Abstract
In this chapter, Naranjo Sandoval and Chignell look at a few of the most prominent ways of articulating Kant’s critical argument for Noumenal Ignorance – that is, the claim that we cannot cognize any substantive, synthetic truths about things in themselves – and then provide two different accounts of how to justify it.
Nothing is so firmly believed, as that which we least know.
– Michel de Montaigne, Essays
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Notes
- 1.
For more on Transcendental Idealism, see Paul Guyer’s chapter in this volume.
- 2.
“To claim that human cognition is discursive is to claim that is requires both concepts and sensible intuition” (Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense, rev. ed. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004], 13).
- 3.
“By an epistemic condition is here understood a necessary condition for the representation of objects, that is, a condition without which our representations would not relate to objects or, equivalently, possess objective reality” (ibid., 11).
- 4.
Ibid., 14.
- 5.
Ibid.
- 6.
Allison follows Prauss in providing a series of key quotations in which Kant himself speaks of the distinction as one about how one and the same set of entities is “considered [betrachtet]” – either under epistemic conditions or not (ibid., 52–57).
- 7.
This does not mean that, for Allison, Noumenal Ignorance is a trivial or purely conceptual truth. For, as he correctly points out, “this would follow only if the distinction [between appearances and things in themselves] were itself obvious or trivial. But this is far from the case with the transcendental distinction, which…rests upon a radical reconceptualization of human knowledge as based on…epistemic conditions” (ibid., 19).
- 8.
See Lucy Allais, “Kant’s One World: Interpreting ‘Transcendental Idealism,’” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 12, no. 4 (Nov. 2004): 655–84; Lucy Allais, Manifest Reality: Kant’s Idealism and His Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Tobias Rosefeldt, “Dinge an sich und sekundäre Qualitäten,” in Kant in der Gegenwart, ed. Jürgen Stolzenberg (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 167–209; Kris McDaniel, “A Philosophical Model of the Relation between Things in Themselves and Appearances,” Noûs 49, no. 4 (Dec. 2015): 643–64; and Andrew Chignell, “Skepticism, Common Sense, and Mind-Dependence,” in The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds, ed. Karl Schafer and Nicholas Stang (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
- 9.
See Rae Langton, Kantian Humility: Our Ignorance of Things in Themselves (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 18. Langton quotes from the Kemp Smith edition, which sometimes translates Kant’s das Innere und Äussere as “the intrinsic and the extrinsic.” The Guyer/Wood translation uses more literal (and possibly less technical) terminology: “the inner and the outer” (A265/B321).
- 10.
See, for example: “The inner determinations of a substantia phaenomenon in space…are nothing but relations, and it is itself entirely a sum total of mere relations.…As object of the pure understanding, on the contrary, every substance must have inner determinations and forces that pertain to its inner reality” (A265/B321).
- 11.
Langton, Kantian Humility, 5.
- 12.
For Ameriks’s criticism, see Karl Ameriks, “Kant and Short Arguments to Humilty,” in Interpreting Kant’s “Critiques” (Oxford: Clarendon, 2003), 135–57. For Langton’s assessment of her own view, consider: “[My interpretation] does ascribe to a notorious idealist a position that is not idealism, not anti-realism of any kind, but rather epistemic humility” (Langton, Kantian Humility, 6).
- 13.
James Van Cleve, Problems from Kant (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 136. Van Cleve also suggests that it might be possible to know that there is some structural similarity (if not outright isomorphism) between facts about things in themselves and facts about appearances (ibid., 155–62).
- 14.
“In dozens of passages, Kant tells us that appearances have no being apart from being represented.…Things in themselves, by contrast, are things that exist independently of human representation or cognition. They exist whether perceived or not and have whatever properties they do independently of us” (ibid., 6–7).
- 15.
Ibid., 11.
- 16.
Van Cleve claims that this thesis “underlines two of his assumptions in the ‘Amphiboly’ section of the Critique of Pure Reason: things in themselves cannot have their nature exhausted by relations, and they cannot differ numerically without differing qualitatively” (ibid., 47). Even though they both agree on the conclusion – that is, that things in themselves have intrinsic properties – this is in sharp contrast to Langton’s views, according to which Kant originally held the reducibility of relations in the pre-critical period but later on came to believe that relational properties are irreducible to intrinsic ones.
