Was Kant a nonconceptualist?

Abstract

I criticize recent nonconceptualist readings of Kant's account of perception on the grounds that the strategy of the Deduction requires that understanding be involved in the synthesis of imagination responsible for the intentionality of perceptual experience. I offer an interpretation of the role of understanding in perceptual experience as the consciousness of normativity in the association of one's representations. This leads to a reading of Kant which is conceptualist, but in a way which accommodates considerations favoring nonconceptualism, in particular the primitive character of perceptual experience relative to thought and judgment.

Kant, the Philosophy of Mind, and Twentieth-Century Analytic Philosophy

“…8 Considerations which have been raised in support of the claim that intuitions are constitutively independent of the understanding include Kant's insistence on the irreducibility of sensibility and the understanding; his account of animal perceptual consciousness; his seeming acknowledgement of the possibility of intuitions offering objects to 5 The most famous discussion of these issues is in (Evans 1980, Strawson 1959. 6 See (Allais 2009, Hanna 2005 for statements of nonconceptualism and (Ginsborg 2008, Griffith 2012) for conceptualist replies. 7 See (Grüne 2009, McLear 2014, 2015, Tolley 2013.…”

The Non-Conceptuality of the Content of Intuitions: A New Approach

“…Ginsborg 2008: 68-9, Griffith 2010. In particular, it is hard to see how this sort of approach will ever be able to square with Kant's explicit claim (cited above) that 'all combination' is an act of understanding.…”

The ‘I Think’ Must Be Able To Accompany All My Representations

“…For the counter position, conceptualism, cf. Ginsborg (2008). See also International Journal of Philosophical Studies 19/3 (2011): Special Issue "Kant and Nonconceptual Content".…”