Kant International Relations

How "realistic" is Kantian "empirical realism"? Mainly by way of commentary on passages from the Analytic of Principles and Appendix to the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason, Abela offers, first, the "priority-of-judgment" view: "Kant...banish[es] the idea of any epistemic intermediary between belief and the world" (35); "there is nothing outside judgment...that informs, constrains, or ultimately grounds objectively valid judgment" (139-40). The ultimate ground is simply the totality of one's judgments. Second, representation of empirical reality presupposes a grasp of realistic truth-conditions, i.e., conditions construable neither pragmatically nor as mere assertion-conditions (230-49).

On several occasions Abela weakens the first claim, speaking rather only of Kant's rejection of a determinate "given" or a determinate "subjective foundation" for judgment (e.g., 60, 99, 151). But that must be an understatement. One might think to connect it with Abela's reading of the Axioms of Intuition and Anticipations of Perception (115-39). There, Kant is said to be concerned with highly "indeterminate" judgments Ð'- which Abela equates with empirical intuitions Ð'- regarding the extensive and intensive magnitude of sensations (viewed as modifications of one's sense organs). But there is no epistemic priority here: "the product of these judgments is not, in my estimation, the first line of conscious, cognitive engagement with the world....They do not offer an informative or evidential basis for objective representation" (115). Since Abela formulates the point (a bit misleadingly, to be sure, since the judgments involve concepts) with reference to Kant's talk about the "blindness" of intuitions, I take it that this is supposed to be Kant's view as well.

Chapter 1 divides contemporary efforts to honor Kantian realism into attempts to promote whatever degree of realism might be compatible with pragmatic or assertion-condition approaches (Epistemic Humanism) and appeals to "noumenal Ð''inputs'" as ultimate sources of sensation, or at least such as are aimed at some sort of account of "regularity" in sensory appearance (Ultimate Realism). Whatever one thinks about the latter, it seems to me misleading to suggest any particular connection with a desire to do justice to Kant's empirical realism. In any case, it seems to me compatible with the main tenets of Abela's own reading. The case against Epistemic Humanism is reserved for Chapter 4, which it somewhat artificially shares with the First Antinomy. (Except for the Appendix, the latter is the only part of the Dialectic specifically discussed.)

Here and throughout the book, several references to Graham Bird seem to identify him as the only reliable ally in the debate. But one might wish for more of a sense of how his reading relates to Abela's. Henry Allison gets a separate section, as an "object lesson." Though his heart is apparently on the whole in the right place, his distinction between "looser" and "weightier" objects is Ð'- I'm not clear why Ð'- taken to suggest overfriendliness to a "Cartesian epistemic model" (33). Mainly by way of attention to Quine, Davidson, and McDowell, the chapter concludes with anticipation of Abela's reading of Kant.

Chapter 2 contains additional stage-setting (Evans, McDowell, Davidson), plus what seems to me unconvincing critique (89-95) of "the causal theory of perception" for at least tacit hostility to the priority-of-judgment view. About half the chapter concerns the Axioms and (mainly) Anticipations, and the role of sensation in relation to empirical "intuition." At a couple of points Abela seems to identify them: "sensation (empirical intuition)" (50); sensations "obtain" only through the very forms of judging that are constitutive of empirical intuitions (53). But elsewhere he refers to a certain sort of "cognitive structure" in which Ð'- by way of indeterminate judgments of magnitude Ð'- sensations get "realized as" (126; cf. 127) intuitions. And just before the "obtaining" passage, he puts the point rather in terms of conditions under which sensation are "present to the mind." At one point Abela also speaks of intuitions as "the subject" of the indeterminate judgments in question (130). But it seems clear that he takes sensations to be their subject. I am tempted to speculate as to why there is some ambiguity here. If there is nothing extra-judgmental to which judgment is (epistemically) responsive Ð'- and given his view of "causal theories" of perception Ð'- one might hesitate to suppose that, except on a relatively high level of theoretical representation, sensations ever are subjects of judgment. But if not, we may seem left with Kantian intuitions as the subjects of our lowest-level (most indeterminate) judgments. But, for Abela, these are constituted by way of such judgments in the first place.

Though intuitions are not epistemically responsive to sensations, Abela nonetheless emphasizes that we apprehend appearances (meaning: objectively real objects and events) "through" them. He even describes them as functioning as "sensory signs" in cognition. He offers two analogies: representation of rectangular and circular objects through, or on the "basis" of, trapezoidal and elliptical retinal images (118; cf. 198), and the way in which a concert pianist "look[s] through" the notes printed on sheets of music (119n61). In any case, we need to resist the temptation to suppose Ð'- as Abela himself sometimes seems to suggest (7, 276) Ð'- that sensations are after all epistemic intermediaries in cognition, just not directly so. For again, even the intuitions by which sensations get cognitively "realized" are not "the first line of conscious, cognitive engagement with the world" (115); only the totality of judgments is that.

Now Kant himself says that the "mathematical" concepts concern objects of intuition, while the "dynamical" concepts of the Analogies and Postulates are "directed at the existence of these objects" (B110). And the syntheses introduced by way of the two sorts of concepts pertain, respectively, "partly merely to the intuition, partly to the existence" of an appearance (A160/B199). Furthermore, he speaks repeatedly of appearances, or (Anticipations) a certain aspect thereof, as the subject of our judgments of magnitude. To be sure, Kant also speaks of sensation Ð'- but sometimes "the real of sensation" Ð'- as the relevant