- 17.
“The only properties we know of in external things are their powers to affect us” (Van Cleve, Problems from Kant, 153).
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
More precisely, Van Cleve references Moore’s test: P is intrinsic if and only if “when anything possesses it, that same thing or anything exactly like it would necessarily or must always, under all circumstances, possess it in exactly the same degree” (ibid., 152).
- 20.
Some metaphysicians would disagree with Van Cleve here and claim that dispositions are categorial, intrinsic properties that are only “triggered” in the right kinds of circumstances.
- 21.
All citations are from Desmond Hogan, “How to Know Unknowable Things in Themselves,” Noûs 43, no. 1 (March 2009): 49–63. Hogan has expanded on some of the details of his view in Desmond Hogan, “Noumenal Affection,” Philosophical Review 118, no. 4 (Oct. 2009): 501–32.
- 22.
Hogan, “How to Know Unknowable Things in Themselves,” 52.
- 23.
In fact, these two senses of “a priori knowledge” are related. For Hogan, Kant held that knowledge through the ground depends on non-empirical knowledge precisely because we cannot know via empirical observation alone the causes or grounds of things – non-empirical principles are ultimately required for this purpose. In our example regarding sunrises, some causes could be known empirically, but in the last analysis one would have to invoke either the Principle of Contradiction, if the truths involved are necessary, or the Principle of Sufficient Reason. This allows Hogan to read some of Kant’s epistemic claims that we cannot non-empirically know some things – which is by far the most frequent formulation of Noumenal Ignorance – as metaphysical claims that there are no grounds through which these things could be known.
- 24.
Hogan, “How to Know Unknowable Things in Themselves,” 56.
- 25.
Note that this interpretation of Noumenal Ignorance is not limited to the unknowability of facts regarding agents. In conversation Hogan has indicated that, since free acts are unknowable, and since agents can freely act on (some) features of reality, it follows that those features of reality are unknowable too, in the sense that they lack grounds through which they could be known.
- 26.
Another clear passage presented by Hogan is: “[contingent changes such as free actions], in so far as they appear to have about them an indeterminacy in respect of determining grounds and necessary laws, harbour within themselves a possibility of deviating from the general tendency of natural things towards perfection” (OPA 2:110–11).
- 27.
Hogan is in good company in this regard: Allison and Ameriks have also defended the claim that, at the time Kant wrote the first edition of the first Critique, he believed that there is theoretical proof that we are absolutely free. See Karl Ameriks, Kant’s Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 189–98; and Henry E. Allison, Kant’s Theory of Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), chs. 1–3.
- 28.
Hogan recognizes that in passages like this it seems that absolute freedom could only be known to be real if we know that the moral law is binding. Hence it seems that absolute freedom has only practical (and not theoretical) grounding. But, he alleges, Kant holds that facts that have practical grounding have the same epistemic standing as facts that have theoretical grounding (CPrR 5:121; RP 20:310).
- 29.
“Even if we cannot cognize [erkennen]…objects as things in themselves, we at least must be able to think [denken] them as things in themselves” (Bxxvi–xxvii).
- 30.
The view sketched here is a simplified version of an interpretation that I (Naranjo Sandoval) am currently preparing for presentation elsewhere. Here, I focus mostly on Kant’s theory of truth and cognition. A fuller study, I think, would also consider the role that intuition plays in the justification of knowledge as a propositional attitude.
- 31.
For an important exception, see Eric Watkins and Marcus Willaschek, “Kant’s Account of Cognition,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 55, no. 1 (Jan. 2017): 83–112. See also the replies to that article (in the same volume) by Stefanie Grüne and Andrew Chignell.
- 32.
The “t” in “t-judgments” stands for “theoretical,” although I do not claim here that all theoretical judgments are t-judgments and vice versa. Some general features of t-judgments include that they have content and are truth-evaluable attempts at describing the world. However, commentators will disagree on further details.
- 33.
