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Abstract
In this debate article I respond to Alison Assiter's various objections and points regarding my work on Kant's empirical realism, his relation to ontology, and related issues. Although Assiter raises some very interesting and important issues, I do not find her ontological interpretation of Kant sufficiently supported textually, and I think her objections to my work are too dependent on omissions and mistaken assumptions to provide an effective challenge.
Notes
1 Assiter Citation2015. All in-text page numbers refer to this work.
2 McWherter Citation2015.
3 McWherter Citation2013.
4 McWherter Citation2013, 66. Once this conclusion is reached, and an ontological construal of empirical realism is conceded, the question then becomes which ontology to prefer—e.g. the actualist ontology of empirical realism, the dispositionalist ontology of critical realism, or some other.
5 Although I have reached firmly critical conclusions regarding non-ontological interpretations of Kant and empirical realism more generally, my engagement with them has led me to defend Bhaskar's contention in a more cautious, modest and complicated form than Bhaskar himself does. My position on Bhaskar's contention at present is (1) that the inexorability of ontology cannot be defended as a positive claim since a genuinely non-ontological epistemology or philosophy of science is at least broadly conceivable, although (2) we are justified in requiring any putative counter-position to explain how its conception of objects of knowledge is non-ontological and to justify any assumptions that explanation may make, and (3) I am unaware of any actual counter-position that meets both of the requirements given in (2).
6 I think it is perfectly possible for someone to have broadly Kantian sympathies and still be committed to ontology, but that is a separate question from whether Kant himself is committed to ontology in any traditional sense. If he is not, then a Kantian ontologist would have to be a heterodox Kantian on this particular point. I am also open to more boldly heterodox readings of Kant, as long as they are honest about their heterodox character (as, for example, Heidegger is about his reading of Kant).
7 While philosophers should be interpreted as charitably as the evidence permits, we must not forget that great philosophers often leave major problems, and the ways great philosophers err can be just as historically significant as the ways they succeed. For example, if it were not at least reasonable to think there are fundamental problems in Kant's philosophy, the whole of German idealism would probably never have happened.
8 Kant 1998, A247/B303.
9 That Kant takes ontology to be distinctively concerned with things in general is not only clear from the passage at issue here but also from his lecture courses on metaphysics, which span the pre-Critical and Critical periods of his career: ‘I shall then proceed to ontology, the science, namely, which is concerned with the more general properties of all things’ (Kant Citation1992, 295); ‘We now begin the science of the properties of all things in general, which is called ontology’ (Kant Citation1997, 140); ‘Ontology thus deals with things in general, it abstracts from everything particular’ (Kant Citation1997, 307).
10 Assiter's claim that in Kant's historical context ‘ontology includes the provable and necessary existence of God and the soul’ (p. 510) is not quite correct. In the conception of metaphysics that Kant inherited from Christian Wolff and Alexander Baumgarten, God and the soul are the respective topics of rational theology and rational psychology, which are in turn (along with rational cosmology) sub-branches of ‘special metaphysics’, to which ontology, as ‘general metaphysics’, is contrasted. See Guyer and Wood Citation1998, 5. Assiter mentions this distinction between general and special metaphysics in note 7 of her article but seems to miss its significance for her interpretation of Kant.
11 ‘A science which is supposed to treat the properties of all things in general must be an a priori science’ (Kant Citation1997, 141); ‘Ontology … contains the summation of all our pure concepts that we can have a priori of things’ (Kant Citation1997, 308, original emphasis).
12 For the role of certainty in the Critique of Pure Reason see: ‘As far as certainty is concerned, I have myself pronounced the judgment that in this kind of inquiry it is in no way allowed to hold opinions, and that anything that even looks like an hypothesis is a forbidden commodity, which should not be put up for sale even at the lowest price but must be confiscated as soon as it is discovered. For every cognition that is supposed to be certain a priori proclaims that it wants to be held for absolutely necessary, and even more is this true of a determination of all pure cognitions a priori, which is to be the standard and thus even the example of all apodictic (philosophical) certainty’ (Kant Citation1998, Axv, original emphases). See Kant Citation1998, A2, B22 and A13/B27 for similar claims. Hence Assiter's claim that Kant is not a foundationalist nor concerned ‘standardly to refute the sceptic’ (p. 514) does not rule out his commitment to philosophical certainty.
13 To be clear, Empirical Realist is a hypothetical empirical realist whose epistemology is characterized in a way that is definite enough to count as empirical realist but indefinite enough to leave open the possibilities of either Humean or Kantian influence. I chose this latter indefiniteness in order to show that the results of the dialogue apply to both Humean and Kantian forms of empirical realism, despite their differences on other counts. Furthermore, although Empirical Realist's position is shown to assume ontology's association with infallibilism by way of logically necessary truth, and Kant's conception of a priori certainty is not exhausted by logical necessity, it should be remembered that Empirical Realist's assumption is implicitly contained in his conception of objects of knowledge as non-ontological and therefore is not intended to reflect an assumption that either Hume or Kant explicitly articulate.
