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Kants judgments of perception and the ambiguity of his concept of intuition

Paul Redding

(Paper given at APA Pacific Division Annual Conference, March 2013)

Introduction

In his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics Kant introduced a distinction that seems to sit awkwardly, if at all, with what he says in the Critique of Pure Reason: the distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience. All our judgments, Kant says, are at first mere judgments of perception; they hold good only for us.1 But some can be shown to have an objectivity that others lack: on reflection it is thought that these judgments should be valid for all times for us and for everyone else.2 These are judgments of experience, and reflection involves bringing them under the pure concepts of the understanding, the categories. Thereby a judgment as air is elastic3 will be seen to have a new relation, namely to an object, a relation which ensures the judgment has objective validity.4 In contrast, the merely subjectively valid judgments of perception that cannot be brought under the categoriesjudgments such as the room is warm, the sugar sweet, the wormwood nasty or bitter [widrig]5fail to be afforded this new status. They are only the logical connection of perceptions in a thinking subject.6

Many have dismissed this doctrine because of the alleged inconsistency with what Kant says elsewhere, and especially in the rewritten Transcendental Deduction of the second edition of the Critique, published five years later.7 A few, however, have attempted to square the doctrine with the critical philosophy, and prominent among these has been Batrice Longuenesse, who points to Kants analyses of the logical forms of judgment as providing the key to understanding the distinction.8 My account is in the spirit of Longuenesses reading, although it differs on particular points. Crucially, however, I argue that Kants account of the distinction between the two judgment forms draws on an ambiguity in his notion of intuition that has been noted within a variety of analytically inspired readings of Kant over the last half century. This ambiguity brings into question Kants own project of basing critical philosophy on the fundamental distinction between concepts and intuitions, but raises the possibility that the distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience might itself be sufficient for Kants purposes, relieving him of the need to rely on a more basic intuitionconcept distinction.

1. Kants transcendental logic in the light of modern logic.

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To get these issues into view we might start with Wilfrid Sellarss reading of Kant in his Locke Lectures of 1966,9 where he points to the implications for Kants official intuitionconcept distinction of the rewritten transcendental deduction of the second 1789 edition of the Critique of Pure Reason. Sellars notes that Kant refers to the relations of intuitions to their objects as immediate but remarks that this could be construed in two ways, making the notion of intuition ambiguous or Janus-faced. First, immediacy might be interpreted as holding between the intuition and an object considered as the cause of the intuition,10 or immediacy might be construed as the immediacy of a phenomenal content given to consciousness. Thought of in the latter, phenomenal way, an intuition could be thought on the linguistic analogy of a demonstrative pronoun, this.11

But Sellars now directs our attention to Kants discussion of the shaping of intuition by the productive imagination, in the rewritten B Deduction.12 Here the productive imagination is described as the understanding functioning in a special way,13 clearly suggesting the involvement of concepts in the shaping of intuition. And so rather than think of intuition on the model of a bare this, Sellars suggests the model of a demonstrative concept, a this-such nexus.14 The intuition of a cube, for example, is of this as a cube, though it is not a judgment and does not involve cube in a predicative position.15 But this now blurs the distinction between a special sub-class of conceptual representations of individuals and a radically different kind of representation of an individual which belongs to sheer receptivity and is in no sense conceptual.16

Around the same time, debates over the nature of Kantian intuitions resulted in similar claims as to their ambiguity. In a series of papers in the 1960s, Jaakko Hintikka suggested that intuitions be understood on the linguistic analogue of singular terms standing in immediate relationship to their objects, this singularity contrasting with the generality of objects.17 Charles Parsons, however, critical of Hintikkas reduction of the phenomenal features of Kants intuitions to their functioning as singular terms, questioned whether the criteria of immediacy and singularity actually coincided.18 A few years later, Manley Thompson alluded to a parallel ambiguity in Kants concept of concept. Sometimes Kant describes predication in the traditional way as a relation between two concepts rather than the modern post-Fregean way, as holding between a concept and an object subsumed under it,19 and yet elsewhere there is the strong suggestion of the modern conception of concepts as corresponding to open sentences and their different uses as corresponding to different quantifications of open sentences.20 Thompson claimed that there was a tension in Kants project between the traditional Aristotelian understanding of general or formal logic, and the purposes to which Kant had wanted to put logic in the context of his transcendental logic. The general logic required by Kants transcendental logic, wrote Thompson, is thus at least first order quantificational logic plus identity but minus proper names or other singular terms that are in principle eliminable.21 Here, Thompson seems to go down the same path as Sellars. If Kants

