Sensations as Representations in Kant

Abstract

This paper defends an interpretation of the representational function of sensation in Kant's theory of empirical cognition. Against those who argue that sensations are ‘subjective representations’ and hence can only represent the sensory state of the subject, I argue that Kant appeals to different notions of subjectivity, and that the subjectivity of sensations is consistent with sensations representing external, spatial objects. Against those who claim that sensations cannot be representational at all, because sensations are not cognitively sophisticated enough to possess intentionality, I argue that Kant does not use the term ‘Vorstellung’ to refer to intentional mental states exclusively. Sensations do not possess their own intentionality, but they nevertheless perform a representational function in virtue of their role as the matter of empirical intuition. In empirical intuition, the sensory qualities given in sensation are combined with the representation of space to constitute the intuited appearance. The representational function of sensation consists in sensation being the medium out of which intuited appearances are constituted: the qualities of sensations stand in for what the understanding will judge (conceptualize) as material substance.

Keywords:

• Kant
• sensation
• empirical intuition
• representation
• intentionality

Notes

1 Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2012 Central APA meeting and at UCSD's History of Philosophy Roundtable. Participants at both meetings offered helpful suggestions for improvement (especially Lisa Shabel, who commented on the paper at the APA). More recent drafts of the paper benefitted from helpful feedback from Eric Watkins, Clinton Tolley, James Messina, and three anonymous reviewers.

²All quotations of Kant are from the Cambridge Editions of the Works of Immanuel Kant, Paul Guyer and Allen Wood general editors. Citations of Critique of Pure Reason use standard A/B pagination. Citations from other works refer to Akademie volume number and page number.

³I will stick with ‘representationality’ for the most part. It is an admittedly unattractive term, but ‘intentionality’ and ‘object-directedness’ carry connotations that would muddy the waters I hope to clarify in the paper.

⁴It will be important to keep this semantic question regarding sensation's role in securing intentional relations distinct from any epistemic role that sensation might perform. For the question of whether and to what extent (if at all) sensations might determine or justify our objectively valid judgements of objects is a different one than the question of how sensations make a pre-epistemic object-directedness possible.

⁵I will not address the complex question regarding whether empirical objects (appearances) or things in themselves are the causes of sensation. As best I can tell, the dominant reading (with which I agree) seems to be that things in themselves are the true cause of sensation. Kant himself is not always perfectly clear on the matter.

⁶In the A-edition formulation of this principle, the relation is merely one of ‘correspondence’ (A166). The fact that Kant revised the formulation of the principle to specify that this correspondence is an ‘object of’ sort of relation indicates that he was self-consciously emphasizing that there is some sense in which sensations have objects and hence represent.

⁷For instance, when Kant distinguishes judgements with objective validity from those with subjective validity, ‘subjective’ is being used in a sense distinct from the two senses to be articulated presently.

⁸Here and in what follows, all references to the way the object is ‘independently of the way the subject is affected by it’ are meant to refer to the empirical sense of a thing in itself (see A29/B45) as opposed to the usual transcendental sense. It is of course possible for us to have knowledge of empirical objects as they are in themselves (e.g. when we know their spatiotemporal determinations, or cognize them by appeal to the pure principles of the understanding), even if we cannot have knowledge of transcendent things in themselves.

⁹Kant defends a similar position in ‘Jäsche Logic’ (see 9:37).

¹⁰Below (the fourth section) I discuss at greater length the different senses in which sensations and intuitions are both A-subjective.

¹¹See also ‘Inaugural Dissertation’ (2:393).

¹²To be more specific, if an object x is represented by the content ϕ, if ϕ is a logically valid determination of x then (other things being equal) the judgement ‘x is ϕ’ may be licensed. But if ϕ is an A-subjective content, then at most one would be justified in saying ‘x seems/appears ϕ to me.’

¹³I take semantic functions to be more basic than epistemic functions for the simple reason that I cannot have knowledge of an object unless I am first able to make determinate reference to that object.

¹⁴NB: A sensation can contribute to cognition without itself being a cognition. For since sensations are A-subjective, these contents cannot count as knowledge of the object. The contribution to cognition is rather a semantic one: sensation secures the intentional relation to the object.

