3

I am trying to understand Kant's taxonomy of ideas (or "representations") and I am stuck on his meaning of "intuition", in particular, whether or not the object of an intuition always refers to something that is empirically real. My working interpretation of "object" is something like "the thing that the thought is about", and hence could refer to something that can be given in experience or not (like the things studied in math). That he does mean that the objects of intuitions always refer to material things in the world is suggested to me in how he says that these objects must be "given to us" through our sensibility and that these intuitions are acquired through the way objects "affect" us.

If I restrict to thinking only about external objects in the world affecting my senses, then I think I can understand what he means well enough, but once I start contemplating other forms of thought I get confused as to the difference between objects and ideas. For example, if I dream up some object in my mind that doesn't exist in the world, like a chair or a triangle, but nonetheless think it singularly and picture it in my mind, is this an intuition? If so, what is the object and how do you distinguish it from the idea itself?

SihOASHoihd
  • 141
  • 3
  • Kant uses both "object" and "intuition" in his own peculiar senses. "Intuitions" are unstructured starting points of cognition supplied either by sensations or by productive imagination, images, sounds and the like. "Objects" are intuitive unities brought under a concept. Your idea of his "object" as what Brentano and Husserl later called "intentional object" is close, but it does need to be attached to something sensible, unlike "idea", i.e. concept of the understanding alone, see [What is Kant's view of a mathematical object?](https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/32569/9148) – Conifold Jul 07 '21 at 22:27
  • What is the relation between the two? Do intuitions always require objects? Are intuitions always objects of something in the understanding? – SihOASHoihd Jul 07 '21 at 23:12
  • What are objects? Are they ideas, material objects or neither? You said an object for Kant needs to be attached to something sensible. Does this something sensible correspond to something material in the external world? Or, can it correspond to something supplied by my productive imagination, and if so is the object the same thing as the idea in this case? – SihOASHoihd Jul 07 '21 at 23:21
  • 1
    Sensibility (sensations or imagination) supply intuitions, understanding supplies concepts, objects appear when the two are synthesized. Sensibility and understanding are independent faculties, one does not require the other, but both are required for knowledge ("*concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind*"). There is no "external world" with what *we* call "objects" in it for Kant, only impenetrable thing-in-itself. On the last questions see the link, even imagined object is not an idea, an idea doesn't need an attached image. – Conifold Jul 07 '21 at 23:30
  • @Conifold Thank you for your responses. I am still struggling to understand. Kant says that cognitions are objective perceptions and that these come in two types either intuitions or concepts. It sounds therefore that objects need to be defined *before* you can define intuitions and concepts, whereas you seem to describe it the other way around where objects are defined in terms of intuitions and concepts – SihOASHoihd Jul 07 '21 at 23:44
  • In the link, I am struggling to get past the first line where you write "mathematical objects are not pure objects of the understanding". If objects are a synthesis of intuitions and concepts, then what is a pure object of the understanding? For example, do objects need attached images? – SihOASHoihd Jul 07 '21 at 23:50
  • "Pure object of the understanding" is something introduced by neo-Kantians, it is not relevant here. One cannot "define" either objects, intuitions or concepts, only describe interrelations among them. They are labels for something taken from experience. And the order of description does not have to follow the order of generation, it is in the latter that concepts and intuitions are prior to objects. It follows then that both are "objective", i.e. needed for objects, as Kant says in advance. – Conifold Jul 08 '21 at 00:02
  • How much would you say that "object" for Kant conforms to our intuition of the word as meaning an argument, something to be imputed, something passive, etc.? – SihOASHoihd Jul 08 '21 at 00:12
  • So, to be clear, objects don't necessarily have to be capable of being visualized in the mind, since ideas are concepts and ideas you said don't need attached images? – SihOASHoihd Jul 08 '21 at 00:37
  • My sense is that Kant's goal is to "justify" ordinary talk on the surface, while completely replacing its underlying naive conception that he considers misguided. The conception being of external things affecting us through senses and of reason figuring out what caused the affections. So I wouldn't expect Kant's terms to conform much to their ordinary meanings. I do not think Kant uses "idea" as a term, unlike "concepts" and "intuitions", but objects do need an intuition attached, albeit not necessarily visual. – Conifold Jul 08 '21 at 00:43
  • Last question: what does Kant mean then we he says that practical cognition is concerned with "making objects actual"? I took this to mean framing or visualizing ideas, but it seems like this isn't right. – SihOASHoihd Jul 08 '21 at 00:51
  • It means that practical cognition is concerned with actions needed to obtain or produce empirical objects that match representations we have, the "intentional" objects. – Conifold Jul 08 '21 at 01:04
  • 1
    There is a definition of object (B 137) which effectively says that an object is constituted by subsuming the manifold of intuition under a concept, giving an intuition (Anschauung) *of something*. There is also the difference between possible object of thought (table of judgements) and possible object of experience (table of categories), which allows to say that *abstract objects* are possible in Kant, but still only as a literal abstraction from input via the manifold of intuition (using an abstract concept). – Philip Klöcking Jul 08 '21 at 12:05
  • In other words: The critical point for an object is the **unification** of the manifold **into an intuition by subsumption under a concept**. This has to involve a judgement where, guided by a concept, particular aspects of the manifold are taken out as counting towards a "this", which is essentially saying that any object is an intentional object, but the intention does not have to be aimed at naive realist objects like "chairs" or "tables", it can be "roundness" or "greenness" etc., an arbitrary something the cognition's focus has taken out of the whole of the manifold of intuition. – Philip Klöcking Jul 08 '21 at 12:22
  • The brain is structured in such a way to get a grasp on reality. All processes in the world can be reoresented by huge collections of neurons acting in concert. You can even dream a wirld like the real wirld. Intuition is the ability to feel how processes in the world evilve. These can be macroscooic processes and microscopic ones for which everyday exoerience doesn't apply directly but nevertheless have a big influence in getting an intuition for what is going on. Different physical processes can be represented (not calculated) in the same neural networj which excells in plasticity. Different – Deschele Schilder Jul 07 '21 at 21:43

