Kant's conception of the mind

It's a bit surprising that one of the most noted contributors to Modern thinking about thinking, Immanuel Kant, failed to make his thinking about the mind absolutely clear. Commentators nevertheless view his general contribution as revolutionary, of course, citing two things. The first is his nostrum that it is the mind that spins out of the inchoate deliverances of sense our conception of ourselves as individuals situated in an objective world which has for example the features of time and space. The second, his bringing into centre stage judgements in the place of ideas.

Making a judgement displaces having an idea

The second point first. Kant makes central use of the notion of a judgment, where earlier writers had used 'idea' [See Barry Stroud, Hume, p.232. (Kant also gives a central role to 'concept', but the only role of concepts is in making judegments. (A68/B93; Strawson, BoS, p.74.)) A judgment is a thought - a thought that such and such is true. Even the recognition of an object involves a judgment. It involves the thought that a certain proposition is true. (Strawson, BoS, p.74.)

(One may ask the question: May I not have sensations which I do not think of as linked with an object (object in the sense of something belonging to the objective world)? Kant's answer I think is that I can, but only if I have the wherewithal to understand them as sensations of mind - ie only if I can think them in the context of the thought of myself as a perceiving subject - the unity of apperception. We cannot imagine what 'sensations' might be like outside of this context - they are 'nothing to us', 'less than a dream'.)

"The I think must be capable of accompanying all my presentations; otherwise something would be presented to me which could not be thought at all, which means no less than: the presentation would be either impossible, or at least nothing to me ... Consequently every manifold of perception has a necessary relation to the I think, in the same subject in which the manifiold is found." Kant, Pu R. 108, B 131.

In making judgments central, Kant is seen by commentators as emphasising the mind as an agency, where earlier writers had emphasised its passivity. Locke's image of the mind as a cupboard certainly conveys passivity, in spite of the fact that he maintains that ideas shift their relationships one to another within its confines, sometimes with the mind playing an initiatory role in such rearrangements. Sometimes indeed for Locke the mind creates new ideas, as when it forms general ideas. Writers after Kant, belonging to Romanticism proper, were to insist on the alleged creativity of the mind as of the last importance, and they exagerated when they condemned their predessors for denying it entirely.

But more significant as a shift was the way in which the centrality Kant gave to judgment opened the way for a much finer-grained analysis of the nature of thought. Stroud says this:

[Hume] does not see that without an account of how ideas combine to make a judgment or a complete thought he can never explain the different roles or functions various fundamental ideas perform in the multifarious judgements we make, or in what might be called the 'propositional' thoughts we have." (Stroud, Hume, p.232.)

(Stroud adds: 'Consequently, he does not arrive at even the beginnings of a realistic decription of what 'having' the idea of causality actually consists in. And that is an indispensable first step in his naturalistic science of man." p.232. From this I think it follows that the first step is one we have yet to make! We certainly don't know yet what 'having the idea of causality consists in' and the idea that Kant helps us towards such an understanding is of course not yet demonstrated. It is only philosophers, not scientists, who find what Kant had to say helpful.)

(In fact however the most important postKantian development in logic made a point about syllogistic patterns, showing them mapped onto two-valued arithmetic and making no use of the Kantian innovation. It came from a mathematician, George Boole, whose Laws of Thought was published in 1824.)

Kant's 'Copernican Revolution'

In developing the first point, Kant works with a distinction between 'representations' which are 'partly' caused by objects on the one hand and, on the other, 'knowledge of objects', knowledge which is the result of 'the activity of our understanding' in comparing such representations and 'by combining or separating them' in working up such 'raw material' into what we call 'experience'. (Kant CPR B1 Kemp-Smith abridged, p. 25.)

