KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL FUNCTIONALISM

Author(s): CHONG-FUK LAU

Source: The Review of Metaphysics , DECEMBER 2014, Vol. 68, No. 2 (DECEMBER 2014),
pp. 371-394
Published by: Philosophy Education Society Inc.

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 KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL FUNCTIONALISM

CHONG-FUK LAU

It IS NO LONGER A NOVELTY TO VIEW KANT as a func

about the mind or self. Wilfrid Sellars may have been the fir
this line of interpretation onto the agenda,1 and a number o
including Andrew Brook, Patricia Kitcher, Ralf Meerbote, Thomas
Powell, and Jay Rosenberg have further explored different functionalist
interpretations of Kant.2 These interpreters credit Kant with original
insights into the nature of self-consciousness, mental representation,
and human cognition, but they tend to uncouple Kant's psychology from
his epistemology and metaphysics. Brook, for example, considers
Kant's epistemology "merely a cultural artefact,"3 which belongs to what
is dead in Kant, while maintaining that what is still living is his analysis
of the cognitive mind.4 Kitcher concedes that Kant's transcendental
psychology, being incompatible with the ideality of time, does not fit
well into the metaphysics of transcendental idealism. '
Separating Kant's epistemology and metaphysics from his
psychology has a long tradition, which can be traced back to neo

Correspondence to: Chuong-Fuk Lau, Department of Philosophy, The

Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, N.T., Hong Kong.
1 Wilfrid Sellars, Essays in Philosophy and Its History (Dordrecht:
Reidel, 1974), 62-90.
2 Andrew Brook, Kant and the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994); Andrew Brook, "Kant and Cognitive Science," in The Prehistory
of Cognitive Science, ed. Andrew Brook (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2007), 117-36; Patricia Kitcher, "Kant's Real Self," in Self and
Nature in Kant's Philosophy, ed. Allen W. Wood (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1984), 113-47; Patricia Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental
Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); Ralf Meerbote, "Kant's
Functionalism," in Historical Foundations of Cognitive Science, ed. J.-C.
Smith (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1989), 161-87; Thomas Powell, Kant's Theory of Self
Consciousness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); Jay Rosenberg, The Thinking
Self (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986).
1 Brook, Kant and the Mind, 1.
4 Ibid., 11.
' Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology, 140-41.

The Review of Metaphysics 68 (December 2014): 371-94. Copyright © 2014 by The Review of
Metaphysics.

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372 CHONG-FUK LAU

Kantianism,6 but this antipsychological interpretation has become par

ticularly influential since Peter Strawson called for an abandonment of
"the imaginary subject of transcendental psychology" in favor of "the
strictly analytical argument" for the necessary structure of objective
experience.' By contrast, functionalist interpretations attempt to revive
the "subjective" side of Kant's Critique, at the cost of surrendering
certain central tenets of transcendental idealism. Yet, I think both
Strawson and the functionalist interpreters fail to do justice to Kant's
strategy to reveal the necessary structure of cognition and reality by
analyzing the faculty of cognition (Erkenntnisvermogen). The way that
Kant characterizes cognitive faculties such as sensibility,
understanding, and apperception does give prima, facie evidence for a
functionalist interpretation. The problem is how a functionalist
interpretation can be brought into line with Kant's overall position of
transcendental idealism. In this paper I will develop an interpretation
called transcendental functionalism, which explains Kant's way to
account for the objective structure of reality based on a theory of
necessary cognitive functions.
While ordinary functionalism of the mind describes mental states
in terms of their functional roles, transcendental functionalism
determines what functions the mind has to realize if it is to be capable
of objective cognition. It is not directly about the human cognitive
system, neither at the phenomenal nor the noumenal level, but about an
abstract functional structure that Kant refers to as the transcendental
subject. Accordingly, Kant's cognitive psychology does not aim directly
at factual knowledge of the human mind's workings, but rather, by
analyzing the concept and structure of objective cognition, to reveal the
cognitive functions that are necessary for all potential cognizers
including, but not limited to, human beings. It is a theory of rational
cognition as such, which at the same time accounts for the basic

6 Lanier R. Anderson, "Neo-Kantianism and the Roots of Anti

Psychologism," British Journal for the History of Philosophy 13, no. 2 (2005):
287-323.
7 Peter F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense: An Essay of Kant's Critique of
Pure Reason (London: Methuen, 1966), 32. In a later article Strawson
relativized his criticism of Kant's psychology. See Strawson, "Sensibility,
Understanding, and the Doctrine of Synthesis: Comments on Henrich and
Guyer," in Kant's Transcendental Deductions: The Three Critiques and the
Opus Postumum, ed. Eckart Forster (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1989), 77.

