[1]References to the Critique are from Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1929). I follow the usual practice of referring to the first and second edition of the Critique as A and B, respectively, and the number following each letter refers to the page number in each respective edition.
[2]In "Kant's Notion of a Deduction and the Methodological Background of the First Critique" (in Kant's Transcendental Deductions ed. Eckart Förster, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989: 29-46), Dieter Henrich argues that the use of the term "deduction" in the Critiques has some special affinity to the juridical usage of the term in and around Kant's time. In legal circles a deduction was required when there was a challenge to a rightful possession of title, and the purpose of the deduction is to show that a title belongs rightfully to the owner by accounting for its origin (30-34), and "[t]he process through which a possession or a usage is accounted for by explaining its origin, such that the rightfulness of the possession or the usage become apparent, defines the deduction" (35). Henrich argues, in short, that the tracing back to the origin of a claim aiming at confirming the right to that claim constitutes its deduction, and that Kant appropriated this use from jurisprudence to apply to his critical project such that the Deductions in the first Critique is a justification of the rightful possession and usage of the categories in constituting our experience. This tracing, however, is not a mere empirical act of accounting for the causal chain of origin of the claim--that would not in itself establish a rightful or legitimate possession or usage. It only concerns itself with the question of fact (quid facti) and not the question of right (quid juris) (A84/B117). The tracing intended to answer the question of right, therefore, has to search for something that would justify the claim in question, and for Kant that is a search for the condition of possibility of the claim. So on the issue of transcendental and general logic it is the task of the former to trace the origin--not merely causal one, which would be merely physiological or psychological--but a search for the origin that serves to justify the legitimate possession of claims in general logic itself.
However, this search for the "origin" of the claims of general logic by no means implies that general or formal logic stands in need of any account of justification, as if by itself it did not have a self-evident claim to certainty. It is clear that Kant regarded logic as actual and certain. But the transcendental account that he proposed in the first Critique does not aim to provide a justificational account in order to show that they are indeed worthy of the title of knowledge. On the contrary, since they are actual, they are paradigms of knowledge, if there are any. The problem for him, as is well known, is to find out how such species of knowledge are possible at all. There is no question regarding the possibility of such species, for they are actual. Hence Kant's words that ". . . logic has from the earliest times proceeded upon this sure path is evidenced by the fact that since Aristotle it has not needed to retrace a single step" and that logic is "a closed and complete doctrine" (Bviii) do not in any way entail that an account of how logic itself is possible is not needed because logic is a closed, consistent, and self-evident system. Cf. Weldon, T. D. Weldon, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958): 146.
[3]In the Jäsche edition of Logic, Kant states that general logic differs from transcendental logic in that in the latter "the object itself is presented as an object of mere understanding, whereas general logic concerns all objects generatim" (Immanuel Kant, Logic, trans. Robert S. Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz, New York: Dover, 1974: 18). Thus, the role of the understanding is necessarily involved in transcendental logic. Briefly stated, general logic is concerned with the pure and abstract forms of thought; transcendental logic, on the other hand, is concerned instead with how such forms of thought treated in general logic are possible at all.
[4]Gary Hatfield, in The Natural and the Normative: Theories of Spatial Perception from Kant to Helmholtz (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), argues that Kant's transcendental psychology differs from naturalistic, empirical psychology such as that of Hume in that the former treats of the normative aspect of what must be the case for the knowing mind to have objective judgments--judgments that are entitled the name of knowledge. Naturalistic psychology, on the other hand, only describes the actual sequences of representations without investigation into such grounds of possibility (86). Thus his account of transcendental psychology accords with my account of transcendental logic. In this paper I argue that transcendental logic is the condition without which the claims of general logic cannot be justifiably grounded. Transcendental psychology puts an epistemic constraint upon empirical psychology, and, likewise, transcendental logic puts the same sort of constraint upon general, formal logic. In each case the task of the transcendental is to provide a norm for either psychology or logic--indeed for any type of knowledge claims--a norm that justifies those claims. According to Hatfield, ". . . any empirical description of the mind must accord with transcendental philosophy" (108). What I am suggesting is that the same is also the case for general logic, which must also accord with transcendental logic. Indeed this must be the case if Kant's account of the critical project is to be a unified one.