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concept of concept is ambiguous, then this must have ramifications for his concept of intuition, Hintikkas singular term reading fitting the modern open sentence reading of concept, and the more phenomenal reading fitting the idea of what is given to experience as an object conceived to be designated by a this such that forms the subject of a traditional Aristotelian predication.22 Since this period, an increasing number of interpreters, including Longuenesse, have been drawn to reading Kant in the former proto-Fregean way.23

While one must be wary of any anachronistic reading back into Kant ideas that are familiar now, neither should the limitedness of the logical resources available to him be exaggerated. The idea of a judgment as holding not between two concepts but between a concept and an object can already be found in Leibnizs reinterpretation of the standard Aristotelian conception of judgment within his project of the universal characteristic.24 Rather than thinking of the judgment in the traditional sense as the joining of a universal-naming predicate to a substance-naming subject, Leibniz, adopting an approach from Johannes Raue, treated the subject term as itself a predicate, such that S is P was to be read as identifying terms S and P in the sense of eachs being true of some third, a tertium commune, not named in the judgment.25 This alternative non-Aristotelian analysis of judgment form was known and debated within German scientific circles in the second half of the eighteenth century, and Kant seems to have been well aware of these developments.26 It is not surprising that we can recognize this Leibniz-Raue approach in those features of Kants analyses of the logical form of judgment commented upon by Longuenesse.27

Longuenesse, portrays Kant as using the idea of intuition qua singular, non-conceptual representation to provide a non-Aristotelian logical deep structure for judgments with an overtly Aristotelian S is P surface structure. Thus, in Kants transcendental logic, the subject-predicate judgment is interpreted such that the objects subsumed [as the contents of intuitions] under the subject-concept are also subsumed under the predicate-concept.28 In various places Kant designates such subsumed objects with the symbol x, and sometimes refers to the transcendental object=x. Thus, for example, the judgment All bodies are extended can be rendered: To everything x, to which the concept of body (a + b) belongs, belongs also extension (b).29 This properly non-empirical or transcendental object x which cannot be intuited by us but which in all of our empirical concepts in general can provide relation to an object, i.e., objective reality.30 Kants transcendental object = x, I suggest, is essentially Raues and Leibnizs tertium commune. It cannot be intuited in the sense of being the object of a phenomenal intuition despite the fact that it is precisely what is subsumed under a concept as the content of an intuition in the Hintikkan singular-term sense. Kants acceptance of this Leibniz-Raue conception of judgment structure is perhaps most explicit in a reflection cited by Longuenesse: In every judgment, accordingly, there are two predicates that we compare to one another, of which one is the logical subject, and the other is called the logical predicate.31

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Thus Kant uses the distinction between formal and transcendental logics to relate two different ways of thinking of the logical structure of the judgment. Following Aristotle, qua merely logical forms, the judgment relates two terms, a subject term and a predicate term, to each other. Considered at this level, an object is just what is presented or named by the subject term: In every judgment there is a subject and predicate. The subject of the judgment, insofar as it contains different possible predicates, is the object.32 This object is an appearance, and on Sellarss reading, it is what is given via the phenomenal content of an empirical intuition qua this-such nexus. But intuitions can also be as interpreted, following Hintikka, as properly singular terms, and so come to play a different functional role qua means via which transcendental objects=x are subsumed, first under the subject term considered as a predicate, and then under the second, predicate predicate. On this second Leibniz-Raue account of the judgment structure, the object is no longer conceived as a substance named by the subject term, but rather as whatever it is that is responsible for the truth of the applicability of the S and P predicate terms, respectively.

This distinction now clarifies what is going on with the distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience in the Prolegomena.

