Kant on the Communicability of Empirical Knowledge--- VERY rough draft ---

Alexandra Newton

It is striking that, despite its indisputable pervasiveness in our cognitive activities, knowledge from testimony does not appear alongside empirical knowledge or experience as a kind of theoretical knowledge in the core sections of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The lacuna has led several contemporary philosophers to present Kant as a radical individualist who advocates the ‘epistemic autonomy’ of the epistemic agent in making up her own mind about what she should think, without relying on the authority or competence of others. This ‘individualist’ position is often contrasted with a ‘social’ epistemology that endorses mutual dependence and the loss of individual hegemony. Only if we relinquish some of our personal freedom, and allow ourselves to be constrained by what others tell us, will we achieve the higher freedom of those who have been initiated into a social practice of giving and asking for reasons. In this way we may come to view our role as individuals in these discursive practices as that of (more or less distinguished) members, and to reign in our arrogant desire to usurp the position of the whole.

In this paper I wish to argue that this narrative of the self-conceit of Kantian reason, and its inevitable fall, overlooks one of the most important lessons of Kant’s first Critique. For the narrative is predicated on the empiricist assumption that the subject of empirical judgment or knowledge is a singular individual, and that her acts of judging are her acts of judging only if they are brought about by her individual acts of making up her own mind. As I will argue here, the Kantian self-conscious subject of judgment must be universal, in the sense that any judgment that constitutes knowledge is conscious of

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itself as possibly shared by any other individual subject. Indeed, contrary to empiricism, Kant shows that experience itself would not be possible if it were not the exercise of a universally shared capacity for knowledge. Reason is not arrogant, although the individuals who embody it may be.

Once we introduce the idea of a universal subject of knowledge, a second myth about the Kantian subject begins to make its appearance, thus obscuring his universalist insight from another angle. For it may now seem that Kant adopts the rationalist position of thinking that the universal subject of knowledge is entirely indifferent to the empirical individuals in which it comes to be embodied. If this is so, our practices of communicating knowledge with one another will appear to be a dispensable aid to the exercises of a universal capacity for knowledge, rather than an essential milestone on its path of self-realization. But this overlooks the importance of experience in Kant’s account of discursive cognition. As I will argue here, by showing that our universal faculty of cognition can be actualized only through experience, Kant also shows that the universal subject non-accidentally develops through its embodiment in the individual to its realization in a community of individuals.

Kant thus does not need to discuss testimony explicitly in the first Critique, since the possibility of sharing knowledge is already the upshot of his anti-empiricist conception of knowledge, and the necessity of its actually coming to be shared by others is the upshot of his anti-rationalism.

1. Let us begin by assuming, with the empiricists, that the self of

which I am conscious in self-consciously judging ‘S is P’ is a singular, individual self distinct from those with whom I converse. There are two reasons why this assumption can seem to be obvious. If, following

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Hume, judgment or “assent” is understood to be “an immediate impression of the senses, or a repetition of that impression in the memory”, then the subject of the judgment must be a single individual (T 1.3.6, p. 61). For if judgment consists in sensible affection, the subject of judgment must be the individual thus affected. Judgment may also seem to be inseparable from the individual subject if it is taken to consist in a kind of choice or act of ‘making up one’s mind’. I can only make up my own mind about what I should think, based on my own epistemic deliberation about what is true; but this is not something I can do for you. Just as my free actions are mine only, since they are attached to my individual choices about what to do, my mental actions of judging are attached to my choices about what to think. In his logic lectures, Kant discusses these two ways in which judgment comes to be attached to the individual subject as resting on the influence either of ‘sensibility’ or of the ‘will’ on the understanding (the faculty of judgment).

The question I wish to focus on here is whether the assumption that the subject of judgment is the individual in either of these senses enables us to make sense of the possibility of communicating my judgment with others. This question may be heard in two registers: first, can the content of my judgment be accessible to you if the I that thinks this content is distinct from your I? And second, can you agree or disagree with my judgment if my I is distinct from yours?

In the following I will set aside the first question and assume that, in any act of communication, two subjects come to grasp the same thought content. My focus will instead be on the consequences of thinking that the subject of judgment is a single, unrepeatable individual. That is, in communication, how does it happen that you not only understand what I say, but also agree or disagree with my judgment about what is the case?

