Submission to Academia Letters

Re-signifying Skepticism: a retrospective reading

of the projection of Kantian anti-skepticism
Lucas Vollet

1. Preliminary note:
This is a programmatic paper organizing a orientation to read some aspects
of the Kantian legacy. We put together some references and quotes in the
limited exhibition space (1600 words) to show the focus points that we suggest
to expand this reading path.
2. The failure of the answer to skepticism
Not so long ago, a second generation of thinkers of analytical philosophy took
advantage of the rereading of transcendental arguments to exploit doors of inter-
pretation that were unfairly closed. The closed doors were those of the concep-
tion of logic and semantics that had established themselves as premises rooted in
the cradles of this school. Along with these premises, there was a persistent em-
piricist inspiration, which gained presence in the philosophy of Rudolph Carnap
and the logical positivists, although part of this influence travelled directly from
Bertrand Russell. Peter Strawson (1959, 1966), a gifted thinker from the Ox-
ford school, tried to escape the doctrinal bounds of this part of the school, and
described the Kantian argument not only as an anti-metaphysical statement,
but also as a philosophical statement against skepticism. The author exploited
the Transcendental Deduction and Refutation of Idealism as arguments that
could also serve to push thinkers into the flow of ordinary language philosophy.
It was no longer a case, as in Kant’s time, to prove the application of pure
concepts to intuition, in order to save apodictical and necessary knowledge for
empirical science and mathematics. It was, in fact, a campaign to prove that
a minimum of structure is inevitable to make up the intentional content that
codes our knowledge of particular objects.

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 The argument assumed in this reading sets forth that our knowledge of
particular objects included in the stream of the psychological sequence of con-
sciousness implies the conceptual condition in which these objects can be recog-
nized and regulated. Categories (and other formal conditions for reference and
intuitive representation) are the coding structure of that theoretical knowledge.
The argument was thus broken down in its behavioral profile, which sum-
moned logical physiologists to catch a glimpse of its propositional value and
the possible reactions to it in specific contexts of debate. Once unfolded, the
possible answers to the argument can also be exhausted. It can be shown what
it cannot prove, and even how that limit can teach philosophy something about
a limitation of similar arguments. With some luck, this can become a leverage
to some more learning.
Barry Stroud (1968) have great merit for successfully showing that the ar-
gument program is insufficient to respond to the connection between the rules
and structures of thought and the reality of things. Stroud has argued that
the skeptic is not refuted by simply saying he does need the basic structure for
recognition of particulars to sustain his own doubts.In any case, Kant’s step to
some knowledge of unperceived course of particulars is unjustified:

On his grounds, to deny this would be just as unjustified as our

asserting it—he argues only that our belief that objects continue to
exist unperceived can never be justified. (Strout 1968, p. 247)

Kant’s overstimation of his own success was based in a misrepresentation of

the skeptic proponent, one that identifies him with one diminished type of skep-
tic: the empirical idealist. Those would indeed fail to prove that the empirical
course of particular things is not connected by rules, because they would fail
to represent any course of experience by denying that. This does not settle the
issue, though. That said, the most general points of humean skepticism remain.
Kant’s argument does not reach constitutive thinking about non-observable en-
tities. So it lets skepticism point where Hume fixed it. Within the list of
Canonical English-language commentaries, the consensus on Kant’s failure to
prove the objectivity of the categories was not greatly disputed. Paul Guyer in
1987 wrote:

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 Kant is entitled to some kind of contrast between the entirely arbi-
trary connections which are permissible in idle fancy and the con-
straints in our ideas which are imposed upon them by the require-
ment that they veridically represent a particular object. But what
more can be said? (Guyer 1987, p. 127)

Once we grant that, something else is brought to our attention: Kant thought
he proved the limits of the skeptic by proving the limits of Reason itself. Kant
consciously employed this reasoning. Part of the fascinating features of his
philosophy is due to how it inaugurates the digression about those crisis and
dilemmas in the legislation of reason, wich brings insight to several means of
circular justification through transcendental means. This curious phenomenon
was formed about Kantian literature: the argument of Transcendental Analytic
could be recognized as a failure on its own terms, without losing its importance
in the history of philosophy.
What derives from this is remarkable. The style and rhetoric of the Tran-
scendental Deduction argument forms a new court of judgment to discuss con-
ditions of possibility of knowledge. There is a more fundamental sense in which
the appeal to apperception puts conditions on the acceptance of principles of
objective possibility: Kant thinks that we can only understand what we actively
produce (KrV B xii). This maxim, taken from the analogy with the production
of methods of instantiation of laws in experimental science, or intuitive repre-
sentation of concepts through mathematics, permeates the author’s thought as a
comprehensive human condition, which goes so far as to generate his moral con-
ceptions about autonomy and the ability of reflection to generate the subjective
foundation of judgment laws (Critique of the Faculty of Judgment).
Now we can see with more clarity why there is a force in this argument
that is attractive to the thinkers of the second phase of analytical philosophy.
The links of apperception to the whole of Kant’s practical philosophy could be
aligned to pragmatist and conventionalist readings. It was, for Strawson, a base
for his philosophical views of the normative nature of our cognition of things
like semantic categories, the logical forms of sentences, i.e, the nature of our
knowledge of possible meaning.
This reading would suggest that Kant did not refute, but re-signified Hume’s