3 Answers3

1

In general, from a philosophical perspective (debatable), the object is the counterpart of the subject in the interactive process of knowledge. That is, Schroedinger's cat is the object, and Schrodinger is the subject, or also, the observer. If the object, or concept is something that exists in the mind, the thing is what corresponds to the physical world. That is, the cat, as it exists in Schroedinger's mind, is the object, and the cat, the one inside the box, is the thing.

For Kant, the object seems to raise in the Transcendental Logic, specifically in the first part, the Transcendental Analytic.

Sensible experience (odor, flavor, color, form) are a disparate set of intuitions (which can be understood as representations) that don't have any sense as they are perceived. That is basically what the Transcendental Aesthetic is about.

Those intuitions are manifolded (grouped in spite of their disparity) and integrated to become concepts of the understanding, in the Transcendental Analytic. The object "cat" raises at such point, and is granted of a status among the categories. That is, it is the object of categorization. So, the object seems to raise here: the subject classifies the object, which is now an integrated entity, by means of the categories, in order to become a concept. At this point, the object is already part of the interaction process with the subject: judgements.

In the Transcendental Dialectic, the object becomes integrated with other sets of judgements, in what Kant calls the unity of the self. The former object is at this point not only the target of perception, but a concept, or even transcendental idea, which is radically different. There is no sense in referring to the concept as an object here, because it would imply a psychological target, which is not anymore Kant's goal.

RodolfoAP
  • 6,580
  • 12
  • 29
0

For mathematical objects, the formal reality is the objective reality. By formal i mean the logical definition of the thing and by object i mean the thing referenced by its idea. Kant believed in the correspondence theory of truth so the idea or proposition has to agree with its object. So he does think about "thinghood" as an object of our mental ideas.

Intuition is the receptivity of the mind while the understanding is the spontaneity. For Kant intuition is only empirical and rejects humans having a intellectual or rational intuition. So objects are given to us empirically through the intuitions of inner sense and outer sense. Mental phenomena like desires are objects of inner sense (inner intuition). Intuitions have a form and matter. The form of sensible intuition are space and time. Space for outer and time for inner (and thus for other as well). The matter is the content, the feeling of that sensation.

Kant is not a materialist necessarily, but a transcendental idealist. This means that the world is structured by rationality of the mind (phenomena are dependent on the categories of the mind of their reality). Kant the objective deduction says objects are a "transcendental X" which just means non-sense to me. What he means, as informed by Paul Woff in his youtube series on the Critique of Pure Reason, an object for Kant is a structure or schemata of the phenomenal data according to the categories in the mind. So the table is all the sense data of it in accordance with the category of substance. This is when it has its "thing-hood" and is an empirical object in the everyday sense.

Noumena or things-in-themselves are not given to us with the categories of the mind. An object does not give its unity, number, substance, etc. to us. There are merely a manifold (or multi-told) of representations that are given to us between the interaction of us as subjects and the object-in-itself. Objects-in-themselves need not be things or units, the unity as well as every other category is introduced by the unitary time consciousness. So reality could be a plurality like most of us think or even monism could be true as well...we just don't know. We can't know anything about things-in-themselves even that they are unitary objects. Things-in-themselves is an ontological term, and noumena is an epistemological term. Things-in-themselves is "being" and its ability to be thought but not sensed is where it gets its noumenal designation. Since speculative reason relies on something of possible experience to give it meaning, we cannot know what is noumena or things-in-themselves. It is different in practical reason, but that's a whole 'nother book.

Vishnu Vardhan-Reddy Burla
  • 33
  • 4
  • Kant strongly rejects the _Correspondence Theory of Truth_. See [this](https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/4280/pg4280-images.html#chap29). – RodolfoAP Nov 03 '21 at 12:48
  • thank you for this observation. when i read it, i thought he noticed its limits but subscribed to it as a nominalist, but after reading this for a 5th time. it seems he rejects correspondence as it is bot general to all instances of truth (something maybe true but not correspond to the right object). he even says coherance theory of truth is merely analytic. aim i reading this passage better? im not really sure how to read Kant then...i do still think he is not using object as thing but the object of a thought which can be a non-thing, a universal on the other hand. – Vishnu Vardhan-Reddy Burla Nov 04 '21 at 13:51
0

I'm thinking that objects, like the subject-object example, refers to a coordinate pair that must exist in cognitive processes, so that when Kant says something like, ". . . reason really has as object only the understanding. . . " (A644/B672), he is saying that Reason needs something to reason about so its object is understanding, and Intuition needs something to intuit, so its objects are the senses, and the Understanding needs something to understand, so its objects are the particular objects and the empirical concepts they constitute, etc.

Gerry
  • 61
  • 5