (ibid.).

The first of these principles, “that all things in the universe take place in accordance with the

order of nature” (ibid.), states a version of what in Kant’s 1781 magnum opus the Critique of

Pure Reason becomes the general causal principle of the Second Analogy that all events have a

cause. The third of Kant’s principles of convenience, that “nothing material at all comes into

being or passes away” (ibid.), corresponds to what in the Critique is the principle of the First

Analogy that substances persist throughout all change. Nestled between these two is the second

principle of convenience which states that “principles are not to be multiplied beyond what is

absolutely necessary” (ibid.). Kant explains this principle as arising from an “impulsion of our

understanding” (ibid.) to reduce explanations of natural phenomena to a single principle from

which the phenomena can be derived. What is significant about this principle is that, unlike the

other two, it corresponds not to one of the Analogies of Experience but, rather, to what Kant calls

the principle of systematicity in the Appendix to the Dialectic of the Critique.

!

The Cambridge translation renders this as “principles of harmony” (Kant [1992]). All 1

translations from Kant follow the Cambridge edition of his works, unless otherwise noted.

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Whereas in the Inaugural Dissertation Kant seems to think of all three of these principles of

convenience as sharing the same status and as operating solely to fulfill a practical need of the

understanding, in the Critique the Analogies of Experience enjoy a status far removed from that

of the principle of systematicity. In the later work, Kant argues that the principles of the

Analogies are necessary conditions of the very possibility of experience itself and, hence, are

“constitutive” of experience. By contrast, the principle of systematicity is merely “regulative”

and seems to operate as a heuristic for the understanding, much as Kant describes the principles

of convenience in 1770. It is noteworthy that by 1781 Kant uses the distinction between the

regulative and the constitutive to separate two sets of principles which in the Inaugural

Dissertation he had grouped together under the same heading. Kant’s distinction between the

regulative and the constitutive is of central importance to his Critical philosophy, and what this

brief comparison between the Inaugural Dissertation and the first Critique already shows is that

Kant had a complex understanding of the distinction which evolved throughout his career.

!Kant, indeed, is the first philosopher in the history of the subject to make extensive and

systematic use of the regulative/constitutive distinction, although the terms can be found in

Leibniz. In The Philosophy of “As If”, the Neo-Kantian Hans Vaihinger concerns himself 2

extensively with the uses to which Kant puts regulative principles and ideas in an attempt to

understand what Vaihinger calls Kant’s “theory of fictions”. Moreover, the regulative/constitutive

See Leibniz’s A New System in Philosophische Schriften ed. Gerhardt vol. IV pg. 479. See 2

Hanno Birken-Bertsch’s entry for “Konstitutiv/regulativ” in the Kant-Lexikon: “Die Unterscheidung zwischen konstitutiven und regulativen Prinzipien oder Arten des Gebrauchs von Ideen war in der Philosophie vor Kant noch nicht etabliert” (1264). See also the entry for “Konstitution” in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, pp. 992-1006.

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distinction has played a significant role in contemporary analytic philosophy of language. 3

Nevertheless, very little scholarship dedicated to the interpretation of Kant, not even that of

Vaihinger, attempts to explain precisely what the distinction amounts to and to make sense of the

different uses to which Kant puts it. Filling this lacuna is one of the primary tasks of this 4

dissertation.

!A related aim of the present work is to challenge an interpretation of Kant concerning the role of

regulative principles in experience according to which such principles, despite their status, are

necessary conditions of the possibility of empirical concepts and, hence, of experience itself.

This style of interpretation has gained traction in recent years, with commentators such as Henry

Allison, Lanier Anderson, and Hannah Ginsborg defending some version of this claim. A related 5

proposal, that regulative principles are necessary for the identification of particular empirical

laws, can be traced back at least to the work of Gerd Buchdahl and has also been defended by

Paul Guyer. A host of commentators in more recent years have arrived at similar conclusions on 6

See, e.g., Searle (1969) and Lewis (1979)3

In The Philosophy of “As If”, Vaihinger’s most clear expression of what Kant means by 4

“constitutive” comes when he says that regulative principles of reason “ are not ‘constitutive’ principles of reason, i.e. they do not give us the possibility of objective knowledge either within or outside the domain of experience, but serve ‘merely as rules’ for the understanding, by indicating the path to be pursued within the domain of experience…” (273). As we shall see in Chapter 2, I think that Vaihinger is on the right path here. However, he provides no defense of or justification for his interpretation.

See, e.g., Allison (2001), Anderson (2015), Ginsborg (2006)5

See, e.g., Buchdahl (1967), Guyer (1990), and Guyer (2017). 6

E.g., Abela (2002), Anderson (2015), Geiger (2003), Rohlf (2018), to name just a few. 7

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a variety of grounds which I discuss in great detail in this work. While a few brave souls have 7

attempted to argue against such positions, their defenses have been incomplete in various ways. 8

!I attempt to correct this interpretation in the following dissertation by arguing at length that

regulative principles do not play any necessary role in the sort of experience with which Kant is

concerned in the Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Treating regulative principles as

necessary conditions of the possibility of experience risks collapsing the regulative/constitutive

distinction altogether, confuses the distinct contributions which Kant argues human

understanding and human reason make to experience (hence threatening to erase Kant’s

distinction between understanding and reason), and runs afoul of what I call the problem of the

regulative. I develop this problem in detail in the next chapter. For now, the problem can be

understood simply as the possibility that, should Kant’s notion of experience require regulative

principles as necessary conditions of its possibility, that notion of experience itself at best turns

out to be a regulative ideal, subject to indeterminacy and revision. While Paul Guyer has noted

that this is a consequence of his own interpretation of Kant, he nevertheless embraces it on the

grounds that many of Kant’s assumptions which make it problematic are themselves

unwarranted. Although that may be the case, in the present work I attempt the exegetical 9

exercise of interpreting Kant’s distinction between the regulative and the constitutive in light of

the central tenets of his Critical philosophy. Doing so reveals that Kant had a relatively precise,

E.g. Pickering (2011) 8

See, e.g., Guyer (1980), Guyer (1987) and Guyer (1990). 9

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powerful, and original understanding of the regulative/constitutive distinction which has been

largely overlooked in the literature. Moreover, keeping the regulative firmly distinct from the

constitutive cleanly separates the contributions which Kant argued the understanding makes to

experience from those for which he held reason responsible. This “layer cake” approach to

interpreting Kant preserves many of the insights and strategies he used in responding to his

dogmatic predecessors. The views of my opponents according to which the regulative and the

constitutive both make direct contributions to experience, often at the same level, risk obscuring

Kant’s distinctive Critical doctrines.

!The structure of the dissertation is as follows:

In Chapter 1, I set up what I call the problem of the regulative. I rehearse an interpretation of the

Second Analogy of Experience due to Paul Guyer and show that, on this and related

interpretations, the notion of experience Kant is working with turns out to be a regulative ideal. I

then argue that the specific problem of the regulative with which I am concerned results from the

conjunction of two claims which I call [Regulative Necessity] and [Empirical Priority], roughly

the claims that (1) at least one regulative principle is a necessary condition of empirical concept

formation and the discovery of particular natural laws and (2) that the pure categories of the

understanding are applied to experience only through the application of such concepts and laws.

I then argue that the result that experience is a regulative ideal is problematic for Kant, because

he held that the unity of apperception was a priori certain, a view which would be threatened by

such a result.

!

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In Chapter 2, I attempt to clarify Kant’s distinction between the regulative and the constitutive. It

is controversial whether Kant holds that if x is a necessary condition of the real possibility of y, x

is constitutive of y. In Part I, I argue that there is strong textual evidence that Kant does maintain

that necessity implies constitutivity in this way. Furthermore, I argue that alternative proposals

such as Henry Allison’s which reject this line of thought fail to attribute a univocal use of the

regulative/constitutive distinction to Kant. In Part II, I examine why Kant calls the merely

regulative principle of systematicity a necessary condition of experience, given that the necessity

of x for the real possibility of y implies the constitutivity of x for y. My solution exploits Kant’s

relativization of the regulative/constitutive distinction to different domains. Kant is clear that a

principle which is constitutive in regard to one domain can be regulative in regard to another. I

argue that the principle of systematicity is regulative in regard to the sense of “experience” Kant

is concerned with in the Transcendental Analytic, while serving as a constitutive necessary

condition of a distinct notion of scientific experience.

!In Chapter 3, I argue that, on Kant’s view, the mechanism of empirical concept formation does

not require reason’s principle of systematicity. In Part I, I discuss the account of empirical

concept formation in the Jäsche Logic and argue that this text indicates that Kant held that the

faculties of the understanding and the imagination alone can yield empirical concepts based on

the input from sensibility. In Part II, I outline some of the main worries commentators have with

Kant’s account of empirical concept formation and rehearse some motivations they have

presented for attributing a necessary role to reason’s principle of systematicity in empirical

concept formation. In Part III, I argue that, these worries notwithstanding, systematicity is not

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necessary for the possibility of empirical concept formation. To this end, I show that Kant

distinguishes between two types of natural order. On the one hand, there is natural uniformity,

necessary and sufficient for empirical concept formation and the discovery of particular natural

laws. On the other, there is the systematicity of the Appendix to the Dialectic, an ordering of our

concepts and laws which requires natural uniformity but which is itself a more demanding notion

of natural order than is needed for empirical concept formation. In the Analytic, Kant argues that

the former natural order, the natural uniformity sufficient for empirical concepts, is imposed by

the understanding and its principles on experience. This shows that the understanding alone is

sufficient for the formation of empirical concepts.

!In Chapter 4, I turn my attention to Kant’s account of the principle of purposiveness in the third

Critique. I argue that by 1790 Kant had attributed a more robust role to the regulative principle

of purposiveness than he did to the regulative principle of systematicity in the first Critique. I

focus my discussion on the argument from empirical chaos, which Kant presents in both the first

and the third Critiques, albeit to very different ends. In the third Critique, Kant uses this

argument as a deduction for the principle of purposiveness. Moreover, he assigns to this principle

the role of a necessary condition for the possibility of empirical concept formation and the

discovery of particular empirical laws, thereby leading back to the problem of the regulative

once more.

!!!!

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!CHAPTER 1: The Problem of the Regulative in Kant’s Critical Philosophy !!Introduction: A Cornerstone of the Critical Philosophy !Among the cornerstones of Kant’s Critical philosophy is the distinction he makes between

regulative and constitutive principles. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant uses the distinction to

several ends. Chief among these is his use of the regulative/constitutive distinction to delineate

the mental faculty of the human understanding from the mental faculty of reason. Additionally,

he uses the distinction to diagnose the cause of transcendental illusions, mistakes brought about

by the misuse of reason which result in our supposing that what exists only as an idea of reason

can be encountered in the course of experience. In particular, Kant says that within the faculty of

reason there lie “fundamental rules and maxims for its use” (A 297/B 353) which, although 10

they are merely subjective principles, appear objectively necessary and are mistakenly taken by

us humans to determine the objects of our experience. Kant sometimes says that such 11

subjective principles or maxims are merely regulative in their use, as opposed to features of the

mind, such as the a priori categories of the understanding, which partially constitute the objects

of experience. It is part of Kant’s criticism of the dogmatic metaphysicians preceding him that

they make just such a confusion, by taking rational ideas such as God, the world, and the soul as

corresponding to objects of possible experience. In this way, Kant’s diagnosis of the cause of 12

Throughout this dissertation, I will refer to the pagination of the first (A) edition and second 10

(B) edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in the Akademie edition of Kants gesammelte Schriften.

Cf. A 642/B 67011

Kant uses this language at A 297/B 353, when he says that “the cause” of transcendental 12

illusions is the use of subjective principles as if they were objective.

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transcendental illusions, and the regulative/constitutive distinction on which it is based, serves as

the lynchpin of his critique of traditional metaphysics in the Transcendental Dialectical.

!Kant classifies principles as either merely regulative or constitutive throughout both his

theoretical and his practical philosophy of the Critical period. One of the most illuminating of

such passages occurs in the “Antinomy of Pure Reason” section of the Transcendental Dialectic.

The first antinomy involves a conflict of reason between the claim that the world is finite in

space and time and the claim that it is infinite in space and time. Kant attempts to solve this

conflict by adverting to his theory of transcendental idealism that things in themselves are not in

space and time. He claims that we are not presented with the totality of what exists in the course

of experience, but merely with spatiotemporal appearances. Since both the thesis and the

antithesis make claims about the totality of what exists and attribute spatiotemporal properties to

this totality, he argues that both claims are false, resting as they do on the false assumption that

the world is given as either an infinite or finite whole in space and time (A 505-6/B 533-4). It is

in this context that Kant mentions the principle of reason that one should, in the course of

investigating nature, always search for the conditions of some appearance, and the conditions of

those conditions, and so on, ad indefinitum. Rather than applying to the world of sense as a thing

in itself and, therefore, helping to constitute it as an infinite series of conditions, this principle is

merely regulative, in the sense that it serves as a rule guiding our empirical investigations of the

world. As Kant says:

Thus the principle of reason is only a rule, prescribing a regress in the series of conditions for given appearances, in which regress it is never allowed to stop with an absolutely unconditioned. Thus it is not a principle of the possibility of

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experience and of the empirical cognition of objects of sense, hence not a principle of the understanding, for every experience is enclosed within its boundaries (conforming to the intuition in which it is given); nor is it a constitutive principle of reason for extending the concept of the world of sense beyond all possible experience; rather it is a principle of the greatest possible continuation and extension of experience, in accordance with which no empirical boundary would hold as an absolute boundary; thus it is a principle of reason which, as a rule, postulates what should be effected by us in a regress, but does not anticipate what is given in itself in the object prior to any regress. Hence I call it a regulative principle of reason, whereas the principle of the absolute totality of the series of conditions, as given in itself in the object (in the appearances), would be a constitutive cosmological principle, the nullity of which I have tried to show through just this distinction, thereby preventing—what would otherwise unavoidably happen (through a transcendental subreption)—the ascription of objective reality to an idea that merely serves as a rule (A 508-9/B 536-7, italics added). !

Several things are important about this passage. First, Kant says at the end of this quotation that

the antinomies come about as the result of a transcendental illusion which compels us to take

what is merely a normative rule guiding our conduct to be a principle which applies to objects of

experience. Second, such a rule has merely regulative status, whereas if it were descriptive of

objects of experience, it would be constitutive. Third, such a rule is therefore not a principle of

the understanding, but rather of reason, because principles of the understanding provide the

necessary conditions for the possibility of experience and what is merely a rule guiding our

investigation of nature is “not a principle of the possibility of experience”. From this passage,

then, we see a few of the common ways in which Kant characterizes merely regulative principles

in contrast with constitutive principles, and we see that Kant makes use of the regulative/

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constitutive distinction to diagnose transcendental illusions. At least one way in which such

illusions occur is through the treatment of a merely regulative principle as constitutive. 13

!In the important section following Kant’s criticisms of illicit uses of regulative principles called

the “Appendix to the Dialectic”, Kant again addresses the legitimate role such principles have in

scientific investigation. In these pages, Kant further characterizes his distinction between the

regulative and the constitutive. He says that reason does not directly relate to objects of

experience or create the concepts of such objects, but merely orders such concepts (A 643/B

671), that reason’s assumption that empirical concepts and laws of nature form a seamless genus-

species hierarchy is merely a logical principle, i.e. one dealing with concepts, and not one

determining objects (A 648/B 676), and that principles of reason are not constitutive in regard to

empirical concepts (A 664/B 692). Although he scatters such remarks concerning the regulative/

constitutive distinction throughout the Critique, Kant nowhere provides a detailed exposition of

the distinction or formalizes it in any way. Kant’s lack of clarity on this point has led to

difficulties in reconciling his various uses of the distinction. For example, as we have seen, Kant

tends to treat principles of the understanding which provide for the possibility of experience as

constitutive, reserving the regulative status for principles of reason. However, in his discussion

of the Analogies of Experience in the “System of All Principles of Pure Understanding”, Kant

attributes merely regulative status to principles which clearly issue from the understanding, as

See also A 619/B 647, where Kant calls the idea of God merely regulative, but says that it is 13

unavoidable to take it constitutively through a “transcendental subreption”. Bennett (1974) also observes that this is one description of Kant’s of how transcendental illusions arise (270). Cf. also Willaschek (2018) for an extended discussion of how transcendental illusions arise by mistaking regulative principles for constitutive ones.

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even the title of the section makes clear. Thus, he says that the Analogies of Experience, despite

being principles of the understanding which serve as necessary conditions of the possibility of

experience, are valid of objects “merely regulatively”, not constitutively (A 179/B 222). In 14 15

fact, Kant’s seemingly confused discussion of the regulative/constitutive distinction has led at

least one commentator to suppose that the distinction cannot ultimately be maintained. 16

!In addition, many interpretations of Kant’s treatment of regulative principles lead to the result

that our concept of experience, according to Kant, is itself merely a regulative ideal. In the 17

Transcendental Analytic, Kant’s primary task is the identification of the necessary conditions of

the possibility of experience and the subsequent demonstration that such conditions apply

objectively to the objects of experience in the form of the principles of the understanding. As we

have seen from the passage at A 508-9/B 536-7, such principles stemming from the

understanding seem to be distinguished by Kant from regulative principles in virtue of their role

as necessary conditions of the possibility of experience. As Kant says in the Appendix at A 664/B

692, such principles are “constitutive in regard to experience”. However, several interpretative

See B 234 for the claim that the principle of the Second Analogy, e.g., is a necessary condition 14

of the possibility of experience.

About Kant’s use of these terms in this context, Bennett says the following: “Kant twice uses 15

‘regulative’ and ‘constitutive’ in the Analytic with meanings which I do not understand. Nor do I follow his attempt to relate those meanings to the ones which now concern us [sc. in the Appendix to the Dialectic]. I shall now ignore the Analytic’s uses of ‘regulative’ and ‘constitutive’” (270).

Cf. Bennett 274-516

As is well known, by “experience” Kant means empirical cognition. See B 166: “Empirical 17

cognition… is experience”.

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pressures have led scholars to admit principles of merely regulative status among those which

serve as necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. On the natural assumption that

something is only as strong as its weakest necessary condition, the result, on such interpretations,

would seem to be that experience itself is infected by the status of its regulative conditions. In

this first chapter, I aim to show that such a result rests uncomfortably with some of Kant’s central

theoretical commitments.

!In what follows, I will first discuss a prominent interpretation of Kant’s project in the Critique of

Pure Reason put forward by Paul Guyer which saddles Kant with the result that Kant’s notion of

experience is a regulative idea. In this connection, I will discuss Guyer’s interpretation of the

principles of the understanding, in particular the Analogies of Experience. Once we see that an

interpretation such as Guyer’s results in the regulativity of experience, I will then explain what it

would mean for experience to be a regulative ideal and show that such a conclusion would

undermine a key premise of Kant’s theoretical philosophy, namely that we have a priori certainty

of the unity of apperception. Such certainty is meant by Kant to ground the determinacy of the

form of experience, and assigning regulative status to any necessary condition of experience

would threaten such determinacy. This is what I call the problem of the regulative. Lastly, we

will be in a position to examine what combination of views leads to the problem of the

regulative. This problem results from jointly maintaining two positions:

(1) [Regulative Necessity]: at least one regulative principle is necessary for the formation of

empirical concepts and identification of particular empirical laws.

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(2) [Empirical Priority]: the pure categories of the understanding are applied to experience only

through the application of empirical concepts and laws. Put differently, the categories are but

mere forms of empirical concepts and laws.

This dissertation will investigate whether Kant has the resources available in his Critical

philosophy to escape the problem of the regulative. In particular, I will focus on [Regulative

Necessity]. After setting the problem of the regulative up in detail in this chapter, I will argue

over the course of Chapters 2, 3, and 4 that Kant does not maintain [Regulative Necessity] during

the period of the publications of the A and B editions of the Critique of Pure Reason

(1781-1787). However, I will conclude in Chapter 4 that Kant does eventually subscribe to

[Regulative Necessity] in the Critique of the Power of Judgment of 1790. In this later work, he

introduces the merely regulative principle of purposiveness and argues that it is a necessary

condition for the formation of empirical concepts and identification of particular empirical laws.

Kant’s later view, then, is exposed to the problem of the regulative in a way in which his earlier

view is not, or so I will argue.

!1.0 The Epistemological Reading of the Principles of the Understanding

One prominent reading of the Second Analogy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason clearly leads to

the conclusion that the notion of experience whose conditions Kant identifies and attempts to

secure in the work is itself a regulative ideal. This interpretation has been put forward most

prominently by Paul Guyer in his 1987 book Kant and the Claims of Knowledge and is part of a

larger epistemological reading of Kant’s Critical project. According to this reading, the true value

of Kant’s theoretical insights lies not in the dubious metaphysics of transcendental idealism,

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roughly the claim that things in themselves are not spatiotemporal. Rather, such value lies in

Kant’s discussion of what conditions must be in place in order for us to be justified in making

certain knowledge claims about our own mental states. On this view, to be justified in claims

about the order of our subjective mental representations of the world, for example, we must be

able to make claims about an external empirical world of substances obeying natural laws. If we

have justified knowledge of our mental states, so Kant is supposed to argue, then we are justified

in believing that the external world conforms with the conditions for that knowledge, namely by

being composed of various substances interacting in deterministic causal relations with one

another. 18

!One such piece of self-knowledge is the recognizable distinction between objective sequences of

representations and subjective sequences of representations. The former involve a series of

representations taken to represent an objective event in the world, for instance a ship sailing

downstream, while the latter involve a series of representations which do not represent such an

event and whose order therefore could, in principle, be reversed. Kant’s argument in the Second

Analogy exploits this distinction to show that the concept of causation is a priori and that the

general causal principle that all events have a cause applies a priori to the objects of experience.

In what follows, I will briefly explain Kant’s goals for the Second Analogy and his argument

therein, as interpreted by commentators such as Guyer and Lewis White Beck. We will then see

that, on such an interpretation, Kant is committed to the regulativity of experience itself.

! See Guyer (1987) 315-1618

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1.1 Hume’s Worries and the Second Analogy

As is well known, David Hume raised several distinct questions about causation and Kant’s

Second Analogy is seen by most as an attempt to answer at least some of these questions. In the 19

Treatise of Human Nature, Hume brings up three questions about our concept of causation. First,

what is the origin of our concept of causation as involving a necessary connection between two

events given that such a necessary connection is never given in perception? Second, what is the

basis for the general causal principle that every event has a cause, given that it is logically

possible to separate an effect from its cause such that no logical contradiction would arise were

we to posit an event without a cause? And third, what is the basis for our inductive belief that

particular like causes will produce particular like effects? Hume notoriously says in the Treatise 20

that he will “sink” the second question into the third, in the hopes that the same answer will 21

suffice to address both points. It is in the course of answering the third question that Hume raises

his famous doubts about the rationality of inductive practices, by arguing that neither

demonstrative nor moral, i.e. probabilistic, reasoning can establish the validity of the principle of

the uniformity of nature that the unobserved resembles the observed. Although Hume never

doubts the practical utility of basing our decisions on induction, he claims that our inductive

practices lack a rational foundation without a principle establishing the uniformity of nature and

A prominent exception is Watkins (2005)19

Guyer (2008) 77-79 describes Hume as posing these three questions in the Treatise. Lewis 20

White Beck (1978) 120 mentions in detail only the second two, which he calls the question of (1) the basis for the general principle every-event-some-cause and of (2) the basis for the principle same-cause-same-effect. In what follows, I will use Beck’s terminology to identify these two principles.

THN (ed. Selby-Bigge), p. 7821

!25

he resorts to a psychological explanation of our belief in causation. According to this view, the

content of our idea of causation results from repeated past experiences of events of one type

regularly following events of another type, thereby leading the mind to anticipate the occurrence

of the former upon observing the latter. What is important to note here, then, is that Hume not

only challenges the rationality of our inductive practices, but provides a theory of the empirical

origin of our concept of causation.

!Kant’s Second Analogy is standardly read as an attempt to respond to at least some part of

Hume’s skeptical conclusions concerning the concept of cause. The argument Kant provides

there purports to establish the principle that “All alterations occur in accordance with the law of

the connection of cause and effect” (B 232). Although I cannot give a full account of the many

exegetical issues surrounding the Second Analogy here, I want to outline some of the main

questions commentators have raised. First, assuming that the Second Analogy constitutes a reply

to Hume, what part of his skeptical worries does it address? Does the conclusion Kant’s

argument supposedly establishes secure merely the general causal principle every-event-some-

cause, or does it result in the principle of the uniformity of nature, same-cause-same-effect?

Those who claim that it supports merely the general causal principle typically see the argument

as falling short of answering Hume’s problem of induction, a response to which would require

not just that for every event there is some cause or another, but that we are rationally justified in

identifying natural laws, instantiations of which are tokens of repeatable causal sequence types.

A second question then arises: if the Second Analogy does not establish the principle of the

uniformity of nature needed to answer Hume’s worries concerning induction by establishing

!26

same-cause-same-effect, does it answer Hume at all? One possible response to this is to say that,

even if the Second Analogy leaves the problem of induction unaddressed, Kant can arguably be

understood as demonstrating the a priori origin of our concept of causation and, in that way,

refuting Hume’s empirical explanation of our causal beliefs.

!A third question, closely related to first, is whether Kant’s argument in the Second Analogy at

any point appeals to natural laws. That is, even if the conclusion of the argument of the Second

Analogy establishes merely the general causal principle, it is still an open question whether the

argument itself at some point assumes that knowledge of natural laws is possible or, rather, first

makes such knowledge possible by establishing its conclusion.

!To see where these central questions lead, I will now present a brief overview of Kant’s argument

in the Second Analogy, before turning to Guyer’s interpretation of it and a few problems that one

might find with that interpretation. In particular, interpretations on this model lead to what I

called above the problem of the regulative if one assumes [Regulative Necessity], the view that at

least one regulative principle is necessary to secure knowledge of natural laws and the formation

of empirical concepts.

!1.2 The Argument of the Second Analogy

Many commentators understand the Second Analogy as providing a transcendental argument for

the general causal principle every-event-some-cause, starting from a premise which Hume

!27

himself would accept. This starting premise is simply the empirical claim that we recognize a 22

distinction between the order of states which an object possesses when it undergoes an alteration

and the order in which the states of an object are subjectively represented in apprehension.

Kant’s famous examples of the house and the ship are meant to show this. Kant’s first move is to

point out that all of our representations succeed one another. As he says, “The apprehension of

the manifold of appearances is always successive” (A 189/B 233). So, whether one observes a

given stationary object, say a house, from roof to basement, or from basement to roof, we

apprehend the parts of the house successively. However, we do not take this as evidence that the

house itself has undergone alteration: “Now the question is whether the manifold of this house

itself is also successive, which certainly no one will concede” (A 190/B 235). Contrast this

example with observing a ship moving downstream. Here, too, our representations of the ship are

successive, with a representation of the ship upstream at t1 and a second representation of the

ship downstream at t2. However, unlike the previous example, we take this series of

representations to depict an object undergoing alteration, i.e. we take it as a depiction of an

event. The difference between the two sequences of representations, Kant says, is that whereas in

the first example, the sequence is reversible, in that we could first have observed the roof, then

the basement, or vice versa, in the second example, the sequence is irreversible. Kant’s argument

for the principle of the Second Analogy will exploit this difference between sequences of these

two types by showing that a necessary condition of identifying a series of representations as

depicting an event is the application of the category of causation.

!E.g. Beck (1978) 129, 130-35, Guyer (2008) 107-114; cf. Watkins (2005) 209-217. 22

!28

Two commentators who take Kant to begin his argument with the commonsensical distinction

between subjective and objective sequences are Lewis White Beck and Paul Guyer. Beck thinks

of Kant’s argument in the Second Analogy in the following way. Kant is responding to Hume by

showing that a basic empirical assumption accepted by Hume requires as its necessary condition

the distinction between objective and subjective successions of representations. Then Kant shows

that this distinction itself requires the a priori application of the category of causation, something

which Hume doubted. In other words, Hume accepted the distinction between objective and

subjective succession and Kant shows that this distinction implies what Hume doubted. The

basic Humean assumption (H) is that we find that certain types of events are regularly followed

by certain other types of events and we are thereby led to make the inductive inference that

events of the first type will be followed by events of the second type in the future. This requires

(P) that we be able to distinguish between our apprehension of events and successions which

represent merely non-events (such as observing a stationary house). And this, according to the

Second Analogy, requires the principle (K) that “everything that happens (begins to be)

presupposes something which it follows in accordance with a rule”. To quote Beck, “P implies K,

by the arguments of the Second Analogy, which give a sufficient reason for K. H implies P, since

if events cannot be distinguished, pairs of events cannot be found, and thus P is a necessary

condition of H. Hence: H implies P and P implies K, therefore H implies K. That is Kant’s

answer to Hume”. 23

!

Beck (1978) 13523

!29

Guyer agrees with Beck that Kant begins with the empirical assumption that we sometimes

perceive events and then “shows that the ability that Hume takes for granted… rests precisely on

the principle that Hume has thrown into doubt… that every event occurs as the consequence of

some cause”. Guyer goes on to say that “Of course, if some skeptic wanted to question even 24

whether we can ever reliably judge that an objective change has occurred, then Kant’s argument

would have no purchase—but that skeptic would not be Hume”. 25

!So, Kant begins his argument with the Humean assumption that we can distinguish objective

from subjective succession. I want now to focus on Guyer’s model for understanding Kant’s

argument. Kant claims that time cannot be perceived and that, therefore, time determinations are

not given in perception. Since he also claims that we do not have direct access to the objects of

our representations, but only to the representations themselves, we can infer the order of events

neither from the objects of perception themselves nor from our own representations, for we can

always imagine our representations’ being reversed. Hence, Kant argues, we can know a given

succession of representations to be irreversible, which is a condition of our distinguishing

objective from subjective succession, only if we subsume the objective states represented to us

under a particular causal law which says that one state necessarily follows the other. This is

because objective state A in fact preceding objective state B is a sufficient condition for us to

have a representation of A (Ra) followed by a representation of B (Rb), on the condition that Ra

is temporally related to its object in the same way Rb is temporally related to its object, so that,

Guyer (2008) 112-13. 24

ibid25

!30

for example, B does not cause Rb to occur more quickly than A causes Ra to occur, which might

result in the sequence RbRa. So, the argument purports to show, in order to make the distinction

between objective and subjective succession which Hume assumed was unproblematic, we have

to take particular sequences of states as instantiating causal laws. In other words, we have to

assume knowledge of particular causal laws in order to make the distinction which was Kant’s

and Hume’s starting point. It is for this reason that, e.g., we know that the perceptions of the ship

upstream at t1 and downstream at t2 represent an objective event, since we know that, given the

specific circumstances of the air currents, water flow, and so on, the ship could have been in the

downstream position only after having been upstream. It is because knowledge of particular

causal laws is necessary for distinguishing events from non-events, and because we can

determine for any given sequence of representations whether an event or a non-event is

represented, that Kant can conclude that such a distinction assumes the general causal principle

every-event-some-cause.

