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ABSTRACT
One of the core issues where interpreters of Kant disagree concerns his alleged Noumenalism—the claim that the objects of our experience, which are in space and time, are underpinned by entities that are not spatio-temporal and that non-spatio-temporally cause our representations of empirical objects. Although there is much textual evidence in favour of Noumenalism, non-Noumenalists have also gathered a significant number of philosophical and exegetical challenges to such a reading of Kant. I present a novel way of understanding the Noumenalist view, which characterises the distinction between appearances and things in themselves as the distinction between referents and truthmakers. I show that, on this interpretation of Kant, the most pressing problems for the Noumenalist reading are primarily based on equivocations between features of reference and features of truthmaking.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 There are many different non-Noumenalist views, including the ‘methodological readings’ defended by Allison [Citation2004] and Bird [Citation2006], among others, as well as the ‘metaphysical readings’ defended by Hanna [Citation2001] and Allais [Citation2015], again among others.
2 Proponents of the two-world reading include Adickes [Citation1924] and Stang [Citation2013].
3 Proponents of this ‘one-world’ Noumenalist picture include Vaihinger and Schmidt [Citation1922], Aquila [Citation1979], van Cleve [Citation1999], and Bader [Citation2010]. Guyer [Citation1987] may be classified here as well, although he thinks that phenomena do exist, and that we are just wrong about what they are like (because they are really identical to noumena).
4 For a discussion of the ‘philosophical modelling’ methodology, see McDaniel [Citation2015]. I take my model of transcendental idealism to have significant advantages over his, which will hopefully become clear as the paper develops.
5 For an extensive list of the textual evidence in favour of Noumenalism, see Stang [Citation2016].
6 Some of these concerns are helpfully enumerated by Allais [Citation2015]. The problem of double affection is not, but I still take it to be quite serious. Some of Allais’s own worries are also not mentioned here, as I take these to be the most pressing concerns that need to be addressed by a Noumenalist.
7 See Stang [Citation2015] for discussion.
8 In particular, I do not address the objection that the existence of noumena is inconsistent with the consequences of the transcendental deduction (cf. Allison [Citation2004] and Grier [Citation2001]). This objection tends to come from attributing to Kant what Ameriks [Citation1990] has described as ‘short arguments for idealism’—arguments for idealism that do not rely on Kant’s claims about the nature of human sensibility. Ameriks convincingly argues that Kant makes no such arguments, and so I need not repeat his points here. Another objection not listed here is that Noumenalism commits Kant to the existence of positive noumena. I briefly address this issue in note 12.
9 See Underwood [Citation2003], Paek [Citation2005], and Vanzo [Citation2010].
10 Underwood [Citation2003]’s Kant’s Correspondence Theory of Truth, the most extensive discussion of different approaches to Kant’s views about truthmaking in the English language, fails to note this even at the outset, where she defines a truthmaker as ‘the referent of a given subject’ [ibid.: 12]. I think this is because the view that the referent of a judgment is its truthmaker is one of the historical foundations of analytic philosophy (either explicitly endorsed or implicitly assumed by Frege [Citation1948(1892)], Moore [Citation1899], and Russell [Citation1903]).
11 Heil [Citation2003] and Cameron [Citation2008] are defenders of this general position.
12 This also helps us to understand better Kant’s distinction between two senses of ‘noumena’, a positive and a negative sense [B307–9]. Noumena, in the negative sense, are simply the truthmakers for our thoughts (objects considered independently of how they appear). Noumena in the positive sense would be both truthmakers and referents of some thought. Without a proof of the existence of God, Kant thinks, we have no reason to believe that it is even possible to refer to noumena.
13 In recent discussion, Jankowiak has proposed a causal version of P-intentionality, but one where it is sensations, rather than noumena, that are P-intentional objects.
14 Better cases for qualifying as Kantian appearances are holes and shadows, of which we can say true things, but that do not, in themselves, exist. I thank Kris McDaniel for the idea that we treat Kantian appearances in this way.