[5]See, for example, Normal Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason," 2nd ed., revised and enlarged (New York: Humanities Press, 1962); Robert Paul Wolff, Kant's Theory of Mental Activity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963); H. J. Paton, Kant's Metaphysics of Experience, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1936); Peter Strawson, The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966); Klaus Reich, Die Vollständigkeit der kantischen Urteilstafel (Berlin: Diss. Rostock, 1932); Henry E. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Hubert Schwyzer, The Unity of Understanding: A Study of Kantian Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Charles Nussbaum, "Concepts, Judgments, and Unity in Kant's Metaphysical Deduction of the Relational Categories" Journal of the History of Philosophy 28(1990): 89-103; J. Michael Young, "Functions of Thought and the Synthesis of Intuitions" in The Cambridge Companion to Kant ed. Paul Guyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
[6]In Die Vollständigkeit der kantischen Urteilstafel, Klaus Reich tries to provide an argument to the effect that the twelve categories, and only these twelve, derive from the analytic unity of consciousness--the 'I think.' This attempt has been criticized by L. Krüger in "Wollte Kant die Vollständigkeit seiner Urteilstafel beweisen?" Kant-Studien 59(1968): 333-355. In the Critique, however, Kant does not give any detailed discussion of why he arrives at these twelve logical forms and none other. It seems that he takes the table to be obvious and stands in no need of a justification. He only states that an act of abstraction of sentences in discourse will yield the table at A70/B95.
[7]An act of Erkenntnis is an act of mentally grasping or comprehending a distinct intentional object, for example, a having of a red square mental image. That Kant's use of the term here is technical is shown by his use of the word as a count noun in various places in the Critique. At A119, for instance, he uses the plural form "Erkenntnisse," meaning various distinct "ways" that the understanding can be related to its object. Kemp Smith's translation of the word in his edition, however, seems to be misleading. At A19/B33 and A119, he translates the word as "a mode of knowledge," but in the chapter on the Table of Categories he translates it as "one act of knowledge" (A77/B103). The two phrases are different. The first one seems to mean something like a distinct species of knowledge, whereas the latter suggests an act. Hence it is quite clear that the latter meaning is a more accurate interpretation of Kant's use. What eine Erkenntnis actually means is not akin to a separate "mode" or "species" of knowledge, but one distinct act of knowing or cognition of an intentional object. See also Hubert Schwyzer, The Unity of Understanding: 57n.
[8]Here I agree with Allison in Kant's Transcendental Idealism: 123. The work of synthesis is the same throughout, whether operating to connect and unite various sensory data into intuitions or singular representations or to unite various intuitions under one common heading of a concept.
[9]See Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on a Kantian Themes (London: Routledge, Kegan Paul, 1968) for a detailed treatment of Kantian intuitions as singular and individualized representations. See also Moltke S. Gram, "The Sense of a Kantian Intuition" in Interpreting Kant (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1982): 41-67. For a discussion of Kantian intuitions in relation to modern cognitive theory, see Lorne Frankenstein, "Kant's Account of Intuition" Canadian Journal of Philosophy 21(1991): 165-193, and "Kant's Account of Sensation" Canadian Journal of Philosophy 20(1990): 63-88.
[10]Kant explicitly says that thinking must be in the form of language. In Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View trans. Mary J. Gregor (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1974), he writes:
Language signifies [the presence] of thought and, on the other hand, the means par excellence of intellectual signification is language, the most important way we have of understanding ourselves and others.--Thinking is talking with ourselves (the Indian of Otahiti call thought "speech in the belly"); so it is also listening to ourselves inwardly (by reproductive imagination) ([[section]]39, 192).
[11]Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason trans. Lewis White Beck (New York: Macmillan, 1956): 4n. The page number of the second Critique refers to that of the Prussian Academy edition, Volume V.