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Notice that an answer to the first question will not settle the second question. That is, the agreement in our judgments cannot consist in the mere identity of the content judged, just as disagreement cannot consist in mere negation in the content judged. For mere identity of content does not explain why your judgment supports mine, just as the difference in the contents of our judgments does not explain why your act of judging opposes mine, or cancels it out. That is, it cannot explain why your judgment may issue a demand on me to revise my judgment. The contents of judgments may be identical or different without the subjects who judge them ever coming into harmony or conflict with one another in conversation. To understand agreement and disagreement among subjects in conversation, then, we must focus on the act of judging or assertion.

Now, if the act of judging is understood as resting on sensibility or an act of choice, then it is conceivable that we each judge the same proposition to be true and yet disagree with one another. For instance, if judgment is understood as a kind of inclination towards taking a certain proposition to be true, it may so happen that I feel positively inclined towards a proposition in this way, but feel no inclination towards your inclination towards it. Hence, although I may defend myself, I am not inclined to support your judgment when you face challenges to it from a third party. Or again, although I deliberate about what I should think by considering what is true, I may choose to mislead you by telling you falsehoods. Thus, my judgment does not necessarily support your judgment, even when the contents of our judgments are the same.

But if agreement and disagreement in our judgments can come radically apart from the contents judged, the phenomenon of communication will appear to be mysterious. For if I cannot know whether your saying ‘yes’ to my judgment means ‘no’ towards its content, or whether your disagreement with my judgment is due to

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your aversion towards me rather than towards the content of my judgment, I will not be able to understand what you say as supporting or opposing what I judge. Hence, conversation with you will be impossible. The problem with individualist conceptions of judgment is that they leave it mysterious how knowledge of another’s judgments, and hence conversation, is possible: how can I know that you feel positively inclined towards a proposition, or have made up your mind about its truth? And how can I know that your inclinations are towards the truth at all?

Even assuming that such knowledge is possible, further problems arise from thinking that your judgment’s agreement with mine is a different reality from our knowledge of their agreement. For if agreement and disagreement were properties that our judgments could have independently of our consciousness of them as such, we could converse without realizing that we do. But this is absurd. We cannot come into agreement if we fail to understand ourselves as agreeing about what we judge. Of course, I may cause you to judge as I do through brainwashing, and without your noticing. But that is different from our agreeing with one another in a conversation. Likewise, when I induce you to suppress a judgment, there may be a sense in which I disagreed with you. But this is different from disagreement in conversation, which requires our joint understanding of a disharmony in our judgments. Without this common consciousness of an opposition, there would be no demand to resolve the dispute, and hence no real opposition.

We have been led into this predicament because we began with the assumption that judging rests on sensibility or an act of choice, which are accessible only to the individual who is affected or who chooses. It is certainly true that we sometimes hold something to be true merely because of the way we have been passively influenced or affected, or because of a choice we have made (as in wishful thinking).

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But if we judge correctly, we will judge from a consciousness of the truth of what we judge, and not from merely subjective causes. Assuming that all judgments purport to be correct or true, erroneous judgment must therefore rest on the illusion that merely subjective grounds – i.e. grounds that have their source in the “constitution of the subject” - are objective, or ground the truth of what is judged. Kant calls this illusion persuasion [Überredung] (KrV A820/B848). By contrast, judging that self-consciously rests on objective grounds, or that is conscious of its source not in subjective causes but in a capacity for objective cognition, is called conviction [Überzeugung].

If a judgment is conviction, its grounds are “objectively sufficient”, which is to say that it constitutes knowledge. And if a judgment is knowledge, then it will be in necessary agreement with all other judgments that constitute knowledge, and will exclude any judgment that opposes it. To be conscious of this agreement of a judgment with itself and with others in a whole of cognitions is to be self-conscious: we are conscious of what we necessarily think when we are conscious of what we know. But if the self thus constituted by the necessary unity of all my judgments were myself as distinct from your self, then this ‘necessity’ will be merely subjective. It would merely reflect how I must combine representations together, for instance, due to the ways in which I have been passively influenced to think. But it would not reflect how representations must be combined in order to constitute objective knowledge of a shared world. The self of self-conscious knowledge therefore must be one that can be shared by others: my judgment must agree not only with other judgments that I hold, but with the judgments of any other (possible) knowing subject. Self-consciousness of a judgment must, that is, consist in the consciousness that the judgment has of itself as necessarily agreeing and opposing other judgments, regardless of whether those judgments issue from you or me.

