Kant’s View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self

First published Mon Jul 26, 2004; substantive revision Thu Oct 8, 2020

Even though Kant himself held that his view of the mind andconsciousness were inessential to his main purpose, some of the ideascentral to his point of view came to have an enormous influence on his successors. Some of his ideas are now central to cognitive science, for example. Other ideas equallycentral to his point of view had little influence on subsequentwork. In this article, first we survey Kant’s model as a wholeand the claims in it that have been influential. Then we examine his claimsabout consciousness of self specifically. Many of his ideas that have not been influential are ideas about the consciousness of self.Indeed, even though he achieved remarkable insights into consciousnessof self, many of these insights next appeared only about 200 years later, in the 1960s and1970s.

1. A Sketch of Kant’s View of the Mind

In this article, we will focus on Immanuel Kant’s (1724–1804) workon the mind and consciousness of self and related issues.

Some commentators believe that Kant’s views on the mind aredependent on his idealism (he called it transcendental idealism). Forthe most part, that is not so. At worst, most of what he said about themind and consciousness can be detached from his idealism. Though oftenviewed as a quintessentially German philosopher, Kant is said to havebeen one-quarter Scottish. Some philosophers (often Scottish) hold that‘Kant’ is a Germanization of the Scottish name‘Candt’, though many scholars now reject the idea. It isnoteworthy, however, that his work on epistemology, which led him tohis ideas about the mind, was a response toHume as much as to any other philosopher.

In general structure, Kant’s model of the mind was the dominantmodel in the empirical psychology that flowed from his work and thenagain, after a hiatus during which behaviourism reigned supreme(roughly 1910 to 1965), toward the end of the 20^th century,especially in cognitive science. Central elements of the models of themind of thinkers otherwise as different as Sigmund Freud and JerryFodor are broadly Kantian, for example.

Three ideas define the basic shape (‘cognitivearchitecture’) of Kant’s model and one its dominant method. Theyhave all become part of the foundation of cognitive science.

The mind is a complex set of abilities (functions). (As Meerbote 1989and many others have observed, Kant held a functionalist view of themind almost 200 years before functionalism was officially articulatedin the 1960s by Hilary Putnam and others.)
The functions crucial for mental, knowledge-generating activity arespatio-temporal processing of, and application of concepts to, sensoryinputs. Cognition requires concepts as well as percepts.
These functions are forms of what Kant called synthesis. Synthesis(and the unity in consciousness required for synthesis) are central tocognition.

These three ideas are fundamental to most thinking about cognition now.Kant’s most important method, the transcendental method, is also at theheart of contemporary cognitive science.

To study the mind, infer the conditions necessary for experience.Arguments having this structure are calledtranscendentalarguments.

Translated into contemporary terms, the core of this method isinference to the best explanation, the method of postulatingunobservable mental mechanisms in order to explain observedbehaviour.

To be sure, Kant thought that he could get more out of histranscendental arguments than just ‘best explanations’. Hethought that he could geta priori (experience independent)knowledge out of them. Kant had a tripartite doctrine of theapriori. He held that some features of the mind and its knowledgehada priori origins, i.e., must be in the mind prior toexperience (because using them is necessary to have experience). Thatmind and knowledge have these features area priori truths,i.e., necessary and universal (B3/4)^[1]. And we can come to know thesetruths, or that they area priori at any rate, only by usinga priori methods, i.e., we cannot learn these things fromexperience (B3) (Brook 1993). Kant thought that transcendentalarguments werea priori or yielded thea priori inall three ways. Nonetheless, at the heart of this method is inferenceto the best explanation. When introspection fell out of favour about100 years ago, the alternative approach adopted was exactly thisapproach. Its nonempirical roots in Kant notwithstanding, it is now themajor method used by experimental cognitive scientists.

Other topics equally central to Kant’s approach to the mind have hardly been discussed by cognitive science. These include, as we will see near the end, a kind of synthesis that for Kant was essential to minds like ours and what struck him as the most striking features of consciousness of self. Far from his model having beensuperseded by cognitive science, some things central to the model have not evenbeen assimilated by it.

2. Kant’s Critical Project and How the Mind Fits Into It

The major works so far as Kant’s views on the mind are concerned arethe monumentalCritique of Pure Reason (CPR) and his little,lateAnthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, firstpublished in 1798 only six years before his death. Since theAnthropology was worked up from notes for popular lectures, itis often superficial compared toCPR. Kant’s view of the mindarose from hisgeneral philosophical project inCPR the following way. Kant aimed among other thingsto,

Justify our conviction that physics, like mathematics, is a body ofnecessary and universal truth.
Insulate religion, including belief in immortality, and free willfrom the corrosive effects of this very same science.

Kant accepted without reservation that “God, freedom andimmortality” (1781/7, Bxxx) exist but feared that, if sciencewere relevant to their existence at all, it would provide reasons todoubt that they exist. As he saw it and very fortunately, sciencecannot touch these questions. “I have found it necessary to denyknowledge, … in order to make room forfaith.” (Bxxx, his italics).

Laying the foundation for pursuit of the first aim, which as he saw itwas no less than the aim of showing why physics is a science, was whatled Kant to his views about how the mind works. He approached thegrounding of physics by asking: What are the necessary conditions ofexperience (A96)? Put simply, he held that for our experience, andtherefore our minds, to be as they are, the way that our experience istied together must reflect the way that, according to physics, says objects inthe world must be tied together. Seeing this connection also tells usa lot about what our minds must be like.

In pursuit of the second aim, Kantcriticized some arguments of his predecessors that entailed if sound that we can know more about the mind’s consciousness ofitself than Kant could allow. Mounting these criticisms led him to some extraordinarilypenetrating ideas about our consciousness of ourselves.

InCPR, Kant discussed the mind only in connection with hismain projects, never in its own right, so his treatment is remarkablyscattered and sketchy. As he put it, “Enquiry … [into] thepure understanding itself, its possibility and the cognitive facultiesupon which it rests … is of great importance for my chiefpurpose, … [but] does not form an essential part of it”(Axvii). Indeed, Kant offers no sustained, focussed discussion of themind anywhere in his work except the popularAnthropology,which, as we just said, is quite superficial.

In addition, the two chapters ofCPR in which most ofKant’s remarks on the mind occur, the chapter on the TranscendentalDeduction (TD) and the chapter on what he called Paralogisms (faultyarguments about the mind mounted by his predecessors) were the twochapters that gave him the greatest difficulty. (They contain some ofthe most impenetrable prose ever written.) Kant completely rewrote themain body of both chapters for the second edition (though not theintroductions, interestingly).

In the two editions ofCPR, there are seven maindiscussions of the mind. The first is in the Transcendental Aesthetic,the second is in what is usually called the Metaphysical Deduction (forthis term, see below). Then there are two discussions of it in thefirst-edition TD, in parts 1 to 3 of Section 2 (A98 up to A110) and inthe whole of Section 3 (A115-A127)^[2] and two more in the second-edition TD, from B129 to B140 and fromB153 to B159, the latter seemingly added as a kind of supplement. Theseventh and last is found in the first edition version of Kant’sattack on the Paralogisms, in the course of which he says things ofthe utmost interest about consciousness of and reference toself. (What little was retained of these remarks in the second editionwas moved to the completely rewritten TD.) For understanding Kant onthe mind and self-knowledge, the first edition ofCPR is farmore valuable than the second edition. Kant’s discussion proceedsthrough the following stages.

