Kant on the Communicability of Empirical Knowledge

--- VERY rough draft ---

Alexandra Newton

It is striking that, despite its indisputable pervasiveness in our cognitive activities, knowledge from testimony does not appear alongside empirical knowledge or experience as a kind of theoretical knowledge in the core sections of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The lacuna has led several contemporary philosophers to present Kant as a radical individualist who advocates the ‘epistemic autonomy’ of the epistemic agent in making up her own mind about what she should think, without relying on the authority or competence of others. This ‘individualist’ position is often contrasted with a ‘social’ epistemology that endorses mutual dependence and the loss of individual hegemony. Only if we relinquish some of our personal freedom, and allow ourselves to be constrained by what others tell us, will we achieve the higher freedom of those who have been initiated into a social practice of giving and asking for reasons. In this way we may come to view our role as individuals in these discursive practices as that of (more or less distinguished) members, and to reign in our arrogant desire to usurp the position of the whole.

In this paper I wish to argue that this narrative of the self-conceit of Kantian reason, and its inevitable fall, overlooks one of the most important lessons of Kant’s first Critique. For the narrative is predicated on the empiricist assumption that the subject of empirical judgment or knowledge is a singular individual, and that her acts of judging are her acts of judging only if they are brought about by her individual acts of making up her own mind. As I will argue here, the Kantian self-conscious subject of judgment must be universal, in the sense that any judgment that constitutes knowledge is conscious of itself as possibly shared by any other individual subject. Indeed, contrary to empiricism, Kant shows that experience itself would not be possible if it were not the exercise of a universally shared capacity for knowledge. Reason is not arrogant, although the individuals who embody it may be.

Once we introduce the idea of a universal subject of knowledge, a second myth about the Kantian subject begins to make its appearance, thus obscuring his universalist insight from another angle. For it may now seem that Kant adopts the rationalist position of thinking that the universal subject of knowledge is entirely indifferent to the empirical individuals in which it comes to be embodied. If this is so, our practices of communicating knowledge with one another will appear to be a dispensable aid to the exercises of a universal capacity for knowledge, rather than an essential milestone on its path of self-realization. But this overlooks the importance of experience in Kant’s account of discursive cognition. As I will argue here, by showing that our universal faculty of cognition can be actualized only through experience, Kant also shows that the universal subject non-accidentally develops through its embodiment in the individual to its realization in a community of individuals.

Kant thus does not need to discuss testimony explicitly in the first Critique, since the possibility of sharing knowledge is already the upshot of his anti-empiricist conception of knowledge, and the necessity of its actually coming to be shared by others is the upshot of his anti-rationalism.

1.

Let us begin by assuming, with the empiricists, that the self of which I am conscious in self-consciously judging ‘S is P’ is a singular, individual self distinct from those with whom I converse. There are two reasons why this assumption can seem to be obvious. If, following Hume, judgment or “assent” is understood to be “an immediate impression of the senses, or a repetition of that impression in the memory”, then the subject of the judgment must be a single individual (T 1.3.6, p. 61). For if judgment consists in sensible affection, the subject of judgment must be the individual thus affected. Judgment may also seem to be inseparable from the individual subject if it is taken to consist in a kind of choice or act of ‘making up one’s mind’. I can only make up my own mind about what I should think, based on my own epistemic deliberation about what is true; but this is not something I can do for you. Just as my free actions are mine only, since they are attached to my individual choices about what to do, my mental actions of judging are attached to my choices about what to think. In his logic lectures, Kant discusses these two ways in which judgment comes to be attached to the individual subject as resting on the influence either of ‘sensibility’ or of the ‘will’ on the understanding (the faculty of judgment).

The question I wish to focus on here is whether the assumption that the subject of judgment is the individual in either of these senses enables us to make sense of the possibility of communicating my judgment with others. This question may be heard in two registers: first, can the content of my judgment be accessible to you if the I that thinks this content is distinct from your I? And second, can you agree or disagree with my judgment if my I is distinct from yours?