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Self-consciousness in judging that constitutes knowing thus is consciousness of myself not as an individual or singular ‘I’, but as a “consciousness in general” [Bewußtsein überhaupt] that can be shared by any thinker (B143). This of course does not mean that I may not also be conscious of myself as an individual subject in making a judgment, but I am not conscious of myself in this way merely through the exercise of a capacity for judgment.1 As an exercise of a capacity for knowledge, judgment is not the possession of an individual, but essentially belong to any rational subject capable of knowledge. A judgment that constitutes knowledge thus does not need to be supplemented by the desire to communicate it to others, or by an inclination to support their judgments, in order to enter relations of agreement and disagreement with the judgments of others. That is to say, knowledge has its own, inner power to sustain itself, to be sustained by the judgments of other knowing subjects, and to oppose error. Simply as knowledge, it essentially demands agreement from other knowers, and demands revision of judgments that oppose it. This is Kant’s point in the Prolegomena when he says that the “objective validity” of a judgment (i.e. its non-accidental truth or validity as knowledge) and its “necessary universal validity (for everyone) are […] interchangeable concepts” (P 4:298).

Only under the assumption that the subject of judgment is general in the above sense can we make sense of the possibility of agreement and opposition among the judgments of different subjects. For if we did not assume that these subjects share a common capacity for judgment, they would each operate as isolated communities, in accordance with their own laws and principles of organization. But there would be no common law that demands that one subject relinquish her judgment when challenged by another on objective

1 Kant marks this distinction by distinguishing between transcendental apperception and inner sense.

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grounds, and no law in accordance with which harmony could be established. In short, in order to communicate with others we must stand under common laws of the understanding, which is just to say that we must judge from a consciousness of a common capacity to judge.

We are now in a position to see how empiricism about the judging subject may have its source in a common error. Sometimes we think that another person has communicated their knowledge with us when in fact we have allowed ourselves to be persuaded by them on the grounds of their influence and prestige. And conversely, we sometimes think we are reasoning when in fact we are obstinately refusing to hear the voice of reason in others. When, for instance, I am persuaded by what you say, your taking something to be true causes my taking it to be true through my wish to believe what you say. The influence of the prestige and authority [Ansehen] of the speaker on my judgment is here mistaken for the power of insight or reason in her judgment. When this passive use of reason becomes habitual, and thus gives rise to “determining judgment”, it becomes prejudice (“the prejudice of the prestige of the person”). Similarly, one may fall under the illusion that one’s own judgments are true simply because they are one’s own. Here one mistakes a subjective propensity to self-love, an inclination to believe only “that which is the product of one’s own understanding”, for the capacity to judge on objective grounds (i.e. for a universally shared capacity for knowledge) (JL 9:80). This “prejudice based on self-love” is called “logical egoism” (ibid.), and is just as harmful as blind submission to the prestige of others. In both kinds of prejudice, the particular constitution of the individual (whether oneself or another) is confused with a universal capacity for reason, which is just to say that subjective grounds of judgment are confused with objective ones.

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Kant’s point is thus not, as some of his readers have maintained, that the claims of the logical egoist are merely in need of qualification. Although Kant denies that ‘a priori truths of reason’ can be learned from testimony, this does not mean that logical egoism is an appropriate position to adopt with respect to them (cf. Guyer 1997). Truths of reason cannot be learned from testimony not because they arise from self-love, but because they are already had by others prior to communication: they flow not from the individual, but from a universally shared capacity for cognition that is a necessary condition of the possibility of communication. Communication of these truths thus does not serve the purpose of teaching or learning, but of clarifying knowledge we already share. Kant denies that philosophy, which is concerned only with truths of reason, can be taught, but not that it can be communicated; we cannot learn philosophy from others, but we can certainly learn how to philosophize with them.

Hume, the most consistent of all empiricists, avoids the above error of confusing the individual subject of judgment with a universal faculty of cognition, and thus does not maintain that his individualist conception of judgment enables communication in our sense. Rather than admitting that the judgments of others can agree with or oppose my judgments, Hume maintains that they can merely provide me with evidence that I may or may not take up in my judgment, which may then oppose other judgments of mine. For instance, if I have repeatedly noticed that what you say is true, I may take your statement as evidence that a certain claim is true, and hence come to revise my previous judgment to the contrary. It is not your judgment, but rather an inclination in me, that opposes my previous judgment and demands a revision. Thus, testimony will consist not in a communication of knowledge through the internal demand of agreement that your judgment issues on me, but in the communication of thoughts that may or may not become knowledge in

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the hearer, depending on the ‘force’ that the evidence of the testifier’s statements have in the hearer’s assessment.

