Abstract
Kant’s transcendental psychology, often maligned,1 is a cognitive psychology. More specifically, it is a faculty psychology which speaks of capacities and abilities of various sorts which are needed for empirical cognition. The exercise of such capacities and abilities typically consists in mental actions of several types. An activity-characterization of cognitive mental life is the indispensable core element of transcendental psychology.2 Kant conceives of cognitive mental actions as goal-oriented and as performed by an agent on the basis of the agent’s conception of rules governing the actions in question.3 Such a conception assigns to cognitive activities a high degree of structure.
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Notes
Among recent Anglo-American commentators, P.F. Strawson has labeled Kant’s transcendental psychology imaginary and an aberration. See his The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966). p. 32.
Productive imagination is central in the generation of mathematical-intuitive concepts. I have explored the nature of such concepts in my “Kant on Intuitivity,” Synthese 47 (1981), pp. 203–228.
For an elaboration of Kant’s distinction between what is given in intuition and what is produced through combination, see my “Apperception and Objectivity.” delivered at the Spindel Conference on the Deduction in B, Memphis State University, October. 1986. and since then published in The Southern Journal of Philosophy. Vol. XXV. Supplement (1987). pp. 115–130.
In addition to passages in that work cited in note 10. also see Kant’s summary account in sec. 10 (Ac. V, 219–220).
See his “Functional Analysis,” Journal of Philosophy,vol. LXXII (1975), pp. 741–765.
See his “Intuition, Synthesis and Individuation in the Critique of Pure Reason,” Nous,vol. VII (1973), pp. 207–231.
I am thinking primarily of Gordon Brittan, who has been defending such an interpretation in a series of papers beginning at an APA Symposium in Long Beach, March, 1984. Brittan is represented in B. den Ouden (ed.), New Essays on Kant ( Bern: Peter Lang, 1987 ).
Among several pieces of hers, see “Kant’s Real Self’ in A. W. Wood (ed.), Self and Nature in Kant’s Philosophy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 113–147. and ”Kant on Self-Identity,“ Philosophical Review 91 (1982). pp. 41–72.
I have attempted to do so in “Kant on the Nondeterminate Character of Human Actions” in W. L. Harper and R. Meerbote (eds.). Kant on Causality. Freedom and Objectivity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 138–163.
See his “Functionalism and Qualia,” Philosophical Studies 27 (1975), pp. 291–315. My present formulation is indebted to him.
See F. H. Jacobi, David Hume aber den Glauben, Werke (Leipzig: G. Fleischer, 1815), vol. II, 304. Jocobi holds of cognitive representations that without any presumed real and
See his “Troubles with Functionalism” reprinted in N. Block (ed.), Readings in Philosophy of Psychology,vol. I (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980). pp. 268–305.
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Meerbote, R. (1991). Kant’s Functionalism. In: Smith, JC. (eds) Historical Foundations of Cognitive Science. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 46. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2161-0_10
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