!Lewis White Beck seems committed to a similar view of the matter as Guyer. As I have already

described, he too understands Kant’s starting point to be the Humean premise that we distinguish

between objective and subjective succession. Beck concludes that Kant shows in the Second

Analogy that the general causal principle is necessary for this distinction, even though we must

“in good Humean fashion, go about finding uniform ordered pairs of events by straightforward

observation and induction”. In other words, the Second Analogy establishes merely the general 26

causal principle on the assumption that we know particular causal laws which conform to the

Beck (1978) 12926

!31

principle same-cause-same-effect. It does not establish this principle itself, nor does it give any

direction about how we come to discover particular causal laws. We do so by Humean induction

based on past observations, and the possibility of encountering recalcitrant empirical data which

force us to revise our view of which causal laws there are is still open.

!1.3 Experience as Regulative

We are now in a position to see the commitments of this style of interpretation more clearly.

What is important about the argument as constructed above is its reliance on knowledge of

particular causal laws, the laws governing air currents and water flow, say. That such knowledge

is a premise of the argument, rather than the possibility of such knowledge being its conclusion,

leads to two worries, the second more serious than the first.

!First, there might seem to be the flavor of circularity to Kant’s argument, so interpreted. The

Second Analogy is supposed to show that we must apply the category of causation, yet it does so

only by assuming we have already applied the concept in identifying particular causal laws.

Since which representations present a case of objective succession depends on knowledge of

particular causal laws, and our knowledge of which causal laws hold depends on knowing which

sequences of representations are objective successions and which are not, as Watkins puts the

point, “it appears that we are appealing to knowledge of objective temporal relations in order to

justify knowledge of objective temporal relations”. However, this problem need not present 27

insuperable difficulties. For, on Guyer’s interpretation, the Second Analogy is not justifying our

Watkins (2005) 19927

!32

identification of particular causal laws according to the principle same-cause-same-effect. It is

merely pointing out that, given that we assume such laws to make the distinction between

objective and subjective successions, we apply the category of cause a priori, not a posteriori as

Hume thought. Furthermore, the argument relies on the principle same-cause-same-effect as a

premise to reach a conclusion expressed as the general causal principle every-event-some-cause.

So, it cannot be charged with assuming its conclusion as a premise. Guyer himself considers this

objection of circularity and responds to it by appeal to his interpretation of Kant’s project as

epistemological. On this view, we need not worry that Kant is deriving knowledge of causal laws

from sequences of appearances, beliefs about the order of which are derived in turn from the

same causal laws. This is because Kant is not engaged in providing a psychological model of the

aetiology of beliefs. Rather, Kant is indicating the necessary conditions for certain knowledge

claims about our own representations, in the case of the Second Analogy the distinction we make

between subjective and objective sequences. Such a justification can be successful, on this view,

as long as one sequence of representations is not used to justify knowledge of a particular causal

law, which law in turn justifies our knowledge of the very same sequence of representations. 28

!The second, more pressing worry arises when we consider the mechanism by which we attain

knowledge of particular causal laws, according to Kant. As we have already seen, such

knowledge can arise only as the result of induction based on past experience. However, many

commentators, Guyer included, think that Kant’s considered view, at least by the time of the 29

See Guyer (1987) pp. 258-928

See, e.g., Allison (2000), Buchdahl (1967, 1969), Ginsborg (2006) and Guyer (1990), to name 29

just a few. This issue will be discussed in greater detail in the next two chapters.

!33

Critique of the Power of Judgment of 1790, is that a regulative principle is necessary for the

formation of particular empirical concepts and the identification of particular empirical laws.

While in the third Critique this principle takes the form of the principle of purposiveness

discussed in the two Introductions to that work, in the first Critique it takes the form of the

principle of systematicity discussed in the Appendix to the Dialectic. In other words, many

commentators think that Kant maintains [Regulative Necessity].

!The reasons the regulative principles of systematicity and purposiveness might be taken as a

necessary condition for the formation of empirical concepts and the discovery of particular

causal laws are several. First, there is some textual indication in the Appendix that Kant meant

the principle of systematicity to serve this function. For instance, at A 651/B 679, he says that

without the principle there would be “no coherent use of the understanding”, while at A 654/B

682, he says that one version of this principle must be “necessarily presupposed in the manifold

of a possible experience…, because without it no empirical concepts and hence no experience

would be possible”. I will explain how we should interpret such remarks in the next chapter.

Second, the purpose of the principle of systematicity is to guide our ordering of causal laws and

empirical concepts into a genus-species hierarchy, with particular laws derived from more

general laws, which are in turn derived from more general laws still. So, one way of identifying

which sequences of representations present an instance of a genuine causal law, rather than

representing a mere accidental regularity, might be to find a place for the hypothesized law in

such a systematic hierarchy, so that the hypothesized law can be seen to derive from more

general ones and to yield more specific ones. In this way, the regularity of the events in question

!34

would serve an explanatory role which merely accidental regularities lack. So, using the

principle of systematicity might be a necessary step for distinguishing genuine laws from merely

accidental regularities during the process of induction. Third, and relatedly, Kant seems to hold

in the third Critique that causal laws are themselves necessary, not merely that there is a

conditional necessity that, given some cause, some effect must follow. If so, then ordering 30

hypothesized laws into a systematic hierarchy might be a way to think of such regularities as

necessary, given that they can then be seen to have a particular place in a larger system. In this

way, systematicity would serve the epistemological function of allowing us to identify which

regularities are instances of genuine causal necessities and, therefore, be an indispensable

condition for the discovery of particular causal laws.

!It is the combination of such a view calling for a robust role for a merely regulative principle

with an interpretation of the Second Analogy like the one sketched above that leads to what I call

the problem of the regulative. This is because, according to the epistemological interpretation of

the Second Analogy, the pure categories of the understanding, in this case the pure concept of

<cause>, are applied to experience only through the identification of particular causal laws. It is

only on the basis of recognizing particular causal laws that we apply the category of cause and

the general causal principle, since the a priori application of this principle is a consequence of

knowledge claims we make in order to distinguish subjective from objective successions.

Combined with the view of the necessity of using the regulative principle of systematicity

discussed above to identify particular causal laws, this generates the result that the application of

See 5:18430

!35

the categories to experience is itself, at best, regulative. However, as we have seen, it is precisely

the application of the categories to the sensory manifold in the form of the principles of the

understanding which is supposed to constitute experience, by serving as a necessary condition

for the possibility of experience. On the view under discussion, however, the application of the

categories is at best a regulative matter and, since the application of the categories is itself a

necessary condition for the possibility of experience, experience itself is indeterminate and our

concept of it at best a regulative ideal.

!This result, of course, rests on the assumption that there operates a principle of what one might

call regulative infection. This principle can be spelled out as follows:

[Regulative Infection]: Anything which rests on a regulative principle as a

necessary condition is itself at best merely regulative.

[Regulative Infection] is an instance of the more general and intuitively plausible principle that

something is only as strong as its weakest necessary condition. And there is evidence that Kant

accepts such a principle, at least in other contexts. For instance, in explaining the difference

between philosophical and mathematical cognition in the “Discipline of Pure Reason”, Kant

makes the point that from the mere analysis of concepts no synthetic judgment can arise. As he

says, “Now all of pure reason in its merely speculative use contains not a single direct synthetic

judgment from concepts. For through ideas… it is not capable of any synthetic judgments that

would have objective validity” (A 736/B 764). That is, from purely analytic premises, no

synthetic conclusion can arise. In order to reach a synthetic conclusion, a synthetic premise is

!36

required. In other words, Kant accepts infection in this context, where a synthetic premise

“infects” the conclusion with its own status. 31

!Guyer of course recognizes the result that, on his combination of views, our concept of

experience is, for Kant, a regulative ideal. This point turns up several times in his discussion of

the principles of the understanding in Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, and is not confined to

his interpretation of the Second Analogy. For instance, in the First Analogy, Kant argues that the

a priori concept of substance is a necessary condition of the possibility of experience, by arguing

for the principle that “In all change of appearances, substance persists, and its quantum is neither

increased nor diminished in nature” (B 224). Guyer mentions the objection that modern science

might be seen to undermine Kant’s claim about the permanence of substance, since we know that

matter, for instance, is not conserved, but rather gradually transformed into energy. Guyer

defends Kant on this score by pointing out that the dynamical principles of the understanding,

including of course the analogies of experience, are meant to be regulative, meaning they

represent ideals which are “thus always open to revision in light of our actual progress in the a

posteriori employment of our a priori principles—that is, in light of scientific progress”. The 32

point is that the First Analogy does not force us to consider any one type of item, matter, for

instance, as substance, but just points out that the criterion of being a substance is that of

I doubt that there is any risk of infection happening in the opposite direction, so that, e.g., a 31

supposedly regulative principle might turn out to be constitutive if it rests on constitutive principles. This is because I do not think a regulative principle can be derived from constitutive principles alone. A regulative premise would be needed to derive the regulative principle. I thank Rolf-Peter Horstmann for asking me about this issue.

Guyer (1987) 235; cf. also ibid. pg. 320 32

!37

endurance and that, therefore, whatever science eventually determines meets this criterion

properly deserves the title of substance. This leaves room for modifications of our conception of

substance as science progresses.

!However, since Guyer holds, as we have seen in the case of the Second Analogy, that categories

of the understanding such as <substance> and <cause> are applied to experience only through

the application of empirical concepts and particular laws, this view means that the category of

substance is always applied indeterminately, in the sense that the revision of our application of

the concept is always possible. This once again leads to the result that our concept of experience

itself is indeterminate. It is true, as I have already mentioned, that Kant calls the dynamical

principles of the understanding regulative (A 180/B 222-3). However, understanding what Kant

means by this use of the term will require a nuanced understanding of the regulative/constitutive

distinction which will be developed in the next chapter. Here I want to point out only that the

combination of the views [Regulative Necessity] and [Empirical Priority] leads to the result that

the concept of experience Kant is most concerned with in the Critique of Pure Reason is itself a

regulative ideal. In the next section, I develop in more detail why this result is problematic for

Kant.

!2.0 The Problem of the Regulative

To see the force of the problem resulting from the view that experience itself is indeterminate,

consider that the Analogies of Experience aim, among other things, to secure the unity of time by

providing principles of time determination in the form of persistence (First Analogy), succession

!38

(Second Analogy), and simultaneity (Third Analogy). These three principles, according to Kant,

account for the unity of time, i.e., the character of time as one whole, whose successive parts are

individual moments, and in which individual substances simultaneously persist and affect each

other. Kant argues that the three principles of the Analogies are necessary to secure the unity of

time which, in turn, he takes to be necessary for the possibility of experience, understood as

temporal experience. As Watkins says, “Insofar as what he means by temporal experience is the

experience of objects in one and the same time, Kant’s general task [i.e., that of showing the

necessary conditions for the possibility of experience] transforms into the more specific task of

explaining how the unity of time is possible”. 33

!If, therefore, the application of the relational categories, in particular the category of causation,

depends on the identification of particular causal laws, and if the identification of such laws

depends, in turn, on a merely regulative principle, the unity of time and the unity of experience

itself are at best regulative ideals. That is, nothing Kant has shown in his Critical philosophy in

fact determines, or secures, the unity of experience, understood as temporal experience. This, I

submit, is an unwelcome result for the Critical Kant. Among other things, if the application of

the categories is always indeterminate, as resting on a regulative principle, the transcendental

unity of apperception, i.e. the ascription of representational states to a numerically identical self,

would itself be indeterminate. However, in at least some versions of Kant’s argument in the

“Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding”, Kant assumes as an a

Watkins (2005) 19333

!39

priori premise the determinacy of the transcendental unity of apperception. Thus, resting the 34

application of the categories on a regulative principle disrupts the foundations of Kant’s Critical

project.

!2.1 The A Priori Certainty of the Unity of Apperception

In many places in Kant’s argument in the Analytic that the a priori concepts of the understanding

have objective validity, Kant assumes as a premise that the unity of transcendental apperception

is a priori certain. This is in fact seen by Guyer to be a cornerstone of Kant’s deduction of the

categories. Kant holds that the ascription of the manifold of representations to a single 35

continuing self is a priori certain, and it is this a priori certainty which leads him to suppose that

the rules necessary for the synthesis of such representations are imposed by the mind on nature in

the form of the principles of understanding, rather than that whatever representations we happen

to synthesize in intuition conform to such rules contingently. As Kant says, 36

We are conscious a priori of the thoroughgoing identity of ourselves with regard to all representations that can ever belong to our cognition (since the latter represent something in me only insofar as they belong with all the others to one consciousness, hence they must at least be capable of being connected to it). This principle holds a priori, and can be called the transcendental principle of the unity of all the manifold of our representations (thus also in intuition). Now the unity of the manifold in a subject is synthetic; pure apperception therefore yields a principle of the synthetic unity of the manifold in all possible intuition. This synthetic unity, however, presupposes a synthesis, or includes it, and if the former is to be necessary a priori then the latter must also be a synthesis a priori (A 116-18). !

See, e.g., Guyer (1987) Chap. 534

See Guyer (1980) 21135

See Guyer (1980) 207-836

!40

In other words, because we have a priori certainty of the unity of apperception, and such unity

can come about only as the result of synthesis according to concepts, we can have a priori

certainty that any object of knowledge that becomes synthesized with other representations must

accord with such concepts. Kant repeats in several places that we are a priori certain of the unity

of apperception, and it clearly plays an important role in at least one of his argumentative

strategies. And, it is important to note that this approach is not confined to the A edition of Kant’s

Critique. For instance, at B 134, Kant says that “Synthetic unity of the manifold of intuitions, as

given a priori, is thus the ground of the identity of apperception itself, which precedes a priori

all my determinate thinking”. 37

!The problem should now be clear. Kant’s argument that the mind imposes certain a priori

principles on nature takes the form of arguing that such principles are necessary conditions of the

synthetic unity of apperception, which unity is supposedly a priori certain. If such principles are

merely regulative, however, as the interpretation discussed in the previous section holds, then the

unity of apperception can itself at best be a regulative ideal, assuming once again that

[Regulative Infection] holds. If such is the case, we may find that apperception involves at best a

unity which approximates that ideal. Then, however, Kant’s argument that the categories in the

form of the principles of the understanding must be imposed on nature as a condition of

transcendental unity of apperception fails. For, in the case that objects of nature failed to meet

the conditions necessary for such unity, we could explain this apparent gap between nature and

the requirements for human cognition as resulting from the fact that the synthetic unity of

Cf. Also A 108, A 12537

!41

representations needed for apperception was only a regulative ideal to begin with. Only the a

priori certainty of such synthesis yields the result that nature cannot fail to conform to the

conditions of the mind, since these conditions must be imposed by the mind on the pain of

threatening such certainty.

!2.2 Empirical vs. A Priori Synthesis

One possible response to this situation is to distinguish between empirical and a priori syntheses.

One might then say that the doctrine of [Regulative Necessity] leads at worst to regulative

indeterminacy of the unity of the empirical self, governed by mere empirical synthesis, and does

not touch the unity of the transcendental self, which can still involve determinate a priori

synthesis. Kant identifies a priori synthesis in the passages quoted in the previous section as a

condition for the determinacy of apperception. It seems he also identifies some form of empirical

synthesis, for instance when he discusses inner experience given through the pure form of

intuition of time in the “Refutation of Idealism”: “…empirical cognition, i.e., experience… to

that there belongs, besides the thought of something existing, intuition, and in this case inner

intuition, i.e., time, in regard to which the subject must be determined…” (B 277). So, it appears

there might be a priori synthesis, securing the transcendental unity of apperception on the one

hand, and some form of empirical synthesis, securing the unity of the empirical self on the other.

This empirical unity might involve the ascription to the self of various empirical representations

through time, and it seems that the Analogies of Experience are precisely what are meant to

secure such ascription. So, the thought goes, although the application of the principles of the

understanding, securing the unity of the empirical self, might be indeterminate, since they might

!42

rest on regulative principles, this does not threaten the a priori certainty of transcendental

apperception, since such certainty is secured by an a priori synthesis insulated from regulative

infection. 38

!However, it is clear that Kant is arguing from the a priori unity of apperception to the conclusion

that empirical synthesis is determinate, on the grounds that such determinacy is a consequence of

a priori synthesis. As a result, this solution to the problem of the regulative fails. Were there to

be no determinacy of empirical synthesis, then there would be no determinacy of transcendental

synthesis. It is in that sense that Kant seems to be suggesting that the transcendental unity of

apperception, which involves a priori synthesis, is itself what is ultimately secured by the

determinate application of the principles of the understanding to the empirical manifold. That is,

even if what the principles proximately secure is empirical synthesis, such synthesis itself seems

to need to be determinate in order to secure the determinacy, and therefore the a priori certainty,

of transcendental apperception. So, in the passage from A 116-118 we have already seen, Kant

says that we are aware “a priori of the thoroughgoing identity of ourselves with regard to all

representations that can ever belong to our cognition”. This is the claim that the unity of

apperception is a priori determinate. He then claims that “the unity of the manifold in a subject is

synthetic”, and that therefore apperception gives us a principle governing the synthetic unity of

“the manifold in all possible intuition”. In other words, Kant argues that the determinate

synthetic unity of a manifold of intuition that characterizes the empirical self is implied by the a

priori certainty of apperception, since the former is a necessary condition of the later. His

I thank Paul Guyer for raising this point.38

!43

argument is that apperception would not be a priori certain were there no a priori certainty

governing the synthesis of empirical consciousness. In a footnote appended to this passage, Kant

confirms this point by saying: “All empirical consciousness… has a necessary relation to a

transcendental consciousness (preceding all particular experience), namely the consciousness of

myself, as original apperception” (A 117). Hence, distinguishing between empirical and a priori

syntheses and claiming that [Regulative Infection] concerns only the former do not offer a

promising path out of the problem of the regulative.

!Conclusion

This dissertation aims to show that Kant, at least before the introduction of the principle of

purposiveness in the third Critique, has the resources in his Critical philosophy to avoid the

problem of the regulative. However, there is one important caveat to the way I have set up the

problem of the regulative which must be mentioned. I have claimed that the problem of the

regulative arises from the combination of the claims [Regulative Necessity] and [Empirical

Priority]. The strategy of the argument of this dissertation is to show that Kant does not accept

[Regulative Necessity] in the period surrounding the publication of the first Critique. If Kant has

the resources to reject [Regulative Necessity], then the problem of regulative, as I have set it up

in this chapter, does not arise for Kant. Therefore, for the purposes of the present argument, I

remain neutral on the issue of [Empirical Priority].

!However, I have argued in this chapter that the reason why the regulative status of experience is

an unwelcome result for Kant is because it saddles him with the position that the categories apply

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indeterminately to nature and that, therefore, apperception is not a priori certain. The latter

claim, though, as we have seen, is a central tenet of Kant’s Critical philosophy. This way of

viewing the issue seems to compel me to address [Empirical Priority] in more detail. This is

because, if [Empirical Priority] is true, then rejecting [Regulative Necessity] no longer seems

enough to block the unwanted result that the notion of experience Kant attempts to secure in the

first Critique is indeterminate. Whatever else we might say about Kant, it is clearly his view that

empirical concepts and our knowledge of particular natural laws rest on experience of the world.

Since the world, for Kant, is an indefinitely extendable whole, our empirical knowledge must

always be viewed as incomplete and subject to revision. Hence, if we apply the categories only

through the application of empirical concepts and our knowledge of particular natural laws

[Empirical Priority], it seems that our application of the categories is itself incomplete and

subject to revision. And if this is the case, it seems Kant’s view is no better off than before we

rejected [Regulative Necessity].

!In response to this, I want to make clear that the aims of this dissertation are limited in scope. I

aim to solve the problem of the regulative in the following pages. This is specifically the problem

that experience, for Kant, might turn out to be a regulative ideal if it is found to rest on certain

regulative principles. To deny this, all that is needed is a rejection of [Regulative Necessity].

Addressing whether experience turns out to be indeterminate for other reasons is beyond the

scope of this project. I focus in particular on the issue of [Regulative Necessity] because recent

scholarship on the issue of regulative principles in Kant has tended to defend the view that such

principles are necessary conditions of the possibility of experience, a general view which I find

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pernicious for the reasons discussed in detail in this and the subsequent chapters. Incidentally, I

also think that [Empirical Necessity] is likely false as an interpretation of Kant. However, a

defense of this claim would require a lengthy treatment in its own right and would include,

among other things, an interpretation of the Second Analogy which departs radically from

Guyer’s reading. This dissertation aims to remain neutral on the correct interpretation of the

Second Analogy and to argue that, even if [Empirical Priority] is true, the author of the Critique

of Pure Reason did not hold that regulative principles are indispensable for the possibility of

experience.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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CHAPTER 2: Necessity and Systematicity in the Critique of Pure Reason !!Introduction !The distinction between the regulative and the constitutive is central to Kant’s critical

philosophy. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant uses the distinction, among other things, to

delineate the faculty of understanding from the faculty of reason and to diagnose the causes of

transcendental illusions. The importance of the distinction notwithstanding, commentators have 39

struggled to give a satisfactory account of what makes a principle constitutive and what makes

one at best merely regulative. This unclarity has led to difficulties in interpreting Kant’s claim

that the principle of systematicity in the Appendix to the Dialectic is regulative.

!In the Appendix, Kant discusses the role that reason plays in ordering empirical concepts and

laws of nature into genus-species hierarchies. In his 1783 work the Prolegomena, Kant, referring

to this part of the Critique as two scholia, says that they “on account of their dryness, could

hardly be recommended to amateurs, and have therefore been set out only for experts” (4:364

footnote). However, this dense stretch of text has vexed even the experts because Kant seems to

characterize the principle of systematicity in two conflicting ways. On the one hand, he says that

the principle is merely regulative and, as such, does not determine objects of experience but

should be treated as a mere heuristic device. On the other, he sometimes describes the 40

Kant uses this language at A 297/B 353, when he says that “the cause” of transcendental 39

illusions is the use of subjective principles as if they were objective. See Willaschek (2018) 238 and passim for an extended defense of the claim that transcendental illusions arise from mistaking merely regulative principles of reason for constitutive ones.

Cf. A 643/B 67140

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assumption that the principle accurately describes nature as indispensable for the very possibility

of experience itself. Indeed, Kant attributes to systematicity the robust function of providing a

necessary condition for the possibility of empirical concept formation and experience itself when

he says that without systematicity “no empirical concepts and hence no experience would be

possible” (A 654/B 682). Commentators are divided, then, on whether to emphasize the

regulative status of the principle and treat it merely as a dispensable heuristic aid to the

advancement of science or to view its application by human cognizers as a necessary condition

of the possibility of empirical concept formation and thus of experience itself. 41

!One common approach in the literature, represented prominently by Henry Allison, is to

acknowledge the role of the assumption of reason’s principle of systematicity as a necessary

condition of the possibility of experience, while accepting its status as regulative. This move 42

involves denying that only those principles which are constitutive serve as necessary conditions

of the possibility of experience. As Allison says, “systematicity must in some sense be regarded

It should be noted that talk of the application of the principle of systematicity is ambiguous. It 41

could mean (1) that the principle does, in fact, apply to nature, in the sense that nature is systematically ordered in such a way that the principle accurately describes nature. Or, it could mean (2) that we, i.e. human cognizers, apply the principle to describe nature, whether or not it actually applies in the first sense. Since the principle of systematicity is undeniably regulative, the debate about whether the application of the principle is necessary for experience concerns whether human cognizers must apply the principle to describe nature, not whether the principle actually applies to nature independently of such cognizers. In what follows, then, when I speak of the principle’s being necessary or not, I intend to discuss whether it is necessary for us to apply the principle in the second sense above. Sometimes I express this point by speaking of our assumption of the principle. I thank Andrew Chignell and Tobias Rosefeldt for pressing me to make this point clear.

See, e.g., Allison (2000) 81. Cf. also Geiger (2003) 293: “the idea of systematic unity is a 42

necessary condition of experience yet not constitutive of it”.

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as a necessary condition of the possibility of experience”. I will argue in this chapter that this 43

approach comes with several interpretive costs. First, this approach ignores textual evidence

indicating that Kant accepts that only constitutive principles can be necessary conditions of the

possibility of experience. Second, this view cannot ultimately maintain a principled distinction

between the regulative and the constitutive. In the first part of this essay, then, I will show that,

according to Kant, x is constitutive of y iff x is a necessary condition of the real possibility of y.

This will prove to be the best way to give a univocal account of Kant’s regulative/constitutive

distinction.

!However, this account of what it is for something to be constitutive requires one to explain those

passages in the Appendix where Kant says that the principle of systematicity, a regulative

principle, is a necessary condition of the possibility of experience. My proposal of what it is for a

principle to be constitutive might be thought to lead to an exegetical puzzle that can be expressed

as an inconsistent quartet of claims:

(1) The principle of systematicity is regulative (A 643-5/B 671-3). (2) The principle of systematicity is a necessary condition of the real possibility of empirical

concepts and experience (A 654/B 682). (3) If a principle is a necessary condition of the real possibility of empirical concepts and

experience, it is constitutive of empirical concepts and experience. (4) No principle is both regulative and constitutive. 44

!

Allison op. cit. 82. Most commentators are not clear in what sense they take systematicity to be 43

necessary for experience (see Geiger in the previous footnote). As this quotation from Allison makes clear, however, they must mean it to be a necessary condition of the possibility of experience, rather than merely of its actuality for instance.

Thanks to Colin Marshall for suggesting that I set the problem up in this way. 44

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In the second part of this essay, I propose a solution to this puzzle by exploiting Kant’s claim in

the Appendix that the regulative/constitutive distinction is always relativized to a specified

context or, as I shall call it, domain. This allows the same principle that is constitutive relative to

one domain to be regulative relative to another. In other words, I use Kant’s relativization of the

distinction to solve the puzzle above by rejecting claim (4). In particular, I argue that the

principle of systematicity is merely regulative and, hence, dispensable relative to the notion of

experience with which Kant is concerned in the Analytic. However, it is constitutive of a

different sense of experience which requires the ordering of empirical concepts into a genus-

species hierarchy for scientific purposes. This tactic on the one hand avoids the Scylla of the

robust account of the principle of systematicity which emphasizes its necessity for experience at

the risk of inflating the principle into one constitutive of the very possibility of experience, a

view which would threaten claim (1) above. It avoids, on the other, the Charybdis of

acknowledging the principle’s regulative status while at the same time ignoring those texts in

which Kant seems to suggest its indispensability, claim (2) above.

!1.0 The Regulative/Constitutive Distinction

In this section, my primary aim is to show that Kant holds that all and only those principles

which are necessary conditions of the real possibility of experience are constitutive of

experience. Put differently, he accepts the biconditional: x is constitutive of y iff x is a necessary

condition of the real possibility of y. While commentators such as Hans Vaihinger and Marcus

!50

Willaschek have assumed that this is how Kant uses the distinction, no one has defended this 45

interpretation in the literature. And, as we shall see, it requires considerable defense.

Understanding Kant’s view of what it is for something to be constitutive in this way proves to be

the most promising path for providing a univocal account of Kant’s regulative/constitutive

distinction. In order to make this case, I will examine the most prominent uses to which Kant

puts the distinction in the Analytic and the Appendix to the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure

Reason.

!1.1 Kant’s Understanding of “Constitutive”

In the Transcendental Analytic, Kant’s primary task is the identification of the necessary

conditions of the possibility of experience and subsequent proof of their objective validity. These

conditions include the application of the a priori categories of the understanding to the sensory

manifold in the form of what Kant calls principles of pure understanding. In the “System of the

Principles of Pure Understanding”, Kant presents these principles under four headings. The

sections dealing with the axioms of intuition and the anticipations of perception offer what Kant

calls mathematical principles of the understanding. For reasons I am about to discuss, Kant

claims that these principles are constitutive and contrasts them with the principles he calls

E.g., Vaihinger (1924) says that regulative principles of reason “are not ‘constitutive’ 45

principles of reason, i.e. they do not give us the possibility of objective knowledge either within or outside the domain of experience, but serve ‘merely as rules’ for the understanding, by indicating the path to be pursued within the domain of experience…” (273). Cf. Willaschek (2018) 110: “it emerges that …a constitutive principle contributes to the possibility of empirical concepts, and thus of experience itself (A 664/B 692)”. See also Rohlf (2014) 163: “Kant uses ‘constitutive’ to refer to principles that we can have a priori knowledge about because they are conditions of any possible experience. By contrast, regulative principles are not conditions of any possible experience…”

!51

dynamical principles, the analogies of experience and the postulates of empirical thinking in

general, which he says are regulative. While the mathematical principles deal with the way

appearances are presented to us in intuition, the dynamical principles offer rules ordering those

appearances in time, notably the causal principle that every event follows another in accordance

with a rule. Kant is clear that this principle, along with the other analogies, is a necessary

condition on the possibility of experience. As he says, “it is only because we subject the

sequence of appearances and thus all alteration to the law of causality that experience itself, i.e.

empirical cognition of them, is possible; consequently they themselves, as objects of experience,

are possible only in accordance with this law” (B 234). Kant’s characterization of this principle 46

as regulative presents an obvious challenge to my claim that any necessary condition of the

possibility of experience must be constitutive of experience.