2.1 Transcendental Aesthetic

Kant calls the first stage the Transcendental Aesthetic.^[3] It is about what space and time must be like, and how we must handlethem, if our experience is to have the spatial and temporal propertiesthat it has. This question about the necessary conditions ofexperience is for Kant a ‘transcendental’ question and thestrategy of proceeding by trying to find answers to such questions is,as we said, the strategy of transcendental argument.

Here Kant advances one of his most notorious views: that whatever itis that impinges on us from the mind-independent world does not comelocated in a spatial nor even a temporal matrix(A37=B54fn.). Rather, it is the mind that organizes this‘manifold of raw intuition’, as he called it, spatially andtemporally. The mind has two pure forms of intuition, space and time,built into it to allow it to do so. (‘Pure’ means‘not derived from experience’.)

These claims are very problematic. For example, they invite thequestion, in virtue of what is the mind constrained to locate a bit ofinformation at one spatial or temporal location rather than another?Kant seems to have had no answer to this question (Falkenstein 1995;Brook 1998). Most commentators have found Kant’s claim that space andtime are only in the mind, not at all in the mind-independent world, tobe implausible.

The activity of locating items in the ‘forms ofintuition’, space and time, is one of the three kinds of whatKant called synthesis and discussed in the chapter on theTranscendental Deduction. It is not entirely clear how the twodiscussions relate.

2.2 Metaphysical Deduction

The Aesthetic is about the conditions of experience, Kant’s officialproject. The chapter leading up to the Transcendental Deduction, TheClue to the Discovery of All Pure Concepts of the Understanding (butgenerally called the Metaphysical Deduction because of a remark thatKant once made, B159) has a very different starting point.

Starting from (and, Bvii, taking for granted the adequacy of) Aristotelianlogic (the syllogisms and the formal concepts that Aristotle called categories), Kant proceeds by analysis to draw out the implications of these concepts and syllogisms for the conceptual structure (the “function of thought in judgment” (A70=B95)) within which all thought and experience must take place. The result is what Kant called theCategories. That is to say, Kant tries to deduce the conceptual structure of experience from the components of Aristotelian logic.

Thus, in Kant’s thought about the mind early inCPR, thereis not one central movement but two, one in the TranscendentalAesthetic and the other in the Metaphysical Deduction. The first is amove up from experience (of objects) to the necessary conditions ofsuch experience. The second is a move down from the Aristotelian functionsof judgment to the concepts that we have to use in judging, namely, theCategories. One is inference up from experience, the other deductiondown from conceptual structures of the most abstract kind.

2.3 Transcendental Deduction, 1^st Edition

Then we get to the second chapter of the Transcendental Logic, thebrilliant and baffling Transcendental Deduction (TD). Recall the twomovements just discussed, the one from experience to its conditions andthe one from Aristotelian functions of judgment to the concepts that we mustuse in all judging (the Categories). This duality led Kant to hisfamous question of right (quid juris) (A84=B116): with whatright do we apply the Categories, which are not acquired fromexperience, to the contents of experience? (A85=B117). Kant’s problemhere is not as arcane as it might seem. It reflects an importantquestion: How is it that the world as we experience it conforms to ourlogic? In briefest form, Kant thought that the trick to showing how itispossible for the Categories to apply to experience is toshow that it isnecessary that they apply (A97).^[4]

TD has two sides, though Kant never treats them separately. He oncecalled them the objective and the subjective deductions (Axvii). Theobjective deduction is about the conceptual and other cognitiveconditions of having representations of objects. It is Kant’s answer tothequid juris question. Exactly how the objective deductiongoes is highly controversial, a controversy that we will sidestep here.The subjective deduction is about what the mind, the “subjectivesources” of understanding (A97), must as a consequence be like.The subjective deduction is what mainly interests us.

Kant argues as follows. Our experiences have objects, that is, they are aboutsomething. The objects of our experiences are discrete, unifiedparticulars. To have such particulars available to it, the mind mustconstruct them based on sensible input. To construct them, the mindmust do three kinds of synthesis. It must generate temporal and spatialstructure (Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition). It must associatespatio-temporally structured items with other spatio-temporallystructured items (Synthesis of Reproduction in the Imagination). And itmust recognize items using concepts, the Categories in particular(Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept). This threefold doctrine ofsynthesis is one of the cornerstones of Kant’s model of the mind. Wewill consider it in more detail in the next Section.

The ‘deduction of the categories’ should now becomplete. Strangely enough, the chapter has only nicely got started. Inthe first edition version, for example, we have only reached A106,about one-third of the way through the chapter. At this point, Kantintroduces the notion of transcendental apperception for the first timeand the unity of such apperception, the unity of consciousness.Evidently, something is happening (something, moreover, not at all wellheralded in the text). We will see what when we discuss Kant’s doctrineof synthesis below.

We can now understand in more detail why Kant said that the subjectivededuction is inessential (Axvii). Since the objective deduction isabout the conditions of representations having objects, a better namefor it might have been ‘deduction of theobject’. Similarly, a better name for the subjective deductionmight have been ‘the deduction of the subject’ or‘the deduction of the subject’s nature’. The latterenquiry was inessential to Kant’s main critical project because themain project was to defend the synthetica priori credentialsof physics in the objective deduction. From this point of view,anything uncovered about the nature and functioning of the mind was ahappy accident.

2.4 Attack on the Paralogisms, 1^st Edition

The chapter on the Paralogisms, the first of the three parts of Kant’ssecond project, contains Kant’s most original insights into the natureof consciousness of the self. In the first edition, he seems to haveachieved a stable position on self-consciousness only as late as thischapter. Certainly his position was not stable in TD. Even his famousterm for consciousness of self, ‘I think’, occurs for thefirst time only in the introduction to the chapter on theParalogisms. His target is claims that we know what the mind islike. Whatever the merits of Kant’s attack on these claims, in thecourse of mounting it, he made some very deep-running observationsabout consciousness and knowledge of self.

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

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

As we said, Kant rewrote both TD and the chapter on the Paralogismsfor the second edition ofCPR, leaving only theirintroductions intact. In the course of doing so, he moved the topic ofconsciousness of self from the chapter on the Paralogisms to thesecond discussion of the mind in the new TD. The new version of theParalogisms chapter is then built around a different and, so far astheory of mind is concerned, much less interesting strategy. Therelationship of the old and new versions of the chapters iscomplicated (Brook 1994, Ch. 9). Here we will just note that theunderlying doctrine of the mind does not seem to change very much.

CPR contains other discussions of the mind, discussionsthat remained the same in both editions. The appendix on what Kantcalled Leibniz’ Amphiboly contains the first explicit discussion of animportant general metaphysical notion, numerical identity (being oneobject at and over time), and contains the firstargument inCPR for the proposition that sensible input is needed forknowledge. (Kant asserts this many times earlier but assertion is notargument.) In the Antinomies, the discussion of the Second Antinomycontains some interesting remarks about the simplicity of the soul andthere is a discussion of free will in the Solution to the ThirdAntinomy. The mind also appears a few times in the Doctrine of Method,particularly in a couple of glosses of the attack mounted against theParalogisms. (A784=B812ff is perhaps the most interesting.)