Hume’s failure to see how genuine communication is possible is due to his inability to see how judgment could have its source in a universal capacity for knowledge. From a Humean perspective your knowledge is added to mine only accidentally, not because my knowledge necessarily contains within itself the potentiality of its communication with you. A Humean may argue that knowledge grows as gossip does, i.e. not because of its inner character as knowledge, but because of the desires in those who share it (e.g. the desire to hear of the misfortune of others). But while it is certainly true that the communication of gossip is driven by such desires, it does not follow that there is not a tendency internal to knowledge as such, in abstraction from the influence that sensibility or desire has on judgment, towards its communication with other knowers.2

2.In the above section we emphasized that communication

presupposes consciousness of a common capacity for knowledge as shared by those who communicate. In accepting what you say, I must be conscious of your judgment as issuing from a universal capacity that I share with you. At the level of reflection in the self-consciousness of judgment, I do not distinguish between my and your thoughts, just as I am not conscious of the differences between this tree and that tree merely through the concept or general representation <tree>. There is no difference in this respect between agreement and opposition among my own judgments, and agreement

2 Thus, we should distinguish between this inner tendency towards subjective expansion through communication and the desire for sociability, which we doubtless also have – “Daß seinen Gemütszustand, selbst auch nur in Ansehung der Erkenntnisvermögen, mitteilen zu können, eine Lust bei sich führe, könnte man aus dem natürlichen Hange des Menschen zur Geselligkeit (empirisch und psychologisch) leichtlich dartun” (KU §9, 29).

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and opposition with your judgments: in both cases, the judgments either sustain one another or demand a resolution of conflict merely in virtue of being exercises of a common capacity for knowledge, and not because I or you desire its resolution. When we communicate, we speak with one voice, one ‘I’ of self-consciousness.

Since the I of self-conscious judgment is entirely general in this sense, it does not matter whether I know something from my own experience or from your testimony:

[W]e can just as well accept something on the testimony of others as on our own experience. For there is just as much that is deceptive in our experience as in the testimony of others. Our thinking, when we hold an experience to be true, is subject to many hazards. To be sure, the testimony that we accept from others is subject to just as many hazards as our own experience is subject to errors. But we can just as well have certainty through the testimony of others as through our own experience. (VL 24:896; cf. LB)

Testimony thus does not give us a kind of knowledge that is distinct from our own experience. The difference in the subjects of knowledge is irrelevant for the relations of agreement and disagreement that any judgment enters with other judgments in a whole of cognitions: whether you or I see a black swan, for instance, the empirical judgment that there are black swans must cancel out any judgment that all swans are white. Whereas the ‘groundedness’ of a judgment is an internal criterion of its truth, since it shows the judgment to be in necessary agreement with other judgments, the subjective universality or communicability of a judgment is a merely “external mark” of its truth (Logic…).3 For although it is not accidental that knowledge is communicated with others (as we have seen above), 3 “The touchstone of whether taking something to be true is conviction or mere persuasion is […] externally, the possibility of communicating it and finding it to be valid for the reason of every human being to take it to be true” (A820/ B848).

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whether or not it is shared by one or more subjects has no relevance for the question whether its internal agreement with other judgments in a whole of cognitions is necessary. The subjective universality of the judgment (i.e. its being shared by others) is thus external to the inner agreement of judgments, and hence to their character as knowledge. Much of our epistemic discourse can be carried out in foro interno.

This is not to deny that testimony is necessary for expanding our individual experience of the world. But the limits of individual experience that are extended by testimony are contingent. If I had been in a different place or time, or had access to machines for faster travel to distant places, I would have acquired knowledge from my own experience instead of from others. Reliance on testimony in any given case is therefore contingent. Moreover, there is an element of contingency in the subjective generality that knowledge acquires through testimony. As we have seen, the universality of the ‘I’ of self-conscious judgment is necessary and presupposed as internal to the subjects who communicate their knowledge with one another. But in addition to the universality of the capacity for judgment, there is also the question whether the empirical judgment that is actual in me is also actual in you and others. Unlike the self-consciousness of judgment in communication discussed above, consciousness of the completion of an act of communicating knowledge with others through testimony rests on factors external to the act: whether or not you learn from me will depend not only on our possession of a common faculty of cognition, but on whether you understand what I say in the concrete situation in which I say it, and are not inhibited from learning it through suspicions about my honesty. Whereas I cannot fail to share a faculty of cognition with you if I am in a position to communicate with you at all, I may fail to actually share my knowledge with you. Thus, unlike the universality of the capacity for

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knowledge, which is presupposed by the individuation of particular acts of the capacity, the subjective generality of an act of judging (its being shared by a plurality of subjects) presupposes the contingent actuality of that act in particular subjects.4

