Abstract
Kant’s concept of cognition (Erkenntnis) has often been understood in terms of propositional knowledge. However, Kant’s primary concern is not epistemological in the sense we understand it today, but rather about possible objects of cognition and their necessary structure. This chapter aims to unfold the ontological implications of Kant’s concept of cognition.
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Notes
- 1.
Norman Kemp Smith renders both Erkenntnis and Wissen as “knowledge” in his translation of Kant’s Critique, which was regarded as the standard for a few decades. See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1929).
- 2.
See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1996); and Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Kant himself would have agreed to render Erkenntnis in English as “cognition,” as he often identifies Erkenntnis with the Latin word cognitio (A320/B376–77, A835–36/B863–64; JL 9:55, 63).
- 3.
Robert Brandom, “Kantian Lessons about Mind, Meaning, and Rationality,” Southern Journal of Philosophy 44, no. S1 (Spring 2006): 51.
- 4.
Robert Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 66. See also Hanna’s analysis of Kant’s concept of cognition in Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy, 18.
- 5.
See Rudolf A. Makkreel, “The Cognition-Knowledge Distinction in Kant and Dilthey and the Implications for Psychology and Self-Understanding,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 34, no. 1 (March 2003): 149.
- 6.
Guyer and Wood render the German word Glauben into English as “believing” or “belief.” Since the concept of belief in contemporary epistemology means taking something to be true regardless of whether it is justified or not, it is less restrictive than Kant’s concept of Glauben, which is a kind of belief that is sufficient only subjectively but not objectively. Pluhar makes a better choice in rendering Kant’s Glauben as “faith,” which is usually understood as believing on insufficient evidence.
- 7.
Although Kant does not accept practical knowledge (praktisches Wissen), he allows the possibility of practical science (praktische Wissenschaft) (CPrR 5:8), which consists of practical cognitions.
- 8.
Although Kant sometimes uses the notion of objective reality in a stronger sense than that of objective validity, the two notions are often used synonymously. I will treat them as equivalent in this chapter.
- 9.
Knowledge is classically defined as justified true belief, which, however, has been shown to be inadequate by Edmund Gettier’s famous counterexamples. It is debatable whether it is possible to offer an adequate definition of knowledge by modifying the condition of justification or replacing it with other conditions, or even whether the concept of knowledge is analyzable, but epistemologists rarely dispute that knowledge is a kind of true belief.
- 10.
The difference is in line with the ordinary usage of the two terms, as noted by G. E. Moore: “The word ‘cognition’ itself is sometimes confined, as its etymology suggests, to awareness or consciousness of what is true, in which case it is equivalent to ‘knowledge.’ But a ‘false cognition’ would not be so generally recognised as a contradiction in terms, as ‘a false experience’ or ‘false knowledge’” (“Experience and Empiricism,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 3 [1902–1903]: 83).
- 11.
Kant ridicules the situation with the following analogy: “it is just as when someone makes a statement before a court and in doing so appeals to a witness with whom no one is acquainted, but who wants to establish his credibility by maintaining that the one who called him as witness is an honest man” (JL 9:50).
- 12.
Each of these four categories of perfection can be further divided into aesthetic and logical ones, based on the distinction between intuitive and discursive cognition (JL 9:36).
- 13.
Wilfrid Sellars, Kant and Pre-Kantian Themes: Lectures by Wilfrid Sellars, ed. Pedro Amaral (Atascadero, Cal.: Ridgeview, 2002), 44. This is in line with the tradition of epistemology of Kant’s time: “In the eighteenth century its core sense [of Erkenntnis] was intimately connected with the notion of reference. To have Erkenntnis of a thing was to have in one’s mind a presentation, an idea, an image, a token referring to that thing.…This makes understandable the close connection in eighteenth-century philosophy between good reference and knowledge: To know is to have a good picture, the right concept, the correct name, of a thing” (Rolf George, “Vorstellung and Erkenntnis in Kant,” in Interpreting Kant, ed. Moltke S. Gram [Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1982], 35).
- 14.
In the Jäsche Logic, Kant discusses seven degrees or grades of cognition, starting from the most primitive one (JL 9:64–65): 1) representing, 2) perceiving in the sense of representing something consciously, 3) being acquainted with something, 4) cognizing in the sense of being consciously acquainted with something, 5) understanding in the sense of cognizing something conceptually, 6) having insight into something in the sense of cognizing it through reason, and finally 7) comprehending something in the sense of cognizing it “through reason or a priori to the degree that is sufficient for our purpose” (JL 9:65). Since Kant defines cognition (as the fourth degree) as the state of being “acquainted with something with consciousness” (JL 9:65), it implies that the state of being acquainted with something (as the third degree) is understood as a kind of objective representation without consciousness. In this sense, objective unconscious representation can be called acquaintance, although it also belongs to obscure representation.
- 15.
Brandom, “Kantian Lessons,” 51.
- 16.
I analyze the concept of objective validity in greater detail and distinguish between two orders of it in Chong-Fuk Lau, “Transcendental Concepts, Transcendental Truths and Objective Validity,” Kantian Review 20, no. 3 (Nov. 2015): 445–66. See also Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy, 83–95.
- 17.
Donald Davidson, “Mental Events,” in Essays on Actions and Events, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 2001), 208.
- 18.
The idea is similar to what Davidson calls the principle of charity, which implies the impossibility of universal mistake: “Global confusion, like universal mistake, is unthinkable, not because imagination boggles, but because too much confusion leaves nothing to be confused about and massive error erodes the background of true belief against which alone failure can be construed” (Davidson, “Mental Events,” 221).
- 19.
See Peter Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” (London: Routledge, 1975), 21–22.
- 20.
Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 333. See also Chapter 4 of this volume.
- 21.
Things in themselves and noumena will be taken as roughly referring to the same thing in this chapter, although there are subtle differences between the two concepts. See Henry E. Allison, “Things in Themselves, Noumena, and the Transcendental Object,” Dialectica 32, no. 1 (March 1978): 41–76.
- 22.
I explain the nonexistence of things in themselves in greater detail in Chong-Fuk Lau, “Kant’s Epistemological Reorientation of Ontology,” Kant Yearbook 2 (2010): 123–33. J. G. Fichte picks up on this idea in Kant and develops a version of transcendental idealism in which he explicitly denies the existence of a thing in itself. For a defense of this claim in Fichte (as true to the spirit of Kant), see Matthew C. Altman, “Fichte’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense,” in The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism, ed. Matthew C. Altman (London: Palgrave, 2014), 323–25.
- 23.
See Karl Schafer, “Kant’s Conception of Cognition and Our Knowledge of Things in Themselves,” in The Sensible and Intelligible Worlds, ed. Karl Schafer and Nicholas Stang (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
- 24.
See Karl Schafer, “Practical Cognition and Knowledge of Things-in-Themselves,” in The Idea of Freedom: New Essays on the Interpretation and Significance of Kant’s Theory of Freedom, ed. Dai Heide and Evan Tiffany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
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Lau, CF. (2017). Kant’s Concept of Cognition and the Key to the Whole Secret of Metaphysics. In: Altman, M. (eds) The Palgrave Kant Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54656-2_6
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