In other new material prepared for the second edition, we find afirst gloss on the topic of self-consciousness as early as theAesthetic (B68). The mind also appears in a new passage called theRefutation of Idealism, where Kant attempts to tie the possibility ofone sort of consciousness of self to consciousness of permanence insomething other than ourselves, in a way he thought to be inconsistentwith Berkeleian idealism. This new Refutation of Idealism has oftenbeen viewed as a replacement for the argument against the FourthParalogism of the first edition. There are problems with this view, themost important of which is that the second edition still has a separatefourth Paralogism (B409). That said, though the new passage utilizesself-consciousness in a highly original way, it says little that is newabout it.

Elsewhere in his work, the only sustained discussion of the mind andconsciousness is, as we said, his little, lateAnthropology from aPragmatic Point of View. By ‘anthropology’ Kant meantthe study of human beings from the point of view of their(psychologically-controlled) behaviour, especially their behaviourtoward one another, and of the things revealed in behaviour such ascharacter. Though Kant sometimes contrasted anthropology as a legitimate studywith what he understood empirical psychology to be, namely, psychologybased on introspective observation, he meant by anthropology somethingfairly close to what we now mean by behavioural or experimentalpsychology.

3. Kant’s View of the Mind

3.1 Method

Turning now to Kant’s view of the mind, we will start with a pointabout method: Kant held surprisingly strong and not entirelyconsistent views on the empirical study of the mind. The empiricalmethod for doing psychology that Kant discussed was introspection.

Sometimes he held such study to be hopeless. The key text onpsychology is inThe Metaphysical Foundations of NaturalScience. There Kant tell us that “the empirical doctrine ofthe soul … must remain even further removed than chemistry fromthe rank of what may be called a natural science proper”(Ak. IV:471). (In Kant’s defence, there was nothing resembling asingle unified theory of chemical reactions in his time.) The contentsof introspection, in his terms inner sense, cannot be studiedscientifically for at least five reasons.

First, having only one universal dimension and one that they areonlyrepresented to have at that, namely, distribution intime, the contents of inner sense cannot be quantified; thus nomathematical model of them is possible. Second, “the manifold ofinternal observation is separated only by mere thought”. That isto say, only the introspective observer distinguishes the items onefrom another; there are no real distinctions among the itemsthemselves. Third, these items “cannot be kept separate” ina way that would allow us to connect them again “at will”,by which Kant presumably means, according to the dictates of ourdeveloping theory. Fourth, “another thinking subject [does not]submit to our investigations in such a way as to be conformable to ourpurposes” – the only thinking subject whose inner sense onecan investigate is oneself. Finally and most damningly, “even theobservation itself alters and distorts the state of the objectobserved” (1786, Ak. IV:471). Indeed, introspection can be badfor the health: it is a road to “mental illness”(‘Illuminism and Terrorism’, 1798, Ak. VII:133; see161).

In these critical passages, it is not clear why he didn’t respect whathe called anthropology more highly as an empirical study of the mind,given that he himself did it. He did so elsewhere. In theAnthropology, for example, he links‘self-observation’ and observation of others and callsthem both sources of anthropology (Ak. VII:142–3).

Whatever, no kind of empirical psychology can yield necessary truthsabout the mind. In the light of this limitation, howshouldwe study the mind? Kant’s answer was: transcendental method usingtranscendental arguments (notions introduced earlier). If we cannotobserve the connections among the denizens of inner sense to anypurpose, we can study what the mindmust be like and whatcapacities and structures (in Kant’s jargon, faculties) itmust have if it is to represent things as it does. With thismethod we can find universally true, that is to say,‘transcendental’ psychological propositions. We havealready seen what some of them are: minds must be able to synthesizeand minds must have a distinctive unity, for example. Let us turn nowto these substantive claims.

3.2 Synthesis and Faculties

We have already discussed Kant’s view of the mind’s handling ofspace and time, so we can proceed directly to his doctrine ofsynthesis. As Kant put it in one of his most famous passages,“Concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions withoutconcepts are blind” (A51=B75). Experience requires both perceptsand concepts. As we might say now, to discriminate, we needinformation; but for information to be of any use to us, we mustorganize the information. This organization is provided by acts ofsynthesis.

Bysynthesis, in its most general sense, Iunderstand the act of putting different representations together, andof grasping what is manifold in them in one knowledge[A77=B103]

If the doctrine of space and time is the first major part of hismodel of the mind, the doctrine of synthesis is the second. Kantclaimed, as we saw earlier, that three kinds of synthesis are requiredto organize information, namely apprehending in intuition, reproducingin imagination, and recognizing in concepts (A97-A105). Each of thethree kinds of synthesis relates to a different aspect of Kant’sfundamental duality of intuition and concept. Synthesis ofapprehension concerns raw perceptual input, synthesis of recognitionconcerns concepts, and synthesis of reproduction in imagination allowsthe mind to go from the one to the other.

They also relate to three fundamental faculties of the mind. One isthe province of Sensibility, one is the province of Understanding, andthe one in the middle is the province of a faculty that has a far lesssettled position than the other two, namely, Imagination (seeA120).

The first two, apprehension and reproduction, are inseparable; onecannot occur without the other (A102). The third, recognition, requiresthe other two but is not required by them. It seems that only the thirdrequires the use of concepts; this problem of non-concept-usingsyntheses and their relationship to use of the categories becomes asubstantial issue in the second edition (see B150ff.), where Kant triesto save the universality of the objective deduction by arguing that allthree kinds of syntheses are required to represent objects.

Acts of synthesis are performed on that to which we are passive inexperience, namely intuitions (Anschauungen). Intuitions arequite different from sense-data as classically understood; we canbecome conscious of intuitions only after acts of synthesis and only byinference from these acts, not directly. Thus they are something morelike theoretical entities (better, events) postulated to explainsomething in what we do recognize. What they explain is thenon-conceptual element in representations, an element over which wehave no control. Intuitions determine how our representations willserve to confirm or refute theories, aid or impede our efforts to reachvarious goals.

3.2.1 Synthesis of Apprehension in Intuition

The synthesis of apprehension is somewhat more shadowy than theother two. In the second edition, the idea does not even appear until§26, i.e., late in TD. At A120, Kant tells us that apprehendingimpressions is taking them up into the activity of imagination, i.e.,into the faculty of the mind that becomes conscious of images. He tellsus that we can achieve the kind of differentiation we need to take themup only “in so far as the mind distinguishes the time in thesequence of one impression upon another” (A99). Kant uses theterm ‘impression’ (Eindrucke) rarely; it seems tobe in the same camp as ‘appearance’ (Erscheinung)and ‘intuition’ (Anschauung).

The idea behind the strange saying just quoted seems to be this.Kant seems to have believed that we can become conscious of only onenew item at a time. Thus a group of simultaneous‘impressions’ all arriving at the same time would beindistinguishable, “for each representation[Vorstellung],in so far as it is contained in a singlemoment, can never be anything but absolute unity” (A99).Kant’s use ofVorstellung, with its suggestion of synthesized,conceptualized organization, may have been unfortunate, but what Ithink he meant is this. Prior to synthesis and conceptual organization,a manifold of intuitions would be an undifferentiated unit, a seamless,buzzing confusion. Thus, to distinguish one impression from another, wemust give them separate locations. Kant speaks only of temporallocation but he may very well have had spatial location in mind,too.