!In later sections of the Critique Kant tends to attribute merely regulative status precisely to those

principles which play no role in constituting experience itself. For instance, in the context of

discussing a principle of reason in the Antinomies, he says that it “cannot say what the object is”,

because “then it would be a constitutive principle” (A 510/B 538), and he attributes merely

regulative status to it instead. By contrast, though, the analogies of experience do, in fact, “say

what the object is”, precisely because they partially constitute experience itself. As we just saw

in the quotation from B 234, since the general causal principle is a necessary condition of the

possibility of experience, a fortiori it is a necessary condition of the possibility of objects of

See A 183/B 226 for the claim that the First Analogy is a necessary condition of the possibility 46

of experience. Cf. A 202/B 247

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experience. Why, then, does he call it a regulative principle? To understand Kant’s use of

terminology here, in what follows I will draw on an illuminating passage from the Appendix and

a suggestion of Michael Friedman’s. In particular, we shall see that the regulative/constitutive

distinction is always relativized to a given domain, a point which addresses the challenge to my

view presented by Kant’s characterization of the dynamical principles as regulative.

!In an important passage, Kant contrasts the mathematical principles with the dynamical

principles in terms of the regulative/constitutive distinction. I quote the passage at length:

The preceding two principles [sc. the axioms of intuition and the anticipations of perception], which I named the mathematical ones in consideration of the fact that they justified applying mathematics to appearances, pertained to appearances with regard to their mere possibility, and taught how both their intuition and the real in their perception could be generated in accordance with rules of a mathematical synthesis, hence how in both cases numerical magnitudes and, with them, the determination of the appearance as magnitude, could be used. E.g., I would be able to compose and determine a priori, i.e., construct the degree of sensation of sunlight out of about 200,000 illuminations from the moon. Thus we can call the former principles constitutive (Daher können wir die ersteren Grundsätze constitutive nennen). Things must be entirely different with those principles that are to bring the existence of appearances under rules a priori. For, since this existence cannot be constructed (construiren), these principles can concern only the relation of existence (das Verhältnis des Daseins), and can yield nothing but merely regulative principles (regulative Principien) (A 178-9/B 221-2). !!

There is some feature, then, which makes the mathematical, and not the dynamical, principles

suited to be called constitutive. The suggestion of this passage that the mathematical principles

determine appearances a priori as of a certain magnitude has been thought by Paul Guyer to

provide a hint as to what this feature is. Here the thought is that, while the mathematical

principles determine the magnitude of an appearance precisely, the dynamical principles are

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always indeterminate. Put differently, any given magnitude is calculable as a precise extensive or

intensive magnitude. However, the dynamical principle of the Second Analogy that every event

has a cause might apply to experience as a necessary condition of its possibility without it being

the case that we can determine a priori what the cause was for some given effect. What causes

there are in the world is always an empirical matter which no a priori principle alone can reveal.

!However, if Kant is distinguishing the regulative from the constitutive on this ground of

determinacy, he faces a problem, as Guyer notes. The problem is simply that the mathematical

principles are just as indeterminate as the dynamical principles, in the sense that neither set of

principles determines any specific feature of appearances a priori. Just as the dynamical

principles say nothing about what particular causes and effects we will encounter in experience,

the former, although they tell us that intuitions will be composed of extensive and intensive

magnitudes, say nothing about what particular magnitudes we will find existing. To use Kant’s

example, although an a priori rule might be able to tell us how to arrive at the degree of light

intensity given by the sun using the intensive magnitude of the moon’s light, it tells us nothing

about how bright the sun and moon actually are, which are simply empirical matters. Therefore,

the mathematical principles are just as indeterminate as the dynamical ones, and if Kant is really

resting his distinction on a difference in determinacy between the two, it looks as though his

distinction collapses, making all principles regulative. 47

!

Guyer (1987) 188-947

!54

We must, then, look for another way to distinguish the regulative from the constitutive. Luckily,

in the context of discussing the regulative principle of systematicity in the Appendix, Kant

explains the use he made of the distinction in the Analogies:

In the Transcendental Analytic, we have distinguished among the principles of the understanding the dynamical ones, as merely regulative principles of intuition, from the mathematical ones, which are constitutive in regard to intuition. Despite this, the dynamical laws we are thinking of are still constitutive in regard to experience, since they make possible a priori the concepts without which there is no experience (A 664/B 692). !

Three points are important about this passage. First, the fact that in the Appendix Kant refers to

the use he made of the regulative/constitutive distinction some 400 pages earlier in the Analytic

suggests he uses the distinction consistently throughout the Critique. Consequently, it should be

a constraint on a satisfactory interpretation of the distinction that the account attributes to Kant a

univocal use of it. Second, as Michael Friedman has pointed out, this passage makes clear 48 49

that the same principle that is regulative in regard to one domain, can be constitutive in regard to

another. In this case, Kant says, the dynamical principles, including the analogies of experience,

are regulative relative to intuitions, while the mathematical principles constitute intuitions.

Nevertheless, the dynamical principles can still claim constitutive status relative to experience

itself. Third, and most importantly, this passage provides clear textual evidence that Kant holds

that necessity for the possibility of some domain implies constitutivity for that domain. Kant’s

explanation in the second sentence of why the dynamical principles are constitutive of

I therefore disagree with the approach taken by Birken-Bertsch (2015) who speculates that 48

Kant uses the terms “regulative” and “constitutive” in different ways across the text: “Dem Abstand zwischen Haupttext und Anhang könnte ein Unterschied in der Bedeutung von ‘regulativ’ entsprechen” (1265).

Friedman (1992) 79; Cf. also Rush (2000) pg. 839 fn 5.49

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experience depends on such a view. It is precisely because the dynamical principles make

experience possible, i.e. serve as necessary conditions for the possibility of experience, that they

have constitutive status in regard to experience. Such an inference rests on the view that if x is

necessary for the possibility of y, x is constitutive of y.

!While this passage is Kant’s most clear expression of how he understands what it is for a

principle to be constitutive, its description of the role of constitutive principles is not at all

unusual. As we have already seen, Kant says that the mathematical principles “pertained to

appearances with regard to their mere possibility” (A 178/B 221, emphasis mine) and that “thus

we can call [them] constitutive” (A 179/B 221). In light of A 664/B 692, it is clear that Kant

means that, since the mathematical principles are necessary conditions of the possibility of

intuitions, they are constitutive of intuitions. Furthermore, in Section Eight of the “Antinomy of

Pure Reason”, Kant explains that principles which are merely regulative, and not constitutive, for

experience are, for that reason, not necessary conditions of the possibility of experience:

Thus the principle of reason is only a rule [i.e. merely regulative], prescribing a regress in the series of conditions for given appearances in which regress it is never allowed to stop with an absolutely unconditioned. Thus, it is not a principle of the possibility of experience and of the empirical cognition of objects of sense … (A 508-9/B 536-7, emphasis mine) !

Here, Kant starts from the position that only constitutive principles are necessary conditions of

the possibility of experience and concludes by modus tollens that a merely regulative principle is

not a necessary condition of the possibility of experience. Similarly, as early as the Introduction

to the Transcendental Dialectic at A 306/B 362, Kant says that reason’s principle of unity “does

not prescribe any law to objects, and does not contain the ground of the possibility (enthält nicht

!56

den Grund der Möglichkeit) of cognizing and determining them as such in general, but rather is

merely a subjective law of economy for the provision of our understanding” (italics added). 50

There is clear textual evidence, then, that, for Kant, if x is a necessary condition for the

possibility of y, x is constitutive of y.

!1.2 Applying the Regulative/Constitutive Distinction to the Principles of the Understanding

With these passages in mind, I now return to the text from A 178-9/B 221-2 to understand what it

could mean to say that certain principles constitute intuitions, while others merely regulate them.

Notice that Kant says that the mathematical principles teach us how the magnitude of an intuition

can be “generated (erzeugt) in accordance with rules of a mathematical synthesis”. By contrast,

Kant says that the dynamical principles are not involved in “constructing” (construieren)

existence, but rather regulate existence. This notion of construction becomes important in a

passage where Kant explains what he means by an “analogy” of experience:

In philosophy analogies signify something very different from what they represent in mathematics. In the latter they are formulas that assert the identity of two relations of magnitude, and are always constitutive (constitutiv), so that if two members of the proportion are given the third is also thereby given, i.e., can be constructed (construirt). In philosophy, however, analogy is not the identity of two quantitative but of two qualitative relations, where from three given members I can cognize and give a priori only the relation to a fourth member but not this fourth member itself, although I have a rule for seeking it in experience and a mark for discovering it there. An analogy of experience will therefore be only a rule in accordance with which unity of experience is to arise from perceptions (not as a perception itself, as empirical intuition in general), and as a principle it will not be valid of the objects (of the appearances) constitutively but

Referring to this passage, Thöle (2000) comments: “Kant vertritt hier also die Auffassung, dass 50

erstens die Vernunftprinzipien nicht Bedingungen möglicher Erfahrung formulieren, und zweitens auch keine Aussage über die Wirklichkeit implizieren, sondern bloße Handlungsanweisungen sind…” (117)

!57

merely regulatively (und als Grundsatz von den Gegenständen (den Erscheinungen) nicht constitutiv, sondern bloß regulativ gelten) (A 179/B 222). !

In a mathematical analogy, the first two members are constitutive of the third member, in the

sense that they are necessary conditions for the possibility of the third member by directly giving

the third member or “constructing” it. The analogies of experience, however, are not like this,

since if a certain “proportion” is set up, for instance the cause-effect relationship, and an effect is

given, the cause is not also thereby given. We know a priori merely that something with the

relation of a cause to this effect exists or did exist. Since this principle does not constitute the

object which was the cause, but merely orders the cause in a relation to the effect, it can be said

to be merely regulative relative to the object, or the intuition which would represent the object,

which acted as cause. Since intuitions just are extensive magnitudes of different sensations

calculable as intensive magnitudes, the mathematical principles can be seen as alone necessary

conditions of their possibility and, hence, as constitutive of intuitions. Causal laws merely place

these intuitions in relations with one another, without thereby constructing them. Furthermore,

although experience in its particularities is underdetermined by the dynamical principles, since

Kant thinks that it is a necessary condition of the possibility of experience that substances exist

in causal relations with one another, the dynamical principles can be said to be constitutive of

experience in general. So, the fact that Kant calls the analogies of experience regulative does 51

not show that Kant is content to attribute this status to some necessary conditions of the

possibility of experience. Instead, the analogies are regulative relative to intuitions, but necessary

conditions of the possibility of experience and, hence, constitutive of it.

See A 183/B 226 and B 23451

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!This account, though, raises an important issue. It is unclear whether it makes sense to say that

intuitions are constituted solely by extensive and intensive magnitudes and that causal relations

are not necessary conditions of their possibility, thereby serving for them as regulative principles

at best. After all, the given intensive or extensive magnitude of an appearance in space and time

is surely the effect of some cause. This is, indeed, correct in the case of intuitions considered as a

part of broader experience. However, in his presentation of the mathematical principles, Kant

works with the notion of an intuition isolated from the rest of experience, rather than with the

idea of an intuition unified with other intuitions in experience by the principles of the

understanding. Kant indicates that this is the notion of intuition he is working with in the 52

Principles of Pure Understanding when, in the passage just quoted, he says that “An analogy of

experience will therefore be only a rule in accordance with which unity of experience is to arise

from perceptions (not as a perception itself, as empirical intuition in general)” (A 179/B 222,

emphasis mine). In other words, the analogies bring unity about from perceptions which, qua

unified, they partly constitute. However, such a notion of an intuition unified with other

intuitions in experience should be kept distinct from “perception itself, as empirical intuition in

general”. This is the notion of an intuition abstracted from experience, or of intuition qua

intuition, which features in the Principles. This is a theoretical abstraction on Kant’s part, used

By “intuition isolated from the rest of experience”, I do not mean to suggest anything like an 52

intuition of mere form, without any matter such as sensation or color. I mean the notion of a particular intuition considered by itself, independently from the rest of experience, a theoretical abstraction not encountered in experience but used by Kant to highlight clearly the contribution of the mathematical principles.

!59

for the purpose of making clear which principles directly constitute intuitions, considered apart

from experience, and which experience itself.

!1.3 Problems for Alternative Accounts

Although there is strong textual evidence that Kant holds that the necessity of x for the

possibility of y implies the constitutivity of x for y, might one think that there is a way to interpret

these passages without jettisoning the thought that a principle regulative for some domain can be

necessary for its possibility? If such an interpretation could be given, we could easily

accommodate the texts from the Appendix such as A 654/B 682 which suggest that a regulative

principle is also a necessary condition of the possibility of experience. What would be required

for this strategy to work is an account that sharply distinguishes between the regulative and the

constitutive in all the contexts in which Kant uses the distinction without relying on the idea that

being necessary for the possibility of some domain implies being constitutive of it. I will briefly

present two plausible versions of such an account before arguing that they fail as adequate

interpretations of Kant. The first version of such an account I consider below fails to attribute a

univocal distinction between the regulative and the constitutive to Kant. And there is strong

textual evidence against the second version.

!The first version of this account reads the texts I discussed in 1.1, which suggest that, for Kant,

the necessity of x for the possibility of y implies the constitutivity of x for y, as incomplete.

According to this view, Kant does not mean to suggest that if something is merely a necessary

condition of the possibility of y it is constitutive of y. Rather, he holds that in order for something

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to be constitutive of y, it must be a necessary condition of the possibility of y and have some

further feature. On this interpretation, Kant has just omitted to explain what this further feature is

in the texts I discussed. If this is Kant’s view, then a principle which is a necessary condition of

the possibility of y, yet does not have this further feature, could still be regulative relative to y. I

will call this interpretation the determinacy interpretation of “constitutive”, because it suggests

that a constitutive principle must determine some feature about the objects it constitutes, in

addition to being necessary for those objects’ possibility.

!To get clear on this sort of view, consider again the criterion of determinacy discussed in section

1.1 as a way to distinguish the regulative from the constitutive. It may be the case, as Guyer has

pointed out, that, just as the analogies are indeterminate in the sense that they do not yield a

priori a cause for a given effect, the mathematical principles are likewise indeterminate in the

sense that they do not determine a priori what particular extensive and intensive magnitudes we

will find existing. However, there may be another way in which determinacy can do the work of

distinguishing the regulative from the constitutive. Although the mathematical principles do not

tell us what extensive and intensive magnitudes we will encounter, they do allow us to describe

precisely the extensive and intensive magnitudes of any given appearance. Put differently, every

appearance is represented as having some determinate magnitude. It is not necessarily the case,

however, that every appearance is given with a cause that can be empirically determined, at least

not immediately. It is always possible to imagine more than one causal chain leading to any

given event and it is up to scientific investigation to discover what the correct causal history is.

The mathematical principles of the understanding could be understood as constitutive, then,

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because they determinately describe each appearance, whereas the principle of the Second

Analogy, for instance, says only that there must be a cause for any given alteration, without

determining by itself what the specific cause must be, and is therefore merely regulative. We

could then say that constitutive principles are represented in experience in concreto in a way in

which merely regulative principles are not. Kant might be taken to intimate this suggestion in the

Appendix when he says that regulative principles of pure reason “can have no object in

concreto” (A 664/B 692), implying that constitutive principles do describe objects given in

concreto. One might then suggest that a principle is constitutive of experience if it is a necessary

condition of the possibility of experience and given in concreto. Failing one of these conditions,

a principle is at best regulative. This view leaves open the possibility that a merely regulative

principle could still be a necessary condition of the possibility of experience, albeit not one

exhibited in concreto. 53

!The determinacy interpretation, however, fails to attribute a univocal account of the regulative/

constitutive distinction to Kant. As is clear from Kant’s discussion in the Appendix, the

regulative/constitutive distinction is always relativized to a particular domain. The proposal

above seems to work well when the distinction is relativized to intuitions, as it is in Kant’s

Thanks to Colin Marshall for making this position clear to me. This position is also articulated 53

by Birken-Bertsch who claims, following Paton: “Es scheint also die Konstruierbarkeit a priori ihres Gegenstandes und damit dessen Anschaulichkeit zu sein, die Prinzipien zu konstitutiven macht…, zumindest innerhalb der Transzendentalen Analytik. Fehlt diese Konstruierbarkeit, handelt es sich um ‘keine andre als bloß regulative Principien’ (KrV A 179/B 222)” (1265). The problem with this view is that it deals only with Kant’s treatment of “constitutive” in the Analytic. By contrast, the proposal I offer reconciles his uses of the term across the entirety of the first Critique.

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discussion of the principles of the understanding in the Analytic. The mathematical principles of

the understanding describe intuitions determinately and, thereby, can be seen as given in

concreto, whereas the dynamical principles give us rules for ordering such intuitions yet do not

by themselves determine what the cause is for any given effect. However, when the distinction is

relativized to experience in general, as in A 664/B 692, the proposal fails. For there Kant says

that the dynamical principles are regulative relative to intuitions, yet constitutive relative to

experience. On the proposed view, then, the dynamical principles should be exhibited in concreto

in experience in general, even if they are not in the case of intuitions. However, when we

consider experience itself, the dynamical principles are exhibited no more determinately than

before. The Second Analogy’s principle, for example, still tells us only that for every alteration

there is a cause, but does not thereby determine what particular cause there is for some given

effect. In other words, although the dynamical principles are constitutive relativized to

experience in general, they are not exhibited in concreto any more when relativized to that

domain than when relativized to intuitions. According to the determinacy interpretation, then,

Kant must be using the regulative/constitutive distinction differently in the Appendix than he

does in the Analytic. However, this is implausible, since, as I observed in 1.1., it is in the

Appendix that Kant discusses the use he made of the distinction in the Analytic. We should, then,

attribute a univocal account of the distinction to Kant. For this reason, viewing necessity for the

possibility of some domain as alone implying constitutivity for that domain is a more promising

way to maintain the regulative/constitutive distinction than that offered by the determinacy

interpretation.

!

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The second exegetical view which denies that only principles constitutive of experience can be

necessary conditions for the possibility of experience appeals to what one might call an

essentialist interpretation of what “constitutive” means. According to this view, to say that x is

constitutive of y is to say that x is a necessary condition of y’s being the sort of thing that it is.

Put differently, if x is constitutive of y, x contributes to the concept of y. For instance, if we define

<human being> with the concept <rational animal>, we might say that <rationality> is

constitutive of the concept <human> because the concept <human> essentially includes

<rationality>. On this view, being rational is a necessary condition of the possibility of being a

human, because one could not possibly be a human while failing to be rational. If this is a correct

interpretation of what Kant means by “constitutive”, then in the passages in which Kant suggests

that if x is a necessary condition of the possibility of y, x is constitutive of y, he means that if x is

a necessary condition of the possibility of y by being part of y’s essence, x is constitutive of y.

This leaves open the view that a principle which is not constitutive of experience could still be a

necessary condition of the possibility of experience, provided it is not part of the essence of

experience. For example, assuming that the regulative principle of systematicity describes nature

might be a necessary condition for the possibility of the formation of empirical concepts, and

hence of experience itself, without it being constitutive of experience, if it does not contribute to

make experience the sort of thing it is. 54

!The essentialist interpretation seems to have several advantages over the determinacy

interpretation. First, it attributes a consistent use of the regulative/constitutive distinction to Kant.

Thanks to Paul Guyer and Sam Meister for helping me see the force of this objection. 54

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On this view, the mathematical principles are constitutive of intuitions, because they are

necessary conditions of the possibility of intuitions by contributing to what intuitions essentially

are (extensive magnitudes calculable as sensations of intensive magnitudes, for instance), while

the dynamical principles do not contribute to what intuitions essentially are. However, the

dynamical principles do contribute to what experience itself essentially is (substances interacting

with each other in causally deterministic ways), and therefore are constitutive of it. Second, the

essentialist interpretation attributes a view to Kant which is perhaps similar to the view of

constitution put forward by Leibniz and his followers, influenced by Scholasticism. Leibniz

refers to substantial forms as “forms constitutive of substances” and to souls which serve as the 55

forms of bodies as “something constitutive” , suggesting that he thought of what is constitutive 56

of something as part of the formal cause or essence of that thing. It might be thought an

advantage of the essentialist interpretation that it attributes a view to Kant informed by his

immediate historical context.

!However, the essentialist interpretation does not make good sense of the textual evidence. First,

it is radically underdetermined by the main passages in which Kant speaks of constitutive

principles. Although the texts I have discussed so far are not inconsistent with the essentialist

interpretation, nowhere in those texts does Kant suggest that when he speaks about a principle

constitutive of experience, he means a principle which is a necessary condition for the possibility

of experience by contributing to what experience essentially is. Second, there is textual evidence

See Leibniz’s A New System in Philosophische Schriften ed. Gerhardt vol. IV pg. 479. See also 55

the entry for “Konstitution” in the Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, pp. 992-1006.

See “Nature Itself” in Philosophische Schriften ed. Gerhardt vol. IV pg. 512. 56

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which strongly indicates that Kant did not hold the essentialist understanding of what it means

for something to be constitutive. In the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Kant discusses the

highest good of human action, which he conceives of as the distribution of happiness in

proportion to virtue. Kant argues that, in order for us rationally to pursue the highest good, we

must maintain belief on practical grounds in the existence of God, the immortality of the soul,

and human freedom. Although we cannot have theoretical knowledge of God, the soul, and

freedom, Kant argues that these practical postulates, as he calls them, are necessary conditions

for the possibility of bringing about the highest good and are, therefore, constitutive of the

highest good:

…they [the ideas of God, the soul, and freedom] become immanent and constitutive inasmuch as they are grounds of the possibility of making real the necessary object of pure practical reason (the highest good), whereas apart from this they are transcendent and merely regulative principles of speculative reason… (5:135) !

For practical cognition, then, these ideas have constitutive status relative to the highest good,

whereas they are merely regulative as far as theoretical cognition is concerned. They are 57

constitutive of the highest good because they are necessary conditions (or grounds) of the

possibility of the highest good. Nevertheless, they do not contribute to the essence, or concept, of

The fact that in this passage Kant applies the regulative/constitutive terminology both to 57

practical and to speculative (theoretical) reason indicates to me that Kant is using these terms in the second Critique in the same sense in which he uses them in the first. As I discuss in Chapter 4, I think that Kant first uses these terms in a different way in 1790 in the third Critique with the introduction of the reflecting power of judgment. Of course, one could object that Kant first seems to mention this new power of judgment in a letter to Karl Leonhard Reinhold from December 1787, before the publication of the second Critique in 1788. However, even if Kant had a fully developed theory of reflecting judgment by the time of the letter, which is doubtful, the manuscript of the second Critique had in any case been completed before the time of the letter.

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the highest good. The content of the concept <highest good> contains just <virtue> and

<happiness> and does not include concepts such as <God>, <soul>, and <freedom>. This is

evident from Kant’s discussion of the highest good in the section of the second Critique entitled

“On the dialectic of pure reason in determining the concept of the highest good”. There Kant

argues that both virtue and happiness are elements of the highest good, claiming that “virtue and

happiness together constitute (ausmachen) possession of the highest good in a person, and

happiness distributed in exact proportion to morality (as the worth of a person and his worthiness

to be happy) constitutes the highest good of a possible world” (5:110). That Kant considers both

<happiness> and <virtue> as concepts contained in the concept <highest good> is clear from his

subsequent discussion of different views of how these two concepts contribute to the concept of

the <highest good>:

Two determinations necessarily combined in one concept must be connected as ground and consequent… the connection of virtue with happiness can therefore be understood in two ways: either the endeavor to be virtuous and the rational pursuit of happiness are not two different actions but quite identical, in which case no maxim need be made the ground of the former other than that which serves the latter; or else that connection is found in virtue’s producing happiness as something different from the consciousness of virtue, as a cause produces an effect” (5:111). !

Kant then proceeds to discuss how the ancient Epicureans adopted the first of these two

alternatives to “determine the concept of the highest good”, whereas the ancient Stoics adopted

the second of the two approaches. This discussion indicates, then, that Kant conceives of the

concept <highest good> as containing only the concepts <happiness> and <virtue>, with

happiness distributed in proportion to virtue. Nevertheless, Kant is still willing to call God,

freedom, and immortality constitutive relative to the highest good, precisely because they are

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necessary conditions of the possibility of the highest good. The passage from 5:135, then, is

strong evidence against the essentialist interpretation and supports the claim that, for Kant, if x is

a necessary condition of the possibility of y, x is constitutive of y. According to Kant, it is not

possible for x to be a necessary condition of the possibility of y, yet fail to be constitutive of y on

the grounds that x is not part of y’s essence.

!We are now in a position to see what is distinctive and powerful about Kant’s conception of

constitutivity. Because Kant holds that x is constitutive of y if x is a necessary condition of the

possibility of y, he can rule out many merely necessary conditions from being constitutive. For

example, the consequences entailed by the necessary conditions of the possibility of y are

themselves necessary conditions of y, yet Kant’s account of constitutivity allows us to maintain

that they are not for that reason constitutive of y. For instance, since the form of intuition of

space is, according to Kant, Euclidean, and since it is a necessary condition of the possibility of

experience, the theorems of Euclidean geometry are also necessary conditions of experience.

However, we need not conclude that the theorems are constitutive of experience, since, although

they are consequences of necessary conditions of the possibility of experience, in this case the

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formal structure of space, they are not themselves among those conditions. Kant’s account, 58

then, allows that there are some necessary conditions of experience which are nevertheless not

constitutive of experience. Moreover, his account leaves room for this without resorting to an

essentialist view of what constitutivity amounts to. As a result, on the interpretation I am

proposing, we can attribute to Kant a powerful and original view of what constitutivity amounts

to.

!We should be clear that by maintaining that if x is a necessary condition of the possibility of y, x

is constitutive of y, the notion of possibility Kant has in mind is real possibility. Kant famously

distinguishes between logical and real possibility. While logical principles, such as the principle

of non-contradiction, are necessary conditions of the possibility of objects, they are necessary

conditions of the logical possibility of objects. According to Kant, in order for it to be logically

possible that at least one object instantiates a concept, the internal marks of the concept must not

mutually violate the law of non-contradiction. However, meeting this condition is not sufficient

for real possibility, which requires, in addition to logical possibility, agreement with the

See Stang (2016) 203-204 for a similar suggestion. I think the same account can be given of 58

synthetic a priori truths of arithmetic such as 2+2=4. Since such truths are necessarily true, they might trivially be considered necessary conditions of experience. However, they need not be considered constitutive of experience, since they are not necessary conditions of the possibility of experience, but are rather consequences of those conditions, in this case the form of intuition of time. Even if one thinks that distinguishing necessary conditions of experience from necessary conditions of the possibility of experience is not enough to avoid the consequence that, on my view of Kant, necessary truths like those of arithmetic turn out to be constitutive of experience, it is unclear to me how worrisome this is. The only reason one might balk at this consequence is if one is relying on an ordinary language intuition about what “constitutive” means. However, we should not expect a technical term in Kant to correspond to such intuitions.

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conditions for the possibility of experience. Such conditions of course include the principles of 59

the understanding. Since it is these conditions which are paradigmatically constitutive of

experience, the notion of possibility involved in Kant’s definition of constitutivity must be real

possibility.

!To summarize my conclusions so far, I have argued that Kant holds that if a principle is

necessary for the real possibility of y, it is constitutive of y. Indeed, Kant’s explanation in the

Appendix of why the dynamical principles of the understanding are constitutive of experience

depends on this view. Moreover, I have argued that Kant’s assignment of regulative status to the

dynamical principles in the Analytic does not conflict with such a view, even though such

principles are necessary conditions of the real possibility of experience, because Kant always

relativizes the regulative/constitutive distinction to a specific domain. Finally, I have argued that

two plausible alternatives for drawing Kant’s regulative/constitutive distinction which do not

hold that necessity for the real possibility of y implies the constitutivity of y fail as adequate

interpretations of Kant. Since it seems that Kant also holds the less controversial position that

what is constitutive of y is necessary for the real possibility of y, for instance when he says that

were the principle of systematicity to determine objects, then it would have a constitutive use,

“which would make systematic unity not merely something subjectively and logically necessary,

as method, but objectively necessary” (A 648/B 676), we can see that Kant maintains that x is

constitutive of y iff x is a necessary condition of the real possibility of y. However, this account

leaves us with the puzzle of how Kant in the Appendix can call regulative principles necessary

See, e.g., A 596/B 624 fn. 59

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conditions of the real possibility of empirical concept formation and, hence, of experience itself.

It is to this that I now turn.

!2.0 The Status of the Principle of Systematicity in the Appendix

In the Appendix to the Dialectic, Kant outlines an “indispensable” use of reason, as opposed to

reason’s dialectical confusions he has diagnosed in the preceding pages. Kant says that reason

provides a principle which cognizers use to order the empirical findings of the understanding into

a systematic hierarchy which attributes unity to nature. Kant specifies this general principle

under three headings: the homogeneity, specification, and continuity or affinity of forms. The 60

first principle states that given any two species, reason seeks to discover similarities between the

two which allow them to be subsumed under a higher genus. Specification is the principle that,

given the members of any one species, reason looks for differences among the members which

allow them to be divided into further subspecies. Kant sometimes says that the final principle

comes from uniting the first two. It states that a continuity of species can be found between any 61

species and the subspecies falling under it. In these three ways, the principle of systematicity

orders the empirical concepts of natural forms, be they species-concepts or natural laws, into a

systematic whole.

!The point at issue in the Appendix is the status of the principle of systematicity. As I have

already mentioned, Kant is clear both that we employ the principle merely regulatively and that

A 658/B 68660

Cf. A 658/B 686 and A 660/B 68861

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its assumption is a necessary condition of the possibility of experience, in some sense to be

specified. Thus, he says that “reason never relates directly to an object… hence it does not create

any concepts (of objects) but only orders them and gives them… unity” (A 643/B 671) and that

the systematic unity of nature involves a “hypothetical” (A 647/B 675) use of reason which is not

constitutive. He even explicitly says that “principles of pure reason…. cannot be constitutive

even in regard to empirical concepts” (A 664/B 692). These remarks all suggest that the

principle should be taken to order the objects of the understanding and to have the heuristic

function of guiding the understanding in discovering more empirical concepts, rather than as

constituting such concepts.

