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Kant's Theory of Judgment
First published Wed Jul 28, 2004; substantive revision Thu Apr 23, 2009
Theories of judgment bring together fundamental issues in semantics, logic,
philosophical psychology, epistemology, and action theory: indeed, the notion of
judgment is central to any theory of human rationality. But Kant's theory of judgment
differs sharply from many other theories of judgment, both traditional and
contemporary, in three ways: (1) by taking the capacity for judgment to be the central
cognitive faculty of the human mind, (2) by insisting on the semantic, logical,
psychological, epistemic, and practical priority of the propositional content of a
judgment, and (3) by systematically embedding judgment within the metaphysics of
transcendental idealism . Several serious problems are generated by the interplay of
the first two factors with the third. This in turn suggests that the other two parts of
Kant's theory of judgment can be logically detached from his transcendental idealism
and defended independently of it.
1. The Nature of Judgment
1.1 The power of judgment and the other faculties of cognition
1.2 Judgments are essentially propositional cognitions
1.3 Judgments, objective validity, objective reality, and truth
1.4 Judging, believing, and scientific knowing
2. Kinds of Judgments
2.1 Kinds of logical form
2.2 Kinds of propositional content
3. The Metaphysics of Judgment: Transcendental Idealism
3.1 Judgment, transcendental idealism, and truth
3.2 Is Kant a verificationist?
4. Problems and Prospects
4.1 The bottom-up problem: non-conceptual intuitions, rogue objects, and
the gap in the B Deduction
4.2 The top-down problem: judgment, transcendental affinity, and the
systematic unity of nature
4.3 The dream-skeptical problem: judgment, problematic idealism, and the
gap in the Second Analogy
4.4 Conclusion: judgment without transcendental idealism?
Bibliography
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries
Kant's Theory of Judgment (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-judgment/
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1. The Nature of Judgment
According to Kant, judgments are complex conscious cognitions that (i) refer to
objects either directly (via intuitions) or indirectly (via concepts), (ii) include concepts
that are predicated either of those objects or of other constituent concepts, (iii)
exemplify pure logical concepts and enter into inferences according to pure logical
laws, (iv) essentially involve both the following of rules and the application of rules to
the objects picked out by intuitions, (v) express true or false propositions, (vi) mediate
the formation of beliefs and other intentional acts, and (vii) are unified and
self-conscious. The three leading features of this account are, first, Kant's taking the
capacity for judgment to be the central cognitive faculty of the human mind, in the
sense that judgment, alone among our various cognitive achievements, is the joint
product of all of the other cognitive faculties operating coherently and systematically
together under a single higher-order unity of rational self-consciousness (the centrality
thesis); second, Kant's insistence on the priority of the propositional content of a
judgment over its basic cognitive-semantic constituents (i.e., intuitions and concepts),
over the inferential role of judgments, over the rule-like character of the judgment,
over the self-conscious psychological states in which propositions are grasped as well
as the non-self-conscious psychological processes in which propositions are
synthetically generated, and over beliefs in those propositions and intentional acts
guided and mediated by those propositions (the priority-of-the-proposition thesis);
and third, Kant's background metaphysical doctrine to the effect that judgments are
empirically meaningful (objectively valid) and true (objectively real) if and only if
Transcendental Idealism is correct (the transcendental idealism thesis).
1.1 The power of judgment and the other faculties of cognition
According to Kant, a “judgment” (Urteil) is a kind of “cognition” (Erkenntnis) —
which he defines in turn as an objective conscious mental representation (A320/B376)
— and is the characteristic output of the “power of judgment” (Urteilskraft). The
power of judgment, in turn, is a cognitive “capacity” (Fähigkeit) but also specifically a
spontaneous and innate cognitive capacity, and in virtue of these is it is the “faculty of
judging” (Vermögen zu urteilen) (A69/B94), which is also the same as the “faculty of
thinking” (Vermögen zu denken) (A81/B106).
For Kant the mind is essentially active and vital — “the mind (Gemüt) for itself is
entirely life (the principle of life itself)” (5: 278) — and a cognitive capacity in turn is
a determinate conscious propensity of the mind to generate objective representations
of certain kinds under certain conditions. What do spontaneity and innateness add to a
mere capacity for cognition, so that it becomes a “faculty of cognition”
(Erkenntnisvermögen)? A cognitive faculty is spontaneous in that whenever it is
externally stimulated by raw unstructured sensory data as inputs, it then automatically
organizes or “synthesizes” those data in an unprecedented way relative to those
inputs, thereby yielding novel structured cognitions as outputs (B1-2, A50/B74, B132,
B152). So cognitive spontaneity is a structural creativity of the mind with respect to
its representations. Kant also uses the term ‘spontaneity’ in a somewhat different
sense in a metaphysical context, to refer to a mental cause that can sufficiently
Kant's Theory of Judgment (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-judgment/
2 of 30 20.02.2010 13:05