PHIL 253 - Kant Glossary Terms

(Re)presentation ( + what are the two kinds?)

Kant's most general term for a mental state that relates to an object. All the elements of knowledge and experience are species of representation. Two distinguished kinds: intuitions & concepts. 

Intuition (a kind of representation)

A direct, immediate, and singular representation of an object. Direct and immediate in the sense that they involve no application of concepts, judgment, or thought in the representation of an object (SENSIBLY given). Singular, only apply to one object. 

Intuitions are the product of what...?

the product of sensibility, our capacity to be affected by objects. 

Concept (a kind of representation)

A mediate representation of an object (i.e., they relate to objects ‘by means of a feature which several things have in common’). Concepts are general in the sense that they can apply to many different objects (in contrast to intuitions that are ‘singular’).

Concepts are the product of what?

the product of the understanding, our capacity to make judgments about objects.

Cognition

An ‘objective representation with consciousness.’ A cognition can be thought of as knowledge of an object. It is objective insofar as it involves a relation a possible object (i.e., one given in space and time). It is representation ‘with consciousness’ insofar as it involves the subject being conscious of the object as distinct from the subject’s mental state.

What does cognition require?

It requires both intuition and concepts, hence involves the use of sensibility and understanding.

Experience

Kant sometimes uses it to mean something like sensation or sense perceptions. However, the more central use of the term is something like grasping the objective spatiotemporal world in perception.

What does having experiences involve?

it involves the use of both sensibility (intuition) and understanding (concepts). In this way, experience is closer to empirical cognition/knowledge than it is to a subjective mental event.

Object

That which is known/experienced. It may refer to an individual entity but also to events and states of affairs.

Judgment

The expression of knowledge in propositional form (a statement combining multiple concepts/variables); involve combining concepts (e.g., ‘the dog is furry’ combines ‘dog’ and ‘furry’).

A priori knowledge

A judgment known independently of experience, need not be verified by experience. Necessary and Universal; experience cannot verify that anything must be the case or is not without exception.

A posteriori knowledge

A judgment known through experience. Contingent and reversible in light of further experience. Can be denied without contradiction.

Synthetic Judgment

a judgment that expands knowledge by adding information to the subject that is not inherently contained within its definition (E.g., “All bodies are heavy” is synthetic because being heavy is not contained in the concept of being a body, only experience reveals to us that bodies are heavy). Extend our knowledge whereas analytic judgments do not. Every judgment we make about experience is synthetic for it requires more than just analyzing our concepts (→ they require experiencing that predicate connected to the subject).

Analytic Judgment

A judgment where the predicate is already contained within the concept of the subject (“All bodies are extended” is analytic since the concept of being extended is contained in the concept of a body). They are true because of the principle of contradiction: “A square has four sides” is true because to deny it would entail a contradiction.

Sensibility

Our capacity to be affected by objects, to form representations from the objects given to us. It is passive and produces intuitions by being affected by objects in sense experience.

What are the forms of intuition?

Space and time

Understanding

Our faculty or capacity for thinking and judging. The understanding is active and produces concepts for judging things given in intuition.

What are produced by the understanding?

The categories are produced by the understanding and their application makes knowledge possible.

Reason ( a - c)

Is characterized as

(a) a faculty for making inferences

(b) as a faculty aimed at discovering the conditions under which objects are given and judgments are true, and

( c) as a faculty that serves to unify our thoughts and judgments into a coherent and total system.

(Sometimes Kant uses ‘reason’ in a broader sense to refer to any conceptual elements in cognition that we bring to experience that are not derived from it.)

Appearance

What we experience; a thing considered as conforming to our mode of cognition, i.e., space, time, sensibility, and the concepts of our understanding.

All knowledge is knowledge of _____ ; all spatiotemporal things are _____ .

appearances

Thing-in-itself; things-in-themselves

a thing as considered apart from or independently of our mode of cognition (i.e., apart from space, time, sensibility, and the concepts of our understanding). We can have no knowledge of things as they are in themselves, though Kant holds that we may think of things-in-themselves (i.e., we can have an idea of God).

Synthetic a priori cognition

Necessary and universal judgments known without experience. (e.g., arithmetic propositions - 7 + 5 = 12, Newtonian laws of physics)