The Argument for Apprehension

The Apprehension Argument could be reformulated as follows:

(AC1.1) Assume for reductio that appearance is given to us without reference to any active faculty and its action.

(AC1.2) Every appearance contains a manifold.

(AC1.3) Perception is appearance combined with empirical consciousness. (Definition of Perception)

(AC1.4) from (AC 1.2) and (AC 1.3) that every perception contains a manifold and thus is dispersed and separate.

(AC1.5) (AC 1.4) is false.

197 For a discussion of the unity of perception see Puryear 2006. In fact, this is nothing but the precursor of Kant’s famous notion of synthetic unity, which will be discussed in detail in next chapter.

172 (AC1.6) from (AC 1.5) (AC 1.1) is false. A combination of perceptions is necessary. (Assumption Discharged)

(AC1.7) from (AC 1.5) and (AC 1.6) there is a combination of these perceptions.

(AC1.8) from (AC 1.7) there is an active faculty of the imagination and thereby an action of the apprehension is essential to perception.

This first sub-argument adopts the strategy of reductio ad absurdum. The success of the reductio ad absurdum relies heavily on whether the assumption can entail a contradiction with some accepted truth. The apprehension argument can be divided into two halves according to whether the introduced assumption for reductio is discharged or not. The first half runs from (AC1.1) to (AC1.6), which is intended to show that appearances cannot be simply given to us without being combined.

And its second half runs from (AC1.7) to (AC1.9), which is intended to show that the required function of combination should be assigned to the faculty of the imagination. The apprehension assumes that composition is essential to the notion of cognition. In the following I will examine and evaluate the two parts of apprehension argument.

Let’s begin with the redutio assumption. The assumption for reductio says that appearance is given to us without reference to any active faculty and its action. The assumption for reductio introduced often can be construed as implicitly targeted at some polemical position. It might be proposed that Kant intends to argue against radical sensationalism and thus the monism of epistemic source that only sense could give us representations. One might wonder, however, whether there is anyone who has ever endorsed such a radical position. Classical empiricists, most notably Locke, are also adherent to the dualism of epistemic source. According to Locke, all ideas are either those of sensation or those of reflection, though reflection is identified with inner sense.¹⁹⁸

It is more reasonable to suppose that Kant does not argue that only sense can give us perception, but that sense can provide perception independently from the spontaneous faculty.

This thought naturally leads to the proposal that Kant intends to argue against the non-conceptualism of perception, where perception is understood in the Kantian sense. This reading is also problematic.

Even if Kant is committed to some version of conceptualism, it is not immediately clear that what is presented in the Apprehension Argument by itself is adequate to establish this view. It is equally

198 In Kant literature, the evaluation of the two-faculty theory of mind or of the two-source theory of cognition does not reach consensus. For the novelty of distinction see Henrich 2008, sensation and cognition can be reduced to each other. For the banality of the distinction see Falkenstein 2004.

173 not clear that the involvement of any mental activity in the supposedly passive reception of impressions is equivalent to any version of conceptualism of perception, either the state-conceptualism or content-state-conceptualism.

A middle way drawn between the two previous proposals is to suggest that Kant intends to discard the traditional model of perception that perception is literally sense-perception in favor of the view that the generation of perception must be with reference to the imagination. In fact, this proposal is confirmed by the famous note in A120: “No psychologist has yet thought that the imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.” (A120f) The third proposal seems to be stronger than the first yet weaker than the second, for it does not only affirm that human beings have the imagination as a faculty distinct from sense, but also asserts that the imagination is necessarily involved in perception. Therefore, Kant does not argue for the existence of a distinct active faculty, namely, the imagination, but for the involvement of the imagination in perception. This amounts to assigning a new function to the imagination.

The line of the first half of the apprehension argument roughly runs as follows: perception is the empirical consciousness of appearance. Now since every appearance contains a manifold, it follows that perception contains a manifold. Without any involvement of synthesis, perceptions would be dispersed and separate. Then, Kant concludes that “a combination of them, which they cannot have in sense itself, is therefore necessary” (A120).

The problem of this argument is that it is not clear why dispersed and separate perceptions cannot be accepted, and on what account Kant makes the inference from (AC1.4) to (AC1.5). It is tempting to attribute to Kant the fallacy of non-sequitur. Of course, this would be an uncharitable reading of Kant. One way to circumvent this objection is to maintain that Kant makes a valid argument, yet he merely fails to make explicit some premise. In order for the argument to go through, the hidden premise must be uncovered. At the end of this sub-argument, Kant betrays his implicit commitment when he writes that “the imagination is to bring the manifold of intuition into an image” (A120), and that “it must therefore antecedently take up the impression into its activity”. It suggests that we have the image of an object which contains a combination of perceptions. Only if the fact that perception is essentially composite is granted, the implication that perceptions are dispersed and separate is contradicted. Consequently, the assumption for reductio is successfully discharged. Note that Kant does not make use of the notion of cognition; rather, what he draws on is the peculiar notion of image.¹⁹⁹ While we are not previously informed of what the

199 If one does not cling closely to the text in the first sub-argument, he could suggest that a combinatory notion of cognition has already been introduced before the argument starts off when Kant writes in the preliminary part: “If every individual representation were entirely foreign to the other, as it were isolated and separated from it, then there

174 notion of image means, we inferentially know that image must be something that implies the composition and connection of representations, and perhaps something else.

