Kantian terminology

I have already written some posts about Kant, and am probably going to write more. My posts are generally written with my own terminology, which is a reinterpretation of Scholastic terminology. Kant has his own set of terms, however, and those have fairly standard English translations across editions. So, I leave here a note about the differences in terms.

This blog post was updated in 2022-09-28. The update added new sections after the first one, which was given a heading. It also bolded all key Kantian terms that are commented on.

Intuition, pure intuition and imagination

When Kant says “intuition”, he is usually talking about what scholastics would call the senses, including both internal and external senses; accordingly, he calls sense perceptions “intuitions”. He sometimes considers the theoretical possibility of “intellectual intuition”, which would be God’s understanding of things; but he emphasizes that all human intuitions are sensory.

When Kant talks about “pure intuition”, he is usually talking about “constructing” things a priori in it, and so he seems to be talking about the human power of imagination, i.e., of producing sensible images without an object affecting the senses. He sometimes does use the word “imagination”, and he does define it as “the faculty for representing an object even without its presence in intuition.” (B151) But when using the word “imagination”, he sometimes ascribes to it the function of unifying the impressions of the various senses into a single image, which is a function that the scholastics ascribed to a separate faculty, called the “common sense” (sensus communis) or “central sense”. As a footnote to the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason shows, he seems to be ignorant of this precedent, and to think rather that no one before him had even thought of this function as being separate from sensation itself:

No psychologist has yet thought that the imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself. This is so partly because this faculty has been limited to reproduction, and partly because it has been believed that the senses do not merely afford us impressions but also put them together, and produce images of objects, for which without doubt something more than the receptivity of impressions is required, namely a function of the synthesis of them. (A120)

As I have mentioned elsewhere, I tend to avoid the word “intuition”, and I have no use for it in my own work. When talking about Kant, however, I have found it helpful to use it as he did. When I say “imagination”, however, it is always in my sense of the term, which I find to be more precise, since it excludes the central sense. Sometimes, I may speak of Kant’s teachings in my own terms, so that I might speak of “imagination” where Kant had only spoken of “pure intuition”, and I might talk about “sense” in a context where he had said “intuition”. If something was lost in this translation, it was also lost to my mind; I can only think in my terms.

Concept

What Kant calls the “pure concepts of the understanding” would not all traditionally be called “concepts”, i.e., universals, predicated of many things with regard to their essence. The category of community, for instance, could never be part of a definition of what something is. Really, Kant’s categories are better regarded as words that, when placed within propositions, represent “logical functions of judgment”, a phrase which he himself used often.

Kant seemed quite aware that he was using the term in a broader sense, since he said, for instance, that “just as modality in a judgment is not a separate predicate, so too the modal concepts do not add a determination to things” (Prolegomena, §39). However, while I had not read enough of the relevant works, I was thrown off immensely by the use of the traditional name categories, since Aristotle’s categories really were concepts in the traditional sense, and could all be used as parts of definitions of the essence of things. So, I thought that Kant had tried and failed to make a new division of categories in the old sense, and that, inexplicably, he had tried to derive this division from a table of logical functions in judgments, which I thought was very strange. I raised this complaint, among others, in a now-retracted post about his table. Kant should really have just made a new word for whatever he was doing, maybe “judicatures” or something.

Judgment

In that post, I also said the following:

The division of judgments according to relation is poorly drawn. While these judgments differ in their form of being stated, they do not differ cognitively, since all hypothetical judgments imply categorical judgments. To say that “if A is B, then A is C” implies that “all B are C”, or at least that “all B that are X are C”, where X is something that was understood within the definition of A. The thoughts are equivalent, and only the words aren’t; the division has its place in logic, but not in the theory of knowledge.

I think that this opinion is also rather common in traditional logic. Kant actually agreed that “categorical judgments underlie all the others” (Prolegomena, §39). But he apparently really thought that hypothetical and disjunctive judgments are distinct kinds of judgment, which differ from categorical judgments in that they “do not contain a relation of concepts, but of judgments themselves” (B141). That is, they are compound judgments – judgments about other judgments – whereas categorical judgments are simple judgments. This doctrine was apparently shared by Johann Heinrich Lambert’s 1764 work Neues Organon, which I cannot read because I do not know German. Thinking about it now, it seems perfectly reasonable, and I no longer object to it. I mention it here, however, because it means that the word “judgment” was also used in an unexpected sense by Kant.

Cognition and existence

As I mentioned in the retracted post, Kant restricts the term “cognition” to concepts that have corresponding intuitions, (B144ff.) excluding the categories as “empty concepts”, which are merely “thought” but have no object. He also restricts the term “existence” in this way, i.e., to things of which we have a “determinate” cognition; and he seems to do likewise with “knowledge”. I have grown accustomed to his usage, but I still think that it is pretty arbitrary to restrict these words in this way, and that certainly not everyone does so.

In a different post, I suggested that it would be a good thing to apply a “translation key” to Kant, so that whatever he says is “merely thought” “indeterminately” may also be said, more broadly, to “exist” and “be known” (and by implication, “cognized”), while still meaning to express the same philosophical teachings, fundamentally. He makes a very narrow use of very important terms, and I think that his usage is narrower than that of typical speech; in particular, I think that “God exists” is not typically taken to mean that God is given to us as a determinate object in any kind of intuition.