[12]Lewis White Beck, A Commentary of Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960): 73. The issue of the relation between freedom and moral law has attracted attention of Kantian scholars recently. See, for example, Henry E. Allison, "Morality and Freedom: Kant's Reciprocity Thesis" The Philosophical Review 95(1986): 393-425; Dieter Henrich, "Die Deduktion des Sittengesetzes," in Denken im Schatten der Nihilismus, ed. Alexander Schwan (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975): 55-112; and Karl Ameriks, "Kant's Deduction of Freedom and Morality," Journal of the History of Philosophy 19(1981): 53-79. Allison, in his important article, argues that the relation between freedom and the moral law is a reciprocal one. Thus his view is in accordance in general terms with the view I present here. However, Allison does not mention that the relation is that of ratio cognoscendi and ratio essendi.
[13]Critique of Practical Reason: 30.
[14]My own italic.
[15]"It was an enterprise worthy of an acute thinker like Aristotle to make search for these fundamental concepts. But as he did so on no principle, he merely picked them up as they came his way, and at first procured ten of them, which he called categories (predicaments)" (A81/B107).
[16]But exactly how the complete list of logical forms is justified is still a matter of controversy. See note 6.
[17]Another important piece of evidence lies in a passage from the Prolegomena: "The logical moments of all judgments are so many possible ways of uniting representations in consciousness. . . . Experience consists in the synthetic connection of appearances (perceptions) in consciousness, so far as this connection is necessary. Hence the pure concepts of the understanding are those under which all perceptions must first be subsumed before they can serve for judgments of experience, in which the synthetic unity of the perceptions is represented as necessary and universally valid" (Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1977, [[section]]22: 305). The first sentence is unequivocal in showing the relation of the logical moments to the synthetic activity of consciousness. In so far as experience is to be objective, it must be subsumed under the pure concepts of the understanding. Since judgment of perception is always dependent upon judgment of experience, an account of the function of unity in judgment of experience is the more basic one. Therefore, the logical moments in the text are only the result of abstraction from all the judgments, and they are as they are only when considered apart from any account purported to justify the claims of the judgments as objective. This objective function cannot be constituted by the logical forms, but only by the pure concepts of the understanding. So uniting representations in consciousness, if it is to be objective, has to rely on the pure concepts and not the abstracted logical forms. However, the logical forms serve as what we already have before we could embark on discovering the categories, for they are abstracted from publicly available discourse. Thus the logical forms are the ratio cognoscendi of the categories.
[18]Other commentators include: Peter Strawson, The Bounds of Sense; Hubert Schwyzer, The Unity of Understanding; and J. Michael Young, "Functions of Thought and the Synthesis of Intuitions."
[19]123-126.
[20]126.
[21]My own italic.
[22]Hubert Schwyzer, The Unity of Understanding: 15. See also Peter Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: 76.
[23]H. Schwyzer, The Unity of Understanding: 17.
24Gary Hatfield, The Natural and the Normative: 82. In the note to this particular text, Hatfield writes: "Transcendental knowledge results from 'transcendental analysis,' which does not analyze concepts such as cause or substance themselves, but rather analyzes the 'faculty of understanding itself' as the 'birthplace' of concepts such as cause, or substance (A64-6/B89-91). Transcendental philosophy is not to be classified with either the trivially analytic propositions that come from the analysis of given concepts, nor with the synthetic a priori knowledge that transcendental analysis itself explains. . . . [It] investigates instead the possibility of knowledge for a finite intellect with certain forms of sensibility" (305).
[25]See also Charles Nussbaum, "Concepts, Judgments and Unity in Kant's Metaphysical Deduction of the Relational Categories," on the view that the logical forms and the categories are not to be regarded as the same, but that the former presuppose the latter. In Nussbaum's view, concepts can be arranged and rearranged in many ways--for example, the concept of subject can be inverted to become that of predicate, and vice versa. This, however, is not possible in the case of the relational categories. According to him, "Logically, concepts can be combined in any way that is not contradictory. Most concept can serve either as the subject or the predicate of a judgment. Many judgments can be converted, and still others allow exchange of subject-concept and predicate-attribute judgment, however, the subject must function as a substratum and never as an attribute" (95). Moreover, ". . . the relationship between category and judgmental form cannot be the simple and direct one of providing a general judgmental rule, but is the rather more indirect one of presupposition as mediated by the objective and synthetic unity of self-consciousness" (102).