The synthesis of apprehension is closely related to theTranscendental Aesthetic. Indeed, it is the doing of what the Aesthetictells us that the mind has to be able to do with respect to locatingitems in time and space (time anyway).

3.2.2 Synthesis of Reproduction in Imagination

The synthesis of reproduction in imagination has two elements, asynthesis proper and associations necessary for performing thatsynthesis. (Kant explicitly treats them as separate on A125:“recognition, reproduction, association, apprehension”.)Both start from the appearances, as Kant now calls them, which thesynthesis of apprehension has located in time. At first glance, thesynthesis of reproduction looks very much likememory; however, it is actually quite different from memory. It is a matterof retaining earlier intuitions in such a way that certain otherrepresentations can “bring about a transition of the mind”to these earlier representations, even in the absence of any currentrepresentation of them (A100). Such transitions are the result of thesetting up of associations (which, moreover, need not be conscious)and do not require memory. Likewise, no recognition of any sort needbe involved; that the earlier representations have become associatedwith later ones is not something that we need recognize. Memory andrecognition are the jobs of synthesis of recognition, yet to come.

To our ears now, it is a little strange to find Kant calling thisactivity of reproduction and the activity of apprehension acts ofimagination. Kant describes the function he had in mind as“a blind but indispensable function of the soul”(A78=B103), so he meant something rather different from what we nowmean by the term ‘imagination’ (A120 and fn.). For Kant,imagination is a connecting of elements by forming an image:“… imagination has to bring the manifold of intuitionsinto the form of an image” (A120). If ‘imagination’is understood in its root sense of image-making and we see imaginationnot as opposed to but as part of perception, then Kant’s choice of termbecomes less peculiar.

3.2.3 Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept

The third kind of synthesis is synthesis of recognition in aconcept. To experience objects for Kant, first I have to relate thematerials out of which they are constructed to one another temporallyand spatially. They may not require use of concepts. Then I have toapply at least the following kinds of concepts: concepts of number, ofquality, and of modality (I am experiencing something real orfictitious). These are three of the four kinds of concepts that Kanthad identified as Categories. Note that we have so far not mentionedthe fourth, relational concepts.

In Kant’s view, recognition requires memory; reproduction is notmemory but memory does enter now. The argument goes as follows.

[A merely reproduced] manifold of representation wouldnever … form a whole, since it would lack that unity which onlyconsciousness can impart to it. If, in counting, I forget that theunits, which now hover before me, have been added to one another insuccession, I should never know that a total is being produced throughthis successive addition of unit to unit … [A103; seeA78=B104].

In fact, as this passage tells us, synthesis into an object by anact of recognition requires two things. One is memory. The other isthat something in the past representations must be recognizedasrelated to present ones. And to recognize that earlier and laterrepresentations are both representing a single object, we must use aconcept, a rule (A121, A126). In fact, we must use a number ofconcepts: number, quality, modality, and, of course, the specificempirical concept of the object we are recognizing.

Immediately after introducing recognition, Kant brings apperceptionand the unity of apperception into the discussion. The acts by which weachieve recognition under concepts are acts of apperception. By‘apperception’, Kant means the faculty or capacity forjudging in accord with a rule, for applying concepts. Apperceiving isan activity necessary for and parallel to perceiving (A120). This isone of the senses in which Leibniz used the term, too. To achieverecognition of a unified object, the mind must perform an act ofjudgment; it must find how various represented elements are connectedto one another. This judgment is an act of apperception. Apperceptionis the faculty that performs syntheses of recognition (A115). Note thatwe are not yet dealing withtranscendental apperception.

To sum up: For experiences to have objects, acts of recognition thatapply concepts to spatio-temporally ordered material are required.Representation requires recognition. Moreover, objects ofrepresentation share a general structure. They are all some number ofsomething, they all have qualities, and they all have anexistence-status. (Put this way, Kant’s claim that the categories arerequired for knowledge looks quite plausible.)

3.3 Synthesis: A 90° Turn

With the synthesis of recognition, TD should be close to complete.Kant merely needs to argue that these concepts must include thecategories, which he does at A111, and that should be that.

But that is not that. In fact, as we said earlier, we are only aboutone-third of the way through the chapter. The syntheses ofapprehension, reproduction, and recognition of single objects march ina single temporal/object-generational line. Suddenly at A106 Kant makesa kind of 90^o turn. From the generation of a representationof individual objects of experienceover time, he suddenlyturns to a form of recognition that requires the unification andrecognition of multiple objects existingat the same time. Hemoves from acts of recognition of individual objects to unified acts ofrecognition of multiple objects which “stand along side oneanother in one experience” (A108). This 90^o turn is apivotal moment in TD and has received less attention than itdeserves.

The move that Kant makes next is interesting. He argues that themind could not use concepts so as to have unified objects ofrepresentationif its consciousness were not itself unified(A107–108). Why does consciousness and its unity appear here? We havebeen exploring what is necessary to have experience. Why would itmatter if, in addition, unified consciousness were necessary? As Walker(1978, p. 77) and Guyer (1987, pp. 94–5) have shown, Kant did not needto start fromanything about the mind to deduce theCategories. (A famous footnote inThe Metaphysical Foundations ofNatural Science [Ak. IV:474fn.] is Kant’s best-known comment onthis issue.) So why does he suddenly introduce unifiedconsciousness?

So far Kant has ‘deduced’ only three of the four kindsof categorical concepts, number, quality, and modality. He has saidnothing about the relational categories. For Kant, this would have beena crucial gap. One of his keenest overall objectives inCPR isto show that physics is a real science. To do this, he thinks that heneeds to show that we must use the concept of causality in experience.Thus, causality is likely the category that he cared more about thanall the other categories put together. Yet up to A106, Kant has saidnothing about the relational categories in general or causality inparticular. By A111, however, Kant is talking about the use of therelational categories and by A112 causality is front and centre. So itis natural to suppose that, in Kant’s view at least, the materialbetween A106 and A111 contains an argument for the necessity ofapplying the relational categories, even though he never says so.

Up to A106, Kant has talked about nothing but normal individualobjects: a triangle and its three sides, a body and its shape andimpenetrability. At A107, he suddenly begins to talk about tyingtogether multiple represented objects, indeed “all possibleappearances, which can stand alongside one another in oneexperience” (A108). The solution to the problem of showing thatwe have to use the category of causality must lie somewhere in thisactivity of tying multiple objects together.

The passage between A106 and A111 is blindingly difficult. It takesup transcendental apperception, the unity and identity of the mind, andthe mind’s consciousness of itself as the subject of all itsrepresentations (A106–108). I think that this passage introduces eithera new stage or even a new starting point for TD. Here many commentators(Strawson, Henrich, Guyer) would think immediately ofself-consciousness. Kant did use consciousness of self as a startingpoint for deductions, at B130 in the B-edition for example. But that isnot what appears here, not in the initial paragraphs anyway.