¹⁵Similar remarks can be found in the Anthropology, where Kant distinguishes vision, touch and hearing as objective senses from taste and smell as subjective senses. The former contribute to the cognition of the external object, the latter do not (see 7:154).

¹⁶Only the first sentence of this passage is common to both editions, while the remainder is a revision of a deleted passage. A similar point is made in the A-edition though: ‘Colors are not objective qualities of the bodies to the intuition of which they are attached, but are also only modifications of the sense of sight, which is affected by light in a certain way’ (A28). I take this to be another assertion of the A-subjectivity of sensations.

¹⁷For instance, one and the same color sensation could be caused by two very different objects under different illumination conditions. Hence, on the evidentiary basis of only the sensation, one could know that one was seeing something, but not what exactly. This is not to say, however, that the sensation tells us nothing about the nature of the affecting object. Presumably there will be some correspondence between the intensity of the sensation and the intensity of the object that caused the sensation. For a more detailed discussion of the epistemological significance of sensation in the ‘Anticipations of Perception’, see Jankowiak (‘Intensive Magnitudes’, 404ff.).

¹⁸A further consideration against the Internal Representation interpretation of the passage is that it would not be possible for a sensation to represent the content: ‘that the subject is affected’ (which is how that interpretation would have to read the passage). This is a propositional content, hence a judgement, and hence not a representational content that a creature of mere sensibility could possess.

¹⁹Manley Thompson, relying primarily on the Stufenleiter passage, takes this to be Kant's official account ('Singular Terms', 323).

²⁰See A33/B49–50, A37/B53–4, B72, B156, B291, A374, A379, and B407.

²¹Most of the recent discussion about representationality in Kant has been structured around the question whether Kant thought that the intentional is necessarily conceptual. According to some, a mental state can refer to an object if the object is represented as an object, which requires the deployment of conceptual (categorial) capacities. According to others, we can distinguish two degrees of reference to an object: the ability to represent the object through a nonconceptual intuition is one achievement, and the ability to represent (conceptually) the object as an object is another. Proponents of the conceptualist line include Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, Chap. 1; Ginsborg, ‘Was Kant a Non-conceptualist?’, 70; McDowell, Mind and World, 9; Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead, 23; Sedgwick, ‘McDowell's Hegelianism', 22ff.; and Abela, Empirical Realism, Chap. 2. Proponents of the nonconceptualist line include Allais, ‘Non-conceptual Content', 385ff.; Hanna, ‘Beyond the Myth’, 334; Falkenstein, ‘Kant's Account of Intuition’, 185; and Longuenesse, Capacity to Judge, 201. This debate about whether intuitive representational content is nonconceptual is a deeply important one, and one that must be resolved in order to have a complete account of Kant's theory of intentionality. But no matter where one sides on this debate about the intentionality of intuitions, it is clear that sensations will never meet the conditions on intentionality according to either camp.

²²For Kant's many descriptions of sensations as ‘matter’ in the Critique, see A22/B36, A42/B59–60, A90, B207, A166/B208, A223/B270, and A267/B323. See also the Fortschritte (20:266) and ‘Metaphysik Mrongovius’ (29:795 and 29:800) for similar remarks.

²³In the discussion to follow I focus only on the representation of external objects. A similar story would be told for the representation of inner objects, but in that case sensations are synthesized with the form of time only.

²⁴We have already seen hints that the representational function of sensation could only be realized in the context of empirical intuition. At A374, Kant clarified the claim that sensations designate ‘actualities’ in space with the parenthetical remark, ‘staying for now with outer intuitions’. And in the ‘Metaphysical Foundations’, he wrote, ‘matter, as opposed to form, would be that in the outer intuition which is an object of sensation’ (4:481). See also Anthropology (7:154).

²⁵See also ‘Jäsche Logic’, 9:101: ‘the matter of judgement consists in the given representations that are combined in the unity of consciousness in the judgement, the form is the determination of the way that the various representations belong, as such, to one consciousness.’ In the ‘Metaphysik Mrongovius’, he says, ‘experience has matter, i.e. data, and form, i.e. the connection of the data’ (29:795).