2. Judgments of Perception and Judgments of Experience

Kant says all empirical judgments start as judgments of perception, but not all can be transformed into judgments of experience. Those that fail, then, fail to achieve the new relation, namely to an object, achieved by judgments of experience.33 This idea can suggest that judgments of perception are not really judgments at all, but rather, just the sorts of Humean empirical associations that Kant otherwise carefully distinguishes from judgments. Longuenesse, rightly I think, resists this reading. Here we might call on Kants famous Copernican analogy which is surely central to his critical philosophy and think of the judgment sugar is sweet as akin to the sun moves, but to hold onto the idea of context-specific perceptual judgments, we might compare these expressed in a Sellarsian way as this sugar is sweet and this sun moves. When the pre-Copernican says the latter, we take that to express a judgment about the sun, but one that only holds good for us earthlings, and not for every possible viewerone located outside our galaxy, for example. This judgment is surely in some relation to an objectthe sunit is presumably not in the right one, from the point of view of objectivity and science. What would be crucial in making judgments about the sun or sugar is not that the former simply looks to be moving nor that the latter simply tastes sweet, but that I desire that I and everybody else must [msse] always necessarily connect the same perceptions under the same circumstances [denselben Umstnden] rather than that the judgment be limited to the subject [or] to its state at a particular time.34

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In both examples of judgments of perception, the object here is a perspectivally conditioned appearance identified by a subject term logically connected with the predicate, with both terms relying on phenomenal presences. But what such this S is P judgments need in order to have objective content is a relation to some further transcendental object = x, something not tied to the subjects phenomenal state as is what is picked out by a demonstrative. Thus to say that air is elastic is to allude to something that is responsible for the phenomenal intuitions associated with air and elasticity co-occurring in the circumstances in which they in fact co-occur.35

One way of expressing the idea of the requirement of objectivity as involving, as Kant says, the necessary connection of the same perceptions under the same circumstances would be to say that the content of the judgment must be properly propositional in the distinctly modern sense. Propositional content, as the content of knowledge or belief, is now sometimes expressed by referring to the set of possible worlds or possible situations in which the proposition holds true.36 If my knowledge that the cover of this book, say, is crimson, then this knowledge, expressed as a judgment of experience, must encompasses possibilities in which the book may not look crimson, such as if I look at it in the moonlight, for example, when it might look black.37 But there could be uses of this sentence where the phenomenal look is just what I want to conveythere, possible contexts in which it did not look crimson would be excluded from the meaning.38 Clearly for a subject to know in this way, their knowledge cannot be limited to their particular state at a particular time. Here it is worth reflecting on the difference between this approach to judgment and that found in Aristotle who does not have this modern sense of a proposition. According to Arthur Prior, Aristotle had thought of the default tense of the expression of judgment as the actual present in contrast to the timeless present of the modern conception.39 That is, while in modern thought one thinks of the propositional content of a judgment, if true, as eternally true, this was not Aristotles view: He sits may, for instance, be true. If he rises, it then becomes false.40 Aristotles attitude to the logical structure of belief content is, we might say, pre-Copernican in the Kantian sense, and with only the resources of traditional term logic he lacks the means to conceive of empirical judgments that maintain their truth values from those that do not.41 But there seems no reason not to think of such context-sensitive judgments as judgmentsclearly, they are expressed as truth claims.

Kants commitment to Aristotelian logic at a formal or general level is crucial here. Both judgment types share the same overt syntactic subjectpredicate form in that both are at first mere judgments of perception.42 It is transcendental reflection that is required to establish the possibility of difference. Judgments of experience, but not perception, will be thought of as amenable to the lower, LeibnizRaue level of analysis. Such judgments achieve a new relation as the object understood not simply as defined by the subject term of the surface structure but as the common third, the transcendental object=x. In contrast, in the case of my tasting the sugar,

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while intuition is present in the sense of phenomenal intuition, intuitions in the sense of singular terms understood as referring back to some transcendental object=x are lacking. There is nothing objective corresponding to the sweetness of sugar in the way that there is something corresponding to the elasticity of air.43

3. Conclusion

I have suggested that disambiguating Kants concept of intuition in the manner of Sellars allows us to understand how his distinction between judgments of perception and judgments of experience may be compatible with his critical program in general, but only at the cost of drawing on an ambiguity that, as Sellars points out, blurs the distinction between intuitions and conceptsa distinction that is meant to be foundational for whole critical philosophy as such. The crucial question here becomes: what are the prospects for critical philosophy without a foundational conceptintuition distinction?