!However, in several passages Kant indicates a role for reason which seems to conflict with this

point. He says that the logical principle ordering empirical concepts into a systematic unity must

presuppose the transcendental principle that natural objects themselves reflect such a unity (A

650-1/B 678-9). One reason for this is that Kant assumes that it would be irrational for us to 62

attempt to order the concepts of our understanding into a systematic hierarchy were we not in a

position to suppose that such an ordering reflects an isomorphic systematicity in the objects of

nature themselves. As others have pointed out, this passage and others like it give us no 63 64

reason to think that systematicity is actually objectively valid of objects of nature. Rather, such

passages mention only an assumption or presupposition that the principle of systematicity does

A claim which is repeated at A 654/B 682 and A 660/B 68962

Cf. Guyer (1990) 2663

E.g., Guyer (1990) 27 and Pickering (2011) 43564

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accurately describe nature. As Kant has earlier said, systematicity as understood by reason is a

logical principle that orders concepts. If it ordered objects themselves and, thereby, directly

brought about conformity of objects with it, it would be a transcendental principle. However, in 65

order to engage rationally in the systematic organization of nature, reason must assume its

principle has transcendental status. Nevertheless, this always remains only an assumption and 66

we may find that we have to revise our empirical concepts in light of recalcitrant data. Therefore,

the transcendental status of the principle of systematicity which the logical version of that same

principle (dealing only with concepts) presupposes does not conflict with its regulative status.

This is an important point whose clarification avoids much of the confusion which has afflicted

the literature on this topic. As the problem in the Appendix to the Dialectic is sometimes laid out,

the issue is supposedly how a merely regulative principle can have transcendental status. So, for

instance, Bernhard Thöle claims that, according to Kant, it does not make sense to ascribe

transcendental status to a principle which is not objectively valid, i.e. constitutive. The reason 67

for this, according to Thöle, is that transcendental conditions must be constitutive. This is

A 648/B 676 65

This seems to be Kant’s point in the passage at A 651/B 679 directly before the one previously 66

quoted.

So, e.g.,: “…unter den systematischen Vorgaben der Kritik der reinen Vernunft ist ein 67

transzendentales Prinzip, das nicht zugleich objektiv gültig ist, kaum denkbar” (Thöle [2000] 119). Cf. also Horstmann (1989) 168ff. who argues that the meaning of the word “transcendental” changes between the first and third Critiques. In the earlier work, Horstmann thinks that the meaning of the word “transcendental” requires transcendental principles to be objectively valid and not merely subjectively valid. However, in the third Critique, according to Horstmann, Kant uses “transcendental” in a weaker sense which allows the principle of purposiveness to be merely subjectively necessary and transcendental. However, as I go on to discuss in the main text, there is no tension between being transcendental and merely regulative, or subjectively valid. The real tension is between a principle’s regulative status and its supposed role as a necessary condition of experience.

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because Thöle assumes that Kant uses the labels “transcendental” and “constitutive”

interchangeably to pick out only the necessary conditions of the possibility of experience. If this

were correct, then the obvious difficulty in the Appendix to the Dialectic would be that Kant

attributes to the principle of systematicity both regulative and transcendental status and, thereby,

erases the distinction between regulative and constitutive principles. 68

!However, this identification reading, according to which “transcendental” and “constitutive” are

interchangeable terms, does not adequately capture the problem in Kant’s Appendix to the

Dialectic. Thöle's assessment of the problem is much too hasty. While I agree that by

“constitutive” Kant means to pick out all and only the necessary conditions of the possibility of

some domain, as I showed earlier in this chapter such an interpretation has not been widely

accepted and requires considerable defense, none of which is offered by Thöle. Moreover,

Willaschek, following Guyer, has argued convincingly for the point that the transcendental/

logical and constitutive/regulative distinctions are crosscutting. Willaschek argues that the 69

identification reading does not make good sense of the text. The main problem is that, since Kant

says the logical principles of reason presuppose transcendental correlates, the identification

reading is committed to the view that there is a legitimate constitutive use of principles of reason,

which Kant clearly denies, as when he says at A 510/B 538 that “a constitutive principle is…

Cf. Thöle (2000) 119: “…transzendentale Bedingungen müssen konstitutiv sein. Den 68

Vernunftprinzipien einen transzendentalen—also die Erfahrung ermöglichenden—Status zuzuerkennen, hätte daher zur Folge, daß sie von den konstitutiven Grundsätzen des Verstandes nicht mehr unterschieden werden könnten”.

See Willaschek (2018) 110-118.69

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never possible on the basis of pure reason”. Willaschek argues that when Kant uses the word 70

“transcendental” to describe the principles of reason in the Appendix, Kant does not mean that

such principles are “conditions of the possibility of experience”, but rather that they describe

assumptions we make about objects of nature themselves, instead of just about our concepts of

these objects. 71

!However, this point ultimately makes little progress in solving the real issue of the Appendix. It

merely shows that the question in need of resolution is not how the principle of systematicity can

be both regulative and transcendental. In the Prolegomena, Kant briefly discusses the Appendix

in the first Critique and mentions what he himself takes to be the real problem posed by this text.

He says: “These principles [sc. of reason] seem (scheinen) to be constitutive and law-giving with

respect to experience, though they spring from mere reason, which cannot, like the

understanding, be regarded as a principle of possible experience” (4:364, emphasis added).

See Willaschek op. cit. 11270

This is a view which Guyer (2003) 278 previously put forward. In fairness to Thöle, he also 71

recognizes that this is a possible reading of the term “transcendental” in the context of the Appendix (see Thöle op. cit. 122); however, he seems ultimately to reject it. Note that, while I agree with all of what Willaschek says, his point does not touch the main issue, which is how merely regulative principles, whether they are taken transcendentally or logically, can serve as necessary conditions of the possibility of experience, as Kant clearly says at A 654/B 682. According to my view, if they play such a role, they cannot be merely regulative. Interestingly, this issue is particularly sharp for Willaschek, since he agrees with me concerning what “constitutive” means for Kant: “While Kant does not explicitly introduce or define the distinction between regulative and constitutive principles, it emerges that… a constitutive principle contributes to the possibility of empirical concepts, and thus of experience itself (A 664/B 692)” (Willaschek op. cit. 110). Willaschek does not argue for this claim, as I have done, and he does not confront the problem it poses for his own view, namely, how a merely regulative principle can contribute to the possibility of empirical concepts and thus of experience itself. I thank Marcus Willaschek for a helpful discussion of these points.

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According to Kant, then, the issue in the Appendix is how a merely regulative principle, whether

it is cast in logical or transcendental mode, can be a necessary condition of the possibility of

experience. In one of the most difficult passages to reconcile with the regulative status of the

principle of systematicity, Kant argues that its presupposition is indispensable because necessary

for the operation of the understanding: “For the law of reason to seek unity is necessary, since

without it we would have no reason, and without that, no coherent use of the understanding

(zusammenhängenden Verstandesgebrauch) and, lacking that, no sufficient mark of empirical

truth; thus in regard to the latter we simply have to presuppose the systematic unity of nature as

objectively valid and necessary” (A 651/B 679). The most troubling feature of Kant’s argument

for the necessity of reason to seek unity is his remark that, without reason, there would be “no

coherent use of the understanding” and “no sufficient mark of empirical truth”. This seems to

conflict with the position that Kant has already outlined the necessary conditions of the

understanding in the Analytic. A suggestion that some commentators have adopted is that our 72

application of the principle of systematicity is a necessary condition of the possibility of

empirical concept formation, while empirical concepts, in turn, are necessary for the coherent use

of the understanding and for experience itself. Indeed, in another problematic passage, Kant

seems to suggest just this: “According to that principle [sc. the logical principle of homogeneity],

sameness of kind is necessarily presupposed in the manifold of a possible experience (even

though we cannot determine its degree a priori), because without it no empirical concepts and

hence no experience would be possible” (A 654/B 682). Certainly, as I have argued in the

E.g. Allison (2000)72

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previous section, if a principle is a necessary condition of the real possibility of experience itself,

it cannot also be regulative, as least relative to that same notion of experience.

!2.1 Solving the Puzzle

As mentioned above, these passages, coupled with the position I argued for in the previous

section that necessity for real possibility implies constitutivity, produce an inconsistent quartet of

claims:

(1) The principle of systematicity is regulative (A 643-5/B 671-3). (2) The principle of systematicity is a necessary condition of the real possibility of empirical

concepts and experience (A 654/B 682). (3) If a principle is a necessary condition of the real possibility of empirical concepts and

experience, it is constitutive of empirical concepts and experience. (4) No principle is both regulative and constitutive. !Commentators usually solve this problem either by downplaying claim (2) or by implicitly

denying claim (3). On the one hand, Paul Guyer, Rolf-Peter Horstmann, and Mark Pickering,

contend that in the first Critique the necessary conditions of the possibility of experience are

fully enumerated in the Transcendental Analytic and that the principle of systematicity is an

independent demand of reason playing a merely heuristic role. The main challenge to this 73

See, e.g., Guyer (1990): “…there is no function indispensable for the understanding’s 73

successful accomplishment of its own tasks which cannot be performed without the postulation of systematicity” (31). See also Horstmann (2013): “Kant himself indicates what the role of the principle of purposiveness within the framework of the first Critique should be: it should be taken to be a useful but by no means objectivity grounding maxim of reason” (89). McLaughlin (2014) might also fall into this camp, for instance when he writes that “there is no ‘true conflict’ between the principles [sc. of reason] themselves since they only express different interests of reason” (566).

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deflationary view is of course those passages suggestive of (2). The tendency of the deflationary

account to dismiss such passages as anomalies is certainly unsatisfactory. 74

!On the other hand, Henry Allison, Hannah Ginsborg, Ido Geiger and several others have 75

emphasized precisely those passages which suggest (2) and argue on different grounds that

systematicity is a necessary condition for empirical concept formation. On account of this role,

they then usually admit the further point that systematicity is necessary for experience. 76

Such a tendency comes across when Guyer (1990) 30 says that reason operates in its own 74

interest, rather than that of the understanding, contrary to what these passages suggest, and when he says that “systematicity is an interest of reason but not necessary for any coherent use of the understanding” (32). Guyer’s view of this matter is ultimately nuanced, because he acknowledges the ambivalence in the Appendix between treating systematicity as a dispensable desideratum of reason and as a necessary condition of experience. He does think that by the time of the third Critique Kant had developed the view that systematicity (or purposiveness as Kant there calls it) is a necessary condition of empirical concept formation and the discovery of particular empirical laws (cf. Guyer [1990] 41 and Guyer [2003]). However, in the first Critique, Guyer clearly thinks Kant wanted to avoid this position and views Kant’s statements to the contrary as out of place (cf. Guyer [1990] 34).

Ginsborg (2017) focuses her discussion on purposiveness in the third Critique, since she takes 75

that notion to be more basic than that of systematicity. Nevertheless, she takes a regulative principle to be necessary for empirical concept formation. Others I would group in this camp are: Abela (2002), Godlove (2013), Goldberg (2004), Rajiva (2006), Teufel (2017), and Wartenberg (1979). Each of these commentators maintains the indispensability of the principle of systematicity for experience on different grounds. Kraus (2018) fn. 12 mentions in passing that her view supports the position that the presupposition of systematicity is necessary for scientific cognition, as opposed to being an entirely optional guideline for science. However, it is unclear if she also supports the stronger position that systematicity is necessary for experience (cognition) in general. As we shall see below, the distinction between ordinary experience and scientific experience is an important one.

Cf., e.g., Allison (2000) who says: “given Kant’s equation of experience with empirical 76

knowledge, it follows from this that systematicity must in some sense be regarded as a necessary condition of the possibility of experience” (82).

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However, this robust style of interpretation involves rejecting claim (3) and, as I have shown

above, we have good reason to think that Kant accepts (3). 77

!As I am about to argue, we can acknowledge the role of systematicity in empirical concepts and,

indeed, experience, along with the relevant passages deflationary accounts tend to ignore,

without embracing the robust account, if we import the understanding of the regulative/

constitutive distinction I have suggested above into the Appendix. In particular, the position that

what is regulative in one domain can serve a constituting function in another gives us room to

maintain that our application of the principle of systematicity is a merely heuristic aid relative to

the notion of experience the Analytic is concerned with, while acknowledging that it plays a

necessary role for the scientific ordering of empirical concepts and natural laws into a hierarchy.

In other words, I propose rejecting (4), which is allowed by Kant’s relativization of the

regulative/constitutive distinction to specific domains, in order to solve the interpretive puzzle

above. The main onus on my interpretation will be in spelling out the notion of experience,

This is by no means the only problem that afflicts the robust interpretation of systematicity in 77

the first Critique. Godlove (2013) 137 points out the robust interpretation may undermine the regulative/constitutive distinction, while Goldberg (2004) 409 fears it threatens Kant’s solution to the Antinomies which requires a clear distinction between the regulative and the constitutive. Rush (2000) 855 points out that the doctrine of affinity in the A-deduction seems to supply resources for the understanding alone to form empirical concepts without systematicity’s aid. However, the main problem to my mind is the idea that, if systematicity is a necessary condition on experience, the unity of experience in the Analytic itself turns out to be a regulative ideal. This is because the principle of systematicity is undeniably regulative and, hence, in some sense indeterminate. Assuming that something is only as strong as its weakest necessary condition, experience would then itself be regulative and indeterminate, a result which would threaten Kant’s view that the categories make experience determinate in form and, ultimately, his position that the unity of apperception is a priori certain. This is simply the problem of the regulative which I set up in the previous chapter. Guyer (1990) 19 expresses a similar worry but does not develop it in detail.

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distinct from that involved in the Analytic, for whose possibility systematicity serves as a

necessary condition. Kant himself distinguishes between these two types of experience at A 832/

B 860 when he says “systematic unity is that which first makes ordinary cognition into science”.

The type of experience relative to which systematicity is merely regulative and with which the

Analytic is concerned is that of “ordinary cognition”. Following Kant, I will argue that the sort of

experience relative to which systematicity plays a necessary constitutive role is scientific

experience.

!2.2 Two Notions of Experience

Two notions of experience in Kant have been famously identified by Gerd Buchdahl. By way of

making my own position clear, it will be helpful to have Buchdahl’s view in mind. While my

account shares some features with Buchdahl’s, there are significant differences. Buchdahl finds

in Kant a distinction between “nature” and the “order of nature”. By the former, Buchdahl

understands “the aggregate of individual things or sequential events” governed by the 78

principles of the understanding alone, while by the latter, he means “a term denoting those

complex natural processes treated in the theories of science as coherent systems of empirical

laws”. In other words, by “nature” Buchdahl has in mind particular objects, states of affairs, 79

and sequences of events which, although they conform to the categories of the understanding, do

not exhibit the lawlikeness characteristic of empirical laws. To confer the requisite lawlikeness

on sequences of otherwise mere constant conjunctions, Buchdahl maintains that reason’s

Buchdahl (1967) 210; cf. Buchdahl (1969) 49978

ibid. 79

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principle of systematicity is needed. As he says, “It is one of Kant’s basic assumptions that we

stand in need of systematic experience, and not just ‘experience’ simply (corresponding to the

conceptions of ‘order of nature’ as contrasted with mere ‘nature’) in order to make good this

notion of lawlikeness”. According to Buchdahl, then, Kant recognizes a distinction between a 80

notion of experience of merely “singular objective happenings” and a notion of systematic

experience of a “relationship between a series of events, processes, laws”. Importantly, 81

Buchdahl does not believe that the understanding alone yields cognition of particular empirical

laws. Reason and its principle of systmaticity are required to view constant conjunctions as

instantiations of particular empirical laws and, hence, to give rise to what Buchdahl calls

systematic experience of an “order of nature”. 82

!While Kant does, or so I will argue, recognize a similar distinction, Buchdahl does not draw the

distinction in the right place. As I mentioned above, commentators who view the regulative 83

principle of systematicity as a necessary condition of empirical concept formation and, relatedly,

Buchdahl (1969) 502-380

Buchdahl (1969) 503 fn. 1; see also Buchdahl (1967) 213 for this distinction between two 81

notions of experience.

See also Friedman (2001) 235 for a discussion and criticism of Buchdahl’s distinction between 82

two types of experience. Friedman is concerned not to separate everyday experience from systematic or scientific experience in the way Buchdahl does, because Friedman maintains that objectively valid human experience relies on a priori laws of pure natural science. As far as I can see, the issue of the two notions of experience I am interested in here is orthogonal to Friedman’s concern, because what I call scientific experience below deals with justifying our knowledge of contingent empirical laws, rather than securing the laws of pure natural science that are in fact instantiated.

See fn. 3083

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of the discovery of particular empirical laws, tend to take the further step of identifying it as a

necessary condition of experience in general. Not only does this result conflict with Kant’s

understanding of the regulative/constitutive distinction, but it would also threaten to erase that

distinction altogether. In what follows, then, I argue that Kant recognizes a distinction between

two notions of experience which does not face these difficulties. In particular, I will argue that,

according to Kant, the understanding itself yields a type of experience rich enough to provide for

the formation of empirical concepts and the postulation of particular empirical laws. It is only

when such putative empirical laws are tested in a scientific context that reason’s principle of

systematicity is needed. I distinguish, then, between a conception of ordinary experience, which

is richer than Buchdahl’s thin notion of experience of nature, and a conception of scientific

experience, which outstrips Buchdahl’s notion of experience of an order of nature.

!We should first isolate a general notion of experience at play in the Analytic. This is the notion of

an experience governed and constituted by the a priori categories of the understanding in the

form of the principles of the understanding. It is in this experience that empirical objects are

presented to us and unified with other empirical objects which interact with them in causal

relations. Furthermore, corresponding with this notion of experience, is the notion of an 84

empirical concept under which particular objects encountered in such an experience are

subsumed. I argue that it is relative to these notions of experience and empirical concepts that our

application of the principle of systematicity is regulative, serving merely to order these empirical

That Kant recognizes such a notion of experience is evident from the First Introduction to the 84

third Critique at 20:208-9

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concepts into a hierarchical system and not to determine their content or any ontological features

of objects of experience in any way.

!Kant maintains in the Jäsche Logic that empirical concepts can be formed without the

presupposition of systematicity, but merely through the comparison of and reflection and

abstraction on objects of experience delivered through intuition. To use Kant’s example from 85

the Logic, when we are presented with distinct varieties of tree, for instance a spruce, willow, and

linden, we can form the more general concept <tree> in three stages. First, we compare the three

objects and note their differences, e.g. in trunk, branches, and leaves. Second, we reflect on their

similarities, e.g. that they all have trunks, branches, and leaves. Finally, third, we abstract away

from the particular features of each tree to arrive at a more general concept that subsumes each

particular instance. What is important here is that Kant thinks empirical concepts can be formed

in this way as a matter of what he calls the “three logical operations of the understanding”. No 86

mention here is made of the role of reason and its principle of systematicity. The upshot is that,

Cf. JL 9:92; Although the provenance of the Jäsche Logic is notoriously suspect, it is clear that 85

its account of empirical concept formation as involving comparison, reflection, and abstraction is Kantian, since Kant calls these three operations of the understanding the “logical origin of concepts” in Reflexion 2876 (16:555), dated to 1776-1783. Moreover, a similar discussion appears in the Wiener Logic at 24:905, based on notes dating to the early 1780s. I discuss these issues in greater detail in the next chapter.

JL 9:94-586

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contra Buchdahl, systematicity is a necessary condition of the possibility of neither empirical

concept formation nor the experience on the basis of which such concepts are formed. 87

!However, we can identify another sense of experience which goes beyond the minimal regularity

secured by the categories and required to form empirical concepts. This involves the ordering of

empirical concepts and putative laws of nature into a single hierarchical system according to the

principle of systematicity. Importantly, this is a regulative ideal considered in relation to the

notion of experience with which the Analytic is concerned, because that notion does not require

that nature actually be systematic in the sense that it can be described by a single hierarchy of

laws leading to one fundamental law. Nature, as far as the Analytic is concerned, might well fall

short of systematicity in that sense while still displaying the minimal regularity required by the

categories and empirical concept formation.

!However, if we think that scientific practice requires that we have some justification for thinking

that the putative natural laws we have identified are not mere regularities but have the necessity

required to support counterfactual inferences, then our ordering of laws according to the

principle of systematicity can be seen as necessary for the possibility of such a scientific practice,

It should be noted that Buchdahl treats primarily of the role that systematicity might play vis-87

a-vis empirical laws. However, this is an oversight on his part, because, as I discuss in the next chapter, there is a tight connection between empirical laws and empirical concepts. Providing the details of how Kant thinks the understanding alone forms empirical concepts is a task that I undertake in the next chapter.

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and hence constitutive of it. This is because only the position of hypothesized empirical laws in 88

a system, with more specific laws derivable from more general laws, justifies our taking

observed regularities as exhibiting genuine necessity, even though such a system is always only

regulative relative to the mechanisms by which we postulate such laws in the first place. That is,

although the system of laws demanded by the principle of systematicity is always subject to

revision and reaches completion only asymptotically, organizing regularities into such a system

is required for us to justify their status as genuine causal laws rather than mere regularities and

the principle of systematicity can be seen as constitutive of any practice which requires such

justification based on what is sometimes called in the philosophy of science a consilience of

inductions. Such practices include the use of the hypothetico-deductive model of empirical 89

investigation which involves the testing of hypotheses formed on the assumption that the

hypothesized natural law is counterfactually sustaining. Here, what I have in mind is the use 90

made of empirical concepts, formed solely by the understanding on the model indicated in the

Logic, in scientific contexts which require that empirical concepts and laws have

counterfactually sustaining force.

Of course, we form counterfactuals on the basis of everyday experience and, on my view, with 88

the understanding alone, without considering such experience distinctively scientific. The point is that, without the sort of experience the principle of systematicity allows for, we can never justify the lawlikeness of these counterfactuals.

See, e.g., Kitcher (1986) 221, Guyer (1990) 41, Guyer (2008) 117, and Guyer (2017) 5989

Cf. Rohlf (2014) 165 for a similar suggestion. However, his account faces problems mine 90

avoids. Rohlf does not make use of the relativization of the regulative/constitutive distinction to explain what Kant means by saying systematicity is necessary for experience. As a result, he takes Kant to be engaged in mere “wordplay” in such passages, and to be suggesting that systematicity is necessary for “extending our experience by doing empirical science”. By contrast, I attempt to spell out in more detail what Kant means by a special scientific experience.

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!Of course, according to Kant, the everyday experience whose conditions are outlined in the

Analytic requires us to think of objects as causally determined and governed by necessities.

Moreover, as Kant’s account in the Jäsche Logic indicates, we can form empirical concepts and,

relatedly, hypothesize particular regularities as instantiating causal laws on the basis of the

operations of the understanding alone. Therefore, we can think of there being necessary

connections in nature without any appeal to systematicity. However, once our practices require

us to justify our attribution of necessity to particular regularities through, for instance, the

hypothetico-deductive method, organizing putative laws into a system becomes necessary,

because genuine causal laws are derivable from more general laws and themselves imply more

specific ones. The failure of a putative law to fit into such a system indicates that it does not

exhibit genuine necessity.

!It is to such a notion of scientific experience that I submit Kant refers when he says that

systematicity is a necessary condition of the possibility of experience. By saying that 91

systematicity is required for the “coherent use of the understanding”, then, he has in mind

understanding’s use in predicting the behavior of the natural world on the assumption that the

putative laws and concepts it has discovered carve nature at its joints. Without the presupposition

of systematicity, this use of the understanding would be incoherent, since it is making claims

Some commentators have alluded in passing to such experience, without developing it as 91

clearly as I hope I do here. Thus, we find McLaughlin (2014) 557 state that regulative principles such as systematicity are “not considered by Kant to be constitutive of the objects of experience, even if [they] might be a condition of the possibility of actual scientific experience” (emphasis added).

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about what lies beyond its expertise. It is relative to this use of the understanding that the

principle of systematicity serves a constitutive function by acting as a necessary condition.

!As I already mentioned, Kant himself clearly articulates the division between everyday and

scientific experience which I have argued a proper understanding of his regulative/constitutive

distinction requires, when he says at A 832/B 860 that “systematic unity is that which first makes

ordinary cognition into science”. According to my proposal, by “ordinary cognition” Kant has in

mind the type of experience secured by the principles outlined in the Analytic, while his

reference to science is shorthand for the sort of scientific experience I have just described.

However, might there be some textual evidence which puts pressure on the idea that there is a

neat distinction between ordinary experience and scientific experience? Kant’s use of what

appear to be scientifically informed examples in several key places might appear at first glance

to suggest that, according to Kant, the scientific and the everyday are more closely connected

than my picture of Kant suggests.

!In the Analytic, where according to the interpretation I have put forward Kant is most concerned

with ordinary cognition, he employs several examples which might suggest that ordinary and

scientific experience are continuous, rather than distinct from one another. In §26 of the

Transcendental Deduction at B 162, for example, Kant explains that the category of cause,

applied to sensibility, is necessary to determine temporal relations of states of objects and, so, to

apprehend events. In this context, Kant says, “If… I perceive the freezing of water, I apprehend

two states (of fluidity and solidity) as ones standing in a relation of time to each other”. This

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illustration is similar to Kant’s famous example of the ship sailing downstream in the Second

Analogy at A 192/B 237, where Kant is arguing that the general causal principle that all events

have a cause is a necessary condition of the possibility of experience. These two examples, of

freezing water and a ship sailing downstream, are clearly cases of natural phenomena governed

by particular natural laws. So, it might seem as if scientific knowledge of such laws is part and

parcel of the ordinary experience secured by the categories of the understanding. If so, perhaps

ordinary experience and scientific experience are continuous on Kant’s view.

!In response to this, recall that, on the view I have sketched above, the principles of the

understanding are alone sufficient to secure ordinary experience. Importantly, it is on the basis of

such experience that we can form empirical concepts and postulate particular empirical

regularities as instantiating natural laws through the process of induction. It is for this reason that

the examples mentioned above are best viewed as pieces of everyday knowledge arrived at

without the aid of reason’s principle of systematicity. It is only when we attempt to systematize

such knowledge, perhaps with the end of justifying our taking certain regularities as natural laws,

that systematicity comes into play. A consequence of this interpretation of Kant is that full

knowledge of particular necessary connections in nature is not required for ordinary

experience. Knowledge of particular natural laws, according to Kant, is attained through 92

It should be noted in this context that the issue I am interested in, namely whether the principle 92

of systematicity is necessary for the discovery of natural laws and formation of empirical concepts is, strictly speaking, orthogonal to the issue of whether, according to Kant, knowledge of particular natural laws is possible. If one follows, e.g., Kreines (2008) and holds that knowledge of such laws is not possible, then the question I am interested in simply becomes whether systematicity is necessary for postulating particular empirical regularities as natural laws.

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inductive practices and, as Hume taught us, is always subject to revision. This is true even at the

level of scientific experience where a systematized hierarchy of postulated natural laws gives us

evidence that these hypothesized natural laws obtain without securing certain knowledge of that

fact. After all, any systematic hierarchy of natural laws we might arrive at is itself subject to

revision.

!The examples Kant gives in the Analytic stand in contrast to those he provides in the Appendix

to the Dialectic where, as I maintain, his interest is in a more precise notion of scientific

knowledge. Take, for instance, Kant’s illustration of how we apply the regulative principles of

continuity and homogeneity in the course of seeking explanations even for unobserved

phenomena. Kant draws on the case of our explaining the movements of the planets based on a

continuity of elliptical paths approximating the circle:

…if, e.g., the course of the planets is given to us as circular through a (still not fully corrected) experience, and we find variations, then we suppose these variations to consist in an orbit that can deviate from the circle through each of an infinity of intermediate degrees according to constant laws; i.e., we suppose that the movements of the planets that are not a circle will more or less approximate to its properties, and then we come upon the ellipse. The comets show an even greater variety in their paths, since (as far as observation reaches) they do not ever return in a circle; yet we guess at a parabolic course for them, since it is still akin to the ellipse… (A 662/B 690) !

Kant’s description here of an attempt to unite natural phenomena, even those such as the paths of

comets which go beyond our immediate observation, as a continuity of species (ellipses

deviating from the circle in varying degrees) falling under a single genus (the circle), indicates

that the principle of systematicity in its various forms concerns a type of experience far removed

from our ordinary everyday experiences of observing water freezing and ships moving

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downstream. That Kant is concerned in the Appendix with the sort of experience more

characteristic of scientific investigation than everyday life is evident a few pages later when he

discusses the possibility that one reasoner might put more weight on one version of the principle

of systematicity than on another:

In this way the interest in manifoldness (in accordance with the principle of specification) might hold more for this sophistical reasoner (Vernünftler), while unity (in accordance with the principle of aggregation) holds more for that one… If I see insightful men (einsehende Männer) in conflict with one another over the characteristics of human beings, animals or plants, or even bodies in the mineral realm, where some, e.g., assume particular characters of peoples based on their descent or on decisive and hereditary distinctions between families, races, etc., while others, by contrast, fix their minds on the thought that nature has set up no predispositions at all in this matter, and that all differences rest only on external contingency, then I need only consider the constitution of the object in order to comprehend that it lies too deeply hidden for either of them to be able to speak from an insight into the nature of the object. There is nothing here but the twofold interest of reason… (A 666-7/ B 694-5). !

Kant’s chief point here, namely that the principles of reason have merely subjective force, rather

than constituting objects of experience, is important. However, what I am now interested in is

Kant’s characterization of the activity in which the “reasoners” and “insightful men” are

engaged. They are classifying human beings, fauna, flora, and minerals based on their various

properties. This sort of activity, for which reason’s principle of systematicity is necessary, goes

beyond the sort of experience involved in observing water freezing and ships floating

downstream and making inductive inferences based on such observations.