What Kant does say is this. Our experience is “oneexperience”; “all possible appearances … standalongside one another in one experience” (A108). We have“one and the same general experience” of “all… the various perceptions” (A110), “a connectedwhole of human knowledge” (A121). Let us call this generalexperience aglobal representation.

Transcendental apperception (hereafter TA) now enters. Itis the ability to tie ‘all appearances’ together into‘one experience’.

This transcendental unity of apperception forms out of allpossible appearances, which can stand alongside one another in oneexperience, a connection of all these representations according tolaws. [A108]

It performs a “synthesis of all appearances according toconcepts”, “whereby it subordinates all synthesis ofapprehension … to a transcendental unity” (A108). This, hethought, requires unified consciousness. Unified consciousness isrequired for another reason, too. Representations

can [so much as] represent something to me only in so faras they belong with all others to one consciousness. Therefore, theymust at least be capable of being so connected [A116].

The introduction of unified consciousness opens up an important newopportunity. Kant can now explore the necessary conditions of consciouscontent being unified in this way. To make a long story short, Kant nowargues that conscious content could have the unity that it does only ifthe contents themselves are tied together causally.^[5]

With this, his deduction of the relational categories is completeand his defence of the necessity of physics is under way. The notion ofunified consciousness to which Kant is appealing here is interesting inits own right, so let us turn to it next.^[6]

3.4 Unity of Consciousness

For Kant, consciousness being unified is a central feature of themind, our kind of mind at any rate. In fact, being a single integratedgroup of experiences (roughly, one person’s experiences) requires twokinds of unity.

The experiences must have a single common subject (A350);
and,
The consciousness that this subject has of represented objectsand/or representations must be unified.

The first requirement may look trivial but it is not. For Hume, forexample, what makes a group of experiences one person’s experiences isthat they are associated with one another in an appropriate way (theso-called bundle theory), not that they have a common subject. The needfor a subject arises from two straightforward considerations:representations not only represent something, they represent it tosomeone; and, representations are not given to us – to become arepresentation, sensory inputs must be processed by an integratedcognitive system. Kant may have been conscious of both these points,but beyond identifying the need, he had little to say about what thesubject of experience might be like, so we will say no more about it.(We will, however, say something about what its consciousness of itselfis like later.)

Kant seems to have used the terms ‘unity of consciousness’ (A103) and ‘unity of apperception’ (A105, A108) interchangeably. The well-known argument at the beginning of the firstedition attack on the second paralogism (A352) focuses on this unityat a given time (among other things) and what can (or rather, cannot)be inferred from this about the nature of the mind (a topic to whichwe will return below). The attack on the third paralogism focuses onwhat can be inferred from unified consciousness over time. These areall from the first edition ofCPR. In the second edition,Kant makes remarks about unity unlike anything in the first edition,for example, “this unity … is not the category ofunity” (B131). The unity of consciousness and Kant’sviews on it are complicated issues but some of the most importantpoints include the following.

By ‘unity of consciousness’, Kant seems to have thefollowing in mind: I am conscious not only of single experiences but ofa great many experiences at the same time. The same is true of actions;I can do and be conscious of doing a number of actions at the sametime. In addition to such synchronic unity, many globalrepresentations, as we called them, display temporal unity: currentrepresentation is combined with retained earlier representation.(Temporal unity is often a feature of synthesis of recognition.) Anyrepresentation that we acquire in a series of temporal steps, such ashearing a sentence, will have unity across time (A104; A352).

Kant himself did not explicate his notion of unified consciousnessbut here is one plausible articulation of the notion at work in hiswritings.

The unity of consciousness =df. (i) a single actof consciousness, which (ii) makes one conscious of a number ofrepresentations and/or objects of representation in such a way that tobe conscious by having any members of this group is also to beconscious by having others in the group and of at least some of them asa group.

As this definition makes clear, consciousness being unified is morethan just being one state of consciousness. Unified consciousness isnot just singular, it is unified.

Kant placed great emphasis on the unity of consciousness, bothpositively and negatively. Positively, he held that conceptualizedrepresentation has to be unified both at and across time. Negatively,from a mind having unified consciousness, he held that nothing followsconcerning its composition, its identity, especially itsidentity across time, nor its materiality or immateriality. He argued these points in hisattacks on the second, third and fourth Paralogisms.

4. Consciousness of Self and Knowledge of Self

Many commentators hold that consciousness of self is central to theCritical philosophy. There is reason to question this: unifiedconsciousness is central, but consciousness of self? That is not soclear. Whatever, the topic is intrinsically interesting and Kantachieved some remarkable insights into it. Strangely, none of hisimmediate successors took them up after his death and they nextappeared at the earliest in Wittgenstein (1934–5) and perhaps not untilShoemaker (1968). Kant never discussed consciousness of self in its ownright, only in the context of pursuing other objectives, and hisremarks on the topic are extremely scattered. When we pull his variousremarks together, we can see that Kant advanced at least seven majortheses about consciousness of andknowledge of self. We will consider them one-by-one.

4.1 Thesis 1: Two Kinds of Consciousness of Self

The first thesis:

There are two kinds of consciousness of self: consciousness ofoneself and one’s psychological states in inner sense andconsciousness of oneself and one’s states via performing acts ofapperception.

Kant’s term for the former was ‘empiricalself-consciousness’. A leading term for the latter was‘transcendental apperception’ (TA). (Kant used the term‘TA’ in two very different ways, as the name for a facultyof synthesis and as the name for what he also referred to as the‘I think’, namely, one’s consciousness of oneself assubject.) Here is a passage from theAnthropology in whichKant distinguishes the two kinds of consciousness of self veryclearly:

…the “I” of reflectioncontains no manifold and is always the same in every judgment …Inner experience, on the other hand, contains the matter ofconsciousness and a manifold of empirical inner intuition: …[1798, Ak. VII:141–2, emphases in the original].

The two kinds of consciousness of self have very differentsources.

The source of empirical self-consciousness is what Kant called innersense. He did not work out his notion of inner sense at all well. Hereare just a few of the problems. Kant insists that all representationalstates are in inner sense, including those representing the objects ofouter sense (i.e., spatially located objects):

Whatever the origins of our representations, whether theyare due to the influence of outer things, or are produced through innercauses, whether they arisea priori, or being appearances havean empirical origin, they must all, as modifications of the mind,belong to inner sense. [A98–9]

However, he also says that the object of inner sense is the soul,the object of outer sense the body (including one’s own). He comesclose to denying that we can be conscious of the denizens of innersense—they do not represent inner objects and have no manifoldof their own. Yet he also says that we can be conscious of them —representations can themselves be objects of representations, indeed,representations can make us conscious of themselves. In its role as aform of or means to consciousness of self, apperception ought to bepart of inner sense. Yet Kant regularly contrasted apperception, ameans to consciousness of oneself and one’s acts of thinking, withinner sense as a means to consciousness of—what? Presumably,particular representations: perceptions, imaginings, memories, etc.Here is another passage from theAnthropology:

§24. Inner sense is not pure apperception,consciousness of what we are doing; for this belongs to the power ofthinking. It is, rather, consciousness of what we undergo as we areaffected by the play of our own thoughts. This consciousness rests oninner intuition, and so on the relation of ideas (as they are eithersimultaneous or successive). [1798, Ak. VII:161]

Kant makes the same distinction inCPR:

… the I that I think is distinct from the I that it,itself, intuits …; I am given to myself beyond that which isgiven in intuition, and yet know myself, like other phenomena, only asI appear to myself, not as I am … [B155].