Here I believe that Kant uses “object” to refer to any state of affairs or feature of reality which could be cognized – these might include propositions. For a similar take on what Kant means by “object” in the context of his theory of cognition, see Houston Smit, “Kant on Marks and the Immediacy of Intuition,” Philosophical Review 109, no. 2 (April 2000): 239–43.
- 34.
Here I remain neutral on the nature of this relation, since explaining it would require addressing complicated issues concerning intuition and intuitional content.
- 35.
For more on the relation between judgments and their objects in the context of Kant’s views on logic, see John MacFarlane, “Frege, Kant, and the Logic in Logicism,” Philosophical Review 111, no. 1 (Jan. 2002): 50–51.
- 36.
This is not to say that we can consciously distinguish between similar objects – for example, between the original and the counterfeit. It means only that our representations possess sufficient informational complexity to individuate objects from all others, provided that we can form true t-judgments about them. Note, too, that the sense of “containment” involved here is not linguistic. That is, the sentence expressing the content of my t-judgment contains the expression “the painting acquired by the Metropolitan Museum”; but my t-judgment also contains a representation of the painting (whether the content of this representation can be expressed by that definite description depends on one’s views on the semantics of descriptions). I hope to clarify this relation of containment between the judgment and its component representations elsewhere.
- 37.
Note that this means that Kant does not hold a causal (or in this case “grounding”) theory of reference. The object of the t-judgment is the ground of the t-judgment’s truth or falsity, but whether the t-judgment fails or succeeds at referring to that object depends only on the informational features of its representations.
- 38.
I am left with the difficult task of explaining how certain representations describe one object and no other. I believe that Kant solved this problem by postulating a thoroughgoing correspondence between a true t-judgment and its object; that is, if a t-judgment about an object is true then it must contain a representation that expresses accurately and exhaustively the features of the object. This would be a natural choice given Kant’s doctrine of thoroughgoing determination, according to which, given a predicate P, any object falls under the extension of P or its negation. See, for example, A571/B579. I think it is possible to avoid worries about the finiteness of our cognitive capacities by claiming that this thoroughgoing correspondence obtains between the object and the intuitional content of the representation, which might not be introspectible in its entirety. This would agree with our claim here that only representations with intuitional content can truly refer to objects. The defense of this claim, however, will have to await another occasion.
- 39.
For example, in his analysis of Kant’s notion of knowledge (Wissen), Andrew Chignell includes the requirement of truth. See Andrew Chignell, “Kant’s Concepts of Justification,” Noûs 41, no. 1 (March 2007): 57.
- 40.
It should be noted that, for Kant, the ability to distinguish objects from each other is not only necessary for knowledge but also epistemically beneficial for other lower, less demanding propositional attitudes, such as hypothesis and, more broadly, opinion, the epistemic merits of which come in degrees. That is, insofar as agents have representations that better distinguish objects from others, their cognition of these objects is epistemically improved. Elaborating on this would be part of the fuller project hinted at in note 30.
- 41.
For a discussion of Kant’s hierarchical structure of concepts, see Eric Watkins, “Kant on Infima Species,” in Kant und die Philosophie in weltbürgerlicher Absicht: Akten des XI. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, ed. Stefano Bacin, Alfredo Ferrarin, Claudio La Rocca, and Margit Ruffing, 5 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013), 5:283–94.
- 42.
For Kant’s doctrine of thoroughgoing determination, see A571/B579.
- 43.
In fact, uniqueness is only guaranteed if we consider ordered lists of concepts, that is, lists such that, for every two contiguous concepts in them, the second is a species of the first. For example, one’s representation of an individual cat is correlated to the following ordered list of concepts: thing, living thing, animal, mammal, four-legged, meowing, etc. We also require lists to be finite, given concerns about the finiteness of our conceptual cognitive capacities. For the sake of simplicity, this is left implicit here.
- 44.
It is necessary to note that the understanding orders concepts in this hierarchical structure because it abides by the logical principles of homogeneity, specification, and continuity (A658/B686). Given that these logical principles are regulative, they are also necessary rules about the features of representations and the relations between them. From this it follows that the understanding must order concepts in this way, and so there is no way, independently of the hierarchical structure, in which the understanding could form representations that truly refer.