In the following I will set aside the first question and assume that, in any act of communication, two subjects come to grasp the same thought content. My focus will instead be on the consequences of thinking that the subject of judgment is a single, unrepeatable individual. That is, in communication, how does it happen that you not only understand what I say, but also agree or disagree with my judgment about what is the case?

Notice that an answer to the first question will not settle the second question. That is, the agreement in our judgments cannot consist in the mere identity of the content judged, just as disagreement cannot consist in mere negation in the content judged. For mere identity of content does not explain why your judgment supports mine, just as the difference in the contents of our judgments does not explain why your act of judging opposes mine, or cancels it out. That is, it cannot explain why your judgment may issue a demand on me to revise my judgment. The contents of judgments may be identical or different without the subjects who judge them ever coming into harmony or conflict with one another in conversation. To understand agreement and disagreement among subjects in conversation, then, we must focus on the act of judging or assertion.

Now, if the act of judging is understood as resting on sensibility or an act of choice, then it is conceivable that we each judge the same proposition to be true and yet disagree with one another. For instance, if judgment is understood as a kind of inclination towards taking a certain proposition to be true, it may so happen that I feel positively inclined towards a proposition in this way, but feel no inclination towards your inclination towards it. Hence, although I may defend myself, I am not inclined to support your judgment when you face challenges to it from a third party. Or again, although I deliberate about what I should think by considering what is true, I may choose to mislead you by telling you falsehoods. Thus, my judgment does not necessarily support your judgment, even when the contents of our judgments are the same.

But if agreement and disagreement in our judgments can come radically apart from the contents judged, the phenomenon of communication will appear to be mysterious. For if I cannot know whether your saying ‘yes’ to my judgment means ‘no’ towards its content, or whether your disagreement with my judgment is due to your aversion towards me rather than towards the content of my judgment, I will not be able to understand what you say as supporting or opposing what I judge. Hence, conversation with you will be impossible. The problem with individualist conceptions of judgment is that they leave it mysterious how knowledge of another’s judgments, and hence conversation, is possible: how can I know that you feel positively inclined towards a proposition, or have made up your mind about its truth? And how can I know that your inclinations are towards the truth at all?

Even assuming that such knowledge is possible, further problems arise from thinking that your judgment’s agreement with mine is a different reality from our knowledge of their agreement. For if agreement and disagreement were properties that our judgments could have independently of our consciousness of them as such, we could converse without realizing that we do. But this is absurd. We cannot come into agreement if we fail to understand ourselves as agreeing about what we judge. Of course, I may cause you to judge as I do through brainwashing, and without your noticing. But that is different from our agreeing with one another in a conversation. Likewise, when I induce you to suppress a judgment, there may be a sense in which I disagreed with you. But this is different from disagreement in conversation, which requires our joint understanding of a disharmony in our judgments. Without this common consciousness of an opposition, there would be no demand to resolve the dispute, and hence no real opposition.

We have been led into this predicament because we began with the assumption that judging rests on sensibility or an act of choice, which are accessible only to the individual who is affected or who chooses. It is certainly true that we sometimes hold something to be true merely because of the way we have been passively influenced or affected, or because of a choice we have made (as in wishful thinking). But if we judge correctly, we will judge from a consciousness of the truth of what we judge, and not from merely subjective causes. Assuming that all judgments purport to be correct or true, erroneous judgment must therefore rest on the illusion that merely subjective grounds – i.e. grounds that have their source in the “constitution of the subject” - are objective, or ground the truth of what is judged. Kant calls this illusion persuasion [Überredung] (KrV A820/B848). By contrast, judging that self-consciously rests on objective grounds, or that is conscious of its source not in subjective causes but in a capacity for objective cognition, is called conviction [Überzeugung].