Since most of Kant’s most interesting remarks about consciousness ofand knowledge of self concern consciousness of oneself, the ‘I ofreflection’ via acts of apperception, we will focus on it, though empirical consciousnessof self will appear again briefly from time to time.

4.2 Thesis 2: Representational Base of Consciousness of Oneself and One’s States

How does apperception give rise to consciousness of oneself and one’sstates? In the passage just quoted from theAnthropology,notice the phrase “consciousness of what we are doing”—doing. The way in which one becomes conscious of anact of representing is not by receiving intuitions but bydoing it: “synthesis …, as an act, … is consciousto itself, even without sensibility” (B153); “…this representation is an act ofspontaneity, that is, itcannot be regarded as belonging to sensibility” (B132).

Equally, we can be conscious of ourselves as subject merely by doingacts of representing. No further representation is needed.

Man, … who knows the rest of nature solely throughthe senses, knows himself also through pure apperception; and this,indeed, in acts and inner determinations which he cannot regard asimpressions of the senses [A546=B574].

How does one’s consciousness of oneself in one’s acts ofrepresenting work? Consider the sentence:

I am looking at the words on the screen in front ofme.

Kant’s claim seems to be that the representation of the words on thescreen is all the experience I need to be conscious not just of thewords and the screen but also of the act of seeing them and ofwho is seeing them, namely, me. A single representation can doall three jobs. Let us call an act of representing that can make oneconscious of its object, itself and oneself as its subject therepresentational base of consciousness of these three items.^[7] Kant’s second major thesis is,

Most ordinary representations generated by most ordinary acts ofsynthesis provide the representational base of consciousness ofoneself and one’s states.

Note that this representational base is the base not only ofconsciousness of one’s representational states. It is also the base ofconsciousness of oneself as the subject of those states—as thething that has and does them. Though it is hard to know for sure,Kant would probably have denied that consciousness of oneself in innersense can make one conscious of oneself as subject, of oneself asoneself, in this way.

For Kant, this distinction between consciousness of oneself and one’sstates by doing acts of synthesis and consciousness of oneself andone’s states as the objects of particular representations is offundamental importance. When one is conscious of oneself and one’sstates by doing cognitive and perceptual acts, one is conscious ofoneself as spontaneous, rational, self-legislating, free—asthe doer of deeds, not just as a passive receptacle forrepresentations: “I exist as an intelligence which is conscioussolely of its power of combination” (B158–159), of “theactivity of the self” (B68) (Sellars, 1970–1; Pippin, 1987).

So far we have focussed on individual representations. For Kant,however, the representations that serve as the representational base ofconsciousness of oneself as subject are usually much‘bigger’ than that, i.e., contain multiple objects andoften multiple representations of them tied together into what Kantcalled ‘general experience’.

When we speak of different experiences, we can refer onlyto the various perceptions, all of which belong to one and the samegeneral experience. This thoroughgoing synthetic unity of perceptionsis the form of experience; it is nothing less than the synthetic unityof appearances in accordance with concepts [A110].

This general experience is the global representation introducedearlier. When I am conscious of many objects and/or representations ofthem as the single object of a single global representation, the latterrepresentation is all the representation I need to be conscious notjust of the global object but also of myself as the common subject ofall the constituent representations.

The mind could never think its identity in the manifoldnessof its representations… if it did not have before its eyes theidentity of its act, whereby it subordinates all [the manifold]… to a transcendental unity… [A108].

I am conscious of myself as the single common subject of a certaingroup of experiences by being conscious of “the identity of theconsciousness in … conjoined … representations”(B133).

4.3 Thesis 3: Consciousness in Inner Sense is Only of How One Appears to Oneself

Neither consciousness of self by doing apperceptive acts nor empiricalconsciousness of self as the object of particular representationsyields knowledge of oneself as one is. On pain of putting his right tobelieve in immortality as an article of faith at risk, Kant absolutelyhad to claim this. As he put it,

it would be a great stumbling block, or rather would be theone unanswerable objection, to our whole critique if it were possibleto provea priori that all thinking beings are in themselvessimple substances. [B409]

The same would hold for all other properties of thinking beings.Since Kant also sometimes viewed immortality, i.e., personalcontinuity beyond death, as a foundation of morality, morality couldalso be at risk. So Kant had powerful motives to maintain that onedoes not know oneself as one is. Yet, according to him, we seem toknow at least some things about ourselves, namely, how we mustfunction, and it would be implausible to maintain that one neverconscious of one’s real self at all. Kant’s response to these pressuresis ingenious.

First, he treats inner sense: When we know ourselves as the object ofa representation in inner sense, we “know even ourselves only.. as appearance …” (A278).

Inner … sense … represents to consciousness even ourown selves only as we appear to ourselves, not as we are in ourselves.For we intuit ourselves only as we are inwardlyaffected [byourselves] (B153).

This is the third thesis:

In inner sense, one is conscious of oneself only as one appears tooneself, not as one is.

So when we seem to be directly conscious of features of ourselves,we in fact have the same kind of consciousness of them as we have of featuresof things in general—we appear to ourselves to be like this,that or the other, in just the way that we know of any object only asit appears to us.

Then he turns to consciousness of oneself and one’s states by doingapperceptive acts. This is a knottier problem. Here we will consideronly consciousness of oneself as subject. Certainly by the secondedition, Kant had come to see how implausible it would be to maintainthat one has no consciousness of oneself, one’s real self, at all whenone is conscious of oneself as the subject of one’s experience, agentof one’s acts, by having these experiences and doing those acts. Inthe 2^nd edition, he reflects this sensitivity as early asB68; at B153, he goes so far as to say that an apparent contradictionis involved.

Furthermore, when we are conscious of ourselves as subject and agentby doing acts of apperceiving, we doappear to ourselves tobe substantial, simple and continuing. He had to explain theseappearances away; doing so was one of his aims, indeed, in his attacks onthe second and third Paralogisms. Thus, Kant had strong motives togive consciousness of self as subject special treatment. The view that proposes is puzzling. I am not consciousness of myself as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself but only “that I am” (B157). To understand what he might mean here, we need a couple of intermediate theses. They contain the remarkable insights into reference to and consciousness of self mentioned earlier.

4.4 Thesis 4: Referential Machinery of Consciousness of Self

Kant generated the special treatment he needed by focussing first onreference to self. Here are some of the things that he said aboutreference to oneself as subject. It is a consciousness of self inwhich “nothing manifold is given.” (B135). In the kind ofreference in which we gain this consciousness of self, we“denote” but do not “represent” ourselves(A382). We designate ourselves without noting “any qualitywhatsoever” in ourselves (A355). This yields his fourth thesisabout consciousness of and knowledge of self.

The referential machinery used to obtain consciousness of self assubject requires no identifying (or other) ascription of properties tooneself.

This is a remarkably penetrating claim; remember, the study ofreference and semantics generally is usually thought to have begun onlywith Frege. Kant is anticipating two important theses about referenceto self that next saw the light of day only 200 years later.

