The Transcendental Deduction and Skepticism

The Transcendental Deduction and Skepticism STEPHEN ENGSTROM IT HAS OFTEN BEEN ASSUMEDthat Kant's aim in the Transcendental Deduction includes a refutation of skepticism.' But this assumption has led interpreters to conclude not only that the Deduction is at least in large part a failure, but also that Kant is confused about how his objectives should be achieved and even about what they are. Such a conclusion may well raise doubts about the initial assumption and so invite a closer examination of what Kant himself says concerning the Deduction's relation to skepticism. The present essay undertakes such an examination in an attempt to determine what sort of skepticism Kant has in view and how he responds to it. Consideration of Kant's remarks will suggest that the Deduction does not aim at a refutation of skepticism, ~and will thus open the way to an alternative conception of its task, briefly entertained in the final section. Two sorts of skepticism will be considered. The first is the view Kant According to P. F. Strawson, for example, "A major part of the role of the Deduction willbe to establish.that experience necessarily involves knowledge of objects,in the weighty sense" (The Bounds ofSense[London: Methuen, 1966], 88). And according to Barry Stroud, "the transcendental deduction (along with the Refutation of Idealism) is supposed.., to give a complete answer to the sceptic about the existence of things outside us" ("Transcendental Arguments," Journal of Philosophy65 [1968]: 242). More recently, Paul Guyer has suggested that Kant is ambivalent about whether to answer the skeptic or the empiricist (Kant and the Claimsof Knowledge [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987]; see also "The Failure of the B-Deduction," The Southern Journal ofPhilosophy25, Supplement [1986]: 67-84). Similar conclusions are reached in Karl Ameriks, "Kant's Transcendental Deduction as a Regressive Argument," Kant-Studien 69 (1978): 273-87; Jonathan Lear, "The Disappearing 'We'," Proceedingsof the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 58 0984): ~x9-42; and Henry Allison, "Reflections on the B-Deduction," The SouthernJournal of Philosophy ~5, Supplement (x986): 1-15. (For an intermediate position, see Edwin McCann, "Skepticism and Kant's B Deduction ," History of Philosophy Quarterly~ [1985]: 71-72.) My approach is distinctive primarily in its focus on what Kant himself says concerning the Deduction's relation to skepticism. To keep the discussion manageable, I confine my attention to the Deduction as presented in the second edition, which is where Kant's remarks about skepticism occur. [359] 360 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 32:3 JULY 1994 addresses in the Refutation of Idealism: "the problematic [material] idealism of Descartes," "which declares the existence of objects in space outside us... to be doubtful and indemonstrable" (B274), arguing that "the only immediate experience is inner experience, and from it we only infer outer things, and, moreover--as in all cases where we are inferring from given effects to determinate causes--only in an untrustworthy manner, for the cause of the representations that we ascribe, perhaps falsely, to outer things, may lie in ourselves" (B276).s The second is the skepticism Kant associates with the empiricism of Hume. This skepticism, which will be described in greater detail below, denies that any of our knowledge has its source in reason, maintaining instead that "what is regarded as reason is a universal illusion of our faculty of knowledge" (B128). For convenience, we may call the former "Cartesian.skepticism" and the latter "Humean skepticism" (though, as will emerge, these labels can be somewhat misleading). 1. CARTESIAN SKEPTICISM 1. Kant mentions skepticism only twice in connection with the Deduction, once near the beginning in w , and once at the conclusion in w . The skepticism mentioned in w is Humean, so if the claim that the Deduction attempts to refute the Cartesian skeptic is to be supported by what Kant himself says about skepticism, it will have to be based on the remarks in w Before turning to those remarks, we should briefly consider their context, Kant's criticism of what he calls the "middle course." 3Listed below are the symbolsand abbreviations used in references to Kant's works and the translations on which I have based my own. Page references to the Cr...