!There are further passages in which Kant suggests the sort of picture for which I have been

arguing. The key passage for unlocking what Kant means when he says that systematicity is a

necessary condition for the “coherent use of the understanding” is A 647/B 675. Here, when

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discussing the hypothetical use of reason which assumes systematicity for explanatory purposes,

Kant says,

The hypothetical use of reason is therefore directed at the systematic unity of the understanding’s cognitions, which, however, is the touchstone of truth for its rules. Conversely, systematic unity (as mere idea) is only a projected unity, which one must regard not as given in itself, but only as a problem; this unity, however, helps to find a principle for the manifold and particular uses of the understanding, thereby guiding it even in those cases that are not given and making it coherently connected (zusammenhängend) (A 647/B 675, italics added). !!

Several points here are important. First, the systematic unity of nature, Kant says, is a projected

unity, meaning that it deals with “those cases that are not given” and, hence, is subject to

revision. That is what makes it a problematic unity. Second, systematic unity makes the

understanding’s function of producing scientific explanations “coherently connected”, just as

Kant claims it does in the famous passage from A 651/B 679 (which uses the same German word

for “coherent” (zusammenhängend)), because it allows for the assumption that the understanding

will succeed or has warrant in this activity. Third, Kant makes mention here of the “manifold and

particular uses of the understanding”. One use, as I have already discussed, is the

understanding’s formation of empirical concepts based on experience. However, the

understanding has the further use of employing these empirical concepts in scientific contexts

with the aid of reason’s principle of systematicity.

!Finally, I want to end by mentioning a passage in which Kant himself recognizes the difficulties

we have just been considering. What is interesting about the passage, apart from this recognition,

is that Kant says that the principles of reason have “objective but indeterminate validity”:

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What is strange about these principles, and what alone concerns us, is this: that they seem to be transcendental, and even though they contain mere ideas to be followed in the empirical use of reason, which reason can follow only asymptotically, as it were, i.e., merely by approximation, without ever reaching them, yet these principles, as synthetic a priori, nevertheless have objective but indeterminate validity, and serve as a rule of possible experience, and can even be used with good success, as heuristic principles, in actually elaborating it (A 663/B 691). !

Kant recognizes the tensions in his characterizations of these principles. As I have been arguing,

the principles cannot have objective validity in the sense of determining and, therefore, applying

to objects of experience (although we must presuppose that this is the case). Rather, Kant says

that they have objective validity which is, nevertheless, indeterminate. I submit that my

understanding of these passages makes sense of this phrase, because, as I have suggested,

systematicity allows us to use concepts which, since derived from experience of objects, do have

objective validity, in the testing of hypotheses in scientific contexts. However, it is because it

makes claims about nature as a whole that our systematic ordering of concepts is indeterminate

and subject to revision. To the extent that scientific experience relies on the assumption that our

empirical laws and concepts fit into a single hierarchy, the principle of systematicity serves as a

necessary condition. However, it does this without constituting any objects we actually encounter

in the course of experience.

!This also indicates that, for Kant, there is more than one way for something to serve as a

necessary constitutive condition of something else. In some cases, x is constitutive of y because

the truth of x is a necessary condition for the possibility of y. This is so in the case of the

principles of the understanding, since it is a necessary condition for the possibility of experience

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that such principles truly describe experience. However, in the Appendix, it is not the actual

conformity of nature to the principle of systematicity which is a necessary condition of the

possibility of the sort of scientific experience I have described, but rather our assumption that the

principle does accurately describe nature. Without this assumption, the scientific practice I have

described would not be possible, or so Kant maintains.

!Conclusion

In this chapter, I hope to have shed light on Kant’s famous regulative/constitutive distinction and,

in so doing, to have solved some exegetical difficulties encountered in the Appendix. As I argued

in the first section, Kant holds that a principle is constitutive of y iff it is a necessary condition of

the real possibility of y. A principle is at best merely regulative, on the other hand, if it serves to

order the objects of some domain themselves constituted by other principles. Furthermore, as

Kant himself makes clear in the Appendix, the regulative/constitutive distinction is always

relativized to a certain domain. This shows that commentators who hold that the principle of

systematicity is a necessary condition of experience in general cannot also preserve the

regulative status which Kant clearly attributes to it.

!In the second section, I discussed how Kant can call the principle of systematicity a necessary

condition of experience, its regulative status notwithstanding. I argue that Kant is operating with

two distinct notions of experience: the notion of experience with which the Analytic is concerned

and in regard to which systematicity is merely regulative and a notion of scientific experience for

which systematicity serves as a necessary condition and, hence, constitutes. I suggest that

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scientific experience involves viewing natural laws discovered by the understanding alone as

necessary and, hence, as counterfactually sustaining. Commentators such as Kitcher and Guyer

who suggest a similar role for systematicity fail to make use of Kant’s relativization of the

regulative/constitutive distinction to explain the passages in the Appendix which say that

systematicity is a necessary condition of experience. As a result, they do not consider the

possibility that here Kant is not referring to experience in the sense in which the Analytic is

concerned with it, but to the special sort of experience of nature as a unified system distinctive of

scientific investigation. Consequently, it still remains a puzzle on their view how a merely

regulative principle can serve as a necessary condition for experience. By contrast, I hope to

have shown how the principle of systematicity can serve as constitutive of scientific experience,

even while being an independent demand of reason relative to experience in the sense in which

the Analytic is concerned with it.

!!!!!!!!!!

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CHAPTER 3: Empirical Concepts without Reason !!Introduction !As we saw in the previous chapter, many interpreters of Kant’s theoretical philosophy are 93

tempted by the idea that the regulative principle of systematicity is a necessary condition of the

possibility of empirical concept formation and of the discovery of particular empirical laws. 94

Once this is conceded, it is a short step to the conclusion that systematicity is also a necessary

E.g. Allison (2000, 2001), Anderson (2015), Ginsborg (2006, 2017) and Guyer (1990, 2008, 93

2017).

The relation between empirical concepts and particular natural laws will be discussed below. 94

For now, note that if the application of a principle is necessary to account for one, its application will also be necessary to account for the other. Also, as I noted in the previous chapter, talk of whether the principle of systematicity is a necessary condition of concept formation or experience is ambiguous between two claims: either it can mean its truth is necessary, in the sense that the principle must accurately describe the way nature is, or it can mean its application by us, i.e. human cognizers, is necessary, whether or not it truly describes nature. It is the application of the principle in the second sense which is the topic of scholarly debate in the context of Kant. Therefore, when I speak of the principle’s being necessary in this dissertation, I mean the application of the principle by human cognizers.

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condition of the possibility of experience, leading to the problem of the regulative as developed

in Chapter 1. 95

!However, given the results of Chapter 2, it is clear that such temptations must be resisted. This is

so, because viewing systematicity as a necessary condition for the possibility of empirical

concept formation or the discovery of natural laws ignores the regulative status of that principle.

As I argued in the previous chapter, Kant holds that x is constitutive of y iff x is a necessary

condition of the real possibility of y. I argued that such an understanding of what it is for a

principle to be constitutive is the best way to give a univocal account of Kant’s regulative/

constitutive distinction. Without adopting my proposal, one would have to maintain that Kant

employs this distinction inconsistently, thereby jeopardizing the important uses to which Kant

puts it, in particular as a tool to resolve the Antinomies and as a method for distinguishing the

contributions of the understanding from those of reason. Since Kant holds that necessity for real

Allison (2001) provides a prime example of this move. He attempts to argue that even for the 95

Kant of the first Critique all theoretical judgments, including ordinary judgments of experience, require “moments” of both reflection and determination, in the third Critique sense of the reflecting and determining powers of judgment. He does this by arguing that the formation of empirical concepts and the discovery of empirical laws require the regulative ordering of such concepts and laws: “It would be a mistake… to regard such an ordering merely as a kind of supplemental requirement or desideratum, rather than as a necessary condition of the possibility of the concepts themselves” (33). Since such concepts are necessary components of judgments of experience, he concludes that such a regulative ordering is necessary for experience, understood as a collection of judgments of experience, itself: “it follows that the quest for the conditions of the possibility of empirical concepts and for the systematic organization of empirical laws are best seen as two poles of a quest for the conditions of the empirical knowledge of nature qua empirical, or equivalently, for judgments of experience” (31). In this chapter, I confine my attention to the first Critique, so I am not challenging this as a picture of what may be happening in the third Critique. I argue only that there is no reason to read such a picture into the earlier first Critique, as many do.

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possibility implies constitutivity and since the regulative/constitutive distinction is mutually

exclusive, it follows that no merely regulative principle of reason can play the necessary role in

empirical concept formation that some commentators have attributed to systematicity. Moreover,

it is not promising to maintain in response to this that the principle of systematicity is necessary

for the possibility of, and therefore constitutive of, empirical concepts and natural laws, but

merely regulative relative to experience. This is for several reasons. First, as several

commentators hold, if systematicity were necessary for the possibility of the formation of 96

empirical concepts, then it would be precisely that fact which would explain why it is necessary

for the possibility of experience. Second, Kant himself plainly rejects this line of thought by

saying “principles of pure reason… cannot be constitutive even in regard to empirical

concepts” (A 664/B 692).

!Nevertheless, scholars have been tempted to appeal to the application of reason’s regulative

principle of systematicity, or some version of it, in order to make sense of Kant’s theory of

empirical concept formation. Without attributing to systematicity a central role in empirical

concept formation, these scholars worry that Kant’s account of how such concepts are formed

faces insuperable difficulties. Given the results I argue for in the previous chapter, the burden is

on me to provide an adequate account of Kant’s theory of empirical concept formation without

the aid of reason’s principle of systematicity.

!

See previous footnote.96

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In the literature on this topic, commentators tend to focus on two distinct issues which are not

always clearly separated. The first issue is whether the account of empirical concept formation

presented in the Jäsche Logic is coherent. As we shall see, there are reasons to suspect that the

Jäsche Logic account involves a circularity, in that on the view it presents possession of the

target concept (the concept supposedly under formation) might be presupposed as a condition of

its formation. The second, distinct, issue is whether empirical concept formation in general

requires the application of the principle of systematicity. These two issues often come together,

because appeal to the necessary application of systematicty is one way in which commentators

have attempted to avoid the problem of circularity. However, other commentators have 97

proposed alternative solutions to the issue of circularity in Kant’s account of empirical concept

formation without relying on regulative principles. Nevertheless, one such interpreter, Lanier 98

Anderson, still appeals to the regulative principle of systematicity as a necessary condition of

empirical concept formation on different grounds. As a result, even if one can avoid the issue of

circularity without relying on systematicity, work still needs to be done to show that

systematicity need not, for other reasons, play a necessary role in concept formation.

!In what follows, then, I argue that, on Kant’s view, the mechanism of empirical concept

formation does not require reason’s principle of systematicity. I will argue that Kant had the

Allison (2001) and Ginsborg (2006) clearly appeal to regulative principles to remedy the 97

supposed issue of circularity in Kant’s account of empirical concept formation. Cf. Allison (2001) 28 and Ginsborg (2006) 48ff. Ginsborg focuses her attention on the third Critique’s regulative principle of purposiveness and appeals to it to provide the “primitive” normativity that she takes to be necessary for empirical concept formation. Cf. also Ginsborg (2017).

Cf. e.g. Anderson (2015) and Rogerson (2015). 98

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resources by the time of the A edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) to provide an

adequate account of empirical concept formation without appeal to the faculty of reason and its

regulative principles. By contrast, in the Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790) evidence is

strong that Kant does find a necessary role for the presupposition of the merely regulative

principle of purposiveness in empirical concept formation. It is no accident that interpreters

seeking to establish the necessity of such principles for experience focus on the later text. On my

view, Kant’s position in the third Critique is significantly different from his account in the first.

In this chapter, I discuss only resources available to Kant prior to the introduction of the principle

of purposiveness in the third Critique. My goal is to show that the Critical philosophy can 99

account for empirical concept formation without appeal to regulative principles, whatever

position Kant might have come to adopt by the time of the composition of the third Critique. If

Kant has the resources to provide such an account, he can avoid the problem of the regulative.

!In Part 1, I discuss the account of empirical concept formation in the Jäsche Logic. I argue that

this text, and others like it, indicate that Kant held that the faculties of the understanding and the

imagination can by themselves yield empirical concepts based on the input from sensibility. In

Part 2, I outline some of the main worries commentators have with Kant’s account of empirical

concept formation and rehearse some motivations they have presented for attributing a necessary

role to reason’s principle of systematicity in empirical concept formation. In Part 3, I argue that,

these worries notwithstanding, systematicity is not necessary for empirical concept formation. To

this end, I show that Kant distinguishes between two types of natural order. On the one hand,

See Chapter 4 for a discussion of Kant’s position in the third Critique. 99

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there is natural uniformity, necessary and sufficient for empirical concept formation and the

discovery of particular natural laws. On the other, there is the systematicity of the Appendix to

the Dialectic, an ordering of our concepts and laws which requires natural uniformity but which

is itself a more demanding notion of natural order than is needed for empirical concept

formation. In the Analytic, Kant argues that the former natural order, the natural uniformity

sufficient for empirical concepts, is imposed by the understanding and its principles on

experience. This shows that the understanding alone is sufficient for the formation of empirical

concepts.

!1 The Three Logical Operations of the Understanding

The account of empirical concept formation in the Jäsche Logic is the most clear discussion of

this topic in Kant’s corpus and, as a result, has attracted the attention of interpreters. Most

commentators take Jäsche Logic 9:93-5 to deal in some way with empirical concepts. This 100

passage appears to discuss the mechanism for empirical concept formation and the theory it

offers seems notably to rely only on the operations of the understanding and not to require any

contribution from reason. Kant presents the process of empirical concept formation as involving

what he calls the three logical operations of the understanding: comparison, reflection, and

abstraction. When distinct particular representations are presented to one, one first compares

them to note their differences. Then, one reflects on what features they have in common with one

E.g. Allison (2001), Anderson (2015), Ginsborg (2006), Longuenesse (1998), Pippin (1982), 100

Rogerson (2015) all take the passage to deal with empirical concepts in some way. Aquila (1974) includes an interesting discussion of what empirical concepts are, namely “the contents of possible intuitions” (9), but does not address the topic of how such concepts are formed, which is what I am here interested in.

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another. Finally, one abstracts away from the unessential differences between these features, for

instance from the particular quality and quantity of the features they share. Abstracting away

from these particular differences allows one to form a concept with the form of universality, i.e. a

concept which applies to several objects. As Kant says, “The logical actus of the 101

understanding, through which concepts are generated as to their form, are: 1. comparison of

representations among one another in relation to the unity of consciousness; 2. reflection as to

how various representations can be conceived in one consciousness; and finally 3. abstraction of

everything else in which the given representations differ” (9:94). Kant then supplements this

general description with a concrete example of how this process takes place:

To make concepts out of representations one must thus be able to compare, to reflect, and to abstract, for these three logical operations of the understanding are the essential and universal conditions for generation of every concept whatsoever. I see, e.g., a spruce, a willow, and a linden. By first comparing these objects with one another I note that they are different from one another in regard to the trunk, the branches, the leaves, etc.; but next I reflect on that which they have in common among themselves, trunk, branches, and leaves themselves, and I abstract from the quantity, the figure, etc., of these; thus I acquire a concept of a tree (9:94-5). !

What is striking about this account is how austere the resources enlisted for empirical concept

formation appear to be. Indeed, it appears similar to standard empiricist accounts of concept

formation, relying on a disposition to associate representations based on perceived similarities

and to abstract away from their particular differences to form a general concept. However, we

shall soon see that Kant’s account is more nuanced than this comparison suggests. The important

things to note now are that this passage seems to deal with empirical concept formation and that

See JL 9:94101

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it makes no mention of reason or its regulative principles. Moreover, it calls the three logical

operations of the understanding the “essential”, i.e. necessary, conditions for “generation of

every concept whatsoever”.

!One challenge to the view that this passage deals with empirical concept formation comes from

Melissa Merritt. She adduces both philological and philosophical considerations to throw doubt

on such a reading. Philosophically, she argues that the passage is circular when read as an

account of empirical concept formation and she thus takes herself as challenging the “received 102

view” that JL 9:93-5 presents such an account. I will return shortly to the issue of circularity. 103

But first I will briefly address the philological considerations Merritt adduces. I will argue that,

these considerations notwithstanding, we have reason to take the Jäsche Logic passage as

presenting an account of empirical concept formation.

!As is well known, the Jäsche Logic is of suspect provenance. Although published during his 104

lifetime in 1800, Kant himself did not directly compose the text, but rather assigned Gottlob

Benjamin Jäsche the task of editing a volume of logic based partly on Kant’s handwritten notes

contained in a copy of Georg Friedrich Meier’s Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre, a work Kant used

Merritt (2015) 492102

However, Allison (2001) Chap. 1, Longuenesse (1998) 118 and Ginsborg (2006) 40 think that 103

the account given in JL can, as it stands, be only about clarifying concepts we already have, not about their acquisition. Pippin (1982) 113 also makes this point. These commentators too are worried about circularity, an issue I discuss shortly. So, it is unclear to me to what extent the received view is that the passage concerns concept formation.

For a detailed discussion of the philological issues surrounding the text, see Boswell (1988). 104

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in his lectures on logic. These handwritten notes are fragmentary and it would have required

much reconstruction on Jäsche’s part to put them in the form of the present text. Moreover,

Jäsche appears not to have relied solely on Kant’s notes, but also to have made use of notes of

Kant’s lectures transcribed by students, the accuracy of which is uncertain. Given the state of the

text, Merritt argues that we cannot rely on its example of how the three logical acts of the

understanding produce the concept <tree>. 105

!However, Merritt somewhat overstates the case. As she herself notes, the discussion of the

logical actus of the understanding which I quoted above before the example of the trees can be

traced directly to Kant’s own handwritten notes. Published as Reflexion 2876 (16:555), this note

mentions comparison, reflection, and abstraction as the “logical origin of concepts (logischer

Ursprung der Begriffe),” so it seems likely that Kant intended to use these three logical

operations of the understanding to explain concept formation. Moreover, this note has been dated

to ca. 1776-83, so it stems from the period directly before the publication of the first Critique, if

not from a period immediately thereafter. Hence, we should not hesitate to use it as a guide to

Kant’s views on concept formation in the Critical period. But can we use it to explicate his views

of empirical concept formation? The example of the spruce, willow, and linden might suggest so.

But, as Merritt has noted, this example itself cannot be traced to Kant’s own handwritten 106

notes, unlike the discussion of comparison, reflection, and abstraction which immediately

proceeds it. Nevertheless, there is evidence that this is a Kantian example, since a similar

Merritt (2015) 491 105

ibid. 106

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example appears in notes based on Kant’s logic lectures which Jäsche probably consulted,

published as Wiener Logic 24:905. These notes date once again from the Critical period, the early

1780s. There Kant says, “He who sees his first tree does not know what it is that he sees. If he

becomes aware that these objects have something common, then he omits everything they have

that is different, and takes together what they have in common, and thus he has a repraesentatio

communis, i.e., a conceptus”. We clearly have here an example of empirical concept formation

involving the stages of comparison, reflection and abstraction which produce the concept <tree>,

as in the Jäsche Logic.

!With all of this in mind, I think there is good reason to take the Jäsche Logic as representative of

Kant’s considered Critical period view of empirical concept formation, even though we must be

careful with attributing the verbatim text of the Jäsche Logic to Kant himself. Nevertheless, a

further dialectical point should be made in this context, since the above considerations are not

definitive. Most commentators who attribute a necessary role to regulative principles in

empirical concept formation take as their starting point the Jäsche Logic passage. It is the

passage’s perceived philosophical inadequacy, rather than its provenance, which prompts them to

seek further resources to remedy Kant’s account of empirical concept formation. Therefore,

enlisting the passage to argue against such commentators incurs no dialectical cost.

!Hence, Kant’s account of empirical concept formation never adverts to reason and its principles.

Nevertheless, we should not conclude that the understanding is the only mental faculty involved

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in the formation of empirical concepts. Imagination also plays an essential role. This is clear 107

from Kant’s discussion of the “threefold synthesis” in the A edition of the first Critique. Once

again, though, no mention is made of reason or its regulative principles in these passages. I turn

now to consider briefly Kant’s account in this passage.

!In his discussion of the “threefold synthesis”, Kant distinguishes between three levels of

synthesis needed first to produce intuitions out of sensory input, or to apprehend, as he says. The

first level of synthesis is what Kant calls the “synthesis of apprehension in the intuition”. This is

the cognitive synthesis needed for apprehension, the production of intuitions out of sense

impressions. This is necessary because, as Kant says, “every intuition contains a manifold in

itself” (A 99) and a process of synthesis is needed to produce a unity out of a sensory manifold. It

is such a synthesized manifold which is then apprehended as an intuition. 108

!

There’s a notorious question here concerning what exactly the difference is between the 107

understanding and the imagination, sparked by Kant’s comment that “understanding” and “imagination” are two names applied to the same spontaneity (B 162n), but I will not pause to consider this issue.

In my discussion of the threefold synthesis of the imagination, I follow Horstmann (2018) in 108

taking Kant to be endorsing a “two-stage” model of object constitution: First, there is the transition, guided by an act of synthesis of the imagination, from conscious sense impressions, i.e. perceptions, to intuitions, which is what apprehension consists in (see Horstmann [2018] 11). Second, there is the transition from non-conceptual intuitions to representations of objects involving concepts (see op. cit. 27). Therefore, on Horstmann’s view, there is a progression of representations from a manifold of sensory representations to intuitions and finally to conceptual representations of objects. Nothing in my account of empirical concept formation, however, should rest on what precise story one gives of object constitution and the imagination’s role therein.

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The second level, “the synthesis of reproduction in the imagination” involves the imagination’s

reproducing previously apprehended sense impressions in order to form a representation of an 109

object out of distinct apprehensions. Although Kant in the threefold synthesis passage seems

primarily concerned with object constitution, that is, with the operations of the mind responsible

for constituting the representation of an object out of diverse sensory impressions, it seems clear

that the same activity of reproduction which the imagination undertakes to form such a

representation is also involved in the formation of empirical concepts upon the intuition of

different tokens of objects of the same type. It is when the imagination reproduces

representations which it has already encountered that the understanding can then form, via the

three logical acts of the understanding, an empirical concept applying in general to each instance

it has reproduced. For example, it is only after repeated apprehensions of swans with beaks with

serrated edges and the imagination’s recollection of prior apprehensions of such swans that the

understanding can then compare past representations of swans with present ones and reflect on

One might wonder whether the representations which the imagination reproduces at this stage 109

are non-conceptual intuitions produced by the prior stage of synthesis, or whether they are already conceptual representations of objects, albeit indeterminate ones since no empirical concept yet applies to them. One who believes that the categories can apply to objects only via the application of empirical concepts to objects will obviously prefer the first option above. Anderson (2015) 353-5 argues for the second option and, hence, maintains that the threefold synthesis passage does not present a “bottom-up” story beginning with perceptions and ending with concepts, but rather a “top-down” theory, with conceptual synthesis required for imaginative reproduction, which is in turn required for apprehension. Hence, apprehension itself is already conceptual on Anderson’s view. That may seem to conflict with the way I describe the threefold synthesis passage; however, Anderson requires only the a priori concepts of the understanding to be present in this account, whereas my focus is on empirical concepts. I can therefore remain neutral about this issue for the purposes of reconstructing Kant’s theory of empirical concept formation.

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what swans have in common. Such an act of reflection requires imagination’s ability to

reproduce prior representations.

!Of course, more can be said about the details of this account. For now, I want to make the point

that the threefold synthesis passage discusses an operation of the imagination which seems

necessary to account for the formation of empirical concepts: the reproductive power of the

imagination. Taken together with the Jäsche Logic account, then, Kant gives a theory of

empirical concept formation in the period of the first Critique which involves a process of

comparison, reflection, and abstraction on products reproduced by the imagination. Importantly,

Kant makes no mention of reason.

!As mentioned above, Kant’s theory shares similarities with familiar empiricist accounts of

empirical concepts which involve the comparison of particular perceptions and the abstraction

away from their differences to arrive at a general concept. I shall call Kant’s theory that empirical

concepts arise via the three logical operations of the understanding, with the aid of imagination’s

power of reproduction, the basic account. In the next section, I shall discuss some of the common

problems that have been presented for the basic account. We will then be in a position to examine

why recent commentators have thought the regulative principle of systematicity can solve these

difficulties. I will argue that Kant recognizes that the basic account does, indeed, need to be

supplemented. However, Kant’s theory of the understanding provides everything that is

necessary to avoid the problems that have been raised for the basic account. Regulative

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principles are neither necessary nor suited to address the problems of empirical concept

formation.

!2 Problems for the Basic Account

One of the central issues Kant’s account of empirical concept formation in the Jäsche Logic

presents is the threat of circularity. This worry can be presented by focusing on Kant’s example

in the Logic involving the comparison, reflection, and abstraction undertaken to generate the

concept <tree> when presented with a spruce, willow, and a linden. Recall that the act of

reflection plays the most important role in empirical concept formation because, for Kant, it is

what is responsible for noticing similarities among distinct perceptions. In Kant’s example, the

act of reflection is responsible for noticing that the three objects share trunks, branches, and

leaves. However, it is unclear how the understanding could reflect on just these similarities

without a prior grasp of the concepts <trunk>, <branch>, and <leaf>. How, for instance, could

the understanding come to group the leaves of the different tree species together without prior

possession of the concept <leaf> which would articulate what they have in common? It is

unlikely that the understanding would associate the leaves of the three species based on visual

similarity alone. As Anderson points out, the three types of tree chosen by Kant in his example

are in fact visually very dissimilar. Spruces, for instance, are evergreens with needle leaves,

whereas lindens are deciduous trees with broad leaves. So, it seems that Kant’s example in the 110

Logic presupposes the possession of concepts of tree parts in order to form the concept <tree>.

! Anderson (2015) 340110

!108

This point by itself leads at worst to an infinite regress in empirical concepts, not a circularity.

However, the worry about a circularity appears when one asks how the understanding, through

the logical act of reflection, is able to pick out just the similarities among the three specimens it

does, and not some others. Put differently, how is the understanding able to focus on the fact that

the three specimens all have trunks, branches, and leaves in order to form a general concept

<tree> which contains just these features as it marks, rather than the fact that all the specimens

happen to be in Berlin or happen to have been observed on a Tuesday? The very fact that the

understanding is able to focus on the tree-constituting features of shared leaves, trunks, and

branches among the samples, despite their visual dissimilarity, suggests that the understanding

already has possession of the concept <tree> and, on that basis, is able to recognize the three

objects all as instances of trees. It seems, then, that to recognize the relevant similarities among

the samples, possession of the concept <tree> is presupposed, despite the fact that recognition of

those similarities is supposed to explain how the concept <tree> is generated in the first place. If

prior possession of the target concept is needed to notice that, for instance, both the needles of

the spruce and the broad leaves of the linden count as leaves, then we cannot use the

understanding’s recognition of a similarity between the tree parts as a basis for the generation of

the concept <tree>. 111

!The issue of circularity is usually taken by commentators to be the most problematic feature of

Kant’s basic account of empirical concept formation. Indeed, it is this problem which motivates

Many commentators have discussed this problem. See, e.g., Allison (2001) 22, Anderson 111

(2015) 339-342, Ginsborg (2006) 40, Merritt (2015) 492, Newton (2012) 457, Pippin (1982) 113ff., Robinson (2008).

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many commentators either to reject Kant’s example completely or to supplement it with

regulative resources. For example, in addition to the philological issues surrounding the Logic

discussed above, Merritt sites the supposed circularity of the Logic account as a reason to

discount it as providing a theory of empirical concept formation. And Longuenesse devotes 112

much of her discussion of the Logic to attempting to solve the circularity problem. Her proposal

attributes to Kant two senses of “concept”. According to Longuenesse, on the one hand there is

the sense of “concept” which means consciousness of an act of synthesis which makes a whole

out of the sensible manifold. On the other, there is the standard sense of “concept” as a universal

“reflected” representation produced by the acts of comparison, reflection, and abstraction. It is 113

Longuenesse’s introduction of the first sense of “concept” above which is supposed to solve the

circularity worry. This is because, on her view, an empirical concept is a universal reflected

representation. The passage from the Jäsche Logic, then, can be read as describing how we arrive

at such a representation without presupposing its prior possession, as long as we are only

presupposing prior possession of a concept in the first sense above. Longuenesse calls a concept

in this first sense an empirical schema. If such an empirical schema plays a role in synthesizing

the sensory manifold before the acts of comparison, reflection, and abstraction take place, this

could explain how, in forming the empirical concept <tree>, we are able to focus on the salient

similarities among the objects we are comparing. By comparing empirical schemata, we are

merely making explicit a concept which was already involved in synthesizing the manifold.

!

Merritt (2015) 491ff. 112

See Longuenesse (1998) 46-7 113

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The obvious difficulty for this account is to explain the origin of empirical schemata, and it is

clear that Longuenesse’s own explanation is unsatisfactory. Her official answer to this question is

paradoxical: “To compare representations in order to form concepts is therefore to compare

schemata. And to compare schemata, by means of the three joint acts of comparison, reflection,

and abstraction, is first of all to generate these schemata”. So, on this view, the very same act 114

of comparison of schemata which generates empirical concepts also generates the schemata

being compared. How comparing objects can also generate the objects of that same comparison

is left unclear. Despite its opacity, Allison is sympathetic to this account. He interprets 115

Longuenesse as claiming, not that we must have schemata to compare in order to acquire them in

the first place, but rather that within the apprehensions of the mind (e.g. the three appearances of

different trees), there is some universal feature which the mind then converts into a schema and,

finally, into an empirical concept. Once again, it is unclear what the details of this story are 116

supposed to be. Nevertheless, it is patent that such an account will face circularity worries of its

own: an account of empirical concept formation should indicate how we come to have universal

representations on the basis of experience, rather than presupposing that experience gives us such

representations from the beginning. Of particular relevance to my interests here, though, is that

Allison appeals to reason’s principle of systematicity at this point. According to him, applying

the principle of systematicity is a necessary condition of empirical concept formation, because,

when we compare representations to produce a concept capturing their relevant similarities, we

Op. cit. 114

Ginsborg (2006) 41 also makes this point. 115

Allison (2001) 27ff. 116

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must presuppose that observed similarities and differences among appearances correspond to

intrinsic similarities and differences. This is because, were there not this correspondence, the

similarities and differences would not reflect the nature of the objects under consideration and

would, therefore, be irrelevant to classifying those objects as instances of the same kind. As 117

we shall see in the next section, though, the assumption that similarities we observe in objects are

results of their natures far outstrips the requirements of empirical concept formation.

