Patricia Kitcher

Discovering the Forms of Intuition

Kant proceeds to argue: (a) that the distinction is between two elements of fundamentally different nature and origin. The matter is given a posteriori in sensation; the form ... must lie ready a priori in the mind. (b) Kant also argues that form, because of its separate origin, is capable of being contemplated apart from all sensation. The above statements rest upon the unexpressed assumption that sensations have no spatial attributes of any kind. In themselves they have only intensive, not extensive, magnitude. Kant assumes this without question and without the least attempt at proof. (N. K. Smith Commentary)2

Kant's theory of mind : an analysis of the paralogisms of pure reason

(* NEW TO THIS EDITION) *PREFACE I. INTRODUCTION II. IMMATERIALITY III. INTERACTION IV. IDENTITY V. IMMORTALITY VI. INDEPENDENCE VII. IDEALITY *POSTSCRIPT *BIBLIOGRAPHY *INDEX.

Narrow Taxonomy and Wide Functionalism

Three recent, influential critiques (Stich 1978; Fodor 1981c; Block 1980) have argued that various tasks on the agenda for computational psychology put conflicting pressures on its theoretical constructs. Unless something is done, the inevitable result will be confusion or outright incoherence. Stich, Fodor, and Block present different versions of this worry and each proposes a different remedy. Stich wants the central notion of belief to be jettisoned if it cannot be shown to be sound. Fodor tries to reduce confusion in computational psychology by dismissing some putative tasks as impossible. Block argues that the widespread faith in functionalism is just not warranted. I argue that all these critiques are misguided because they depend on holding cognitive psychology to taxonomic standards that other sciences routinely rise above.

Kant’s philosophy of the cognitive mind

Kants contributions to our understanding of the mind came largely in the course of pursuing other projects. The Critique of Pure Reason was intended to determine what we can know. In trying to answer that question Kant was led to consider what minds must be like to be capable of knowledge. His search for a sound basis for ethics included an investigation of the nature of a being who could be a morally responsible agent. He offered hypotheses about how observers appreciate beauty and sublimity in order to clarify the significance of the aesthetic appreciation of art and nature. By investigating what we could do or what he thought we could do, he developed theories about who or what we are. The task of integrating the aspects of mind that Kant believed are required for knowledge, morality, and aesthetic sensibility in a consistent portrait of a subject has yet to be carried out. In this chapter, I focus exclusively on his depictions of the mind as a subject of knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason . His theory of the active cognizer stands behind his most arresting philosophical doctrine, namely, the thesis that “we ourselves bring into the appearances that order and regularity in them that we call nature , and moreover we would not be able to find it there if we, or the nature of our mind, had not originally put it there” ( Pure Reason , A 125).

Natural Kinds and Unnatural Persons

Most people believe that extraterrestrial beings or porpoises or computers could someday be recognized as persons. Given the significant constitutional differences between these entities and ourselves, the general assumption appears to be that ‘person’ is not a natural kind term. David Wiggins offers an illuminating challenge to this popular dogma in ‘Locke, Butler and the Stream of Consciousness: and Men as a Natural Kind’. Wiggins does not claim that ‘person’ actually is a natural kind term; but he argues hard for the advantages of regarding it as something like a natural kind classification. The problem is that, whatever its merits, there are obvious and fatal objections to the view that person is a natural kind. My aim is to present a modification of the natural kind thesis which avoids these objections and retains the attractions of the basic position.

Kant’s Dedicated Cognitivist System

Kant described his great work not as a critique of “books and systems” but as a critique “of the faculty of reason as a whole, in regard to all knowledge to which it may aspire independently of all experience.”1 Reason provides knowledge which is independent of experience, according to Kant, not because we are able to acquire knowledge in the absence of experience, but because the knowledge that we acquire in the face of experience is partially a reflection of that experience and partially a reflection of our ways of acquiring knowledge. In exploring reason itself in terms of its a priori, or experientially independent, knowledge, Kant proposed to examine how the workings of our thought processes are reflected in the knowledge claims we make. One philosophical point of the work is to reveal that particular aspects of our common wisdom are going to be invariant across peoples and times. Such invariances cannot be established by assuming metaphysical principles about the necessary uniformity or continuity of nature. Kant introduced a new method. He tried to demonstrate philosophically important invariances throughout the body of human knowledge, by arguing that they reflect the ways in which anyone with our basic mental constitution will be capable of thinking.

