The Rigidity of Kant’s Categories

Abstract

The rigidity of Kant’s categories depends on more than their transcendental deduction. This deduction attempts to show that the systematic list drawn up from an analysis of judgments is both correct and complete; but before the idea of such a deduction could present itself, assumptions concerning the nature of knowledge and concerning the way to analyze the act of knowing were required. I suggest that these assumptions, in Kant’s case, were primarily two in number: first, his conviction that Newtonian physics expresses certain and unalterable knowledge of the physical universe (i.e., the world of phenomena); second, his conviction that the traditional subject-predicate logic (of course he knew no other) is the correct tool for the analysis of this knowledge.