!Ginsborg also addresses the circularity worry by appealing to a regulative principle, in this case

the principle of purposiveness. Instead of explaining our possession of empirical concepts by

way of a prior grasp of a concept, she adduces the basic psychological fact that human beings

tend to sort objects together in certain ways to explain empirical concept formation. We simply

form the empirical concept <tree>, then, based on our disposition to group trees of different

kinds together under a general concept. To explain how this merely psychological phenomenon

brings with it the universality characteristic of concepts, Ginsborg then adds a “normative twist”.

We do not merely associate representations based on some psychological quirk, but we take the

associations we make to be appropriate and, therefore, demand that others sort objects in the

same way we have. It is this primitive normativity which requires that the merely regulative 118

principle of purposiveness be in play. What allows us to take our grouping of objects to be

normatively warranted is that we are making the regulative presupposition that nature is

purposive for our faculty of judging it. So, on Ginsborg’s view, our application of a regulative

Op. Cit. 29117

Ginsborg (2006) 49 118

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principle, in this case the principle of purposiveness, is necessary for the formation of empirical

concepts. 119

!To be sure, there is ample evidence from the third Critique’s discussion of reflecting judgment’s

principle of purposiveness that its application is there held to be a requirement of empirical

concept formation. I will turn to a discussion of the third Critique in Chapter 4. For present 120

purposes, I claim only that reading passages concerning purposiveness back into Kant’s theory of

empirical concept in the first Critique is unwarranted and unnecessary. Not only does talk of

primitive normativity seem foreign to Kant’s theoretical philosophy of the Critical period, but

also, as others have noted, a theory which appeals to a primitive disposition to sort objects in a

normatively adequate way risks lapsing into a theory of innate concepts. That is, Ginsborg’s use

of normatively adequate dispositions to sort our perceptions appears to invoke primitive innate

versions of at least some of our empirical concepts, a result which Kant surely would have

wanted to avoid. 121

!The main difficulty, however, with approaches which appeal to a regulative principle to escape

the circularity worry is that none of them maintains a strict distinction between the regulative and

the constitutive. As I have argued, if a principle is a necessary condition of empirical concepts, it

See also Ginsborg (2017)119

See, e.g., 20:211-13, 5:179-180, 5:183, 5:193120

See Rogerson (2015) 447-8 for such a charge. See Robinson (2008) 203-4 for the argument 121

that Ginsborg’s normatively “appropriate” associations are “implicitly universal” and, hence, involve Ginsborg in a circularity of her own.

!113

is also constitutive of empirical concepts. Not only does Kant deny that this is true in the case of

principles of reason, but such a view also risks making all of experience merely regulative. In 122

other words, it leads directly to the problem of the regulative.

!Thankfully, we need not appeal to regulative resources to address the issue of circularity. Recent

commentators have put forward alternative proposals which do not rely on the principles of

reason. Lanier Anderson and Kenneth Rogerson are two such commentators. The issue of

circularity arises only if the possession of the very empirical concept whose formation we are

trying to explain is presupposed in the account of its origin. A priori concepts can be involved at

the earliest stages of empirical concept formation without any threat of circularity. In particular,

the a priori categories of the understanding are suited for this role, since they are not empirical

concepts and, arguably, do not arise on the basis of experience at all. As a result, such concepts 123

can be presupposed for empirical concept formation without giving rise to circularity. To begin

with, application of the categories is enough to secure the concept of an “object in general” (B

128). This means that categorial synthesis of the manifold of intuition secures the unity among

representational content necessary to represent diverse properties as belonging to a single object.

Put differently, the application of the schematized categories of the understanding, such as

substance and accident, cause and effect, to the manifold of intuition represented through our

pure forms of intuition, is sufficient to allow us to represent an object in space and track its

A 664/B 692122

Moreover, such concepts are not problematically innate, in the way that attributing to the 123

mind a primitive normative disposition to sort empirical objects would be, since they are a priori.

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properties and their changes across time. These abilities are all that is required to represent an

object simpliciter and it is on the basis of representing several such objects that the

understanding can then compare them, reflect on their similarities, and abstract from their

differences on the way to forming an empirical concept. Moreover, as Rogerson has pointed 124

out, it is unnecessary to appeal to a normatively adequate primitive disposition to group objects

in a certain way to explain the generation of empirical concepts. This is because there need not

be one “correct” way to group objects together. Our sorting of objects under the same concept

needs to be responsive to pragmatic concerns and, as our pragmatic concerns change or more

empirical data is collected, it should not be surprising if we revise our concepts accordingly. 125

!But what of the view I call in Chapter 1 [empirical priority] that the categories are applied to

experience only through the application of empirical concepts? If this view is correct, then the 126

above proposal clearly fails. As I discussed in Chapter 1, the problem of the regulative afflicts

views which are committed to the conjunction of two claims: (a) The application of some

Robinson (2008) sets up the supposed difficulty of Kant’s view of empirical concept 124

formation by assuming at the outset that empirical concepts are needed to synthesize a manifold of intuition and, thus, even for an object to be presented in intuition at all. He then asks how empirical concepts can be derived from experience which requires such concepts in the first place and, ultimately, seems to admit that the problem is insoluble. In fact, his version of the problem does not arise at all, because it is a priori concepts, not empirical concepts, which are responsible for the synthesis of intuitions into objects.

See Rogerson (2015) 449 ff. for discussion of these points. Anderson (2015) 356-7 proposes a 125

similar view.

Anderson in fact maintains, following Friedman, that a highest empirical concept, that of 126

<matter>, is needed to supplement this account. On his view, though, such a concept is derivable from categorial synthesis alone (Anderson [2015] 357-61) and, therefore, is compatible with my claims.

!115

regulative principle is a necessary condition of empirical concept formation or the discovery of

particular empirical laws [regulative necessity], and (b) the a priori categories of the

understanding are applied to experience only through empirical concepts and particular empirical

laws [empirical priority]. One need deny only one of these claims to avoid the problem of the

regulative. The project of this dissertation is to reject (a), while remaining neutral on (b). So, in

principle one could maintain (b) and, as a result, reject the proposal suggested by Anderson and

Rogerson, while nevertheless avoiding the problem of the regulative by rejecting (a). By

presenting the proposed solution to the problem of circularity above, I intend only to argue that

this supposed difficulty with Kant’s basic account does not force one to accept the claim that

regulative resources are necessary for empirical concept formation. There are alternative

solutions to this worry which make no use of reason and its principles. I have already discussed

the price of assigning a necessary role to the merely regulative at length. Such a view fails to

maintain a principled distinction between the regulative and the constitutive. An account of

empirical concept formation, therefore, which respects the regulative/constitutive distinction, yet

nevertheless maintains claim (b) above and, therefore, rejects the details of the solution to the

circularity problem sketched is compatible with the main claims of this dissertation. Such an

account, though, has to do without regulative resources.

!As I noted in the introduction to this chapter, the supposed issue of circularity in Kant’s basic

account is independent of the issue of whether regulative principles are necessary for empirical

concept formation. As my discussion in this section has made clear, commentators often use the

circularity worry as a springboard for introducing regulative principles into Kant’s account of

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empirical concepts. Nevertheless, a solution to the circularity worry that does not make use of

the regulative is compatible with the claim that regulative principles still play a necessary role in

empirical concept formation. In fact, Anderson himself holds such a combination of views. On

his view, the application of the schematized categories to a sensible manifold presented by

spatiotemporal forms of intuition, followed by the acts of comparison, reflection, and abstraction

on representations so formed, is not sufficient by itself for empirical concept formation. I agree

that more is needed, namely an empirical order, understood in some sense to be specified.

However, in the next section, I will argue that the type of order offered by systematicity far

outstrips the order necessary for empirical concepts. It is Anderson’s failure to recognize this

point which leads him to enlist the resources of reason on behalf of empirical concept formation.

!3.0 Natural Order and Transcendental Affinity

Recall that Kant specifies the principle of systematicity in the Appendix to the Dialectic under

three headings: homogeneity, specification, and the continuity or affinity of forms. The first

version of this principle states that, for any two given species, reason must seek a higher genus

under which to subsume them. The second version states that, given any two members of some

common species, reason should look for differences between them so that they can be further

divided into subspecies. Finally, the third version states that between any two species reason

should always seek out some further species, so that we might approach asymptotically a

continuum of species. 127

!A 658/B 686127

!117

Even though, as we just saw, the supposed issue of circularity in Kant’s basic account does not

by itself motivate the idea that we should give a necessary role to systematicity in a theory of

empirical concept formation or the discovery of particular empirical laws, there are other

philosophical considerations which might lead one to hold that presupposing that nature

conforms to the demands of systematicity does play such a role. To take the case of empirical

laws, one might suppose that placing a particular empirical law within a genus-species hierarchy

is a precondition for distinguishing laws, i.e. regularities which exhibit genuine necessity, from

mere accidental regularities. The fact that a particular hypothesized empirical law can be seen to

derive from more general laws and to imply more specific ones might allow us to see how our

hypothesized law explains natural phenomena and, thereby, counts as a law. By contrast, the fact

that an accidental regularity such as “Good weather follows stork sightings” does not fit into a 128

hierarchical system of other empirical laws might be enough to indicate to us that it is not a

genuine law of nature. Its failing to fit into such a system indicates that it lacks explanatory

power.

!Furthermore, Kant himself seems to think of empirical laws as expressing necessity, in the sense

that a law tells us that an event of one type must occur given an event of another type. Thus, he

says in the third Critique that “These rules [sc. particular rules of nature]… , [the understanding]

must think as laws (i.e., as necessary), because otherwise they would not constitute an order of

nature, even though it does not and never can cognize their necessity” (5:184). In other words,

Kant holds that for a regularity to attain lawlike status, it must be thought of as expressing a

To use an example Kant himself uses in his Lectures on Metaphysics at 28:549.128

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necessary connection, even though creatures of finite intelligences such as ourselves cannot

cognize the necessity of particular empirical laws, since they always appear to us as contingent

regularities. To remedy this defect on our part, ordering particular hypothesized laws into a

systematic hierarchy might allow us to think of regularities which appear to us as contingent as if

they are necessary, since they are seen to occur in a particular place in a larger inferentially

structured system. In this way, organizing particular putative laws according to the principle of

systematicity might be a necessary condition for seeing what would otherwise appear as

accidental regularities as laws.

!These considerations concerning particular natural laws generalize to empirical concepts. This is

because empirical concepts often involve reference to causal powers. We classify natural kinds,

for instance, at least partly based on what effects they have the powers to produce. The empirical

concept <dog> for instance might involve reference to the capacity to bark. We distinguish

between different species of animal based on capacities such as reproductive strategy,

locomotion, and whether fur or hair is present, all concepts involving causal powers. Moreover,

formulating particular causal laws requires at least the assumption of natural kinds described in

terms of empirical concepts. So, if systematicity were necessary for either particular causal 129

laws or empirical concepts, we could understand why it would be a necessary condition of the

other as well.

!3.1 Systematicity and the Structure of Concepts

See Allison (2001) 31 for a brief discussion of this point.129

!119

We saw in the previous section that Anderson proposes a solution to the circularity worry

supposedly afflicting Kant’s basic account of empirical concept formation without resorting to

regulative principles. Nevertheless, for reasons related to those just discussed, he argues that the

presupposition that nature conforms to the demands of systematicity is required for the formation

of empirical concepts. According to Anderson, this is because the content of any particular

empirical concept, understood as further general concepts which are contained in a concept as its

“marks”, must be inferentially linked with the content of still further empirical concepts. For 130

instance, what explains why the concept <tree> contains the marks <branch> and <leaf> is that

these are distinguishing features of plants in general, and the higher concept <plant> is contained

in the lower concept <tree>, which it is related to as genus to species. So, <branch> and <leaf>

are connected with the concept <tree> because the concept <tree> contains in itself the concept

<plant>, with which <branch> and <leaf> are also connected. It is not, in other words, that these

latter concepts just happen accidentally to be associated with the other marks contained in

<tree>. Anderson’s proposal is that such an inferential relationship among concepts depends on

our organizing concepts according to the principle of systematicity.

!Anderson notes that, on the account just proposed, “all empirical concepts that eventually (in the

limit of theorizing) receive properly scientific form and determinate content must together form a

See Anderson (2015) 358-366. See also op. cit. chapter 2 for a discussion of how Kant 130

understands the contents of empirical concepts. Of importance here is the following relation: a concept is higher than another just in case (i) the lower concept is contained under the higher concept (i.e. falls within its extension) and (ii) the higher concept is contained in the lower concept, as genus to species. The more a concept contains in itself, the less it contains under itself, and vice versa. See op. cit. 56.

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single logical system of concepts”. Anderson takes this to be an advantage of his account of 131

conceptual containment since it conforms with the demands of the regulative principle of

systematicity which Kant outlines in the Appendix. However, while it may be true that on Kant’s

account of empirical concept formation such concepts are amenable to being ordered in a

systematic hierarchy according to the principle of systematicity, that falls short of such a

principle being necessary for the formation of empirical concepts in the first place. Indeed, as

discussed in the previous chapter, the demands of systematicity lead one asymptotically to an

ideal science, where all concepts form a hierarchy leading to a single concept or, in the case of

natural laws, to a single fundamental law. Such an ideal might prove useful in refining concepts

in a scientific context; however, it seems too strong to hold that empirical concepts must be

formed according to such an idealized scientific ordering of concepts in the first place.

!What, then, is Anderson’s argument for supposing that systematicity is a necessary condition for

empirical concept formation? His basic idea is that the inferential structure exhibited by a

hierarchy of genus-species concepts demands that concepts be structured in the way

systematicity suggests. However, the fact that a hierarchical ordering of concepts exhibits an 132

inferential structure does not show the stronger claim that such a hierarchy comes about only if

systematicity in the sense in which the Appendix is concerned with it is presupposed. That is, we

might have a hierarchical ordering of concepts which exhibits an inferential structure but which

was not itself created according to the imperatives to find ever higher genera for species

op. cit. 361131

Anderson (2015) 361132

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concepts, further subspecies within each species, and a further species between any two.

Certainly any hierarchical ordering of concepts we actually have at any time will fall short of the

ideal of systematicity. But, in addition to that, there is no reason to suppose that the ideal is

necessary to establish the ordering in the first place. At best, the ideal should be seen as a

heuristic for extending and refining any hierarchical ordering we already possess.

!Anderson makes a further argument in support of the claim that systematicity is necessary for

concept formation. He appeals to a passage in the Appendix which purports to show that the

logical principle of genera presupposes a transcendental one. That is, the version of the principle

of systematicity which states that for any two species concepts a genus concept applying to them

should be found presupposes that nature itself is actually so structured that such a genus can be

found. As Kant says:

If among the appearances offering themselves to us there were such a great variety—I will not say of form (for they might be similar to one another in that) but of content, i.e., regarding the manifoldness of existing beings—that even the most acute human understanding, through comparison of one with another, could not detect the least similarity (a case which can at least be thought), then the logical law of genera would not obtain at all, no concept of a genus, nor any other universal concept… The logical principle of genera therefore presupposes a transcendental one if it is to be applied to nature (A 653-4/B 681-2, emphasis mine). !

Kant is imagining a case where the objects of nature are so diverse and dissimilar from one

another that the logical principle of genera fails on the grounds that we simply can no longer find

enough similarities to order particular species under a higher genus. Since he thinks that applying

the logical principle of genera would be irrational unless we suppose that it is actually possible to

do so, he holds that in applying the principle ordering our concepts, we thereby presuppose that

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nature itself can be so ordered. In other words, we presuppose that our concepts, organized

according to the logical versions of the principle of systematicity, and nature itself are

isomorphic. Anderson reads the passage as saying that, since the logical principle of genera

would not obtain in the situation imagined, no empirical concepts could be formed. Therefore,

the logical principle of genera is a necessary condition of empirical concept formation. 133

!However, we need not draw this strong conclusion. In this passage, Kant is not discussing the

requirements of empirical concept formation in general. Rather, he is addressing the specific

case of finding more general genus concepts to subsume empirical concepts we already have.

Just as there must be similarities among objects in nature for us to form any concepts in the first

place, so too (we must assume) is nature regular enough for us to continue forming increasingly

general concepts as the logical law of genera demands. Kant is merely pointing out that assuming

that nature is isomorphic to the logical principle of genera is a presupposition we make in

ordering our concepts into a systematic hierarchy for scientific purposes of investigating nature.

It is true that, in the absence of the logical principle of genera, highly scientifically refined

concepts which exist in a fully worked out inferential relationship with other such concepts

leading to a single fundamental genus would not exist. Kant is not making the stronger claim that

absent such a principle no concept formation would take place at all.

!Nevertheless, it is true that there must be a minimal similarity among appearances for us to form

any empirical concepts to begin with. Objects which we have classified together under one

Anderson (2015) 362-3133

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concept must exhibit enough similarities among their properties for us to compare and reflect on

them in the first place. It could still be the case, however, that there are so many diverse species

concepts, which exhibit no or so little similarity among themselves, that we could never subsume

them under higher genus concepts. This would be a case where the content of each species

concept is radically different from that of any other. And, in fact, it seems that empirical concepts

are usually formed with this threat looming. We do not consider it a requirement on concept

formation that all of our concepts fit, either at the moment or at the limit of theorizing, into a

single hierarchy. On the contrary, it seems that many of our concepts form local hierarchies

connecting concepts, even if it is unclear how the various hierarchies themselves could ever be

connected by subsuming their concepts under one genus concept, for instance.

!The objects falling under any given species concept must still exhibit enough similarity among

themselves for reflection on them to be possible. This minimal natural similarity falls short of

reason’s highly demanding presupposition of systematicity. In other words, although nature

might have enough uniformity to guarantee that empirical concepts can be created, it might still

fall short of the level of systematicity demanded by the logical principle of genera, which

demands that given two species, we must search for a genus concept containing both under itself.

That principle requires a merely regulative transcendental presupposition that nature conforms to

it which far outstrips any minimal regularity required to form concepts at all. And, as I will 134

now go on to show, that minimal regularity is secured by the understanding itself in the form of

Cf. Thöle (2000) 123 who makes a similar point: “Eine starke Form des 134

Systematizitätsprinzip ist natürlich nicht nötig, um die Möglichkeit empirischer Begriffsbildung zu gewährleisten”.

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transcendental affinity. This minimal regularity, moreover, is not a mere regulative

presupposition, but, according to Kant, a constitutive feature imposed by the mind on the world.

The doctrine of affinity, then, shows that the understanding and imaginative faculties themselves

have the resources sufficient to form empirical concepts absent any principles of reason.

!3.2 Transcendental Affinity

Very little scholarly attention has been given to the doctrine of transcendental affinity, which

appears prominently in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Kenneth Westphal calls it

“a widely neglected issue” and Lewis White Beck says that the “theory of affinity” is of 135

“perplexing obscurity” , while Henry Allison notes that Kant’s remarks about affinity are 136

“obscure and scattered”. Whatever the reasons for its neglect, the doctrine is clearly of central 137

importance for understanding Kant’s account of empirical concept formation. 138

!What then is the doctrine of affinity in more detail and how does Kant argue for it? In the section

of the A edition of the first Critique discussing the threefold synthesis of the imagination entitled

“On the synthesis of reproduction in the imagination”, Kant considers the empirical law of

psychological association, whereby one representation which has been constantly followed by

Westphal (1997) 139135

Beck (1978) 112 136

Allison (1972) 203137

Rush (2000) 855 remarks that the doctrine of Transcendental Affinity in the A-edition seems 138

to provide the resources for an account of empirical concept formation; however, he does not develop what an account would look like in any detail.

!125

another brings to mind the second, even in the absence of the second representation. He then says

that “This law of reproduction, however, presupposes that the appearances themselves are

actually subject to such a rule, and that in the manifold of their representations an

accompaniment or succession takes places according to certain rules” (A 100). Kant then

provides a counterfactual scenario in which there is no regularity among empirical

representations:

If cinnabar were now red, now light, now heavy, if a human being were now changed into this animal shape, now into that one, if on the longest day the land were covered now with fruits, now with ice and snow, then my empirical imagination would never even get the opportunity to think of heavy cinnabar on the occasion of the representation of the color red… There must therefore be something that itself makes possible this reproduction of the appearances by being the a priori ground of a necessary synthetic unity of them (A 100-1). !

Kant here argues that if there were not an a priori ground of what he calls “the necessary

synthetic unity” of appearances, then the possibility of nature’s irregularity would remain. If

nature were irregular, objects could change properties randomly, and the empirical imagination

would not be able to make the associations between some representations and others needed to

support inductive inferences and form empirical concepts. Since nature is in fact regular enough

to allow for the operation of the empirical imagination, Kant argues that there must be an a priori

ground of such regularity.

!As Kant later makes clear, the a priori ground referred to in the cinnabar passage above is

precisely what Kant calls the affinity among appearances. At A 122, he says that there must be an

objective ground which makes appearances “associable in themselves and subject to universal

laws of a thoroughgoing connection in reproduction”. That is, there must be an a priori ground

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on the basis of which one appearance, say the appearance of red cinnabar, is associated with

another appearance, say that of heaviness, so that the empirical imagination can reproduce the

quality of heaviness when it encounters red cinnabar and infer that the red cinnabar will be

heavy. Kant then says that “this objective ground of all association of appearances” is “their

affinity” (A 122). So, we can be certain that Kant is attempting to argue for the presence of

objective, or transcendental, affinity in the cinnabar passage. Moreover, it is clear from the

examples Kant uses and from his focus on empirical imagination’s ability to associate and

reproduce appearances that this passage is concerned with the formation of empirical concepts

and the discovery of particular empirical laws. Were there no ground of the uniformity of nature

ensuring that objects such as cinnabar, human beings, and snow exhibit regular behavior, then

our empirical imagination would not be able to make the associations needed to form empirical

concepts and discover particular empirical laws. Kant himself makes this clear when he says that

“All appearances therefore stand in a thoroughgoing connection according to necessary laws, and

hence in a transcendental affinity, of which the empirical affinity is the mere consequence” (A

113-A 114). Kant’s distinction between transcendental and empirical affinity, and his suggestion

that the former grounds the latter, suggest that the natural empirical uniformities on the basis of

which we form empirical concepts are secured by the transcendental affinity provided by the

understanding. Kant is concerned in this passage, then, with establishing an a priori ground for

the minimal uniformity required of nature for us to be able to form empirical concepts. It is this

ground of the uniformity of nature which Kant calls affinity. As we shall see, Kant’s suggestion

is that the understanding alone can secure this type of uniformity, with the systematicity required

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of nature by reason being a more demanding uniformity which can only be presupposed as a

regulative ideal.

!In another long passage, Kant gives an argument that the ground of the association of

appearances necessary for empirical concept formation is a priori. This argument rests on the

notion of the transcendental unity of apperception, which for our purposes can be understood as

the ability to ascribe diverse representations to an enduring numerically identical subject. Kant

says,

If this unity of association did not also have an objective ground, so that it would be impossible for appearances to be apprehended by the imagination otherwise than under the condition of a possible synthetic unity of this apprehension, then it would also be entirely contingent whether appearances fit into a connection of human cognitions. For even though we had the faculty for associating perceptions, it would still remain in itself entirely undetermined and contingent whether they were also associable; and in case they were not, a multitude of perceptions and even an entire sensibility would be possible in which much empirical consciousness would be encountered in my mind, but separated, and without belonging to one consciousness of myself, which, however, is impossible. For only because I ascribe all perceptions to one consciousness (of original apperception) can I say of all perceptions that I am conscious of them. There must therefore be an objective ground, i.e., one that can be understood a priori to all empirical laws of the imagination, on which rests the possibility, indeed even the necessity of a law extending through all appearances, a law, namely for regarding them throughout as data of sense that are associable in themselves and subject to universal laws of a thoroughgoing connection in reproduction. I call this objective ground of all association of appearances their affinity (A 121-2). !

Here, Kant gives his full argument for the claim that the uniformity of nature must have an a

priori ground. If there were no such ground, Kant argues, the uniformity of nature would be a

contingent fact at best. In this case, we might still have a faculty of associating representations

such that a “multitude of perceptions” could be presented in one’s empirical consciousness.

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However, the possibility would remain open that such representations might lack uniformity, i.e.

be “separated”, to such an extent that it would be impossible to ascribe our various

representations to a single consciousness. Kant says, however, that such a result would be

impossible, since ascription to a single consciousness is a requirement of being conscious of

representations at all. Under the counterfactual scenario thus imagined, we could be in the

peculiar position of having perceptions of which we are not conscious. Since this is an absurd

result for Kant, there must be an a priori ground of the association of appearances, and Kant

calls this ground the affinity of appearances.

!I have presented Kant’s argument above in much the same way as Allison does. He describes 139

the argument as a reductio beginning from Hume’s premise that we do, in fact, make associations

between different representations based on past experience and then use these associations to

make inductive inferences. Kant then shows that the possibility of making such associations

depends on an a priori ground of affinity among appearances, since if such association were

merely contingent, a multitude of disconnected perceptions could arise which would thwart

transcendental apperception, a necessary condition for being conscious of any perception in the

first place. Therefore, against Hume, there must be an a priori ground securing the uniformity of

nature necessary to support inductive inferences. Indeed, Kant mentions the doctrine of affinity

explicitly in the context of a discussion of David Hume at A 767-8/B 794-5, indicating that it is

likely Kant saw the doctrine as a response to Hume along these lines.

! See Allison (1972) 204-5 139

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3.3. Challenges to Kant’s Account of Affinity

Commentators, of course, have pointed out many problems with Kant’s argument for affinity.

Most objections are versions of the charge that Kant’s argument simply begs the question against

the empiricist. The main problem is Kant’s admission into the argument of the a priori status of

the ground of regularity among appearances. Recall, he argues above that if there were no such a

priori ground, empirical representations would be chaotic, in the sense of irregular. But since

they are in fact regular and, hence, allow for the operation of our empirical imagination, there

must be such an a priori ground. The obvious difficulty with this move is that, while it may be

true, even undeniable, that for our representations to be uniform, there must be a ground of this

uniformity, there is nothing to suggest that this ground must be a priori. It may, as a matter of

fact, be impossible to associate the representation of “red” with the representation “heavy

cinnabar” if cinnabar were to change color and weight randomly, but the fact that we are able to

make empirical associations supportive of inductive inferences might just be grounded in the

contingency that nature is in fact uniform. In this case, this contingent fact, not some a priori

ground, would allow for the functioning of our empirical imagination. Since Kant has not ruled

out this option, Hume could (and probably would) accept Kant’s initial premise that the

regularity of our representations requires a ground without conceding the further point that such

a ground must be a priori.

!Now, it might be thought that Kant’s argument, as I have presented it above, goes on to address

this point. Kant’s first argument that an a priori ground is needed to secure uniformity at A 100-1

is indeed open to the type of objection I just outlined; however, Kant’s use of transcendental

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apperception in the subsequent passage I quoted introduces a qualification. Kant’s point is not

that, were there no a priori ground of uniformity there would be no regularity among empirical

representations. Rather, his point is that were there no such ground, there could be empirical

chaos. Any regularity would be a merely contingent fact, as Hume argued. This is supposed to be

a problem because a sequence of disconnected perceptions could disrupt the transcendental unity

of apperception. But then we would not even be conscious of such perceptions, since

apperception is a necessary condition of such consciousness.

!This line of argument might seem to address the first challenge presented above because it

provides a reason for Kant’s introduction of an a priori ground into his argument: the ground of

uniformity must be a priori to rule out merely contingent uniformity which would, according to

Kant, result in the absurdity that we could be conscious of representations which do not conform

to the conditions of apperception. However, problems afflict this line of argument, as well. Guyer

presents one main problem by asking what Kant’s reasons are for assuming that the uniformity of

our representations cannot be contingent and must have an a priori ground. Pending an answer 140

to this question, the most that Kant can show with this argument is the conditional necessity that

if we have conscious experience of representations, our representations must be orderly. It fails to

show the absolute necessity that our representations must be orderly no matter what. But it is

precisely the claim of absolute necessity that Kant requires to justify his introduction of an a

priori ground into the argument. With merely the claim of conditional necessity, as we have seen,

Guyer (1987) 122-3140

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it could be the case that the regularity among appearances that allows for conscious experience

of objects is a contingent regularity. And this is all that any empiricist is forced to admit.

!I am not interested here in defending Kant against these criticisms. However, I want to point out

that we should not draw the conclusion based on these problems that Kant intended to claim

merely that if we are to have experience of a certain sort then objects of experience must

themselves conform to the conditions necessary for that experience. Kant’s Copernican 141

revolution in philosophy, the thesis that “objects must conform to our cognition” (B xvi), is the

starting point for seeing that, according to Kant, transcendental affinity is a product of the

understanding imposed on nature. Shortly following the passages concerning affinity from the A

deduction we have been considering, Kant makes several references to his Copernican

revolution, by pointing out that the application of the pure categories of the understanding

provides the form of experience and, thereby, connects appearances. He says: “we ourselves

bring into the appearances that order and regularity in them that we call nature, and moreover

Ken Westphal (1997) makes such a move, arguing that transcendental affinity shows that Kant, 141

even if only implicitly, recognized an alternative way to analyze the transcendental conditions of experience. Rather than the metaphysically questionable thesis of transcendental idealism that the mind literally imposes necessary conditions for the possibility of experience on objects of experience themselves and, because of this imposition, can claim a priori knowledge of such conditions, Westphal claims that the doctrine of affinity shows that Kant countenanced the position that the mind is restricted to knowing only objects which themselves meet certain conditions. Westphal calls this view transcendental naturalism. As Westphal puts it, instead of holding with the transcendental idealist that the mind imposes conditions on objects of experience which they themselves lack absent the mind, the transcendental naturalist “analyzes those conditions as ‘ontological conditions’ (or rather, real, mind-independent properties) of objects which are also requisite for some relevant range of cognitive subjects to be aware of or to know those kinds of objects”.

