The questions of just what the Second Analogy purports to show and its role in both Kant's overall theory of experience and his philosophy of science remain matters of some controversy. At the heart of the debate is the problem of the connection between the transcendental principle of causality and particular causal laws known through experience. Although Kant consistently denies that ordinary empirical laws can be derived from the transcendental principles alone, he is less clear on the precise relationship between them. On the one hand, he characterizes empirical laws as “special determinations of still higher laws,” the highest of which stem from the understanding itself (A126). This suggests a relatively straightforward picture according to which the principles or transcendental laws of themselves guarantee the empirical lawfulness of nature. Experience is required to arrive at particular laws, but the general principle of the empirical lawfulness of nature is sufficiently guaranteed by the transcendental principles. On the other hand, in the Appendix to the Dialectic of the first Critique and the two versions of the Introduction to the third Critique Kant seems to suggest a more complex story. According to this story, not only the unifiability of particular laws into theories, but also the nomological status of particular uniformities requires an appeal to either reason in its regulative use or reflective judgment.

Gerd Buchdahl, among others, has focused the attention of Kant scholars on this more complex story. At the heart of Buchdahl's interpretation is what he terms the “looseness of fit” between the transcendental and empirical levels.