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More C. on Kant

Oct 21

embodied cognition book Enactivist Interventions

Enactivisim, started by Rosch

So… Kant doesn’t define his Categories.

Meaning,…? he names them but doesn’t really go beyond naming them?

He lists them, doesn’t define them. Gives examples but No “Unity is…”

“This table of categories has some nice points”… in Critique of Pure Reason. “I purposely omit the definitions of the categories,… I may be in possession of them. In a system of Pure Reason, a def of Cats would definition be… but would distract from what’s essential…reserved for another occasion”…but no other occasion ever comes up.

We don’t, Kant observes, simply perceive the world in a structured way and then fail to talk about it in a structured way.

Rather, we experience it in unstructured way, structure it via perception, then answer (or perform judgments) using those (and further) structures?

C.: For Kant, space & time structure our sensibility. Talking about it is how we understand it.

Faculty of Sensation -> Objects

Intuitions are representations of objects

And these intuitions can be represented to use through concepts

and once we get to concepts we are in the faculty of Understanding.

Thing -> Intuition of the thing -> Concept of the Thing or relationships between things

Intuition = “sensation experience” not “gut feeling”

Judgments/Propositions… “A clue to the discovery of the concepts of Understanding”

“All judgments are”

“representations” = intuitions or concepts or maybe other things

“Judgments are functions of unity among our representations” = taking a number of reps and combining them…related to faculty of understanding: “we can reduce all acts of the understanding to judgments”

table of cats and table of judg’s

intuition is a receptive faculty, the (active) understanding does nothing but form judgments

understanding is a faculty of judgment…

the understanding taking representations and putting them together in a structured way.

and these structured ways are the functions of unity

example:

all men are mortal

all men = Subject.

quantity: “all” = universal (not “some” or “a”)

quality: “are” = affirmative (vs negative) refers to predicate

categorical is how subject & predicate are related.

(disjunctive = XOR)

Table of Judgments vs Table of Categories

ToC is “pure concepts of the understanding”, the most basic fundamental a priori concepts humans have in their minds.

Categories can be used as concepts….and structures of the mind… kind of two things.

Why two tables instead of one?

  • Judgments draws on the nature of logic & language

  • Categories focused just on mind and its concepts.

do we have an innate understanding of causality? basic concepts, basic categories of the mind.

In Logic had the “aspects” of judgments, but pre-Kant, there were no “pure categories of the mind.”

Kant says: We already have in logic, these aspects of judgments. I’m going to go further and say that we have these (similar) kinds of representations/concepts in our minds.

There are structures of judgment, structures that govern which propositions make sense and which don’t. In the same way, there are structures of understanding. These structures of the faculty of understanding correspond directly to the structures of judgment. In fact, just like there are four Categories of the understanding (and twelve subcategories), there are equivalent four “categories” of judgment (and twelve similar subcategories). The four are: quantity, quality, relation, modality;

Ok yea let’s talk about this…

quantity is universal, the quality affirmative, the relation categorical, and the modality assertory. Kant devotes about a page and a half (of the 669-page work) to the Categories exclusively. In that section, he says, “The same function which gives unity to the various representations in a judgment also gives unity to the mere synthesis of various representations in an intuition; and this unity, in its most general expression, we entitle the pure concepts of the understanding [which is the other name he has for the categories].”

Yea. I don’t understand what “entitle” means here. “entitle” = “name”.

So, the categories are mini-functions of the faculty of understanding that serve the bigger function of unifying the manifold of intuitions and concepts (intuitions == sense-perception).

Ok hmm “the manifold” as a noun means only one thing to this theoretical physicist, namely the mathematical sense that post-dates Kant.

For Kant, “manifold of i’s and c’s” is all of i’s and c’s. the entirety of them, the set of all…. the group that you are encountering.

Another observation: Kant’s derivation/discovery of the Categories is tightly linked to his prioritizing logic and language. Although he doesn’t explicitly say this, he observed language and logic usage, and then he basically said that our mind must have the same form, the same structure, as logic and language.

Noted!

I hope that clarifies some things. I’d be happy to talk more about it. Kant is an impressive philosopher. I’m starting to see why people regard him as the greatest philosopher since Aristotle.

Yea, this also gives me an helpful idea for writing the chapter on history of classification: structure it around the major players: Plato, Aristotle, Kant, (probably) Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, (maybe Foucoault), Rosch — “major players” in terms of both originality but also in terms of “who most people were responding to” (aka “impact” or “people who changed the game”), and either

a. intersperse little names and “applied” thinkers in between

or (probably better)

b. have a first section of the chapter on major players and another section on appliers, commentators & modifiers.

Best wishes,

Dr H

Hey Dr. Hawley,

I want to correct my comment about categorization of “concepts” in Kant. I’m reading Kant and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy right now, and my claim that Kant was not categorizing concepts was 100% incorrect. In fact, Kant says, “[The idea of the totality of a priori knowledge] can furnish an exact classification of the concepts which compose that totality.” So yes, Kant was classifying concepts. He was categorizing concepts that are “pure” (i.e., that don’t refer to any sensation) and fundamental (i.e., not derivative of or composed by other concepts).

I sincerely apologize for the misdirection I gave when I said Kant’s categories were more basic than concepts (though they are a categorization of concepts that are, according to him, more basic than all other concepts). I think I got too excited and just wanted to talk about Kant, so I overshot by talking about the categories. Everything I said about sensibility, understanding, the forms of intuition, and the general goal of theCritique is accurate: I have actually read those parts of the work.

I’ll keep in mind the search for an example application of the categories as I read.

Best,

References