The 'understanding' is thus thought of as a 'faculty' - or as Kant also puts it, a 'capacity' or 'power' (A51 B75 p.61) - a faculty whose activity is involved in everything that counts as experience. "The faculty ... which enables us to think the object of sensible intuition is the understanding." (A 51 B75, p.61)

A first encounter with the Critique suggests strongly that Kant conceived of a faculty as an agent or agency - a piece of quasi-mechanism which does something. In the case of the faculty of understanding, Kant's text suggests that what it does is to receive receive input - 'impressions of sense' in the quotation below - from the sense organs and having worked on these (by ordering them in some way -"bringing them under concepts" - ) produces experience as we know it.

I am deliberately putting the picture in explicitly quasi-mechanistic terms, because if this is a fair picture of how Kant thinks of the understanding - as some kind of quasi-mechanical processor of alterations registered by the sense organs - I think there is reason to conclude that he is indeed committed to something other than a dynamic conception of mind.

On Kant's commitment to the view that the mind 'processes' mental content there is a substantial literature (usefully mapped by Gary Hatfield). If he is so committed it would seem to follow that the task of studying the mind's 'processing' falls to empirical psychology, and the literature deals at length with Kant's evaluation of psychology's ambitions to be scientific. But it is clear that Kant sees his own project in the Critique as non-empirical, and emphatically not therefore part of psychology. There is then the question of how therefore it is to be understood, and much thought has been directed thither.

It will be enough for our purposes however if we can establish that Kant, whatever else he might have thought, did indeed maintain that as an empirical matter the mind was to be thought of as 'processing' mental content, because this would be enough to support the claim that for him the mind was to be understood other than dynamically.

One passage is unusually clear. He says:

"Meanwhile, with respect to these conceptions [the conceptions of space and time, and the categories as pure conceptions of the understanding], as with respect to all our cognition, we certainly may discover in experience, if not the principle of their possibility, yet the occasioning causes of their production. It will be found that the impressions of sense give the first occasion for bringing into action the whole faculty of cognition, and for the production of experience, which contains two very dissimilar elements, namely, a matter for cognition, given by the senses, and a certain form for the arrangement of this matter, arising out of the inner fountain of pure intuition and thought; and these, on occasion given by sensuous impressions, are called into exercise and produce conceptions. Such an investigation into the first efforts of our faculty of cognition to mount from particular perceptions to general conceptions is undoubtedly of great utility; and we have to thank the celebrated Locke for having first opened the way for this inquiry."(Kant CPR, A 86-7)

Here I think it is clear that Kant thought of the mind as a 'processor', operating as a quasi-mechanism, brought into action by the stimulation of impressions of sense, and then producing by its exercise experience, by in some way uniting the two elements of 'a matter for cognition' and 'a certain form for the arrangment of this matter'. His thoughts about the nature of the task of the Critique, which certainly he sharply distinguished from the empirical project of enquiring into the workings of the mind, may be difficult to understand in the light of this commitment, but the commitment is clear nonethless.

However, when the dynamic view of the liver displaced what I am calling the structural conception, the existence of the liver, and its function were not denied. It was just that the liver began to be thought of as having the appearance only of a single enduring physical thing: in fact, it began to be thought, the liver was a flux - the appearnce created by a complicated programme of chemical reactions, each one of which consisted in a continuous exchange of minute particles of matter.

The parallel in the sphere of attempting to understand the working sof the mind would be then not the denial of structure, but the realization that a particular mental structure - the faculty of understanding, say - was not a temporally enduring mental thing but again a flux, a continuous exchange now not of phyi#sical items but of mental ones.

When the dynamic view of the mind took shape, as it did in the 19th Century, the innovation was to see thoughts as the things that came and went, and in their coming and going constituting the mind. Cannot we think of Kant as maintaining that kind of picture? There is I think nothing to suggest that he did, but let us take a step further and ask if this is a picture he could conceivably have had in his mind, without telling his readers about it?

Might he not have thought of a mental faculty for example as simply a bit of thinking? When the understanding 'brings representations under a concept' can we not take this to be simply a process of thought? Can we not understand Kant as thinking of the mind in its entirety as a programme of ongoing thinking? That is the conception that is to take shape in the 19th Century.