If a judgment is conviction, its grounds are “objectively sufficient”, which is to say that it constitutes knowledge. And if a judgment is knowledge, then it will be in necessary agreement with all other judgments that constitute knowledge, and will exclude any judgment that opposes it. To be conscious of this agreement of a judgment with itself and with others in a whole of cognitions is to be self-conscious: we are conscious of what we necessarily think when we are conscious of what we know. But if the self thus constituted by the necessary unity of all my judgments were myself as distinct from your self, then this ‘necessity’ will be merely subjective. It would merely reflect how I must combine representations together, for instance, due to the ways in which I have been passively influenced to think. But it would not reflect how representations must be combined in order to constitute objective knowledge of a shared world. The self of self-conscious knowledge therefore must be one that can be shared by others: my judgment must agree not only with other judgments that I hold, but with the judgments of any other (possible) knowing subject. Self-consciousness of a judgment must, that is, consist in the consciousness that the judgment has of itself as necessarily agreeing and opposing other judgments, regardless of whether those judgments issue from you or me.

Self-consciousness in judging that constitutes knowing thus is consciousness of myself not as an individual or singular ‘I’, but as a “consciousness in general” [Bewußtsein überhaupt] that can be shared by any thinker (B143). This of course does not mean that I may not also be conscious of myself as an individual subject in making a judgment, but I am not conscious of myself in this way merely through the exercise of a capacity for judgment.[1] As an exercise of a capacity for knowledge, judgment is not the possession of an individual, but essentially belong to any rational subject capable of knowledge. A judgment that constitutes knowledge thus does not need to be supplemented by the desire to communicate it to others, or by an inclination to support their judgments, in order to enter relations of agreement and disagreement with the judgments of others. That is to say, knowledge has its own, inner power to sustain itself, to be sustained by the judgments of other knowing subjects, and to oppose error. Simply as knowledge, it essentially demands agreement from other knowers, and demands revision of judgments that oppose it. This is Kant’s point in the Prolegomena when he says that the “objective validity” of a judgment (i.e. its non-accidental truth or validity as knowledge) and its “necessary universal validity (for everyone) are […] interchangeable concepts” (P 4:298).

Only under the assumption that the subject of judgment is general in the above sense can we make sense of the possibility of agreement and opposition among the judgments of different subjects. For if we did not assume that these subjects share a common capacity for judgment, they would each operate as isolated communities, in accordance with their own laws and principles of organization. But there would be no common law that demands that one subject relinquish her judgment when challenged by another on objective grounds, and no law in accordance with which harmony could be established. In short, in order to communicate with others we must stand under common laws of the understanding, which is just to say that we must judge from a consciousness of a common capacity to judge.

We are now in a position to see how empiricism about the judging subject may have its source in a common error. Sometimes we think that another person has communicated their knowledge with us when in fact we have allowed ourselves to be persuaded by them on the grounds of their influence and prestige. And conversely, we sometimes think we are reasoning when in fact we are obstinately refusing to hear the voice of reason in others. When, for instance, I am persuaded by what you say, your taking something to be true causes my taking it to be true through my wish to believe what you say. The influence of the prestige and authority [Ansehen] of the speaker on my judgment is here mistaken for the power of insight or reason in her judgment. When this passive use of reason becomes habitual, and thus gives rise to “determining judgment”, it becomes prejudice (“the prejudice of the prestige of the person”). Similarly, one may fall under the illusion that one’s own judgments are true simply because they are one’s own. Here one mistakes a subjective propensity to self-love, an inclination to believe only “that which is the product of one’s own understanding”, for the capacity to judge on objective grounds (i.e. for a universally shared capacity for knowledge) (JL 9:80). This “prejudice based on self-love” is called “logical egoism” (ibid.), and is just as harmful as blind submission to the prestige of others. In both kinds of prejudice, the particular constitution of the individual (whether oneself or another) is confused with a universal capacity for reason, which is just to say that subjective grounds of judgment are confused with objective ones.