In a sense this was the question facing those of Kants successors who were, often for similar reasons to those evoked by Sellars, critical of the foundational role Kant gave to the distinction between concepts and intuitions. But Kants distinction between the sorts of judgments that he later described as judgments of perception and judgments of experience actually predated his discovery of the conceptintuition distinction, and in some pre-critical essays he criticized Leibniz for conflating two types of judgment in a way analogous to the way he later criticized Leibniz for conflating concepts and intuitions.44 As his critique of Leibniz was central to his critique of pure reason, this raises the possibility of the critique itself resting on the distinction of judgment forms without the need to further ground this in the conceptintuition distinction. I suggest that after Kant, Hegel thought that the essential features of Kants revolutionary critique of metaphysics could be captured in this way, but this is a topic that takes us well beyond the scope of this paper.

1 Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics. With Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason, revised edition, ed. and trans. Gary Hatfield (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 2004), 18, Kants Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1900-), vol. 4, p. 298. Henceforth, references to the Academy edition will be given in square brackets as [volume:page number]. 2 Ibid., 18 [4:298] 3 Ibid., 19 [4:299] 4 Ibid., 18 [4:298] 5 Ibid., 19 [4:299]

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6 Ibid., 18 [4:298]. Kant uses logical in the sense of belonging to general (i.e., Aristotelian) logic to which he opposes real in the sense of belonging to transcendental logic. 7 In 19 of the B Deduction, Kant explicitly criticizes the traditional explanation of a judgment as a representation of a relation between two concepts. He goes on to claim that a judgment is nothing other than the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception. Only in this way does there arise from this relation a judgment, i.e., a relation that is objectively valid. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), B 1402. That is, this seems to suggest that judgments per se are judgments of experience, with there being no place for subjectively valid judgments of perception. For classic dismissals of the distinction see Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kants Critique of Pure Reason (Bassingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, original publication 1918), p. 288, and Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 101. 8 Batrice Longuenesse, Kant and The Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Charles T. Wolfe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), ch 7. 9 Published as Wilfrid Sellars, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes (Atascadero, Calif.: Ridgview, 1992). 10 It might be interpreted along causal lines, telling us that intuitions are generated by the immediate impact of things in themselves on our receptivity. An intuition is caused by its object. Ibid., p. 2 11 On the other hand, immediate relation can construed on the model of the demonstrative this. On this model, which I take to be, on the whole, the correct interpretation, intuitions would be representations of thises and would be conceptual in that peculiar way in which to represent something as a this is conceptual. Ibid. 12 Ibid., p. 4. 13 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B 1512. 14 Sellars, Science and Metaphysics, p. 5. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid., p. 6. 17 Jaakko Hintikka, Kants New Method of Thought and his Theory of Mathematics, Ajatus, vol 27 (1965), Kant and the Mathematical Method, The Monist, no. 3 (1967), both reprinted in Jaakko Hintikka, Knowledge and the Known: Historical Perspectives in Epistemology (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974), pp. 12634, and 16083, and On Kants Notion of Intuition (Anschauung), in T. Penelhum and J MacIntosh (eds), The First Critique: Reflections on Kants Critique of Pure Reason (Belmont, CA.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1969, pp. 3853. Hintikka played down the association of intuitions with sensory knowledge, with the claim that intuitions were not necessarily very intuitive In Kant and in his immediate predecessors, the term intuition did not necessarily have anything to do with appeal to imagination or direct perceptual evidence. In the form of a paradox, we may perhaps say that the intuitions Kant contemplated were not necessarily very intuitive. For Kant, an intuition is simply anything which represents or stands for an individual object as distinguished from general concepts. Hintikka, Kants New Method of Thought, p. 130. In the final section of the paper, Hintikka suggests that it was Kants Aristotelian assumption that we can have knowledge of particulars only in sense-