14 See Kant Citation1997, 141, where the traditional conception of ontology is critically converted into an epistemologically-oriented transcendental philosophy: ‘A science which is supposed to treat the properties of all things in general must be an a priori science. Thus it is a cognition from mere reason, [and] cannot be created from experience, for experience does not reach so far that it can be applied to all things; it does not teach what must belong to things in general, but rather what our senses show us; while ontology has no determinate object, it can contain nothing but the principles of a priori cognizing in general: thus the science of all basic concepts and basic propositions upon which all of our pure cognitions of reason rest is ontology. But this science will not be properly called ontology. For to have a thing in general as an object is as much as to have no object and to treat only of a cognition, as in logic …; the most fitting name would be transcendental philosophy’ (brackets in original). I think this passage gives us a concise account of what Kant means for ‘the proud name of an ontology’ to ‘give way to the modest one of a mere analytic of the pure understanding’ (Kant Citation1998, A247/B303). One of the shortcomings of my book is that it fails to address these revisionary definitions of ontology on Kant's part and connect them with his opposition to traditional ontology, so I am happy to have the opportunity to begin to do that here.
15 See Allison Citation2002, 341–2 for Kant's uncertainty about how to redefine ‘ontology’ in light of his critique of traditional metaphysics.
16 It is also worth recalling that (1) Empirical Realist's position is not anti-ontological simply because it restricts knowledge to objects of experience but because it conceives of such objects in non-ontological terms, and (2) Traditional Ontologist notes that a non-empirical realist opposition to ontology is conceivable in similar terms.
17 Kant Citation1998, A492/B520.
18 Kant Citation1998, A492/B520 (italics added). The passage in the translation used by Assiter (Kant Citation1970) reads: ‘But this space and this time, and with them all appearances, are not in themselves things; they are nothing but representations, and cannot exist outside our mind.’
19 Assiter does mention Beth Lord's very interesting ontological interpretation of Kant but does not appear to commit to it herself.
20 By some accounts, this is not a mere possibility but a persisting historical actuality. See, for example, Derrida on Plato in CitationDerrida [1981] 2004, 67–186.
21 Considerations like this then lead into some well-known debates in analytic philosophy of language and metaontology over the status of fictional entities and propositions about them. See Berto and Plebani Citation2015, 15–22 and 83–98 for some concise summaries. Bhaskar uses his conceptions of absence and real negation to deal with this issue at Bhaskar Citation1991, 126 and CitationBhaskar [1993] 2008, 41.
22 Kant Citation1998, A400-1/B342–3 and B421–2, for example. As sympathetic as I am to non-ontological interpretations of Kant, I must admit that I find it difficult to interpret what Kant calls ‘the subjective constitution of the senses’ (e.g., Kant Citation1998, A42/B59) in wholly non-ontological terms.
23 ‘[T]he explication of, or presupposition of the determination of, knowledge by being’ (CitationBhaskar [1993] 2008, 90). Also see CitationBhaskar [1993] 2008, 4, 89–90 and 205–6. While orthodox Kantians tend to insist on a more radical distinction between the normative and the natural, Bhaskar and heterodox Kantians such as Wilfrid Sellars are concerned to defend a form of rationalist naturalism that can make sense of the relation between the normative force of epistemic principles and their ontological instantiation. See, for example, Bhaskar's intrinsic/extrinsic aspect distinction at CitationBhaskar [1986] 2009, 16.
24 See Chalmers Citation2009, where this kind of position is referred to as ‘ontological anti-realism’.
25 Kant Citation1998, A158/B197.
26 McWherter Citation2013, 27.
27 ‘In Kant's own words, representations “in so far as they are in these relations (in space and time) connected and determinable according to the rules of the unity of experience are called objects”’ (p. 513). The passage is from Kant Citation1998, A494/B522 (though Assiter is using an older translation).
28 Compare Bhaskar on transcendental idealism in the philosophy of science: ‘According to it, the objects of scientific knowledge are models, ideals of natural order etc. Such objects are artificial constructs and though they may be independent of particular men, they are not independent of men or human activity in general’ (CitationBhaskar [1975] 1978, 25, emphasis added).
29 See CitationHume [1902] 1975, 123, where Hume claims that the notion of an ‘unknown, inexplicable something, as the cause of our perceptions’ is ‘so imperfect, that no sceptic will think it worthwhile to contend against it’.
30 Kant Citation1998, B145, original emphasis. Similarly: ‘The categories of the understanding … do not represent to us the conditions under which objects are given in intuition at all, hence objects can indeed appear to us without necessarily having to be related to functions of the understanding, and therefore without the understanding containing their a priori conditions’ (Kant Citation1998, A89/B122); ‘appearances can certainly be given in intuition without functions of the understanding’ (Kant Citation1998, A90/B122); ‘intuition by no means requires the functions of thinking’ (Kant Citation1998, A91/B123).
31 These issues are also discussed in chapters 2 and 4 of my book.
32 CitationAlllison [1983] 2004, 98.
33 Groff Citation2007, 30.
34 McWherter Citation2013, 133–40.
35 See, for example, Bhaskar and Laclau Citation1998, 13–14.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Dustin McWherter
Dustin McWherter is the author of The Problem of Critical Ontology: Bhaskar Contra Kant (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and has previously published articles in Journal of Critical Realism, Kantian Review and Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy. He was previously Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the American University of Beirut.