Transcendental Deduction Process

The Transcendental Deduction is Kant’s attempt to prove that the categories are a necessary and universal condition for all possible experience. The two editions A and B of the Transcendental Deduction vary wildly with the A-edition focusing more on mental processes and the B-edition a more simplified and tighter presentation. I will present what is most compelling about the A-edition by focusing on the kernel of Kant’s argument that survives and colors the reemphasis of the B-edition. That kernel I will show is the fact that apperception – which is loosely self-consciousness – implies that the categories are necessary for the way we happen to have experience. I will then comment on whether this idea is useful for Kant’s overarching goal …show more content…
The two elements that make up cognition are intuition and concepts, roughly speaking feelings and thoughts. First we “receive impressions” i.e. intuit sensations. Then we invariably cognize those sensations with a “spontaneity of concepts” i.e. think of that intuition as related or meaningful under a concept.
The crucial idea in this two-step process is that both steps always occur together. We cannot control that we organize intuitions with concepts because as we will see this is the only way we can find meaning in our experience – “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.”
Kant calls the first ability to receive impressions i.e. to intuit sensibility and the second ability to think and make sense about impressions understanding. The categories are the pure (read a priori) concepts of understanding in the same way that space and time are the pure concepts of sensibility (the transcendental deduction of which was performed in the Transcendental Aesthetic) – they are not thoughts in and of themselves (though they are concepts) but they are the fundamental forms of the thoughts we can have.
Examples of these categories include cause and effect, e.g. I see that outside is wet after it rains so rain must make outside wet, and quantitative thoughts e.g. I see that on my one hand are five …show more content…
The kernel of thought that persists from the A-edition to the B-edition begins with the idea that we have a unified comprehension of our experience. That is we do not experience things as episodic, disparate events but rather with continuity, cause and effect, pattern, etc. There is a structure to our experience that we seem to inherently or unconsciously impose and this structure makes sense to us. And it seems that we impose this structure because it does not seem a priori that events are given the way we experience them, e.g. it doesn’t seem that cause and effect must be a necessary and universal property of things as they are since we could conceive of everything that does happen as a matter of exact chance or perhaps preordained fate (as it turns out since the laws of physics are symmetric in time, events that happen backwards in time are just as physically possible as events that happen forwards in time. This happens at a non-negligible level at the quantum scale. Therefore cause and effect is a construct of the mind and not a priori. However, even though cause and effect is one the categories this fact does not hurt Kant’s argument because he is not concerned whether or not the categories constitute the events of things as they are a priori but of

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