We should not conclude from these contingent features of knowledge from testimony that the universality of a capacity for knowledge is entirely indifferent to its embodiment in one or more empirical subjects. If the central anti-rationalist tenets of Kant’s critical philosophy are correct, then a universal capacity for knowledge cannot be actualized except under conditions in which an object is given to me in sensibility. But it is only the individual subject that can be affected by the object, and hence only through the individual that the universal capacity can be actualized. Whereas the capacity itself is an ‘analytic unity’, or an identical capacity in a manifold of representations, and hence is indifferent to the differences in the subjects in which it is actualized, the exercises of the capacity in experience bring difference into this identity: a plurality of (possible) subjects emerges due to the reliance of cognition on sensibility. But rather than leaving this plurality external to the universal subject of cognition, Kant has shown that any experience, insofar as it can be integrated into systematic cognition, has an internal tendency to be communicated with others. This inner generalizing tendency of judgment requires that the knowledge belonging to the individual be brought back to the unity of the universal subject through its communication with others. The three

4 One way to put this difference would be by saying that the subjective universality of the capacity is ‘strict’, since it rests only on an ‘analytic unity of apperception’, whereas the subjective generality of its acts is ‘relative’, since it rests on a plurality of acts. Whereas the former belongs to what Kant calls ‘transcendental unity of apperception’ or self-consciousness, the latter belongs to empirical apperception or inner sense. Kant expresses their relation by saying that empirical apperception presupposes transcendental apperception, or is derived from the latter under empirical conditions (…).

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stages of unity, plurality, and totality that cognition must traverse to attain inner or objective perfection thus also seem to apply to its essential development in the attainment of outer or subjective perfection, i.e. in harmonious discourse with others (B114). [???]

3. In a passing remark from his logic lectures, which Kant based

on G. F. Meier’s Excerpts from the Doctrine of Reason, Kant criticizes Meier’s failure to distinguish between ‘believing something’ and ‘believing someone’:

Our author relates belief merely to testimony. We distinguish, however, between believing something and believing someone. We can believe something without someone’s having said it to us. We can believe someone if we have accepted something on someone’s testimony (VL 24:893).

We are now in a position to understand what Kant means by suggesting that testimony involves believing not something or what someone says, but believing someone. First, a condition on believing a person, rather than merely what she says, is that the person reveals something of herself in what she says: she reveals that she takes what she says to be true. What she thus reveals about herself, however, is not something particular to her as an individual. It is instead a universal faculty for knowledge that I share with her, and that I must be conscious of sharing, in order to accept her statement as knowledge. Of course, I must also believe that she is honest in disclosing what she judges: the speaker must have “the will to assert the true, or to declare the experiences as they were” (BL 24: 244; cf. VL 898). But in acquiring knowledge from a speaker through testimony her honesty serves merely as a negative condition enabling access to herself, i.e. to her judgment. Sincerity thus does not

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characterize the (universal) person that I believe, but merely belongs to the conditions that give access to that person.

But as we have seen in the second section, in learning from you through testimony I do not believe a merely universal capacity for knowledge (reason), since that is a faculty I share with you even prior to communication. I believe reason in your person, which is to say I believe its embodiment in concreto, in relation to your experience of a spatio-temporal world. The reason I believe an individual person in acquiring knowledge from testimony thus relates not to sincerity or to the moral character of the person, but to his or her position in a spatio-temporal world of objects that we must share, and therefore must divide. I treat you as offering me knowledge from a particular perspective distinct from my own.

Kant does not deny that it is possible to believe what someone says merely from belief in her person as a moral being, or as a being that embodies practical reason. But such belief will not constitute knowledge of what she says. For instance, one may believe the stories of revealed religion as the word of God, in whom one believes as a holy will. But this does not mean that one believes these stories in letter; one’s belief does not amount to theoretical knowledge, and hence is not knowledge gained from the testimony of religious sources. One’s belief in the stories is rather self-consciously subjective, resting as it does merely on one’s belief in the virtue and holiness of the person who reveals them to us. Thus, one believes the stories in spirit, or as expressions of a holy will.5

5 Belief, Kant says, is not communicable (R 2489, 16:391-92). He cannot mean that one cannot induce another to share one’s belief. Rather, he means that belief, unlike knowledge, cannot be communicated in the sense of shared (‘geteilt’). Beliefs will always be distinct acts in you and me (See also A820-31, RR 2422-2504, Logic 9:65-73).

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