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skepticism. Instead of using it as the basis of an anti-foundationalist conception,
the author built a post-metaphysical condition to create the debate about what
is meaningful, putting the human practical behavior (autonomy) and its rational
limits at the center of the discussion.
Of course one could refuse to give up the option that there is something
hidden in the structure of the transcendental argument that would grants us
better reaction to skeptical accusations. After all, to know the difference be-
tween possible meaning and impossible meaning is a good start to react to
skeptical slander on reason. This reaction is insufficient, though. To say that
Kant failed represents a fairly faithful record of how neo-rationalist initiatives
would be matched against the challenges of anti-justification epistemology. On
the other hand, re-signifying the debate is not a small feat. According to the
interpretation suggested here, this discussion is not a mere reproductive presen-
tation of limits of reason, but a reflective development of the deep meaning of
the impossibility of harmonization of nature to the laws of our understanding
(the constitutive role of teleological judgment).
Kant did not succeed in burying skepticism, but he manages to re-signify its
message in a context of more global philosophical reflection. That involves the
formation of the knowledge that grants us insight into that categorial knowledge
by apperceptive concepts (the self-conscious representation: “I think”) and other
anti-dialectical and transcendental forms of reflection (that gives a subjective
principle for the search of possible objects). To grasp that insight is a conquest of
post-kantian philosophy in order to overview the formation and disputes about
categories and meaning.
3.Conclusive remarks: beyong the analytical tradition
Kant’s concepts and frame of discussion does not solve the issue with Hume,
but our perspective is that he has a richer set of premises to discuss the skep-
tical problem. We have seen above how this is transformed, by being digested
by generations, into a rhetoric of discussion of the problem of the conditions of
access to possible objects, a theme that analytical philosophy accepted, since
first Wittgenstein, becoming a highly diffuse anti-metaphysical motto. But we
also saw that Kant deepened the conditions of skepticism. With it, the doubts
about reason legislation becomes the stimulus of a broad reflection on the con-
ditions of autonomy that presides the formation of categories and its correlated

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distinctions between meaning and pseudo-meaning. In this last conclusive re-
marks we want to remind that this was also the inspiration of large part of
continental philosophy. The article of value in this conception, which has be-
come widely pursued by German Idealism, is this: it does produce reflections on
the self-validating characteristics of scientific knowledge and its historic dram-
maturgy, without resorting to metaphysics. It brings awareness of the fact that
Science goes through periods of self-acknowledgment and historical formation
of categories. In the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century, this
valuable was used to exhaustion. There have been attempts to give sociology,
psychology, phenomenology, a “transcendental” place. And the very philoso-
phy of language, at the beginning of analytical philosophy (Wittgenstein), was
mixed to a transcendental character. Be that as it may, our philosophical cul-
ture is loaded with Imannuel Kant. Kant is still ground zero for discussions on
the post-metaphysical residues and on superstructural idealities embedded in
language, social institutions and scientific paradigms.
august/17/2021
Notes and References:
We are using the Paul Guyer’s and Allen Wood’s translation of KrV (Cri-
tique of Pure Reason): KANT, I. 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. The Cam-
bridge edition of the works of Immanuel Kant. Ed. Paul Guyer and Allen
Wood. Cambridge University Press.
STRAWSON, P.(1966).The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique
of Pure Reason. London: Routledge
STROUT, Barry. “Transcendental Arguments”, The Journal of Philosophy,
1968 pp. 241-256
GUYER, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge University
Press, 1987.
page 3: “A new light broke upon the first person that demonstrated the
isosceles triangle (…). For he found that what he had to do was not to trace
what he saw in this figure (…). (…); but rather that he had to produce the latter
from what he himself though to the object”(B xii)
.

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