In certain kinds of consciousness of self, one can be conscious ofsomething as oneself without identifying it (or anything) as oneselfvia properties that one has ascribed to the thing (self-referencewithout identification) (Shoemaker 1968),^[8]
and,
In such cases, first-personindexicals (I, me, my, mine) cannot be analysed out in favour of anything else,in particular anything descriptionlike (the essential indexical)(Perry 1979).

Was Kant actually aware of (1) and/or (2) or had he just stumbledacross something that later philosophers recognized as significant?

One standard argument for (1) goes as follows:

My use of the word ‘I’ as the subject of[statements such as ‘I feel pain’ or ‘I see acanary’] is not due to my having identified as myself something[otherwise recognized] of which I know, or believe, or wish to say,that the predicate of my statement applies to it [Shoemaker 1968,pp.558].

A standard argument for (2), that certain indexicals are essential,goes as follows. To know thatI wrote a certain book a fewyears ago, it is not enough to know that someone over six feet tallwrote that book, or that someone who teaches philosophy at a particularuniversity wrote that book, or … or … or … , for Icould know all these things without knowing that it wasme whohas these properties (and I could know that itwas me whowrote that book and not know that any of these things are properties ofme). As Shoemaker puts it,

… no matter how detailed a token-reflexive-freedescription of a person is, … it cannot possibly entail that Iam that person [1968, pp. 560].

Kant unquestionably articulated the argument for (1):

In attaching ‘I’ to our thoughts, we designatethe subject only transcendentally … without noting in it anyquality whatsoever—in fact, without knowing anything of iteither directly or by inference [A355].

Thistranscendental designation, i.e., referring to oneselfusing ‘I’ without ‘noting any quality’ inoneself, has some unusual features. One can refer to oneself in avariety of ways, of course: as the person in the mirror, as the personborn on such and such a date in such and such a place, as the firstperson to doX, and so on, but one way of referring to oneselfis special: it does not require identifying or indeed any ascription tooneself. So Kant tells us.^[9]

The question is more complicated with respect to (2). We cannot gointo the complexities here (see Brook 2001). Here we will just notethree passages in which Kant may be referring to the essentialindexical or something like it.

The subject of the categories cannot by thinking thecategories [i.e. applying them to objects] acquire a concept of itselfas an object of the categories. For in order to think them, its pureself-consciousness, which is what was to be explained, must itself bepresupposed. [B422]

The phrase ‘its pure self-consciousness’ seems to referto consciousness of oneself as subject. If so, the passage may besaying that judgments about oneself, i.e., ascriptions of properties tooneself, ‘presuppose … pure self-consciousness’,i.e., consciousness of oneself via an act of ascription-freetranscendental designation.

Now compare this, “it is … very evident that I cannotknow as an object that which I must presuppose to know any object… .” (A402), and this,

Through this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks,nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of thethoughts =X. It is known only through the thoughts which areits predicates, and of it, apart from them, we cannot have any conceptwhatsoever, but can only revolve in a perpetual circle, since anyjudgment upon it has always already made use of its representation.[A346=B404]

The last clause is the key one: “any judgment upon it hasalways already made use of its representation”. Kant seems to besaying that to know that anything is true of me, I must first know thatit is me of whom it is true. This is something very like the essentialindexical claim.

If reference to self takes place without ‘noting anyproperties’ of oneself, the consciousness that results will alsohave some special features.

4.5 Thesis 5: No Manifold in Consciousness of Self

The most important special feature is that, in this kind ofconsciousness of self, one is not, or need not be, conscious of anyproperties of oneself, certainly not any particular properties. One hasthe same consciousness of self no matter what else one is conscious of— thinking, perceiving, laughing, being miserable, or whatever.Kant expressed the thought this way,

through the ‘I’, as simple representation,nothing manifold is given. [B135]

And this,

the I that I think is distinct from the I that it …intuits …; I am given to myself beyond that which is given inintuition. [B155]

We now have the fifth thesis to be found in Kant:

When one is conscious of oneself as subject, one has a bareconsciousness of self in which “nothing manifold isgiven.”

Since, on Kant’s view, one can refer to oneself as oneself without knowing any properties of oneself, not just identifying properties, ‘non-ascriptive reference to self’ might capture what is special about this form of consciousness of self better than Shoemaker’s ‘self-referencewithout identification’.

4.6 Thesis 6: Consciousness of Self is not Knowledge of Self

Transcendental designation immediately yields the distinction thatKant needs to allow that one is conscious of oneself as one is, notjust of an appearance of self, and yet deny knowledge of oneself as oneis. If consciousness of self ascribes nothing to the self, it can be a“bare … consciousness of self [as one is]” and yetyield no knowledge of self—it is “very far from being aknowledge of the self” (B158). This thesis returns us toconsciousness of self as subject:

When one is conscious of oneself as subject, one’s bareconsciousness of self yields no knowledge of self.

In Kant’s own work, he then put the idea of transcendentaldesignation to work to explain how one can appear to oneself to besubstantial, simple and persisting without these appearances reflectinghow one actually is. The reason that one appears in these ways is notthat the self is some strange, indefinable being. It is because of thekind of referring that we do to become conscious of oneself as subject.Given how long ago he worked, Kant’s insights into this kind ofreferring are nothing short of amazing.

4.7 Thesis 7: Conscious of Self as Single, Common Subject of Experience

The last of Kant’s seven theses about consciousness of self is anidea that we already met when we discussed the unity ofconsciousness:

When we are conscious of ourselves as subject, we are conscious ofourselves as the “single common subject”[CPR,A350] of a number of representations.

What Kant likely had in mind is nicely captured in a remark ofBennett’s (1974, p. 83): to think of myself as a plurality of things isto think ofmy being conscious of this plurality, “andthat pre-requires an undividedme.” Unlike one of anything else, it is not optional that I think of myself as one subject across avariety of experiences (A107).

5. Knowledge of the Mind

The remarks just noted about ‘bare consciousness’ and soon by no means exhaust the concerns that can be raised about Kant andwhat we can know about the mind. His official view has to be: nothing— about the mind’s structure and what it is composed of, at anyrate, we can know nothing. As we have seen, Kant not only maintainedthis but did some ingenious wiggling to account for the apparentcounter-evidence. But that is not the end of the story, for tworeasons.

First, whatever the commitments of his philosophy, Kant the personbelieved that the soul is simple and persists beyond death; he foundmaterialism utterly repugnant (1783, Ak. IV, end of §46). This isan interesting psychological fact about Kant but needs no furtherdiscussion.

Second and more importantly, Kant in fact held that wedohave knowledge of the mind as it is. In particular, we know that it hasforms of intuition in which it must locate things spatially andtemporally, that it must synthesize the raw manifold of intuition inthree ways, that its consciousness must be unified, and so on —all the aspects of the model examined above.

To square his beliefs about what we cannot know and what we do knowabout the mind, Kant could have made at least two moves. He could havesaid that we know these things only ‘transcendentally’,that is to say, by inference to the necessary conditions of experience.We do not know them directly, in some sense of ‘directly’,so we don’t have intuitive, i.e., sense-derived knowledge of them. Orhe could have said that ontological neutrality about structure andcomposition is compatible with knowledge of function. As we saw, Kant’sconception of the mind is functionalist—to understand the mind,we must study what it does and can do, its functions—and thedoctrine that function does not dictate form is at the heart ofcontemporary functionalism. According to functionalism, we can gainknowledge of the mind’s functions while knowing little or nothing abouthow the mind is built. Approached this way, Kant’s view that we knownothing of the structure and composition of the mind wouldjust be a radical version of this functionalist idea. Either move wouldrestore consistency among his various claims about knowledge of themind.