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perception, an assumption with which Kant was unfaithful to his own principles, that introduced the misleading suggestion in which intuitive content was tied to passively received sensory content. Ibid., p. 132. In a later article, Hintikka explains that insofar as there is a reference to imagination or sensation contained in Kants concept, it is supposed to be an outcome of his arguments, not a presupposition of those arguments. Jaakko Hintikka, Kants Theory of Mathematics Revisited, p. 201. I think Hintikka underestimates Kants commitment to his Aristotelian notion of formal logic and the consequences for thinking of the nature of perceptual objects that this brings with it. 18 Charles Parsons, Kants Philosophy of Arithmetic, in S. Morgenbesser, P. Suppes, and M. White, eds. Philosophy, Science, and Method (New York: St. Martins Press, 1969), pp. 56894, republished in Mathematics in Philosophy: Selected Essays (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 113115. One might think that the criterion of immediate relation to objects for being an intuition is just an obscure formulation of the singularity condition. But it evidently means that the object of an intuition is in some way directly present to the mind, as in perception, and that intuition is thus a source, ultimately the only source of immediate knowledge of objects. By the immediacy criterion Kants conception of intuition resembles Descartess, while by the singularity criterion and his insistence on a nonintuitive conceptual factor in all knowledge, Kants theory of intuition differs from that of Descartes. Ibid., p. 112. 19 Manley Thompson, Singular Terms and Intuitions in Kants Epistemology, The Review of Metaphysics, vol. 26, no. 2 (1972), pp. 31443, p. 325. 20 Ibid., p. 323. 21 Ibid., p. 334. 22 Thus Thompson first notes that demonstrative pronouns in contrast to proper names seem to be more plausible candidates for linguistic representations of Kantian intuitions. But commenting on sentences of the type This is F he notes that in its normal use such a sentence may be said to have in effect the form This G is F, and so ends with the suggestion that a concept acquires a singular use when it is presented by a general term used as a substantive and preceded by a demonstrative adjective. Ibid., p. 328. 23 See, for example, David Bell, Freges Theory of Judgement (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); Robert Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), Mary Tiles, Kant: From General to Transcendental Logic, in Dov. M. Gabbay and John Woods, (eds.), Handbook of the History of Logic: Volume 3, The Rise of Modern Logic: From Leibniz to Frege (Amsterdam, Elsevier, 2004), pp. 85130. 24 Leibniz first introduced this analysis in his early Dissertatio de arte combinatoria of 1666 where, following Raue, he renders Socrates is the son of Sophroniscus as Whoever is Socrates is the son of Sophroniscus. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Smtliche Schriften und Briefe, Academy Edition (Darmstadt and Berlin, 1923), series, VI. vol. I, pp. 18283. That is, the name Socrates becomes a predicate is Socrates applied to the third designated by the pronoun whoever. 25 This is a move that, according to Ignacio Angelelli, can be expected to delight the Fregean reader. Ignacio Angelelli, On Johannes Raues Logic, in Ingrid Marchelwitz and Albert Heinekamp (eds). Leibniz Auseinandersetzung mit Vorgngern und Zeitgenossen. Stuttgart: Franz SteinVerlag, 1990. The origins of the doctrine of the tertium commune are in medieval debates about the nature of

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transubstantiation. Leibniz had used it extensively to defend the coherence of the doctrine of the trinity. See especially, Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibniz on the Trinity and the Incarnation: Reason and Revelation in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2007). 26 Kant knew the outlines of Leibnizs ars characteristica combinatoria, on whose utopian nature he commented in an essay of 1755 (Nova dilucidatio, Kant 1900, I, 390) in terms that seem to anticipate analogous statements by Ploucquet and Lambert. Moreover, his logic-corpus, as well as his works and correspondence, provide evidence that (1) he was well acquainted with the combinatorial calculus of syllogistic moods; (2) he used Eulers (whom he quotes) circular diagrams to designate concepts, judgments, and syllogisms; (3) he know the linear diagrams of Lambert, with whom he corresponded; (4) he probably had some knowledge of Segners and Ploucquets works; and (5) he actively promoted the diffusion of Lamberts posthumous works containing the latters algebraic calculus. Mirella Capozzi and Gino Roncaglia, Logic and the Philosophy of Logic from Humanism to Kant, in Lina Haaparanta, (ed) The Development of Modern Logic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. 146. Importantly, Leibniz discusses Raues approach to judgment in Dissertatio de arte combinatorial which, as in the quote above, Kant mentions in A new elucidation of the first principles of metaphysical cognition in Theoretical Philosophy, 17551770, ed. and trans. D. Walford and R. Meerbote (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 89. 27 Batrice Longuenesse, Kant and The Capacity to Judge: Sensibility and Discursivity in the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Charles T. Wolfe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999). 28 Ibid., p. 86. 29 Kant, Jsche Logic, 36, quoted in Longuenesse, Kant and The Capacity to Judge, p. 87. 30 Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A 109. 31 Immanuel Kant, Notes and Fragments, P. Guyer and C. Bowman (eds), P. Guyer and F Rauscher (trans.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), note 4634, p. 149 [17.616], emphasis added. This is quoted by Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, p. 107. 32 Kant, Notes and Fragments, note 6350, (JulyAugust 1797), p. 3878 [18, p. 676]. Longuenesse quotes these sentences (p. 55, fn. 29), and comments: An object in the logical sense is thus whatever is thought under the subject-concept of a categorical judgment, where the subject-concept is a complex concept, to which many different predicates may be attributed, and she opposes this object in the logical sense to the object discussed in the Transcendental Deduction which is the appearance or undetermined object of an empirical intuition. But I think this is misleading. As for the logical object, Kant here just says that the subject is the object, he doesnt describe the object as thought under the subject concept. Longuenesse here seems to mix the idea of classical subjectpredicate structure with the Leibniz-Raue idea of subject-predicatepredicate-predicate structure, which must be kept distinct. On my reading, the logical object just is the appearance; it is the sort of content captured by the this-such subject term of a categorical empirical judgment as understood by Sellars. 33 Kant, Prolegomena, 18, 4:298. 34 Ibid., 19.