Two Versions of the Identity Theory

At present, functionalism and central state materialism are the two most popular and fully developed versions of the identity theory. I take any theory of mind to be a version of the identity theory if it includes the claim that each of the states referred to by mental terms could be described in physical terms, and is therefore a physical state. Although it has achieved the status of orthodoxy, the identity theory has been criticized repeatedly because of one class of phenomena. The problem concerns the qualitative character of sensation and perception. It is alleged that the presence of qualia in sensation and perception shows that functionalist and materialist analyses of mental states are simply wrong. In this paper, I hope to establish four claims. (1) Qualitative character is, at most, a problem for functionalism and central state materialism. It is not a problem for the identity theory in general. (2) Recent work in the philosophy of language, specifically, the contributions of Kripke, Putnam and Donnellan, enable us to formulate a version of the identity theory which successfully avoids the problem of qualia. (3) Indeed, current theories of reference enable us to formulate two versions of the identity theory, both of which avoid objections based on qualia. (4) The two versions of the identity theory I propose have three significant virtues, (a) They retain the advantages of functionalism and central state materialism.(b) They enable us to say about qualitative character what we need to say about it, no more and no less. (c) The theories are based on a more adequate theory of language than previous versions of the identity theory.

Kant on the faculty of apperception

ABSTRACT Although I begin with a brief look at the idea that as a faculty of mind, apperception must be grounded in some (noumenal) power of the soul, my focus is on claims about the alleged noumenal import of some of Kant’s particular theses about the faculty of apperception: it is inexplicable, immaterial, and can provide evidence that humans are members of the intelligible world (and so possess the noumenal freedom required for morality). I argue that when the claim of inexplicability is placed in the context of Kant’s standards for transcendental psychological explanation, it has no noumenal implications. Similarly, when understood in the context of his views about scientific explanations, Kant’s claim that the faculty of apperception cannot be understood in materialist terms has no important metaphysical payoff. The case of freedom is different, because for a long time, Kant believed that he could establish the freedom required for morality by appealing to the freedom required for thought. In the end, however, he abandoned this hoped for noumenal implication of the faculty of apperception.

Kant versus the Asymmetry Dogma

Abstract One of the most widely accepted contemporary constraints on theories of self-knowledge is that they must account for the very different ways in which cognitive subjects know their own minds and the ways in which they know other minds. Through the influence of Peter Strawson, Kant is often taken to be an original source for this view. I argue that Kant is quite explicit in holding the opposite position. In a little discussed passage in the Paralogisms chapter, he argues that cognitive subjects have no way of understanding the minds of others except by using their own minds as a model for others.

A Kantian Argument for the Formula of Humanity

Abstract: Although many take the formula of humanity to be Kant’s best formulation of the CI, there is no agreement on his argument for it. Kant says that the argument comes in GMM3, but that section is difficult to interpret. I draw on his remarks about cognizing other minds in the Paralogisms to interpret the argument of sub-section 2 of GMM3, the argument that rational beings must “lend” the idea of freedom to all rational beings. Kant later rejects his attempt to establish the CI in GMM3 and tries again in the fact of reason passages of the Second Critique. I follow Willaschek’s reading of these texts: Humans can cognize their freedom by performing a Gedankenexperiment where they experience their wills being moved through the moral law. Kant tries to move from that demonstration to the claim that pure reason gives the moral law to all humans, but his argument fails. Appealing again to his theory of other minds, I argue that he could have offered a cogent argument that all humans have an efficacious moral law within.