²⁶This mereological sense of the matter/form distinction also appears in some of Kant's discussions of general ontology. For instance: ‘in every being its components (essentialia) are the matter; the way in which they are connected in a thing, the essential form’ (A266/B322). See also ‘Prolegomena’ (4:295–6), ‘Inaugural Dissertation’ (2:389–90), and the L1 Metaphysics Lectures (28:195).

²⁷If sensations are the matter of empirical intuition, then one naturally wants to know whether pure intuitions can be said to have any matter. In places, Kant suggests that they do. Kant claims that the synthesis of a manifold in intuition can be ‘given empirically or a priori’ (A77/B103), by which he presumably means that the matter of pure intuition is a manifold of empty locations or moments in the a-priori representation of space and time (cf. A94/B127).

²⁸Unless one is a conceptualist with respect to intuition, in which case an intuition also involves the conceptual representation of those sensory qualities as an object.

²⁹One might worry that appeal to the combination of sensations into an intuition is illegitimate because combination (or ‘synthesis’) is the work of understanding, not sensibility. In response, I would claim that the understanding (in the guise of the imagination) does play in a role in the creation of intuition. Although I think this view highly defensible, I will not be able to defend it here. See Longuenesse, Capacity to Judge, Chap. 9 and Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, Chaps. 1–2 for defences of this sort of interpretation.

³⁰Thus on this interpretation, sensations are the matter both of the intuition and the appearance. Of the former, because the intuiting of an object just is the organizing of sensations into spatial arrays and bringing these arrays to intentional consciousness, and of the latter, because what the subject is aware of in the intuition, what Kant labels appearance, just is the sensations so arrayed. (Kant refers to sensation as the matter of appearance at A42/B59, B207, and ‘Metaphysik Mrongovius’, 29:829.)

³¹The view I defend here bears some similarity to Falkenstein's (see especially Kant's Intuitionism, Chap. 3), so it is worth making the differences between the views explicit. We agree that sensations are the matter of intuition and that there is some sense in which sensations are spatially located (ibid., 111ff.). We also agree that sensation has an important function with respect to the representation of the real in appearance (ibid., 117). However, where Falkenstein argues for the controversial thesis that sensations are physiological effects on the body (ibid., 119ff.), I take them as they are traditionally understood, viz., as effects in the mind. Accordingly, where Falkenstein says that sensations (and intuitions as well) are in space, I argue that sensations are merely represented in (or ‘projected into’, as I have put it) the representation of space. Just as importantly, where Falkenstein denies that sensations have sensible qualities, and claims instead that sensible qualities are the intentional objects of sensations (ibid., 128), I have argued that sensations are indeed the bearers of sensible qualities, and I have argued that sensations cannot possess an intentional object-directedness. Lastly, where Falkenstein argues that sensations are the matter of intuition but not appearance (ibid., 106ff.), I argue that sensation is the matter of both (see note 30 above).

³²This response will work even for conceptualist interpreters (see note 21 above). For even if intuitions have an ineliminable conceptual component, it does not follow that all intuitive representational content is conceptual. Rather, the part of the intuition that represents the object as an object – i.e. the part of the intuition's content that is structured by categorial form – would be irreducibly conceptual. But this does not preclude a distinct part of the intuition's content – the sensory component, at least – from being non-conceptual. And Kant surely would not have claimed that all intuitive content is conceptual, for this would be to reduce intuitions to a special class of concepts and the entire distinction between sensibility and understanding would be erased (see A15/B29, A50/B74).

³³Johannes Haag arrives at a similar position on this issue: ‘Properties of sensation are not represented by us in sensible perception as properties of sensation, (i.e. as mere subjective modifications of subjects), but rather as properties of the represented objects’ (Erfahrung und Gegenstand, 135, my translation).

³⁴To be sure, I could say ‘that is a dot of red paint’ if I were attending to the painting not as a representation of something, but simply as smears of paint on canvas. Likewise, I could take my visual sensations to be mere visual sensations. But in that case, I would be having an inner intuition of my sensory state. This possibility is not ruled out by the External Representation model. Rather, all this model is committed to is the claim that in instances of external perception (where I take myself to be attending to something outside my mind), sensations are not represented as sensations.