Kant's Transcendental Psychology, and: Kant's Theory of Self-Consciousness (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 6~9 Patricia Kitcher. Kant's Transcendental Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 199o. Pp. xiii + u96. Cloth, $35.oo. C. Thomas Powell. Kant's Theory of Self-Consciousness. New York: Oxford University Press, 199o. Pp. viii + u68. Cloth, $56.oo. Among the several recent book-length studies that emphasize the psychological dimension of the Crit/que ofPure Reason, the works here under review are particularly instructive . Kitcher's book exhibits a high degree of awareness of the methodological issues in the emerging debate between analytic and psychological Kant interpretations. Powelrs study is a good example of combining traditional analytic Kant interpretation with increased attention to Kant's philosophical psychology. Kitcher takes her starting point from the prevailing focus of analytic Kant interpretation on the conditions for the justification of empirical knowledge claims. While conceding the legitimacy of such an epistemological reading, she argues for the recognition of a further, equally important dimension of the first Crit/que, that of Kant's detailed examination of the mental capacities that make cognition possible. Kitcher's claim is not that psychological considerations regarding the mind's faculties can replace the epistemological concern with matters of justification and validity. Rather, she advances the weaker claim that an account of the human practice of cognition is incomplete without the consideration of the mental capacities that enable us to engage in such a practice (9)- It might therefore be most appropriate to read her work not as replacing the epistemologically oriented work on Kant but as supplementing it by rehabilitating an unduly neglected and unfairly maligned dimension of Kant's transcendental philosophy. Kitcher's defense of transcendental psychology amounts to a comprehensive reassessment of Kant's transcendental project in which the Quinean critique of any philosophy proceeding by means of analysis alone is combined with the insistence on the empirical nature of Kant's major starting points. On Kitcher's view, the Critique does not give an analytic argument for the conceptual requirements of possible experience. Rather, Kant is seen as pursuing a twofold argumentative strategy: first, specifying the psychological requirements that are sufficient for knowledge Cepistemic analyses," 19); and second, inferring the actuality of those psychological requirements from the undisputed account of the cognitive tasks that we perform ("analyses of empirical capacities," 19). The term "transcendental psychology," as employed by Kitcher, thus indicates the high level of generality at which Kant's examination of the empirical cognitive capacities is carried out, rind is not meant to suggest the adoption of a nonempirical psychology by Kant. Accordingly, Kitcher abandons any claim to apodictic certainty on behalf of transcendental psychology, making the latter a fallible enterprise that is continuous with and preparatory for empirical research on human cognition. Kitcher's psychological interpretation of Kant is cast in the terminology of a functionalist theory of the mind. The mind is seen as a device that processes material by subjecting it to the formative influence of various mental functions. The principal forms of such processing are a priori in the psychological sense of the term, viz., they 620 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY ~O:4 OCTOBER 1992 originate in the human mind (15f.). In carrying out her revisionist reading of Kant, . Kitcher concentrates on the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic . The former is presented as an analysis of the mind's contributions to spatial perception (Chapter 2), the latter as an extended argument, reaching from the Deduction (Chapter 3) through the Principles (Chapter 6), concerning the psychological basis of representational content. Especially noteworthy is Kitcher's functionalist understanding of synthesis as a higher-order processing that results in contentual connections among already formed perceptions (74f.). At the center of the book stands Kitcher's interpretation of the doctrine of transcendental apperception as a response to Hume's skepticism about personal identity (Chapter 4), followed by an extensive discussion of the purely cognitive nature of mental unity (Chapter 5). Kitcher radically disengages the mind's synthetic activity from any personal agency. The "combiner" behind the synthetic unity of apperception is said to be not some transcendental self but the mind's cognitive apparatus (x22f.). The book concludes with a chapter on the first three Paralogisms...