Does Kantian mental content externalism help metaphysical realists?

Standard interpretations of Kant’s transcendental idealism take it as a 1 commitment to the view that the objects of cognition are structured or made by con2 ditions imposed by the mind, and therefore to what Van Cleve calls “honest-to-God 3 idealism”. Against this view, many more recent investigations of Kant’s theory of rep4 resentation and cognitive significance have been able to show that Kant is committed 5 to a certain form of Mental Content Externalism, and therefore to the realist view that 6 the objects involved in experience and empirical knowledge are mind-independent 7 particulars. Some of these recent interpreters have taken this result to demonstrate an 8 internal incompatibility between Kant‘s transcendental idealism and his own model of 9 cognitive content and the environmental conditions of empirical knowledge. Against 10 this suggestion, this article argues that, while Kant’s theory of content is indeed best 11 construed as externalist, an adequately adjusted form of transcendental idealism is 12 not only compatible with this externalism, but in fact supports it. More generally, the 13 article develops the position that mental content externalism cannot force the adoption 14 of metaphysical realism. 15