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35 Longuenesse, I submit, often fails to note the non-phenomenal dimension of intuitions qua logical singular terms. For example, when she notes that the Critique tells us that, as a singular object, what is represented by the term x can be object only of a sensible intuition this reads as if the intuition the singularity condition and immediacy condition understood phenomenally coincide. But Kant says that the transcendental object cannot be intuited by us, which suggests that the intuition understood as representing the object in this sense is not phenomenally immediate. She mentions the debate between Hintikka and Parsons (Longuenesse, Kant and the Capacity to Judge, p. 220 note 15), and sides with Parsons and treating the two defining characters of intuitionimmediacy and singularityas inseparable, but without noting the fact that Parsons questions the identity of these two conditions. In contrast I want to construe Parsons reading as in line with that of Sellars and Thompson, and so as insisting on the ambiguity involved here. 36 For a classic statement, see for example, Robert Stalnaker, Possible Worlds, in Ways a World Might Be: Metaphysical and Anti-Metaphysical Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Stalnakers attitude to the ontology of possible worlds could be broadly construed as Kantian in contrast to the somewhat Leibnizian modal realism of David Lewis. 37 Or, of a blue tie being viewed under a new type of lighting, as in Sellarss famous story of John the tie salesman in Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, with an Introduction by Richard Rorty and a Study Guide by Robert Brandom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), III, The Logic of Looks. 38 In terms of possible worlds semantics, this might be captured by saying that in the latter case all the worlds in which the sentence would be true would necessarily include my experiencing the colour of the book in just this way. C.f., Jaakko Hintikka, The Logic of Perception in Models for Modalities: Selected Essays (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969). 39 As Prior expresses it, Instead of statements being true and false at different times, we have predications being timeless true or false of different times. Arthur N. Prior, Time and Modality: Being the John Locke Lectures for 1955-6 delivered in the University of Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 30. According to Prior, the idea of timelessly true or false propositions only started to become the dominant view in the nineteenth century, and it wasnt until the turn of the twentieth century that it became the standard view within both traditional approaches to logic with Keynes, Venn and Johnson and the new logic championed by Russell (ibid., p. 116). 40 Aristotle, Categories, in Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, trans. H. P. Cooke and Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), 4a17-23. See also Metaphysics, 1051b8-18. In contemporary thought, the bare assertion a certain man is sitting would be strictly understood as incomplete and as short for something like a certain man sitting at time t1, with that proposition remaining true even when the man later stands. But for Aristotle, the belief is complete as it is, and changes truth value with time. 41 Aristotles ancient critics in this regard were the Stoics, who developed an explicitly propositional logic in opposition to Aristotles syllogistic. 42 Kant, Prolegomena, 18, [4:298], emphasis added. Kant repeats this idea twice more. 43 We might say that there is no analogue of the kinetic theory of gases in the former case.

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44 Immanuel Kant, Attempt to introduce the concept of negative magnitudes into philosophy (1763), in Kant, Theoretical Philosophy, 17551770. Here Kant distinguishes logical from real negation in criticizing Leibniz. Logical negation is essentially the external negation of propositional calculus, while real negation is based on the term negation of Aristotelian logic. Significantly, the term negated predicates he discusses in this work are phenomenally rich and evaluative distinct polar opposites like his discussion of the sweet and bitter/nasty in the Prolegomena. Kants critique of Leibnizs treatment of negation here reaches back to his criticisms of the project of a characteristica universalis in A new elucidation of 1755).