Necessity and Possibility: The Logical Strategy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

3. The Historical Background of Kant’s General Logic

56 Chapter Three The Historical Background of Kant’s General Logic e General Logic and Grammar I have tried to show up to this point that Kant conceives of general logic as a set of universal and necessary rules for the possibility of thought, or as a set of minimal necessary conditions for ascribing rationality to an agent (focusing, up to this point, on the principle of noncontradiction ). Such a conception contrasts with contemporary notions of formal, mathematical, or symbolic logic: rather as an attempt to identify those conditions that must hold for the possibility of thought, such conditions must hold a fortiori for any specific model of thought, including axiomatic treatments of logic and standard Gentzen-Fitch natural deduction models of first-order predicate logic. Kant’s general logic seeks to isolate those conditions by thinking through, or reflecting on, those conditions that themselves make thought possible. To clarify Kant’s reflective strategy, relative to general logic, it is of some help to examine the historical background within which his conception of logic is embedded. To begin to do so, I want to look at his comments about a discipline that has a longstanding historical con- Background of Kant's General Logic   57 nection with logic, namely grammar. Traditionally, grammar, rhetoric, and logic had composed the “trivium” of university study, and along with the “quadrivium” (arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy) constituted the seven liberal arts. The relationship between logic and grammar has, of course, been long recognized; Aristotle’s Organon begins with the Categories and On Interpretation, both of which treat grammatical at least as much as logical issues.1 With Frege’s work and the renewal of interest in the philosophy of logic, investigations into the connections between grammar and logic have flourished. As Bertrand Russell makes the point: “The study of grammar, in my opinion, is capable of throwing far more light on philosophical questions than is commonly supposed by philosophers....... On the whole, grammar seems to me to bring us much nearer to a correct logic than the current opinions of philosophers.”2 To be sure, there would be the sharpest disagreements between Russell and Kant, not the least of which would involve the notion of a “correct logic.” But it is clear that Kant is in agreement with Russell’s observation that the study of grammar can reveal much about logic, and, not surprisingly, Kant begins almost all of his many lectures on logic with some comments about grammar. I want to look at some of these comments, as well as some of Kant’s Reflexionen, not just to shed some light on the strategy Kant pursues in the Critique of Pure Reason, but also to consider why Kant spent so little time talking about natural language outside its grammatical context . 1. One might even be tempted to say that here the distinction between the two breaks down. Not surprisingly, one can find suggestions of the importance of grammar in Plato; in addition to the obvious Cratylos, see Theaetetus 183a and the “Seventh Letter.” T. Benfey argues for the idea that Plato is suggesting the idea of a universal language scheme in “Über die Aufgabe des platonischen Dialogs Kratylos,” Abhandlungen Göttingen, Philologische-Historische Klasse 12 (Göttingen, 1866): 189–330 (I owe this reference to W. K. C. Guthrie, A History of Greek Philosophy, vol. 5 [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986], 31). Sextus Empiricus gives a long discussion of grammar in Against the Professors [Προσ Μαϕεµακους], chapter 3. Such examples can be easily multiplied from the history of Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance philosophy. See also Michael Frede, "The Origins of Traditional Grammar," in Essays on Ancient Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 338–59, which emphasizes the Stoic contribution to this history. 2. Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (London: Allen and Unwin, 1903), 42. 58   Background of Kant's General Logic Kant does not mention grammar in the First Critique—indeed, he says virtually nothing at all about language there—but he does draw a connection in the Prolegomena between grammar and the method employed for discovering the categories. To find the categorial concepts “presupposes no greater reflection nor more insight than to pick out in a language the rules for the actual overall use of words so to collect the elements for a grammar (in fact both investigations are very closely related to one another)” (Ak. IV, 323). Some seven to...