Kant's compatibilism and his two conceptions of truth

Abstract

Kant is a compatibilist, in that he holds that the truth of determinism is compatible with the existence of free will, but he is also a conditional incompatibilist, in that he holds that if appearances were things in themselves, then both determinism and incompatibilism would be true, and therefore freedom would not obtain. The problem for Kant interpreters has been to reconcile Kant's compatibilism and conditional incompatibilism; in particular, the challenge is to show how Kant's transcendental idealism (his view that appearances are not things in themselves) makes compatibilism true. In this paper, I explain how Kant's views can be reconciled, and I argue that the relevance of transcendental idealism here is that it shows that determinism is known to be true, not in accordance with the familiar correspondence notion of truth, but only in accordance with a weaker notion of truth, Kant's empirical notion of truth, which is a kind of coherence notion of truth. © 2000 University of Southern California and Blackwell Publishers Ltd.