But Kant cannot be interpreted as anticipating it. His whole project is to set out what the mind must be doing if a person is to have a thought. He can hardly be understood as maintaining that what is necessary for there to be a thought is a for there to be a whole programme of thoughts. At least, that would be a radically incomplete account.

Might there then (for Kant) be mental processes that fall short of being thoughts? This is of course an issue that has been much discussed. I think Kant's position is best expressed at A45: that if there are they would necessarily be 'nothing to us'. Perhaps we have to leave open the possibility that Kant thought of each faculty as an ongoing 'mental' process taking place beyond the reach of consciousness. This would be what I am calling a 'dynamic' as contrasted with a structural conception. It would be interesting to see an argument attributing this way of thinking to Kant.

_____________________________

The conception of the mind Kant is promulgating here is a structural one, and it means that in one respect at least Kant belonged squarely to the 18th Century.

There is here a point of difference, or apparent difference, between the Kantian conception and the structural theory of the mind characteristic of early Modernity - of the thinking of Locke, for example, or of Hume.

The displacement of 'idea' by 'judgment' is not at the heart of the transition to the dynamic theory of the mind. It anticipates the transition, stressing that the mind is essentially engaged in activity, but left in place is the conception of the mind as a structure. The mind is for Kant an apparatus of mechanisms - or at least a quasi-apparatus of quasi-mechanisms. The understanding is the mechanism for 'producing representations from itself', the 'sensibility' is the mechanism for 'receiving representations' (A51 B75 p.61), the 'transcendental imagination' is the mechanism for effecting the 'reproducibility of appearances' (A101 p.83).

I conclude safely I think that at any rate Kant does not think of the mind as a programme of thinking. For that notion we have to wait for the new Century.

One might say each faculty of the mind, of which the understanding is one, is nothing but a capacity or power of the mind, as indeed Kant says himself. But a power or capacity necessarily belongs to something. According to Kant the mental faculties he identifies belong to - the mind.

The question of the relationship between Kant's arresting argumentation in the first Critique and psychology is famously unclear. (The controversy is mapped eg by Gary Hatfield in Paul Guyer's Cambridge Companion.)

Kant addresses the issue explicitly in the following passage:

"Meanwhile, with respect to these conceptions [the conceptions of space and time, and the categories as pure conceptions of the understanding], as with respect to all our cognition, we certainly may discover in experience, if not the principle of their possibility, yet the occasioning causes of their production. It will be found that the impressions of sense give the first occasion for bringing into action the whole faculty of cognition, and for the production of experience, which contains two very dissimilar elements, namely, a matter for cognition, given by the senses, and a certain form for the arrangement of this matter, arising out of the inner fountain of pure intuition and thought; and these, on occasion given by sensuous impressions, are called into exercise and produce conceptions. Such an investigation into the first efforts of our faculty of cognition to mount from particular perceptions to general conceptions is undoubtedly of great utility; and we have to thank the celebrated Locke for having first opened the way for this inquiry."(Kant CPR, A 86-7)

I read this as saying that there is a mechanism whereby the sense organs bring into action the mechanism of cognition which by its action produces experience, and that the project of coming to an understanding of the train of causes and effects that is being pointed to here is coherent and worthwhile.

Commentators usually address here Kant's discussion of the possibility of a science of psychology, but that is not the focus here. Let us just note though that unless such a project was to be capable of issuing in necessary truths it would not for Kant count as a science - even though, as shown in the passage above, he might regard it as valuable.

It seems strange that Kant, having darwn the distinction in the paragraph above leaves alone the question of how the 'faculty of cognition' might be thought of as working. It would be seem to modern eyes to be of the greatest interest. Kant is of course aty liberty to pursue the other question he distinguishes - the question which I take to be, following Strawson, what has to be true conceptually if experience as we know it is to be enjoyed.

