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A Neo-Kantian Account of Perception

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 May 2018

Leslie Stevenson
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Abstract

I suggest a reconstruction of Kant's theory of perception – in particular his notions of intuition, concept, sensible impression, sensation, synthesis and combination – informed by the progress of philosophy and human and animal psychology since his time. I take from Burge the distinction between unconceptualized perception of objects (found in animals, infants, and to some extent in adult humans) and our conceptualized, judgmental perceptual experience. Kant concentrated on the latter, but he can be seen to leave room for the former, especially if we make clearer distinctions than he did between sensible impression and sensation, and between synthesis and combination.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 93 , Issue 3 , July 2018 , pp. 411 - 431
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Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2018 

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References

1 In some of his earliest work Kant contributed to astronomy and meteorology himself.

2 See Allison, H.E., Kant's Transcendental Deduction: An Analytical-Historical Commentary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), appendix to Chapter 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 And some alleged ‘facts’ involving racial and gender stereotypes.

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5 A and B page numbers refer to the first and second editions of the Critique of Pure Reason, and quotations are from the translation by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

6 Kant had deep and difficult things to say about pure or a priori intuition of space and time, but in this paper I am dealing only with empirical intuition, i.e. perception in the modern sense.

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12 Op.cit. note 10, 7:136.

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15 In the corresponding first edition passage at A1 Kant wrote of ‘sensible sensations’. I suggest that the difference is more important than perhaps he realized. George, Rolf, in ‘Kant's Sensationism’, Synthese 47 (1982), 229–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, interpreted Kant as a ‘sensationist’ but did not clearly distinguish sensations from sensible impressions.

16 Op.cit. note 4 (9, 11, 104, 155).

17 It may give comfort to enthusiasts for homeopathy.

18 See Wyatt, T.D., Pheromones and Animal Behaviour: Communication by Smell and Taste (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), Ch.13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. If any such effect can be experimentally demonstrated, that would be subliminal perception rather than the perfumes some of us pay good money for, and can sniff.

19 As he made clear in pre-critical writing, see op.cit. note 14, 2:59–60 and 2:285.

20 As explored in the pioneering work of Marr, David, Vision (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1982)Google Scholar; see Burge, op.cit. note 4, Ch. 8 & 9.

21 Thomas Reid's understanding was similar: ‘Sensation is a name given by philosophers to an act of the mind, which may be distinguished from all others by this, that it hath no object distinct from the act itself’, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1969), I.i.12Google Scholar. He went on to argue that ‘a quality perceived, and the sensation corresponding to that perception, often go under the same name’ (in his example, the smell of a rose), and ‘this ambiguity has very much perplexed philosophers’ (II.xvi).

22 Imagine how Kant would have suffered in an amplified rock-concert!

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24 As argued by Wilfrid Sellars in his modern classic Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1997, with an introduction and study guide)Google Scholar; first published in 1956.

25 One may see that something looks blue in artificial light and infer that it is really green, but that depends on prior knowledge that such lighting affects the way things look (as Sellars noted).

26 In a lecture in 1910 G.E. Moore introduced his audience to sense-data by holding up an envelope and inviting them to consider ‘what exactly happened to them when they saw it’ – by which he meant: concentrate not on the object itself, but on the visual perspective it presently displays to you. See Some Main Problems of Philosophy (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1953), Ch.IIGoogle Scholar).

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28 This trio is not reproduced in B, but it surfaces again in a sketch of ‘the whole of the critical philosophy’ in a late Reflexion of 1797 (R6385, 18:682–5), so it seems Kant never really gave it up.

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33 As Beatrice Longuenesse has argued in impressive detail in Kant and the Capacity to Judge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

34 Kant divided the first Critique into Aesthetic, Analytic, and Dialectic – supposed to deal respectively with intuitions, concepts plus judgments, and inferences.

35 In a few places Burge mentions further distinctions of mental levels: between single- or cross-modal non-propositional representation, and between unconscious or conscious propositional attitudes (op.cit. note 4, 431, 538), suggesting that apes have the former (492, 538). But to discuss all that would be another story.

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