The inference (AC1.4) to (AC1.5) could be spelled out as follows:

(1) (AC1.1) implies (AC1.4)

(2) We have the image of an object which is combined.

(3) (AC1.4) contradicts with (2).

(4) (AC1.1) is false.

Now let us come to the second half of the argument. When Kant remarks that a combination is necessary for the “dispersed and separate” (A120) perceptions, it immediately leads to the conclusion that there is a distinct active faculty of the imagination in general and the action of apprehension in particular. If the line of reasoning is taken literally, Kant is again guilty of the fallacy of non sequitur in his inference from (AC1.7) to (AC1.8). We must refrain ourselves from attributing a non sequitur objection to Kant and attempt to uncover some hidden premises beneath the argument. While the required premises are not made explicitly in the main text, they are hinted in his famous footnote:

No psychologist has yet thought that the imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself. This is so partly because this faculty has been limited to reproduction, and partly because it has been believed that the senses do not merely afford us impressions but also put them together, and produce images of objects, for which without doubt something more than the receptivity of impressions is required, namely a function of the synthesis of them. (A120f)

This footnote helps us to formulate a negative argument by elimination to close the inferential gap between (AC1.7) and (AC1.8):

would never arise anything like cognition, which is a whole of compared and connected representations.” (A97) This hasty route of justification is obviously not desirable and not adopted by me, though it turns out that cognition is in effect premised.

175 (N1) A combination is necessary for objective representation and it requires perceptions not to be dispersed and separate.

(N2) The combination is attributed either to sense or to the imagination.

(N3) Sense does not provide any combination.

(N4) The combination is attributed to the imagination.

(N5) The reproductive imagination cannot do this job.

(N6) It must be some action in the imagination other than reproduction that exercised immediately on perception.

(N7) Apprehension can be designated to this distinct action of the imagination.

The basic idea of the negative argument is that Kant argues against the two alternative views on faculty attribution. Kant points out that there are different conceptions of sense that are relevant to the validity of the argument. For instance, some contend that sense itself has “a function of synthesis” (A105). Kant firmly rejects this conception of sense. It seems that Kant’s notion of sense is conceptually delineated from any activity and synthesis. Accordingly, Kant seems to be tacitly committed to an empiricist conception of sense, which is characterized by pure passivity. With this particular conception of sense at hand, Kant infers that the function of the combination of sensible representations can only be attributed to the faculty of the imagination, as a species of the genus of sensibility, rather than to sense, as the other one.

Even if the combination is attributed to the imagination rather than to sense, at most it shows that the first half of the conclusion (AC1.8) follows that there is an active faculty of the imagination, and the latter half does not thereby follow that there is an action of apprehension. In order for the latter half to follow, an additional argument for apprehension must be provided. Kant maintains that the imagination “has been limited to reproduction” (A120f). It implies that it has been well-known what it means by reproduction and it is widely recognized that reproduction is attributed to the imagination. On the one hand, reproduction is concerned with recalling the past representations, and reproduction is exercised between perception, rather than within perception. On the other hand, the required action is characteristic of being “exercised immediately upon perceptions” (A120). As a result, Kant concludes that the required action is numerically different from reproduction. The order of inference is critically important. Only if reproduction has been definitely delineated and correctly

176 understood can it be concluded that reproduction does not do the required work of taking impression into perception.

As Kant observes, the reason why no psychologist has ever made this discovery lies in that either they deflate the imagination with reproduction due to the prejudice toward the imagination, or they conflate sense with the imagination due to the misconception of sense. In other words, the apprehension of the imagination, on the one hand, must not be assimilated into the reproduction of the imagination, and, on the other hand, it must be distinguished from sense. The conclusion is that the synthesis of apprehension is neither conflating sense nor deflating the imagination.

This line of argument is of vital methodological importance. It displays exactly how some mental faculty is introduced to close the explanatory gap for objective representation.²⁰⁰ The general pattern of this methodology is first to identify some observational and conceptual requirement, and then to postulate the relevant faculty to satisfy these requirements.²⁰¹ It also displays that for the previously postulated and widely accepted faculty this kind of argument is able to determine the role of the faculty in question and clarify its relation to objective representation.