- 45.
The idea here seems to be that it is always possible to conceive of numerically distinct marks under a given concept, regardless of its content. In accordance with this reading, Kant states that the reason why there is no lowest species is that “as soon as I have a concept that I apply to individua, it would still be possible for there to be still smaller differences among the individua” (VL 24:911). If this interpretation is correct, this lends credence to Chignell’s views, as presented in the next section, that Kant’s Noumenal Ignorance is at least partly informed by his views on modality.
- 46.
Note that this marks a departure from Leibnizian doctrine, according to which each individual object has a complete concept such that, if one understood it perfectly, one would be able to derive from it all concepts under which it falls. For example, see G. W. Leibniz, “Discourse on Metaphysics,” in Philosophical Essays, trans. Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989), 51.
- 47.
Note that I am not only claiming that intuitions are required for representations to refer to a single object. This is what commentators have called the singularity of intuitions. See, for example, Michael Friedman, “Kant’s Theory of Geometry,” Philosophical Review 94, no. 4 (Oct. 1985): 455–506. Rather, I am making the stronger claim that (some) representations with intuitional content contain all the information required for distinguishing the object from all others – this is the sense in which they are at the bottom of the hierarchical structure of concepts.
- 48.
For a similar interpretation of Noumenal Ignorance, see Watkins and Willaschek, “Kant’s Account of Cognition.” However, our accounts differ in important respects, including, for example, the way we understand reference and our arguments to the conclusion that we can only refer through intuitions.
- 49.
For the full description of this account, from which some of the material in this section is drawn, see Andrew Chignell, “Modal Motivations for Noumenal Ignorance: Knowledge, Cognition, Coherence,” Kant-Studien 105, no. 4 (Dec. 2014): 573–97.
- 50.
For the whole argument, see Andrew Chignell, “Kant, Modality, and the Most Real Being,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 91, no. 2 (Jan. 2009): 157–92.
- 51.
For further defense of these claims about subject-canceling real repugnance in the pre-critical period, see Andrew Chignell, “Kant and the ‘Monstrous’ Ground of Possibility,” Kantian Review 19, no. 1 (March 2014): 53–69.
- 52.
In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant asks us to think of a case of “two motions” that are “combined in precisely opposite directions in one and the same point” (MFS 4:491). In such a case the two predicates do not cancel one another out and leave the point at rest (as they would do if we were merely thinking of opposed forces – see, for example, A265/B321 and OP 22:283). Rather, the opposition cancels the entire subject to which they are ascribed: “representing two such motions at the same time in exactly the same point within one and the same space would be impossible, and thus so would the case of such a composition of motions itself” (MFS 4:491). A few pages later, in a reflection on this case, Kant explains that “the representation of the impossibility of these two motions in one body is not the concept of its rest, but rather of the impossibility of constructing this composition of opposite motions” (MFS 4:494). Similarly, later in the Metaphysical Foundations Kant indicates that a material being “is impossible through mere attractive forces without repulsive forces,” and that this impossibility has its basis in “the essence of matter” rather than in a logical contradiction (Demnach ist Materie durch bloße Anziehungskräfte ohne zurückstoßende unmöglich) (MFS 4:511).
- 53.
A more precise articulation of the modal condition:
Necessarily, S cognizes that p only if, for any object referred to in p, if it is really possible then S is in a position to prove its real possibility, and if it is really impossible then S is in a position to prove its real impossibility.
Obviously more needs to be said about what “proving” real possibility amounts to in this context. For my latest efforts in that regard, see Andrew Chignell, “Knowledge, Discipline, System, Hope: The Fate of Metaphysics in the Doctrine of Method,” in Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason”: A Critical Guide, ed. James R. O’Shea (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), 259–79.
- 54.
See note 45 for a further way in which these two views might complement each other.
- 55.
For helpful comments on earlier drafts of this material, we would like to thank Derk Pereboom and Desmond Hogan.
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Naranjo Sandoval, A., Chignell, A. (2017). Noumenal Ignorance: Why, for Kant, Can’t We Know Things in Themselves?. In: Altman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_5
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