"An Almost Single Inference": Kant's Deduction of the Categories Reconsidered

By taking into accountsome texts publishedbetweenthe first and the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason that have been neglected by most of those who have dealt with the deductionof the categories, I argue that the core of the deduction is to be identified as the ‘almost single inference from the precisely determineddefinition of a judgment in general’, which Kant adumbrates in the Metaphysical Foundations in order to ‘make up for the deficiency’ of the A-deduction. Whereas the first step of the B-deduction is an attempt to show that the manifoldof an intuitionbelongs to the ‘necessaryunity of self-consciousness’ by means of the synthesis of the understanding, the second step has the task of showing that the very same synthesis is responsible for the spatio-temporal unity of the manifold. Thus, Kant’s ‘answer to Hume’ is that no spatio-temporal objects of experience at all aremerely ‘given’, independently of the conceptual activities of the understanding.Against the established view I substantiate the claimthat with this ‘almost single inference’of the secondproof step the distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience consequently vanished fromKant’s thinking. There has been a long-standing dispute on the structure of Kant’s deduction of the categories in the second edition of theCritique of Pure Reason, at least for the last 40 years. Even to give a survey of the different interpretative accounts is difficult, let alone to discuss them in detail within the length of a paper. But there is one author in particular who is outstanding not only for having re-opened that discussion but also for reinforcing its momentum with another, quite different paper on the same subject: in 1969, Dieter Henrich published a paper on “The Proof-Structure of Kant’s Transcendental Deduction”, and twenty years later he followed this with his paper on “Kant’s Notion of a Deduction and the Methodological Background of the First Critique”. In the latter Henrich investigates the overall task of what Kant might have had in mind by the term ‘deduction’. By referring to juridical procedures of the time with the production of legal ‘deduction writings’ Henrich points to a methodological connection between the deduction of the first Critique and Kant’s lectures on logic, where Kant distinguishes the concept of reflection from Archiv f. Gesch. d. Philosophie, 90. Bd., S. 323–345 © Walter de Gruyter 2008 ISSN 0003-9101 DOI 10.1515/AGPH.2008.013 Brought to you by | Thomas Cooper Library (University of South Carolina School of L) Authenticated | 172.16.1.226 Download Date | 3/22/12 7:51 PM “AGPh 3/08” — 2008/11/4 — 14:17 — page 324 — #80