6. Where Kant Has and Has Not Influenced Contemporary Cognitive Research

We will close by returning to the question of Kant’s relationship tocontemporary cognitive research. As we saw, some of Kant’s mostcharacteristic doctrines about the mind are now built into the veryfoundations of cognitive science. We laid out what they were.Interestingly, some of the others have played little or no role.

Consider the two forms of Synthesis of Recognition in a Concept. Inthe form of binding, the phenomenon that he had in mind in the firstkind of synthesis is now widely studied. Indeed, one model, AnneTreisman’s (1980) three-stage model, is very similar to all threestages of synthesis in Kant. According to Treisman and her colleagues,object recognition proceeds in three stages: first feature detection,then location of features on a map of locations, and then integrationand identification of objects under concepts. This compares directly toKant’s three-stage model of apprehension of features, association offeatures (reproduction), and recognition of integrated groups of underconcepts (A98-A106). However, Kant’s second kind of recognition underconcepts, the activity of tying multiple representations together intoa global representation (A107–14), has received little attention.

The same was true until recently of theunity of consciousness and Kant’s work on it. However, this is changing. In the past twentyyears, the unity of consciousness has come back onto the researchagenda and there are now hundreds of papers and a number of books onthe topic. However, claims such as Kant’s that a certain form ofsynthesis and certain links among the contents of experience arerequired for unity continue to be ignored in cognitive science, thougha few philosophers have done some work on them (Brook 2004). The sameis true of Kant’s views on consciousness of self; cognitive sciencehas paid no attention to non-ascriptive identification of self and theidea of the essential indexical. Here, too, a few philosophers haveworked on these issues, apparently without knowing of Kant’scontribution (Brook & DeVidi, 2001), but not cognitivescientists.

In short, the dominant model of the mind in contemporary cognitivescience is Kantian, but some of his most distinctive contributions havenot been taken into it (Brook, 2004).

Bibliography

Primary Literature

TheCambridge Edition of the Work of Immanuel Kant inTranslation has translations into English complete with scholarlyapparatus of nearly all Kant’s writings. It is probably the bestsingle source for Kant’s works in English. Except for references totheCritique of Pure Reason, all references will include thevolume number and where appropriate the page number oftheGesammelte Schriften, ed. Koniglichen PreussischenAcademie der Wissenschaften, 29 Vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter etal., 1902– [in the format, Ak. XX:yy]).

Kant, I. (1781/1787)Critique of Pure Reason, P. Guyerand A. Wood (trans.), Cambridge and New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1997. (The passages quoted in the article above generally follow this translation and/or the Kemp Smith translation but all translations were checked.) ReferencestoCPR are in the standard pagination of the 1^st (A) and 2^nd (B) editions. A reference to only one edition means that the passage appeared only in that edition.)
Kant, I. (1783)Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics,P. Carus (trans.), revised and with an Introduction by JamesEllington, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishers, 1977 (Ak. IV).
Kant, I. (1786)The Metaphysical Foundations of NaturalScience, translated and with an Introduction by James Ellington,Indianapolis, IN: Library of Liberal Arts, 1970. (Ak. IV).
Kant, I. (1798)Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point ofView, Mary Gregor (trans.), The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974 (Ak.VII).

Works on Kant on the Mind and Consciousness

Thanks to Julian Wuerth for help with this section.

In the past two decades alone, of the order of 45,000 new books andnew editions by or about Kant have been published. Thus, anybibliography is bound to be incomplete. In what follows, we havefocused on books of the past ten years or so in English that arehaving an influence, along with a few important earliercommentaries. General bibliographies are readily available on thewebsites listed later.

Allais, Lucy, 2009. “Kant, Non-Conceptual Content and theRepresentation of Space”,Journal of the History ofPhilosophy, 47(3): 383–413.
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Allison, H., 1983 [2004].Kant’s TranscendentalIdealism: An Interpretation and Defense, 1st edition 1983, 2ndedition 2004, New Haven: Yale University Press.
–––, 1990.Kant’s Theory of Freedom,Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 2015.Kant’s TranscendentalDeduction, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Altman, M. C., 2007.A Companion to Kant’s Critique of PureReason, Boulder, CO: Westview Press
Ameriks, K., 1983. “Kant and Guyer on Apperception”,Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 65: 174–86.
–––, 1990. “Kant, Fichte, and ShortArguments to Idealism”,Archiv für Geschichte derPhilosophie, 72: 63–85.
–––, 2000.Kant’s Theory of Mind: AnAnalysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, 2^ndedition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
–––, 2006.Kant and the Historical Turn:Philosophy As Critical Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress
Aquila, Richard, 1989.Matter in Mind, Bloomington, IN:Indiana University Press.
Banham, G., 2006.Kant’s TranscendentalImagination, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan
Beck, L. W., 2002.Selected Essays on Kant (North AmericanKant Society Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 6), Rochester NY: NorthAmerican Kant Society. [NAKS has published an excellent series ofroughly annual books on Kant. Some more examples will be citedbelow.]
Beiser, F. C., 2006.The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy fromKant to Fichte, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Bennett, J., 1966.Kant’s Analytic, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.
–––, 1974.Kant’s Dialectic, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
Bird, G., 2006.The Revolutionary Kant, Peru, IL: OpenCourt Publishing
–––, 2009.A Companion to Kant, Oxford:Wiley-Blackwell.
Brook, A., 1993. “Kant’sA Priori Methods forRecognizing Necessary Truths”, inReturn of the APriori, Philip Hanson and Bruce Hunter (eds.),CanadianJournal of Philosophy (Supplementary Volume), 18:215–52.
–––, 1994.Kant and the Mind, Cambridgeand New York: Cambridge University Press.
–––, 1998. “Critical Notice of L. Falkenstein,Kant’s Intuitionism: A Commentary on the TranscendentalAesthetic”,Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 29:247–68.
–––, 2001. “Kant on self-reference andself-awareness”, in A. Brook and R. DeVidi (eds.) 2001.
–––, 2004. “Kant, cognitive science, andcontemporary neo-Kantianism”, in D. Zahavi (ed.),Journal ofConsciousness Studies (special issue), 11: 1–25.
Buroker, J. V., 2006.Kant’s ‘Critique of PureReason’: An Introduction (Cambridge Introductions to KeyPhilosophical Texts), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Caranti, L., 2007.Kant and the Scandal of Philosophy: TheKantian Critique of Cartesian Scepticism (Toronto Studies inPhilosophy), Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Carl, Wolfgang, 1989.Der Schweigende Kant: Die Entwürfe zueiner Deduktion der Kategorien vor 1781, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck& Ruprecht.
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Thanks to Paul Guyer, Paul Raymont, Rick DeVidi, Julian Wuerth,Kirsta Anderson, and an anonymous referee for theStanfordEncyclopedia of Philosophy for very helpful comments.

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