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we would not be able to find it there if we, or the nature of our mind, had not originally put it

there” (A 125). In other words, our minds impose on nature a certain regularity, or as Kant has

called it, affinity. Kant of course realizes that this is a striking claim, that it may sound

“exaggerated and contradictory” (A 127), yet he is clear that according to his theory it is correct

to say “that the understanding is itself the source of the laws of nature, and thus of the formal

unity of nature” (ibid). In the context of the Transcendental Analytic and in the vicinity of Kant’s

presentation of the doctrine of affinity, then, we find ample evidence for the view that, according

to Kant, the mind imposes uniformity on nature. Since it is such uniformity which is requisite for

the formation of empirical concepts, we can see that the understanding itself, together with the

reproductive activities of the power of imagination, is sufficient for the formation of such

concepts, without any input from reason.

!Moreover, this key point does not depend on the success of Kant’s arguments for the doctrine of

affinity in the A edition. Indeed, although these arguments clearly face the insuperable

difficulties discussed above, Kant’s discussion of the uniformity provided by transcendental

affinity is invaluable for our understanding of what is needed for empirical concept formation.

What this discussion shows is that there must be some regularity among appearances for the

formation of empirical concepts in accordance with the three logical operations of the

understanding to take place. Appearances must be uniform enough for our understanding to be

able to detect similarities and differences, no matter what the ground for such uniformity turns

out to be. Indeed, the ground could be a contingent brute fact, as Hume would have it, and it

would still be true that there must be uniformity among appearances for concept formation to

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proceed at all. Such uniformity, however, has little to do with the systematicity demanded by

reason as discussed by Kant in the Appendix. Hume’s worry was that our lack of rational

knowledge of nature’s uniformity threatens our rational justification for induction. He was not

concerned that, were nature in fact to be uniform, such uniformity would fall short of what is

required for us to be able to make inductive inferences and form empirical concepts at all.

According to Kant, we must distinguish between the uniformity which Hume claims we cannot

know to obtain and for which Kant seeks an a priori ground from the systematicity which

demands us to order our concepts of nature into an ideal hierarchy. The former requires that there

be similarities in nature, the latter requires that these similarities relate to one another in a

system. To be sure, systematicity requires natural uniformity, but natural uniformity falls short of

requiring all of nature to be structured such that a single systematic hierarchy of concepts

describes it. Kant’s discussion of affinity makes this point clear, even if his argument for an a

priori ground of natural uniformity fails. Even if the ground of natural uniformity is contingent,

the understanding alone has the resources jointly sufficient for the formation of empirical

concepts and no input is needed from reason to accomplish this task.

!However, an important objection to my reading of Kant’s doctrine of transcendental affinity

remains to be addressed. Several commentators find a tension between Kant’s discussion of

transcendental affinity in the A edition of the Critique and his discussion of the principle of

systematicity in the Appendix to the Dialectic. This is because they assume that the principle 142

of systematicity is necessary for the formation of empirical concepts, despite Kant’s express

See, e.g., Guyer (1990) 29-30, Rohlf (2018) passim, Rush (2000) 854-61142

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language at A 664/B 692 stating otherwise. On this assumption, it appears that the doctrine of

transcendental affinity and the principle of systematicity are redundant: both are enlisted by Kant

to accomplish the same tasks, namely the formation of empirical concepts and discovery of

empirical laws. As Michael Rohlf puts it, “why should we need merely regulative principles of

reason telling us to assume that appearances are so constituted that we can form empirical

concepts of them, if our understanding constructs all appearances according to constitutive

principles which guarantee that we can form empirical concepts of them?”. It should be clear 143

from what I have said that my account does not face this particular worry. On my interpretation,

Kant ascribes the task of empirical concept formation to the understanding with his doctrine of

affinity, while the principle of systematicity is needed to refine those concepts in a scientific

context. However, this issue brings to light a different worry for my account. Can we claim, as 144

I have argued, that the understanding, according to the doctrine of transcendental affinity,

provides the necessary and sufficient conditions for empirical concept formation, or can we at

most say that the understanding provides only necessary conditions for empirical concept

formation, requiring systematicity as a further necessary condition to complete the task?

Maintaining that the understanding provides necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for the

formation of empirical concepts is a solution some suggest to answer the problem above about

Rohlf (2018) 1580143

See my discussion of this in Chapter 3. 144

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the redundancy of affinity and systematicity. On such a view, there is no redundancy, because 145

while the understanding provides some necessary conditions for the formation of empirical

concepts by bringing about transcendental affinity, such affinity is not by itself sufficient for us

to form concepts. We need to assume systematicity in addition to the operations of the

understanding, according to such an account, to attain empirical concepts.

!By now, my general response to such an approach should sound familiar: assigning a necessary

role to the regulative principle of systematicity in empirical concept formation violates what I

argued in the previous chapter is Kant’s conception of the regulative/constitutive distinction.

However, more direct evidence that Kant thinks that the understanding alone provides the

necessary and sufficient conditions for empirical concept formation can also be adduced. First,

there is the philosophical point I have made in this chapter that the assumption of systematicity,

as Kant understands that notion in the Appendix, is far too demanding a requirement for the

formation of empirical concepts. Empirical concepts are formed on a regular basis without any

hint of an assumption that such concepts should, in principle, rest within a single genus-species

See Rohlf (2018) 1584 and Rush (2000) 855-861. Another point to be made in this context is 145

that the doctrine of affinity is presented most clearly in the A edition, Kant having removed most of his discussion of transcendental affinity from the B edition of the Critique. One proposed reason for this is that the doctrine of affinity and the systematicity of the Appendix are redundant, something Kant only noticed upon revising the work. However, Kant does mention affinity in the B edition, notably in a discussion of David Hume at A 766/B 794. Furthermore, both Rohlf (2018) 1581 fn.7 and Rush (2000) 856 fn. 41 admit that there is no direct evidence that Kant changed his position between the two editions, with Rohlf saying that there is strong evidence that the doctrine of affinity imposed by the understanding remains in the second edition, although Kant downplays it.

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hierarchy. It would, then, be philosophically unmotivated to maintain that the formation of any

empirical concepts whatsoever requires such an assumption.

!Second, there is strong textual evidence that Kant holds the understanding solely responsible for

the formation of empirical concepts. Kant’s statement at A 113-114 that empirical affinity

(presumably securing the regularity of empirical phenomena) is a consequence of the

transcendental affinity brought about among appearances by the imposition of the principles of

the understanding indicates that Kant thought the empirical uniformity required for the formation

of empirical concepts is secured by the understanding alone. It is true, as Kant says at B 165, 146

that “particular [sc. empirical] laws… cannot be completely derived from the categories”,

simply because the principles of the understanding alone do not determine the content of

experience. We require the matter of experience to provide us with the particular contingent laws

and concepts we will find instantiated in nature. However, once such content is given, Kant’s

doctrine is that the categories alone secure its uniformity. Moreover, Kant’s examples in the

famous cinnabar passage support this reading. In that passage, Kant is concerned that the

empirical imagination be able to make associations among different representations of cinnabar,

human beings, fruit, ice, and snow needed to form concepts of such items (A 100-101). His

suggestion is that the understanding alone secures the regularity of empirical phenomena

Rohlf (2018) tries to circumvent this point by distinguishing between affinities of form and 146

content (1584), claiming that what is at stake in the A edition doctrine of transcendental affinity is transcendental and empirical affinity of form, whereas affinity of content, secured only by the principle of systematicity, is needed in addition to guarantee the formation of empirical concepts. I think that there is little basis in the text for such a move. But the main difficulty Rohlf’s account faces is to explain away Kant’s choice of examples in the A edition passages.

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requisite for the empirical imagination to undertake its task. Furthermore, in an important

passage discussing the skepticism of David Hume, Kant attributes to the understanding the

ability to secure the empirical uniformity required for us to make particular causal judgements

involving, of course, empirical concepts. Hume attributed our causal reasoning to custom and

habit, denying that we have any a priori insight into the connection between particular causes

and their effects necessary to make causal claims. Kant, of course, agrees that we need

experience to make such judgments and that such judgments are always subject to revision.

However, Kant does not think that we could exist in a world subject to irregularity on account of

an absence of necessary connections between events. The understanding secures such

connections and it is on the basis of such connections that we can make (at least provisional)

claims to knowledge of causal laws:

Thus if wax that was previously firm melts, I can cognize a priori that something must have preceded (e.g., the warmth of the sun) on which this has followed in accordance with a constant law, though without experience, to be sure, I could determinately cognize neither the cause from the effect nor the effect from the cause a priori and without instruction from experience. [Hume] therefore falsely inferred from the contingency of our determination in accordance with the law the contingency of the law itself, and he confused going beyond the concept of a thing to possible experience (which takes place a priori and constitutes the objective reality of the concept) with the synthesis of the objects of actual experience, which is of course always empirical; thereby, however, he made a principle of affinity, which has its seat in the understanding and asserts necessary connection, into a rule of association, which is found merely in the imitative imagination…(A 766/B 794, italics added). !

In other words, the process of discovering empirical laws and, relatedly, forming empirical

concepts which Hume had attributed to the imagination on the basis of custom and habit, Kant

assigns to the understanding on the basis of the transcendental affinity it imposes on nature. The

textual evidence is clear, then, that Kant held the understanding and its resources to be both

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necessary and sufficient for the discovery of particular empirical laws and the formation of

empirical concepts without reason’s regulative principle of systematicity.

!Conclusion

In this chapter, I have argued that, by the time of the composition of the first Critique, Kant held

that the understanding, with the aid of the power of the imagination, has the resources to form

empirical concepts without the aid of regulative principles belonging to the faculty of reason. I

discussed some reasons commentators have given for attributing to reason a fundamental role in

empirical concept formation. In particular, many commentators appeal to reason to rescue the

account of empirical concept formation given in the Jäsche Logic from circularity. As we saw,

such a move is unnecessary, as some commentators have pointed out, because Kant can avoid the

problem of circularity with the resources of the understanding alone. However, this issue of

circularity is distinct from the broader question of whether regulative principles play a necessary

role in concept formation, an affirmative answer to which can seem to be motivated by various

considerations of systematicity. As I argued in the final section, however, Kant held that the

understanding and power of imagination, given sensory input, are alone jointly sufficient for

concept formation, because Kant distinguished between natural uniformity and systematicity,

only the former of which is necessary for empirical concept formation. According to the doctrine

of affinity, natural uniformity is imposed by the understanding on nature. Even if this doctrine

fails, however, the natural uniformity needed for concept formation falls short of the more

demanding principle of systematicity.

!

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If, according to Kant, the regulative principle of systematicity is not a necessary condition of

experience by being a necessary condition of concept formation, Kant can avoid the problem of

the regulative, as outlined in Chapter 1. However, my discussion in this chapter has focused only

on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and writings surrounding that work. In the Critique of the

Power of Judgment, there is evidence that Kant’s position has changed and that by 1790 Kant

had attributed a more central role to merely regulative principles than he did in his earlier work.

If, by 1790, Kant attributes a necessary role to such principles, he is again vulnerable to the

problem of the regulative. It is to these issues that I turn in the next chapter.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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CHAPTER 4: Kant’s Path from Systematicity to Purposiveness !!Introduction !Kant discusses the systematic ordering of natural laws and empirical concepts in both the

Critique of Pure Reason and the Critique of the Power of Judgment published nine years later. In

the previous two chapters, I have argued at length that ordering empirical concepts and laws

according to the principle of systematicity is not a necessary condition of the possibility of the

sort of experience whose a priori principles Kant seeks to uncover in the Transcendental

Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. However, there is evidence that Kant changed his

position by the 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment. Most obviously, there are noticeable

differences in Kant’s presentation of systematicity across the two texts. In the first Critique, Kant

calls the principle that we must organize natural laws and empirical concepts into a systematic

hierarchy the principle of systematicity, whereas he labels the analogous principle in the third

Critique the principle of purposiveness. Furthermore, whereas in his earlier account Kant had

assigned the principle to the faculty of reason, in his later discussion he assigns the analogous

principle to what he calls the reflecting power of judgment.

!As a result of these differences, there has been much scholarly debate about whether Kant’s view

of this topic changed substantively and, if so, in what respects. For instance, while Paul Guyer

sees a shift in Kant’s thought away from the position in the first Critique that the systematicity of

nature is a mere assumption needed for the organization of concepts to the position in the third

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that it is in some sense necessary for the discovery of natural laws, Thomas Wartenberg thinks 147

that Kant in fact proves that nature is systematic in the first Critique and merely assumes it in the

third. Offering a third view, Ralph Walker takes the position that Kant does not change his 148

mind between the works, and maintains consistently that systematicity is necessary to determine

particular causal laws. 149

!As we saw in Chapter 3, several commentators who maintain that, in the first Critique,

systematicity is a necessary condition of the possibility of experience, do so because that seems

to be the position of the third Critique and they read the later work back into the earlier. Thus,

Hannah Ginsborg interprets the systematicity of the first Critique as a necessary condition for

concept formation by appealing to the notion of purposiveness in the third Critique, which she

Guyer (1990) 41:In the third Critique “systematicity is not simply an independent interest of 147

reason but a prerequisite for the employment of the faculty of understanding itself”. Horstmann (2013) also recognizes that Kant identifies a more central role for the principle of purposiveness in the third Critique than he had for the principle of systematicity in the first. Horstmann attributes this change in position to the fact that in the first Critique Kant did not have room for “natural organisms to be genuine objects of nature” (83). According to Horstmann, Kant seeks to remedy this problem in the third Critique by introducing the principle of purposiveness as a more robust epistemic principle. However, I believe this assessment leaves us with some puzzles. Kant clearly maintains that the principle of purposiveness in the third Critique is merely regulative (e.g. 20:219-20: “The concept of purposiveness is not a constitutive concept of experience at all…”and cf. also 5:197 for the claim that it is regulative). So, it is unclear how it can allow us cognition of organisms beyond what the merely regulative principle of systematicity in the first Critique provided. And Horstmann’s account does not explain why Kant in the third Critique seems to think that purposiveness is necessary for the possibility of experience, even while being regulative.

Wartenberg (1979) 417 fn 11148

Walker (1990) 246-7; Buchdahl (1967,1969) and Kraus (2018) also subscribe to the view that 149

Kant’s position does not change between the two works. Cf. Kraus (2018) fn. 11.

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takes to be the more primitive of the two notions. Likewise, Henry Allison understands the 150

principle of purposiveness to be necessary for the formation of empirical concepts. He assigns 151

it chief importance because he takes Kant’s deduction of the principle of purposiveness in the

third Critique to vindicate our inductive practices against Hume’s skeptical doubts. That 152

Allison reads this interpretation of the principle of purposiveness back into the earlier principle

of systematicity is clear from the fact that he also assigns to systematicity the task of supporting

our inductive inferences. Without a systematic ordering of concepts, so Allison contends, we

have no reason to believe that the properties on the basis of which we organize natural objects

correspond to real differences among the objects themselves and, therefore, no reason to make

inductive inferences on the basis of such properties. As I argue in Chapter 3, this view is 153

mistaken, since Kant holds that the affinity imposed by the understanding on nature is sufficient

to secure the minimal natural uniformity needed for us to form empirical concepts and make

inductive inferences, with no appeal made to the principle of systematicity. Nevertheless, Allison

clearly takes Kant’s presentation of the principle of purposiveness in the third Critique as his

starting point for understanding systematicity in the first. 154

!

See Ginsborg (2017) 150

See Allison (2001) 33 151

Cf., e.g., Allison (2001) 35: “…the stakes involved in a deduction of the principle of 152

purposiveness are high indeed, amounting to nothing less than the vindication of induction”.

Cf. op. cit. 29153

Buchdahl (1969) 504, 517 also assumes without argument that Kant’s discussion of 154

purposiveness in the third Critique can explain systematicity in the first.

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As I argued in the previous two chapters, such a view is inadequate as an explanation of

systematicity in the first Critique. Not only does interpreting systematicity as a necessary

condition of the possibility of experience threaten Kant’s regulative/constitutive distinction, but it

also is not needed to explain Kant’s theory of empirical concept formation. However, in this

chapter, I will argue that Kant did change his mind about the role of regulative principles in

experience by the time of the third Critique. While it is true that systematicity for the Kant of the

first Critique is not a necessary condition of experience in the sense in which the Analytic is

concerned with it, it is not true that Kant’s position on this issue was consistent over the course

of his career. Therefore, I shall argue that for the Kant of the third Critique purposiveness, the

analogue of systematicity in the first, does serve as a necessary condition of the discovery of

particular natural laws and formation of empirical concepts and, hence, of experience. Kant’s

position in the third Critique, then, fails to address the problem of the regulative adequately and,

in that respect at least, is an unfortunate retreat from his earlier theory, at least by the lights of the

Critical project.

!There is strong textual evidence in the third Critique that Kant holds purposiveness to be a

necessary condition of concept formation. In this later work, Kant makes use of an argument to

establish the principle of purposiveness which is very similar to an argument he employs in the

first Critique. This argument is what Allison calls the argument from “empirical chaos”. 155

Roughly, the argument seeks to demonstrate the necessity of assuming that our systematic

arrangement of natural laws and empirical concepts reflects an isomorphic systematicity in

Allison (2001) 38155

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nature itself. In the absence of such an assumption, so the argument goes, we have no

justification for the hierarchical ordering of our concepts and laws, since nature could always

exhibit such a wide range of species as to seem chaotic to a finite intelligence.

!Kant runs a version of this argument for the first time in the Appendix to the Transcendental

Dialectic and again twice in the published Introduction to the third Critique. In addition, 156

arguments of this form appear three times in the unpublished First Introduction to the third

Critique. Clearly, then, this line of thought held importance for Kant. The fact that he makes 157

use of the same argument schema in both the first and the third Critiques might suggest that the

principles the argument seeks to establish play the same role in both works. However,

commentators have overlooked the different uses to which Kant puts this argument in the first

and third Critiques. Soon after delivering the argument from empirical chaos in the first Critique,

Kant states that a transcendental deduction proving that the principle of systematicity is actually

instantiated in nature is not possible, but then goes on in the second half of the Appendix to

provide a deduction establishing the objective, albeit “indeterminate” (A 669/B 697), validity of

the ideas of reason. In the third Critique, however, Kant characterizes the argument from

empirical chaos itself as a deduction establishing the necessity of assuming that nature conforms

to our orderings of empirical concepts. Why this difference in characterization?

!

See A 653/B 681 and 5:183 and 5:185156

See 20:203, 20:209, 20:213157

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In this chapter, I will argue that the differences in Kant’s presentation of this material in the two

works can be explained by the new importance Kant gives the principle of purposiveness in the

third Critique. Kant provides a deduction of the principle of purposiveness in his later work,

because the principle is no longer an independent demand of reason, but, rather, operates as an

assumption required for the formation of empirical concepts, a task Kant assigns to the reflecting

power of judgment.

!In Part 1 of this chapter, I will explain the structure of Kant’s deduction of the validity of the

ideas of reason in the first Critique. According to my reconstruction, the deduction Kant gives of

the ideas of reason in the second half of the Appendix relies on the conclusion of the argument

from empirical chaos given in the first half. This shows that Kant’s overall goal in the Appendix

is to establish the positive contribution of the ideas of reason to what I called scientific

experience in Chapter 2. The argument from empirical chaos should therefore be seen as one step

on the way to this vindication of ideas of reason, and this explains why Kant does not

characterize this argument itself as a deduction in the first Critique.

!In Part 2, I argue that two considerations led Kant to reassign the principle to reflecting judgment

in the third Critique. First, he had lingering doubts of how ideas of reason, which cannot be

exhibited in concreto, can nevertheless guide empirical inquiry into nature. Second, he came to

hold that the reflecting power of judgment was needed to form empirical concepts and that the

principle of purposiveness was required for this task. I will discuss the textual evidence for the

view that purposiveness is a necessary condition of empirical concept formation in the third

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Critique. This explains why Kant does not provide a deduction of ideas of reason in the

Introductions to the third Critique and was, therefore, able to re-classify the argument from

empirical chaos as a transcendental deduction of the principle of purposiveness and emphasize

that principle itself.

!1.0 Systematicity and the Deduction of Ideas of Reason

In the Transcendental Dialectic of the first Critique, Kant diagnoses the errors of traditional

metaphysics as involving the misuse of reason. In particular, Kant argues that the three rational

ideas of the soul, the world, and God lead to errors of judgment when they are taken to

correspond to objects which could in principle be given in experience. According to Kant, “no

actual experience is fully sufficient for” (A 311/B 367) such ideas and transcendental illusion

occurs when we take them otherwise. For instance, when the idea of the world, understood as

“the absolute whole of appearances”, is taken to refer to an object of possible experience, it gives

rise to a conflict of reason with itself concerning whether the world is finite or infinite. This is an

illicit, or transcendent, use of this idea of reason because it assumes that the world is given as a

whole, even though “transcendent concepts… exceed the bounds of all experience” (A 327/B

384).

!However, Kant also recognizes a positive use of the ideas of reason. As he says, “…in regard to

the whole of possible experience, it is not the idea itself but only its use that can be either

extravagant (transcendent) or indigenous (immanent), according to whether one directs them

straightway to a supposed object corresponding to them” (A 643/B 671). It is Kant’s project in

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the Appendix to the Dialectic of the first Critique to demonstrate what this immanent use of the

ideas of reason is and, thereby, to justify their validity, even though they do not correspond to

objects of possible experience. Kant’s argument for the validity of the ideas of reason culminates

in a deduction purporting to establish the subjective necessity of these ideas, i.e., the necessity of

assuming that our experience of nature is arranged as if the ideas corresponded with objects

given in experience, even though this remains a mere assumption.

!This deduction is given in the second half of the Appendix, following two arguments given in its

first half purporting to show that we must assume that nature itself is systematically arranged.

The relationship between the two halves of the Appendix has not been adequately discussed in

the literature and the exact nature of Kant’s deduction remains unclear. Peter McLaughlin calls

these two sections “extremely perplexing” and notes that discussions in the literature rarely ask

why the Appendix has two parts and, in fact, tend to focus only on the first. The passage that 158

Kant officially characterizes as a deduction occurs in the second part, and most commentators

think that this passage in isolation constitutes the deduction. McLaughlin calls it “off the cuff”

and says it is “accomplished in one page” and therefore tries to make sense of the first part 159

without a deduction and the second part with one. 160

McLaughlin (2014) 555, 557; Zuckert (2017) focuses on the second part, but does not discuss 158

its relationship with the first half in any detail. Willaschek (2018) 237-242 includes a brief discussion of the second half of the Appendix; however, his focus is not primarily on the role of the regulative principles of reason and their relationship to the ideas of reason, but rather on why human reasoners are tempted to treat such merely regulative principles and ideas as constitutive and, thereby, to fall prey to transcendental illusion.

op. cit. 555159

op. cit. 558160

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!In contrast with such an approach, I reconstruct Kant’s argument for the validity of the ideas of

reason as he presents it across the two halves of the Appendix. I will show that the passage

officially characterized as a deduction is not as “off the cuff” as it appears, because it relies on

material Kant has presented in the first half of the Appendix, in particular, on the conclusion of

the argument from empirical chaos. My argument is that this understanding of the deduction

shows that Kant is specifically concerned to provide a justification for the positive use of ideas of

reason themselves and that, as a result, Kant did not view the argument from empirical chaos

which deals with the principle of systematicity as a transcendental deduction, but merely as one

step in a larger argument that demonstrates the validity of the ideas of reason. In the third

Critique, when Kant finds a more central role for the principle of purposiveness than he gave to

systematicty, he is then free to characterize the argument from empirical chaos itself as a

deduction of purposiveness.

!1.1 The Argument from Empirical Chaos

Recall that, in the Appendix, Kant specifies three sorts of systematicity among our empirical

concepts and natural laws: the principles of homogeneity, specificity and affinity, or continuity,

of forms. When these principles are applied to empirical concepts so that these concepts form a

hierarchy, Kant calls the principles logical in function. This is because the principles, in this case,

apply only to concepts and make no claims about the relative ordering of the natural kinds to

which the concepts apply. When the principles do purport to order concepts which reflect the

order of nature, Kant calls them transcendental in function. The first argument on the way to

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Kant’s overall conclusion that the ideas of reason have an immanent use exploits this distinction.

Kant makes the point that the logical application of systematicity requires a transcendental

principle which states that nature itself has the structure which our logical ordering of concepts

suggests:

In fact it cannot even be seen how there could be a logical principle of rational unity among rules unless a transcendental principle is presupposed, through which such a systematic unity, as pertaining to the object itself, is assumed a priori as necessary. For by what warrant can reason in its logical use claim to treat the manifoldness of the powers which nature gives to our cognition as merely a concealed unity, and to derive them as far as it is able from some fundamental power, when reason is free to admit that it is just as possible that all powers are different in kind, and that its derivation of them from a systematic unity is not in conformity with nature? For then reason would proceed directly contrary to its vocation, since it would set as its goal an idea that entirely contradicts the arrangement of nature (A 650-1/B 678-9). !

Kant’s claim here is that organizing natural laws into a hierarchy according to the logical use of

the principle of systematicity presupposes the transcendental use of the principle, namely that our

logical ordering of such laws corresponds to nature itself. This is because, were reason to admit

otherwise, its derivation of more specific natural powers from more general ones and, ultimately,

a single fundamental power, would be without warrant, that is, arbitrary, since natural laws could

be so multifarious as not to admit of systematization. Kant, then, takes this to show that ordering

empirical concepts into a system involves making an assumption about nature itself, even though

the transcendental principle does not contribute to the way nature is, but merely serves a

regulative rule for the investigation of nature. In other words, while this version of the principle

of systematicity is semantically transcendental (purporting to deal with objects themselves), it is

epistemically a mere assumption. Importantly, the point that Kant takes this argument to show 161

See Chapter 2, section 2.0 for a discussion of this point. 161

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is that this assumption is a priori, since it is a condition of employing the logical use of the

principle in the first place. Kant emphasizes this point when he says that the principle is assumed

“a priori as necessary” and when, shortly after the making this argument, he says “Nor can one

say that it [sc. reason] has previously gleaned this unity from the contingent constitution of

nature in accordance with its principles of reason” (A 651/B 679). It is not, in other words, that

systematic unity has been discovered in nature, but rather that it is presupposed a priori in order

to make the systematic organization of empirical concepts and laws a rational pursuit.

!Kant uses a different argument to draw a similar conclusion a little later in the text when he

presents the argument from empirical chaos. The conclusion of this argument is similar to the

one just discussed and to some extent the argument is redundant. However, Kant makes it clear

once again that the principle of systematicity is in fact transcendental, that is that it is an

assumption about nature itself, rather than merely about concepts and laws. Kant is specifically

concerned in this passage to argue that we must assume that nature itself is such that we can find

ever higher genera for species concepts we already have. In other words, we make a

transcendental assumption about nature when we organize our concepts in accordance with the

principle of homogeneity.

If among the appearances offering themselves to us there were such a great variety—I will not say of form (for they might be similar to one another in that) but of content, i.e., regarding the manifoldness of existing beings—that even the most acute human understanding, through comparison of one with another, could not detect the least similarity (a case which can at least be thought), then the logical law of genera would not obtain at all, no concept of a genus, nor any other universal concept, indeed no understanding at all would obtain, since it is the understanding that has to do with such concepts. The logical principle of genera

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therefore presupposes a transcendental one if it is to be applied to nature (by which I here understand only objects that are given to us) (A 653-4/B 681-2). !

In the final sentence quoted, Kant emphasizes the transcendental status of the principle that must

be assumed before the logical principle of genera can get off the ground. Kant’s point is not that

we are justified in applying the logical principles of systematicity on the ground that we observe

that nature itself is in fact roughly systematic. After all, Kant already takes himself to have

shown at this point that the transcendental principle is a priori in origin, that is, not derived from

experience. Rather, he is arguing that, were we to admit that nature is so chaotic, that is, so

unsystematic, that our understanding could not detect the similarities between natural phenomena

necessary for the formation of higher and higher genus concepts, then there simply could be no

logical ordering of concepts in the genus-species hierarchy required by the logical principle of

genera. Since we do, in fact, so order our concepts, this shows, according to Kant’s argument,

that we do not assume nature to be empirically chaotic, but, rather, roughly systematic. 162

!This mere assumption, of course, does not rule out nature’s in fact being chaotic by the lights of

reason’s highly demanding principle of systematicity. This is a particularly sharp worry within

Kant’s system because the a priori concepts of the understanding, such as substance and

causation, which Kant argues are necessary conditions of the possibility of experience, radically

underdetermine the particular empirical phenomena given in experience. Put differently, even

though the a priori concepts of the understanding must apply to objects as we experience them

and are constitutive of experience, it is not the case that these categories alone secure empirical

Cf. my interpretation of this passage in section 3.1 of the previous chapter. 162

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systematicity. As I discussed in Chapter 3, the transcendental affinity imposed by the

understanding on nature secures a minimal natural uniformity, but such uniformity might fall

short of the demands of systematicity. As Kant says at B 165:

The pure faculty of understanding does not suffice, however, to prescribe to the appearances through mere categories a priori laws beyond those on which rests a nature in general, as lawfulness of appearances in space and time. Particular laws, because they concern empirically determined appearances, cannot be completely derived from the categories, although they all stand under them. !

The important thing about the argument from empirical chaos, then, is Kant’s emphasis on the

transcendental character of the principle, namely that it is an assumption about nature itself. Of

course, the first argument above which Kant uses to demonstrate the a priori origin of the

principle shows not only that the principle is a priori but also that it is transcendental, i.e. that it

concerns nature itself rather than merely our concepts of nature. So, the argument from empirical

chaos, as Kant presents it in the first Critique, is to some extent redundant. Kant wanted to

emphasize the transcendental status of the principle separately from its a priori origin, even

though the argument for the latter also serves to establish the former. In the third Critique,

however, Kant separates these two aspects of the principle more clearly, giving two arguments,

one designed to establish the a priori origin of the principle, the other its transcendental status.