Unfortunately, the position he develops along his preferred topic makes it really difficult for us to understand what could be meant, within his system, by the claim that the faculty of cognition is a kind of mechanism, or quasi-mechanism. This is because he arrives at the conclusion that it is the faculty of cognition that endows our world with causality - the faculty the operation of which results in our thinking of the world as subject to causality. - Kant's acknowledgement of the Humean point, and his resolution of it. Causality is not an empirical concept. Putting these two things together we have the uncomfortable conclusion that the faculty which 'creates' causality operates according to it.

Just how uncomfortable is this?

Doesn't matter.

The fact is it is difficult to defend the idea that Kant didn't believe in mechanisms or quasi-mechanisms operating upon the 'data' delivered by sense.

In other words he assumed, indeed defended, a structural model of the mind.

Kant works with a distinction between perceiving and judging.

Judging is a person entertaining a proposition. (Körner, Kant, Harmondsworth, 1955, Penguin, p. 27.)

'By means of sense objects are given to us and sense alone provides us with perceptions; by means of the understanding objects are thought and from it there arise concepts. Pu.R. 49, B 33.

Kant allows that there might be perceptions that are 'unconnected'. His argument is that there cannot be connected perceptions unless there is unity of apperception. I suppose Hume could agree - but he thinks unity of apperception is created by elision between repeated iterations and repeated appearance.

Korner:

"A manifold of presentations might conceivably be no more than a stream of impressions lacking all connexion. It may on the other hand have some unity....According to Kant the connectedness or unity of a manifold is the result of a connexion or unification ... [performed by] the active understanding." Korner, Kant, p.60.

But could there be 'a stream of impressions lacking all connexion'?

One clear point is that according to Kant for a stream of impressions to constitute experience of an objective world the stream has to be accompanied by 'I think'. Korner tries to help by saying: "[A] manifold of presentations may or may not be an it which can carry the burden of properties and relations.... There can be noit unless there is an I which could be aware of it and thereby of itself". Korner, Kant, p.62.

Kant himself says:

"The I think must be capable of accompanying all my presentations; otherwise something would be presented to me which could not be thought at all, which means no less than: the presentation would be either impossible, or at least nothing to me ... Consequently every manifold of perception has a necessary relation to the I think, in the same subject in which the manifiold is found." Pu R. 108, B 131.

To structure the manifold of presentations two things are requisite: application of the forms of intuition and application of the categories. Benson argues that animals must surely be understood as able to apply the forms of intuition. And suggests they may be thought of as able to apply the categories too. But against this is the fact that Kant regarded the application of the categories as a function of the reason, and it was widely assumed in the 18th C that animals lacked reason.

(Stroud says that the theoretical approach which identified thought with the 'having of an idea' was a cul de sac. Where?? Hume, near page p.232)

Kant on the complimentarity of empirical and transcendental enquiries.

"Meanwhile, with respect to these conceptions [the conceptions of space and time, and the categories as pure conceptions of the understanding], as with respect to all our cognition, we certainly may discover in experience, if not the principle of their possibility, yet the occasioning causes of their production. It will be found that the impressions of sense give the first occasion for bringing into action the whole faculty of cognition, and for the production of experience, which contains two very dissimilar elements, namely, a matter for cognition, given by the senses, and a certain form for the arrangement of this matter, arising out of the inner fountain of pure intuition and thought; and these, on occasion given by sensuous impressions, are called into exercise and produce conceptions. Such an investigation into the first efforts of our faculty of cognition to mount from particular perceptions to general conceptions is undoubtedly of great utility; and we have to thank the celebrated Locke for having first opened the way for this inquiry. But a deduction of the pure a priori conceptions of course never can be made in this way, seeing that, in regard to their future employment, which must be entirely independent of experience, they must have a far different certificate of birth to show from that of a descent from experience. This attempted physiological derivation, which cannot properly be called deduction, because it relates merely to a quaestio facti, I shall entitle an explanation of the possession of a pure cognition. It is therefore manifest that there can only be a transcendental deduction of these conceptions and by no means an empirical one; also, that all attempts at an empirical deduction, in regard to pure a priori conceptions, are vain, and can only be made by one who does not understand the altogether peculiar nature of these cognitions.

(Kant CPR, A 86-7)

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