15 For a truthmaking-based approach to the correspondence theory of truth, see Armstrong [Citation2004].
16 For a defence of truthmaker maximalism, see Rodriguez-Pereyra [Citation2006].
17 I thank Sylvia Pauw and an anonymous referee for asking me to clarify this issue.
18 This is closely related to what Simons [Citation2000] calls ‘truthmaker optimalism’—the thesis that all atomic truths have truthmakers. Truthmaker optimalism is a difficult view to attribute to Kant, who does not obviously have a conception of an atomic truth. I also note that truthmaker singularism fully explains why Kant says, in the introduction to the Critique’s B edition, that it would be ‘absurd’ for there to be an appearance without a thing that appears [Bxxvi]. This has been taken by Allais [Citation2015] to be a significant strike against Noumenalism. Yet this is straightforwardly entailed by truthmaker singularism, as there cannot be a referent of a singular truth without there being a truthmaker for that truth.
19 For a recent attempt to solve this problem that is mostly aligned with mine, see Stang [Citation2015].
20 Note that there is no dotted arrow connecting intuition to the left-most proposition. This is because it is not obvious that intuition is the ground of the existence of judgments about things in themselves. Yet such judgments are possible, since we can think things in themselves. And such judgments, when true, are made true by noumena.
21 This might seem paradoxical, as it appears to involve the claim that the house both is and is not the cause of my representation. But this paradox can easily be avoided by noting that the clause ‘in reality’ is to be understood here as an operator that restricts our judgments only to what holds at the level of our ontology (in Kant’s case, at the level of the noumena). Given this clarification, it is entirely consistent to say that, although the house does cause my representations, it does not do so in reality. In a similar vein, although the house exists, it is nevertheless not the case that, in reality, the house exists. For further discussion of such a reality operator, see Fine [Citation2001]. I also note here that this is not the sense of reality that Kant has in mind with the term Realität, where I take him to follow Baumgarten in taking a ‘reality’ to be a positive predicate. I use the term ‘reality’ here merely because it is the technical term in vogue for describing such a phenomenon. I thank an anonymous referee for pressing me on this issue.
22 For a recent attempt at an explanation, see Jankowiak [Citation2017: 222]. He points out that it is incoherent to think of things in space and time ‘simultaneously as mind-dependent and mere intentional objects’, since intentional objects only have the properties that they are represented to have, and mind-dependence is not one of these properties. I wholeheartedly agree with Jankowiak, but I think that something more needs to be said about why Kant should be a realist about the intentional objects of judgment, rather than taking them to be merely ideal, as one would treat Sherlock Holmes or the fountain of youth.
23 Cf. Dummett [Citation1982], Fine [Citation2001], Armstrong [Citation2004], Cameron [Citation2008], and Chiba [Citation2012]. While not all of these authors agree that mind-independence is the correct constraint, they accept a truth-based characterisation of realism.
24 Cf. Devitt [Citation1991] and Willaschek [Citation2003].
25 Cf. Guyer [Citation1987] and van Cleve [Citation1999].
26 Strictly speaking, we should not claim that these are truthmakers in the same sense that noumena are truthmakers. See section 3 for further discussion.
27 Generalisations is a strengthening of Armstrong’s [Citation2004] claim that the truthmaker for x exists
is always x. Contemporary state-based truthmaker semantics does not have this as a requirement.
28 Cameron [Citation2008: 4], who also accepts a truth-based account of realism, puts the point as follows:
I reject Armstrong’s claim: I think one of the benefits of truthmaker theory is to allow that [x exists] might be made true by something other than x, and hence that ‘a exists’ might be true according to some theory without a being an ontological commitment of that theory.
29 For some discussions of this passage, see Posy [Citation1983], Grier [Citation2001], Willaschek [Citation2003], Allison [Citation2004], and Chiba [Citation2012]. The reading that I offer here is not especially new and draws quite significantly from the reading offered by Posy.
30 The discussion that follows is in large part inspired by the interpretation of the Antinomies offered by Posy [Citation1983], although it does not accept that Kant is an assertibilist about truth.
31 Another way of making this point is to say that the truth of the de dicto judgment that there is a cause of
does not require the truth of a singular de re judgment of the form
is the cause of
. All that is required is that some such de re judgment would be true, were we to continue experiencing things.
32 This is where my reading departs from Posy’s, as he requires that all generalisations have witnesses in order to be true.
33 Drafts of this paper received helpful comments from Fatema Amijee, Tim Jankowiak, Jessica Leech, Colin McLear, Sylvia Pauw, and Nick Stang. This paper was presented at the University of Toronto Graduate Forum, the University of Manitoba Colloquium, and the Eastern APA, where I also received excellent comments. I also thank two anonymous referees for making this a better paper.