The reason for this more careful presentation in the later text is that Kant is there attempting to

give a transcendental deduction of the principle itself. In the first Critique, by contrast, Kant is

concerned primarily with giving a transcendental deduction of the ideas of reason. As I will now

argue, Kant uses the conclusion of the argument from empirical chaos as a premise in the

deduction of the ideas of reason which he presents in the second half of the Appendix.

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!1.2 The Second Step of the Deduction of Ideas of Reason

Shortly after giving the argument from empirical chaos, Kant notes what is puzzling about the

particular transcendental principles of systematicity, those of homogeneity, specificity, and

affinity, as they have been discussed so far. Although these principles are merely regulative,

rather than constitutive, and so do not determine objects of experience, they nevertheless serve as

useful heuristics directing our investigation into nature. Moreover, they are transcendental a

priori principles, a status usually reserved for constitutive principles. So, although they are

regulative, and so do not determine empirical objects, they are nevertheless directed towards

such objects. Kant then makes the point that no transcendental deduction demonstrating the

validity of the principles is possible. As Kant says, “One cannot bring about a transcendental

deduction of them which, as has been proved above, is always impossible in regard to ideas” (A

663/B 691). As McLaughlin has recently suggested, it seems that Kant is referring here to a 163

comment he made much earlier in the Dialectic when initially discussing ideas of reason. At A

336/B393, Kant says

No objective deduction of these transcendental ideas is really possible, such as we could provide for the categories. For just because they are ideas, they have in fact no relation to any object that could be given congruent to them. But we can undertake a subjective derivation of them from the nature of our reason… 164

!Since ideas of reason do not correspond to any object of possible experience, no deduction

establishing their validity can be given by demonstrating that they are necessary conditions of

McLaughlin (2014) 567163

This translation requires reading “Ableitung” with Erdmann, instead of “Anleitung” which 164

Guyer/Wood translate as “introduction”.

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objects of experience. However, as Kant suggests in the passage just quoted, this does not rule

out giving a “subjective” derivation, or deduction, of the ideas. Such a deduction would show

that, even though ideas of reason do not correspond with objects given in experience, it is

necessary to approach nature as if such ideas referred to objects given in experience in order to

meet some subjectively required cognitive goal. This is, in fact, precisely the sort of deduction

which Kant goes on to deliver in the second half of the Appendix.

!So, when Kant says in the Appendix that no deduction of the principles of systematicity can be

given because deductions are always impossible in regard to ideas, we have to make three

observations. First, this claim must be restricted to objective deductions of the sort Kant gives of

the categories of the understanding. No objective deduction of ideas of reason can be given, but

it does not follow from this that no deduction whatsoever can be given, since Kant already

promised early in the Dialectic that he would give a subjective deduction of the ideas. Second,

the claim that no deduction of the ideas can be given seems to imply that Kant does not consider

anything he has said up to this point in the text as constituting a deduction of any sort. In

particular, this would mean that he does not consider the argument from empirical chaos a

deduction. I think we should read Kant’s warning that no objective deduction of the ideas of

reason can be given as a preparation for the subjective deduction that he is about to deliver in the

second half of the Appendix. Third, and importantly, it is interesting that Kant claims that the

reason why no deduction of the principles of systematicity can be given is because no such

deduction of the ideas can be given. This shows, I submit, that Kant does not see his task in the

Appendix primarily as one of demonstrating the validity of the principles of systematicity by

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themselves. Rather, he takes it for granted that these principles are necessary given the goal of

ordering our empirical concepts and natural laws into a hierarchy. He will then argue that the

ideas of reason are a necessary condition of the use of such principles, thereby providing a

deduction of the ideas and establishing the beneficial immanent use of theoretical reason. This

strategy contrasts markedly with Kant’s approach in the third Critique where the ideas of reason

drop out of sight and Kant is explicitly concerned with deducing the validity of the principle of

purposiveness. Before explaining that, however, I now turn to Kant’s deduction of the ideas of

reason in the Appendix.

!Kant begins the second half of the Appendix by reiterating a claim we have already seen him

make: he states that a deduction of the same kind as was given to establish the validity of the

categories is not possible for the ideas of reason. However, Kant states, if they are not to be

considered “merely thought-entities” (A 670/B 698), that is, if they are going to serve some

positive immanent use, then they must be given a deduction of sorts. Kant says that this

deduction is “the completion of the critical business of pure reason” (ibid) and that he will “now

undertake” (ibid) it. Kant then distinguishes between being given an “object absolutely” and

being given an “object in the idea”. In the first case, the concept of the object given actually

determines an object of experience, in the sense that the concept applies to an object of

experience. In the second case, the concept is only what Kant calls a “schema” and does not

represent any object of possible experience. To illustrate, Kant gives the concept of a highest

intelligence, that is, God, as an object in the idea. This concept is not what Kant calls an

“ostensive concept” (A 671/B 699) which has reference to an object given in experience, but

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rather serves as a rule or a heuristic for the ordering of our empirical concepts in a systematic

fashion when we consider the world as if it has been designed by a highest intelligence. Kant’s

deduction of the ideas of reason consists in the claim that the ideas of God, world, and soul are

schemata which serve as necessary conditions for the ordering of empirical concepts in a suitably

systematic way. This passage itself is remarkably short, but builds on what has gone before, as I

will show. It proceeds as follows:

Now if one can show that although the three kinds of transcendental ideas (psychological, cosmological, and theological) cannot be referred directly to any object corresponding to them and to its determination, and nevertheless that all rules of the empirical use of reason under the presupposition of such an object in the idea lead to systematic unity, always extending cognition of experience but never going contrary to experience, then it is a necessary maxim of reason to proceed in accordance with such ideas. And this is the transcendental deduction of all the ideas of speculative reason, not as constitutive principles for the extension of our cognition to more objects than experience can give, but as regulative principles for the systematic unity of the manifold of empirical cognition in general (A 671/B 699, italics added)… !!

Kant’s deduction of the ideas of reason which purports to show that they have a legitimate

immanent use, as opposed to their illicit transcendental use, consists in showing that regarding

nature as if it is constituted according to the ideas of soul, world, and God is indispensable for

the ordering of empirical concepts in a scientific context. Put differently, according to Kant, the

ideas have a legitimate use because they are necessary heuristics in our scientific investigation of

nature.

!This can be seen most clearly if we consider the specific forms that Kant claims systematicity

has. As we have seen, Kant spells this notion out in a number of ways in the first Critique. He

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initially characterizes it in the Antinomy as a principle of reason which states that, for anything

given in experience, we must seek out the condition for what is given, and the condition for this

condition, and so on, ad indefinitum, so that we never rest content with any given explanation,

but continue to investigate nature further. Kant calls this “a principle of the greatest possible

continuation and extension of experience” (A 509/B 537). According to this principle, we must,

therefore, think of nature as an indefinitely extendable whole. This involves, according to Kant,

thinking of the series of appearances as itself infinite. Kant says that thinking of the phenomenal

world as given as an infinite whole gives us the rule that “we ought to proceed as if the series

were in itself infinite, i.e, proceed in indefinitum” (A 685/B 713). According to Kant’s deduction

of the ideas of reason, we can only apply the principle of systematicity which enjoins us to seek

out conditions continually if we employ the rational idea of the world in its totality.

!Next, recall the characterization of systematiciy according to the more specific principles of

homogeneity, specificity, and affinity. Using the rational idea of God to think of the world as if it

were the product of the highest intelligence allows us to think of it as organized by an

intelligence modeled on our own and, therefore, to think of nature as systematic in such a way

that our systematic ordering of concepts according to homogeneity, specificity, and affinity

reflects nature itself. Lastly, Kant argues that the rational idea of myself “merely as thinking

nature (soul)” (A 682/B 710) is necessary in order to systematize psychological phenomena, that

is the phenomena of inner, as opposed to outer, sense. As Kant says, the transcendental idea of

the soul is needed to “connect all appearances, actions, and receptivity of our mind to the guiding

thread of inner experience as if the mind were a simple substance that (at least in life) persists in

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existence with personal identity, while its states… are continuously changing” (A 672/B 700).

Katharina Kraus helpfully explains that Kant here intends the regulative idea of the soul to serve

as a surrogate for the material parts presented to us in the outer sense of space which allow for

the application of the category of substance. Since, in inner experience, there is no enduring

substratum of change, but rather only fleeting representations, the idea of the soul is needed in

order to systematize our inner cognitions. 165

!As I have reconstructed Kant’s argument, then, his claims about the necessity of assuming the

transcendental principle of systematicity in the first half of the Appendix ultimately serve his

goal of demonstrating an immanent use of the ideas of reason. He establishes this use in the

deduction given in the second half of the Appendix, where he shows that the ideas of reason are

necessary conditions of the transcendental use of the principle of systematicity by serving as

schemata of its more specific forms. In summary, the overall argument across the two halves of

the Appendix as I have characterized it is as follows. First, Kant shows that the transcendental

principle of systematicity is a necessary presupposition of the logical principle of systematicity.

He has two arguments for this claim, one establishing both the a priori origin and the

transcendental status of the principle, the other specifically emphasizing its transcendental status.

To focus on the latter argument, Kant claims that if we did not assume nature to be uniform, we

would not be able to apply the logical version of the principle of systematicity. However, we do

apply the logical version of the principle, therefore, by modus tollens, we do assume that nature

See Kraus (2018) pp. 4-6. Kraus develops this idea in more detail than I discuss here. 165

Whatever the specifics of such an account, I believe that something in the ballpark has to be what Kant has in mind.

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is uniform. The contrapositive of this claim is that if we are to apply the logical principle of

systematicity, then we must assume the transcendental principle, exactly the form Kant’s first

argument that the transcendental principle is of a priori origin takes. Then, Kant argues in the

passage in the second half of the Appendix which he characterizes as a deduction that the

transcendental principle of systematicity itself rests on using the ideas of reason as schemata. So,

from the claims that we assume the logical principle of systematicity and that such an

assumption requires the transcendental assumption, coupled with the claim that the

transcendental assumption itself requires an immanent use of the ideas of reason, Kant arrives at

the necessity of employing the ideas of reason regulatively. This is the transcendental deduction

of ideas of reason which he sets out to provide in the Appendix.

!Of course, I am not claiming that Kant’s deduction of the ideas of reason is ultimately successful.

The passage Kant identifies as their deduction in fact contains a conditional claim: if one can

show that presupposing that the three ideas of reason refer to objects leads only to rules which

always promote the scientific investigation of nature, then their immanent use is vindicated.

Although recent scholarly work has added to our understanding of how the ideas of reason might

promote scientific investigation, Kant does little to argue convincingly that the antecedent of 166

this conditional holds. Nevertheless, the structure of Kant’s argument shows that vindicating the

ideas is his ultimate quarry in the Appendix, rather than demonstrating the validity of the

principle of systematicity itself.

! See Kraus (2018).166

!160

As I will now argue, however, Kant no longer concerned himself with demonstrating that ideas

of reason themselves have an immanent use in the third Critique. Rather, there he focuses solely

on providing a deduction for the principles of purposiveness, the surrogate for the principle of

systematicity in the third Critique.

!2.0 The Deduction of the Principle of Purposiveness

Although Kant provides a discussion in the third Critique of a similar notion of systematicity as

that which he had discussed in the first Critique, a noticeable difference in the presentation of the

material is the absence of an emphasis on ideas of reason in the later work. I submit that this is

for two reasons. The first reason involves the uncomfortable pairing of ideas of reason with the

task of ordering empirical laws. As I have discussed, it is a feature of Kant’s theory of ideas of

reason that these ideas have no objective correlate in the phenomenal world. It is this feature of

Kant’s account of ideas of reason which makes their role as heuristic guidelines for empirical

investigation particularly strange. As Rachel Zuckert has recently put the point, “why should a

priori conceptions of the soul, God, or the world as infinite whole have any role to play in

empirical scientific investigation”? Kant himself agonizes over this point in the Appendix, 167

when he says

What is strange about these principles [sc. the specific versions of the principle of systematicity], and what alone concerns us, is this: that they seem to be transcendental, and even though they contain mere ideas to be followed in the empirical use of reason, which reason can follow only asymptotically, as it were, i.e., merely by approximation, without ever reaching them, yet these principles, as synthetic propositions a priori, nevertheless have objective but indeterminate

Zuckert (2017) 89167

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validity, and serve as a rule of possible experience, and can even be used with good success, as heuristic principles, in actually elaborating it… (A 663/B 691). !

In other words, because of Kant’s theory of ideas of reason, any application of such ideas, even if

only heuristically, to the study of empirical phenomena is bound to seem puzzling. It was in part

to avoid worries of this sort, I submit, that Kant drew focus away from ideas of reason in the

introductions to the third Critique and instead speaks primarily of the principle of purposiveness

itself.

!The second reason for Kant’s jettisoning of ideas of reason involves an evolving view of

empirical concept formation and the introduction in the third Critique of the reflecting power of

judgment. As I have argued in Chapters 2 and 3, Kant does not, in the first Critique, see the any

regulative principle as a requirement for the formation of empirical concepts, a job he allocates

to the understanding. Whereas Kant in the first Critique, as I have shown, was concerned

primarily with justifying a certain immanent use of the ideas of reason, and used the principle of

systematicity as a means to this end by showing that the ideas are necessary to ground the

principle, in the third Critique, Kant is concerned more narrowly with the details of empirical

concept formation. This allows him to separate the issue of the grounding of the principle on

ideas from the issue of how the principle itself is justified. The principle of purposiveness, then,

is no longer an independent demand of reason as that of systematicity was in the earlier work.

This, I submit, explains many of the changes in Kant’s presentation of the material across the two

works. Let us look at Kant’s treatment of this material in the third Critique in more detail.

!

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2.1 Purposiveness and Empirical Concept Formation

In the third Critique, Kant introduces the power of judgment and he appears to assign empirical

concept formation to this power in its reflecting capacity. Kant calls the power of judgment

determining when the universal, i.e. a concept or law, is already at hand and a particular is to be

subsumed under the universal. The power of judgment has a reflecting use, however, when “only

the particular is given, for which the universal is to be found” (5:179).

!Kant argues in the Introductions to the third Critique that while the determining power of

judgment needs no special principle for the subsumption of particulars under universals, since

the rule for such subsumption is given by the universals themselves, the reflecting power of

judgment does need a principle to direct its ascent from particular to universal: “the reflecting

power of judgment, which is under the obligation of ascending from the particular in nature to

the universal,… requires a principle that it cannot borrow from experience” (5:180). The

principle of purposiveness is what serves this function in the third Critique. The principle states

that, in order for us to systematize natural laws into a hierarchy, we must think of nature as

purposive for our faculty of cognition, as if an understanding like ours had organized nature

(5:180). In the unpublished First Introduction, Kant defines reflection as follows: “To reflect (to

consider)… is to compare and hold together given representations either with others or with

one’s faculty of cognition, in relation to a concept thereby made possible” (20:211, italics

added). The important point to note here is that this seems to suggest that it is the job of the

reflecting power of judgment to form empirical concepts. It is for this reason that Kant seems to

think that the principle of purposiveness is a necessary assumption for the reflecting power of

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judgment’s task of forming empirical concepts. The principle, in other words, is a requirement

for empirical concept formation and the discovery of natural laws, given the characterization of

the reflecting power of judgment’s job as seeking the universal for the particular.

!And, indeed, a range of texts from the two Introductions to the third Critique confirm this point.

Not only does Kant describe the reflecting power of judgment as ascending from the particular to

the universal, suggestive of the formation of general empirical concepts which apply to a class of

particulars, and speak of reflection as related to a “concept thereby made possible”, but he also

asks at 20:213 “how one could hope to arrive at empirical concepts of that which is common to

the different natural forms” without presupposing “that even with regard to its empirical laws

nature has observed a certain economy suitable to our power of judgment and a uniformity that

we can grasp… as an a priori principle of the power of judgment” (emphasis added). This

passage clearly states that the assumption of the validity of the a priori principle of the power of

judgment, i.e. the principle of purposiveness, is a necessary requirement on forming empirical

concepts and discovering natural laws. Moreover, at 5:193, Kant says that “our concept of a

subjective purposiveness of nature in its forms, in accordance with empirical laws, is… a

principle of the power of judgment for providing concepts”. This is once again a clear expression

of Kant’s new idea that purposiveness is central for concept formation.

!2.2 The (New) Argument from Empirical Chaos

Nevertheless, Kant seeks to establish the principle of purposiveness using the same style of

argument from empirical chaos he uses in the first Critique to establish that we must presuppose

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the systematicity of nature in order to organize our empirical concepts and laws hierarchically. In

a passage from the Appendix to the Dialectic which I discussed in the previous section, Kant

argues that none of our genus concepts would obtain “if among the appearances offering

themselves to us there were such a great variety” (A 653-4/B 681-2) that we could not detect

similarities among appearances by comparing them with one another. Since we do, in fact, form

genus concepts to subsume the species concepts we have and since it would be irrational for us

to do so were we to suppose that they ultimately do not describe nature, we do assume that

nature is in fact isomorphic to our systematization of natural concepts.

!In the third Critique, Kant offers similar arguments from empirical chaos to establish the

necessity of our presupposing the principle of purposiveness. As I have already noted, this form

of argument appears twice in the published Introduction and three times in the unpublished

Introduction. The most prominent use to which Kant puts this argument in the third Critique is 168

at 5:183-4, where he calls it a “deduction” of the principle of purposiveness. There, Kant argues

that we must recognize the possibility that there exists in nature an infinite number of empirical

laws. Since we cannot cognize the necessity characterizing such laws, they will always appear

contingent, that is as mere constant conjunctions, to the human subject. Therefore, in order to

think of our hypothesized laws as expressing necessary connections, and not mere regularities,

we must presuppose that nature itself is such that the human understanding can detect its laws

and organize them into a hierarchical system. It is precisely such a presupposition which the

principle of purposiveness enjoins us to make. Kant is clear in this context that such a

See fn. 10. 168

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presupposition is a pre-requisite for the discovery of natural laws by reflecting judgment, when

he says “thus the power of judgment, which with regard to things under possible (still to be

discovered) empirical laws is merely reflecting, must think of nature with regard to the latter in

accordance with a principle of purposiveness for our faculty of cognition” (5:184, italics

added).

!So, if, as seems clear, Kant thought of the principle of purposiveness in the third Critique as a

necessary condition of both the discovery of natural laws and the formation of empirical

concepts, and if, as I have argued, the principle of systematicity in the first Critique plays a much

more limited role, how was Kant able to use the argument from empirical chaos to establish both

of these principles? A close reading of the arguments from empirical chaos shows that Kant in

fact uses the arguments for vastly different purposes in the first and third Critiques. As I will

argue, it is the new role which Kant assigns the principle in the later work which explains these

differences.

!After providing two arguments in the third Critique that the principle of purposiveness is both a

priori and transcendental, thereby justifying its suitability for a deduction, Kant presents the

deduction:

Now, however, the objects of empirical cognition are still determined or, as far as one can judge a priori, determinable in so many ways apart from that formal time-condition [i.e. the principles of the understanding] that specifically distinct natures, besides what they have in common as belonging to nature in general, can still be causes in infinitely many ways;… Thus we must think of there being in nature, with regard to its merely empirical laws, a possibility of infinitely manifold empirical laws, which as far as our insight goes are nevertheless

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contingent (cannot be cognized a priori);… But since…a unity must still necessarily be presupposed and assumed, for otherwise no thoroughgoing interconnection of empirical cognitions into a whole of experience would take place, because the universal laws of nature yield such an interconnection among things with respect to their genera, as things of nature in general, but not specifically, as such and such particular beings in nature, the power of judgment must thus assume it as an a priori principle for its own use that what is contingent for human insight in the particular (empirical) laws of nature nevertheless contains a lawful unity, not fathomable by us but still thinkable, in the combination of its manifold into one experience possible in itself (5:183-4). !

Here, Kant first points out what he had already stated in the first Critique, namely that the a

priori categories of the understanding radically underdetermine empirical concepts and laws.

Since that is the case, we have to accept the possibility of an infinity of laws which it is not

possible, at least for a finite intelligence, to systematize. This is the possibility of empirical

chaos. However, Kant argues that were we not to assume nature is capable of systematization, we

would have “no thoroughgoing interconnection of empirical cognitions into a whole of

experience”. This is because experience requires that we form empirical concepts which allow us

to make judgments about objects that we encounter and which allow us to explain the relation

between certain phenomena in support of inductive inferences. Were nature unsystematic, as may

be the case as far as the categories are concerned, we would not be able to make the comparisons

necessary to form empirical concepts (or so Kant now argues) and, hence, would not have a

connected experience. Since we do form concepts, we must assume that nature is, in fact,

purposive.

!Shortly after delivering this line of thought, Kant refers to it as a deduction. He says:

In order to be convinced of the correctness of this deduction of the concept that is before us and of the necessity of assuming it as a transcendental principle of

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cognition, one need only consider the magnitude of the task of making an interconnected experience out of given perceptions of a nature that in the worst case contains an infinite multiplicity of empirical laws, a task that lies in our understanding a priori (5:184). !

In other words, a task that is required by the understanding, namely to apply empirical concepts

based on induction, would simply be impossible were reflecting judgment, in forming these

concepts, not to assume that nature is purposive for our cognitive faculties. What is striking, and

unfortunate, about Kant’s new argumentative strategy in 1790 is that he seems to have forgotten

his own key insight from the first Critique that, although experience is underdetermined by the

understanding’s application of the categories, the understanding nevertheless secures the minimal

uniformity requisite for empirical concept formation. While it is true that such minimal

uniformity may fall short of the demands of the third Critique’s principle of purposiveness, it is

groundless to assume that the more demanding notion of purposiveness is necessary for

empirical concept formation in the first place. As we saw in Chapter 3, this was a point Kant

made in his earlier work. As we can see now, he seems to have lost sight of it by 1790.

!The fact that Kant uses the argument from empirical chaos as a deduction of the subjective

necessity of the principle of purposiveness, whereas in the first Critique he had used the same

line of argument to establish the principle’s transcendental credentials only, can be explained by

the fact that, in the later work, he has forgone direct appeal to the ideas of reason and instead is

focusing on the mechanism required to form empirical concepts in the first place. In other words,

Kant in the third Critique is no longer interested in grounding the principles in the ideas of

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reason and, thereby, showing that there is a legitimate use for the ideas, but rather he is interested

in characterizing and justifying the principle itself.

!There is, however, one important qualification to make regarding this characterization of Kant’s

position in the third Critique. Although, as I have argued, Kant does not emphasize the role of

the ideas of reason as strongly in the later work as he did in the Appendix of the first Critique,

ideas of reason still play a role in the third Critique. In the published Introduction of that work, 169

Kant clearly makes use of the rational idea of God. For example, at 5:180, Kant explains why he

names the a priori principle of the reflecting power of judgment a principle of purposiveness. He

writes:

Now this principle [sc. the principle of purposiveness] can be nothing other than this: that since universal laws of nature have their ground in our understanding, which prescribes them to nature (although only in accordance with the universal concept of it as nature), the particular empirical laws, in regard to that which is left undetermined in them by the former, must be considered in terms of the sort of unity they would have if an understanding (even if not ours) had likewise given them for the sake of our faculty of cognition, in order to make possible a system of experience in accordance with particular laws of nature. Not as if in this way such an understanding must really be assumed (for it is only the reflecting power of judgment for which this idea serves as a principle, for reflecting, not for determining); rather this faculty thereby gives a law only to itself, and not to nature (italics added). !

In this passage, Kant clearly makes use of the idea of an infinite intelligence (“an understanding

(even if not ours)”) to make clear to the reader in what sense the a priori principle of reflecting

judgment is one of purposiveness: the principle enjoins us to think of nature as if an infinite

understanding had ordered it for the sake of our understanding. In other words, when we think of

I thank Paul Guyer and Reed Winegar for pressing me on this point.169

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nature in this way, we think of it as purposive for our understanding. This understanding distinct

from ours plays the same role here that the idea of God plays in the Appendix in Kant’s

discussion of the principle of systematicity. Clearly, then, the idea of God does have great

significance for Kant in the third Critique. However, it is striking that in the later work this idea

appears only to serve the goal of elucidating what Kant means by a purposive principle. That is,

unlike in the first Critique, where I have argued Kant used the principle of systematicity for his

ultimate goal of justifying an immanent use of all of the ideas of reason, in the third Critique, the

idea of God plays the subordinate role of explaining what the principle of purposiveness is. The

fact that the other ideas of reason (world and soul) do not make an appearance in Kant’s

discussion of the principle of purposiveness in the Introductions to the third Critique is evidence

for this point. Kant needed to mention only the idea of God to explain what kind of a priori 170

principle he had in mind for reflecting judgment.

!Conclusion

Where does Kant’s position in the Critique of the Power of Judgment leave him with regard to

the problem of the regulative? Although Kant holds in this work that the principle of

purposiveness is a necessary condition of empirical concept formation and the discovery of

particular natural laws, he does not rescind its regulative status. Though Kant does not draw

It is true that in later parts of the third Critique, the other ideas of reason appear to play a role. 170

For example, in §67 at 5:379 Kant mentions the “idea of the whole of nature as a system in accordance with the rule of ends”. This seems to be clearly related to the rational idea of the world whole. However, nowhere in the third Critique does Kant attempt to provide a deduction of those ideas themselves, as he did in the first, and they seem clearly subordinate to explaining purposiveness in nature.

!170

extensive attention to the regulative status of the principle of purposiveness in the Introductions

to this work, its status is clear from Kant’s description of the principle as a mere 171

presupposition and as a “subjective principle”. As Kant says,

Now this transcendental concept of a purposiveness of nature is neither a concept of nature nor a concept of freedom, since it attributes nothing at all to the object (of nature), but rather only represents the unique way in which we must proceed in reflection on the objects of nature with the aim of a thoroughly interconnected experience, consequently it is a subjective principle (maxim) of the power of judgement (5:184, emphasis added). !

This description of the principle makes it clear that it is not constitutive, since it “attributes

nothing at all to the object”, and that it is regulative, since it can be understood as a rule for

reflection, or a subjective principle. This shows, then, that by the time of the third Critique Kant

had rejected the understanding of the regulative/constitutive distinction I have argued he

maintained in the first Critique, namely the view that x is constitutive of y iff x is a necessary

condition of the real possibility of y. In the later work, the principle of purposiveness is clearly a

case of a merely regulative principle which is nevertheless necessary for empirical concept

formation and the discovery of particular empirical laws. Unfortunately, given what I have been

arguing throughout the present work, this can only be understood as a retreat and major setback

by the lights of Kant’s Critical philosophy. Indeed, the fact that Kant downplays the regulative

status of the principle of purposiveness in the Introductions is perhaps evidence of a reticence on

his part to admit fully to his changing view on this topic.

!

He does call the concept of purposiveness “a regulative principle of the faculty of cognition” 171

at 5:197. Cf. also the First Introduction at 20:219ff. He calls a similar principle regulative at 5:379.

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CONCLUSION

In this dissertation, I have argued that in the Critique of Pure Reason, the central text of the

Critical period, Kant holds that the regulative principle of systematicity is not a necessary

condition of the possibility of experience. My argument for this claim rests primarily on an

extended discussion of how Kant understands the regulative/constitutive distinction in this work.

There is strong textual evidence in the Critique of Pure Reason that Kant holds that x is

constitutive of y if and only if x is a necessary condition of the possibility of y. Given that this is

so, no principle which has merely regulative status relative to experience can also be a necessary

condition of the possibility of experience, on pain of erasing the regulative/constitutive

distinction, so central to Kant’s Critical philosophy. In the course of arguing for this

understanding of how Kant understands “constitutive”, I argue against two alternative accounts

of this concept in Kant, namely the determinacy interpretation and the essentialist interpretation.

Since Leibniz and his followers probably adopted the essentialist view of what “constitutive”

means, my discussion reveals that Kant had an original and powerful understanding of this

concept suited to his Copernican revolution in philosophy.

!My interpretation of “constitutive” in Kant, moreover, reveals that Kant has two notions of

experience in the Critique of Pure Reason, a notion of ordinary experience he addresses

primarily in the Analytic of that work and a richer notion of scientific experience addressed in

the Appendix to the Dialectic. As a result, my interpretation reveals that Kant has a more

developed idea of scientific practice than perhaps has heretofore been appreciated.

!

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However, I have argued that by the time of the 1790 Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant had

jettisoned the view that x is constitutive of y if and only if x is a necessary condition of the

possibility of y. This is evident from the fact that the principle of purposiveness outlined in the

Introductions to the third Critique is both regulative and a necessary condition of the formation

of empirical concepts and the discovery of natural laws and, hence, of the possibility of

experience itself. This position exposes Kant to what I have called the problem of the regulative.

This is the problem that, should the possibility of experience itself rest on regulative principles,

the notion of experience at play in the Analytic of the first Critique would itself be a regulative

idea. This is a problem for the Kant of the Critical period because he seeks to make experience in

some respects determinate, a task that requires reliance on constitutive principles only. I have

argued, then, that Kant’s position in the third Critique is a much impoverished version of his

position in the first, at least by the lights of his Critical project.

!It may be the case that we contemporary philosophers find more of value in Kant’s later position.

In particular, the idea that not merely scientific practice, but our very conception of experience,

essentially involves regulative principles might appeal to certain of our pragmatist inclinations.

However, we are not transcendental idealists seeking to make determinate the form of

experience. By the lights of that project, Kant would have been advised to maintain the view of

constitutivity outlined, at times unclearly, in the Critique of Pure Reason. As we have seen,

however, it cannot be said that Kant ever had a settled conception of the regulative/constitutive

distinction. Even as early as the Inaugural Dissertation of 1770, Kant classified principles he

would later consider constitutive alongside regulative principles under the heading of principles

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of convenience. Kant’s view on this topic evolved throughout his career and even, as I have

argued, throughout what we consider the Critical period. As I hope to have established, however,

Kant’s most clear and powerful expression of this distinction is to be found in what we today

consider his most groundbreaking work, the Critique of Pure Reason.

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Works Cited

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