How can a regulative principle have objective validity?

In this paper I examine Kant's claim in the 'Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic' that the
transcendental ideas, although they merely are of regulative use, nonetheless have some objective
validity. This claim has puzzled many Kant scholars. In the Appendix, Kant first seems to argue that
the ideas of reason (the soul, the world, God) are regulative (as opposed to constitutive) in the
following sense: they are merely the subjective, logical, heuristic principles for the systematisation
and unification of our knowledge. In other words, the transcendental ideas, Kant seems to claim, do
not really 'have an object,' for they merely help reason to systematise and unify the concepts of the
understanding: “one cannot properly say that this idea is the concept of an object, but only that of
the thoroughgoing unity of these concepts, insofar as the idea serves the understanding as a rule.”
(A645/B673). However, Kant's point in the Appendix turns out to be almost the opposite: in contrast
to hypothetical ideas, he argues, the regulative transcendental ideas cannot be merely heuristic
devices: they at least pretend to be transcendental principles that do have some objective validity.
The ideas of reason clearly do not only postulate the systematic unity of our concepts, but also a
unity that pertains “to the object itself” (A651/B679). Edward Thornton’s shocked reply captures the
unsettling nature of Kant’s claims quite well: “this is a somewhat baffling claim. How can a regulative
principle have objective validity?” (Thornton 220).

Along the lines of Graham Birds distinction between ‘traditionalists’ and ‘revolutionaries,’ two kinds
of responses can be distinguished, which boils down to a difference in interpretation of the term
‘objective validity.’ For a traditionalist like Kemp-Smith – who tends to read Kant in a traditional
cartesian dualist framework – ‘objective validity’ seems to mean something like ‘there is an actual
objective referent of which the concept is valid.’ Revolutionaries, by contrast, argue that when Kant
speaks of the ideas of reason having ‘objective validity,’ this should be interpreted in a normative
sense. They claim that when Kant claims the ideas of reason to be objectively valid, he does not
mean they have objective referent. He merely means that it imposes certain “rational (objectively
valid) criteria” upon us, to which we must conform as rational knowers (Grier 286).

In my paper, although I reject that Kant worked in a traditional cartesian two-world ontology of
appearances and things-in-themselves, I nonetheless argue that the current ‘normativity’ solution is
too weak to account for what Kant is saying in the Appendix: it works for hypothetical, but not for
transcendental ideas. I argue that when Kant use the term ‘objective validity’ with regard to the
latter, he really means ‘valid of an objective referent.’ For my solution I will turn to an overlooked
aspect of the solution to the dynamical antinomies – namely the role that the transcendental object
= x plays there – by making use of Graham Priests suggestion that the antinomies have the form of a
paradox formulated by Russell in 1905 (Priest 361).

Bibliography

Grier, Michelle. Kant’s Doctrine of Transcendental Illusion. Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason. Edited by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge

University Press, 1999.

Kemp-Smith, Norman. A Commentary to Kant’s" Critique of Pure Reason". Humanities Press Intern.,

1995.

Priest, Graham. ‘The Limits of Thought--and Beyond’. Mind, vol. 100, no. 3, 1991, pp. 361–70.

Thornton, Edward. ‘The Unity of Reason: Kant’s Copernican Presupposition’. Journal of

Transcendental Philosophy, vol. 2, no. 2, 2021, pp. 213–35.