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KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL FUNCTIONALISM 373

structure of reality that can be cognitively accessible to any finite

rational agents.
This paper begins with an analysis of Kant's faculty of cognition,
followed by an examination of the apparent conflicts of the ordinary
functionalist interpretations with Kant's transcendental idealism (I).
Kant's faculty of cognition represents a theoretical construct of the
transcendental subject, but if human beings can be qualified as rational
cognizers, they must have somehow realized the functional constraints
that define the transcendental subject (II). It is important for a coherent
interpretation of Kant to distinguish between two ways of viewing the
faculty of cognition: it can either be considered transcendentally as a
set of abstract functional constraints that are valid to all potential
cognizers, or empirically as a particular realization by a complicated
system of mental operations that take place in time (III). Only the
former belongs properly to Kant's project of grounding the necessary
structure of cognition and reality, although Kant did discuss empirical
cognitive functions in the Critique, especially in the subjective
deduction of categories in the A-edition. The transcendental
functionalist framework developed in this paper offers a better
explanation of Kant's distinction between the subjective and the
objective deductions of categories, as well as the reasons for Kant to
adopt another strategy in the B-deduction (IV).

Kant's Faculty of Cognition. Kant's faculty of cognition consists

of several distinctive powers: the basic faculties of sensibility,
understanding, and reason, with imagination and the power of judgment
as mediating powers among them.8 Kant defines each faculty by its

8 Kant follows Alexander Baumgarten to relegate sensibility and

imagination to the lower faculties of cognition (AA 7:140-43, 196; AA 9:36),
whereas under-standing, judgment, and reason are classified as higher faculties
(CPR, A130/B169; AA 20:201). References to Kant's Critique of Pure Reason
(iCPR) are to the pagination of the first (A) and/or the second edition (B).
References to other works of Kant are given with volume and page numbers of
the Akademie-Ausgabe (AA). Immanuel Kant, Gesammelte Schriften, ed.
Koniglich Preufiische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin: Walter de
Gruyter, 1900-). All English translations of Kant's works are from Immanuel

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374 CHONG-FUK LAU

specific functional role. Meerbote calls Kant's theory "a cognitive

psychology" or "a faculty psychology which speaks of capacities and
abilities of various sorts which are needed for empirical cognition."9
Consider the two constitutive faculties for empirical cognition:
sensibility refers to "the receptivity of our mind to receive
representations insofar as it is affected in some way" and understanding
to "the faculty for bringing forth representations itself, or the
spontaneity of cognition."10 Sensibility and understanding are recog
nized as two indispensable and mutually irreducible stems of human
cognition, because each plays a distinctive and indispensable function
in making cognition. Similarly, other cognitive faculties such as
imagination, the power of judgment, and reason are conceived in terms
of their respective functional role in cognition, and they are unified as a
cognitive system by functions such as synthesis and apperception.
These functional descriptions not only frame Kant's view of the
cognitive mind, but also determine the basic tenets of his epistemology
and metaphysics. However, problems arise immediately when one
attempts to locate the faculty of cognition in Kant's dichotomy of
noumena and phenomena.
Kant's epistemology grounds the objectivity of cognition at the cost
of the incognizability of things in themselves. Our cognitive forms
determine the structure of objects only insofar as they are appearances
whose reality depends, in a certain sense, on our faculty of cognition.
The problem, however, is whether the cognitive faculty itself belongs to
the phenomenal or the noumenal mind. Either way seems to lead to a
dead end. Let us begin with the noumenal interpretation. Kant's
Critique often gives the impression of describing a system of hidden
psychological structures and processes that construct appearance out
of the manifold given from things in themselves. Sensibility and
understanding could not be faculties of the phenomenal mind because
the latter is itself an appearance existing in the spatiotemporal world.
The faculty of cognition would thus refer to the functions and
operations of the noumenal self that synthesize the formless manifold
into the spatiotemporally ordered appearance.

Kant, The Cambridge Edition of the Works oflmmanuel Kant, ed. Paul Guyer
and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992-).
9 Meerbote, "Kant's Functionalism," 161.
10 CPR, A51/B75; A19/B33.

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KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL FUNCTIONALISM 375

The difficulty of this noumenal interpretation is apparent. Kant

rules out the possibility of cognizing things in themselves, and the
noumenal incognizability principle applies to the cognizer itself just as
much as to external objects. Even the cognizer can be cognized only as
an empirical object. Kant rejects the Cartesian presupposition that a
thinking subject has an immediate and indubitable cognitive access to
itself. Even though Kant's transcendental deduction grants a pure
representation "I think" to accompany all representations of a thinking
subject, he considers it fallacious to infer from the transcendental
apperception any rational knowledge about the thinker. In order to
make legitimate applications of categories such as substance and
causality, the sensible conditions of their applications must be fulfilled
because the categories would otherwise have no objective meaning. If
the noumenal interpretation maintains that things in themselves affect
the noumenal mind to produce appearances, this description already
involves an illegitimate employment of the category of causality. Causal
properties cannot be meaningfully employed to describe noumena and
their relations, and thus things in themselves cannot be said to exert any
causal influence on the sensibility. Even if Kant allows the application
of an unschematized category of causality beyond the empirical realm,
it would mean something different from the proper causal relation that
applies only to temporal events. It makes no sense to talk about
synthetic operations or cognitive processes of the noumenal mind, since
operations and processes are temporal-causal concepts that are
applicable only to phenomena.
If cognitive powers such as sensibility, understanding, and
synthesis were to describe functions and operations of the noumenal
mind, the Analytic would be describing nontemporal and noncausal
features of something that is shown to be theoretically incognizable by
the Analytic.11 Thus, Kitcher's verdict seems inevitable:

Some Kant interpreters defend the noumenal interpretation by

restricting Kant's noumenal incognizability thesis. Karl Ameriks, for example,
claims that "Kant does not mean to block all kinds of knowledge of things in
themselves, but only certain types." Karl Ameriks, "Kant and Short Arguments
to Humility," in Interpreting Kant's Critiques, ed. Karl Ameriks (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2003), 143. More specifically, Ameriks suggests that
"the restraints of the Paralogisms . . . may be meant primarily to restrict only
fairly determinate (i.e., positive and specific) claims about noumenal
individuals. Thus it still may be possible to allow some knowledge about mind,

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376 CHONG-FUK LAU

If the phenomenal-noumenal distinction is exclusive and exhaustive,

then transcendental psychology must be about the phenomenal self,
and so empirical, for the straightforward reason that no positive
doctrines can be noumenal. Although it provides only a highly
abstract, functional description of a thinking self, the description is
still positive.12

Proponents of the functionalist interpretation view the cognitive

functions and operations discussed in the Critique as features of the
phenomenal mind, which itself exists in the spatiotemporal world. They
tend to value Kant as an important forerunner of cognitive science and
attempt to rediscover Kant's insights into the structure and workings of
the human cognitive system. However, this phenomenal interpretation
surely has not been acceptable to Kant. It blurs fundamental differences
between his philosophical inquiry and empirical scientific studies of the
mind. If Kant's aim was to search for a priori conditions for the
possibility of objective cognition, an empirical study of the human mind
could not serve this aim, since it would at best discover factual
knowledge of the structure and workings of the human cognitive
system.1!
As the phenomenal mind is part of the empirical world, the
development of its characteristics is governed by the same set of natural
laws that determine the evolution of all organisms. Human beings are

simply in the sense of truths that apply to one's intrinsic individual being, as
long as this involves merely such indeterminate claims as that being is non
spatio-temporal. Similarly, it may be possible to allow some quite determinate
knowledge about mind in another sense, as long as this involves merely the
transcendental structures of our experience." Karl Ameriks, Kant's Theory of
Mind,: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2000), 8. However, if the transcendental structures of experience
represent knowledge of the noumenal mind, then we would have a good deal
of substantial knowledge about things in themselves. This seems hardly
reconcilable with Kant's repeated emphasis of the incognizability of things in
themselves.
12 Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology, 22.
13 Strawson criticizes the phenomenal interpretation as follows: "The
workings of the human perceptual mechanism, the ways in which our
experience is causally dependent on those workings, are matters for empirical,
or scientific, not philosophical, investigation. Kant was well aware of this; he
knew very well that such an empirical inquiry was of a quite different kind from
the investigation he proposed into the fundamental structure of ideas in terms
of which alone we can make intelligible to ourselves the idea of experience of
the world." Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, 15.

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KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL FUNCTIONALISM 377

equipped with a highly sophisticated cognitive apparatus that receives

and processes information in an intelligent way, but this intelligence
system is the result of a long process of biological evolution, in which
certain cognitive functions have been naturally selected for their
adaptive advantages. Human beings have evolved the five senses of
sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch, but this is merely a contingent
fact. We could well have developed other senses such as the ability to
perceive ultrasonic signals as bats do. Knowledge about the structure
and characteristics of the senses is unavoidably a posteriori and
contingent.
If cognitive functions such as sensibility and understanding merely
describe factual characteristics of human beings, then they would be
contingent features of a biological species. Our possibilities of
perceiving the world are certainly constrained, to a certain extent, by
the existing senses, but they are not, as sensibility and understanding,
supposed to be the a priori conditions that account for the possibility
of objective cognition. Kant was well aware of the difference.14 He
pointed out that we cannot account for the necessity of causal laws by
the fact that our understanding always synthesizes representations
according to causal schemas, even if these schemas turn out, as a matter
of fact, to be universal. Factual knowledge about the information
processing mechanism of the human mind cannot explain the
objectivity of human cognition and even less the structure of empirical
reality. Kant himself explains the crucial point as follows:
If... the categories were ... subjective predispositions for thinking,
implanted in us along with our existence by our author in such a way
that their use would agree exactly with the laws of nature along
which experience runs (a kind of preformation-system of pure
reason), then ... in such a case the categories would lack the
necessity that is essential to their concept. For, e.g., the concept of
cause, which asserts the necessity of a consequent under a
presupposed condition, would be false if it rested only on a

14 Kant states clearly that "[t]aste and colors are by no means necessary
conditions under which alone the objects can be objects of the senses for us.
They are only combined with the appearance as contingently added effects of
the particular organization. Hence they are not a priori representations, but are
grounded on sensation, and pleasant taste is even grounded on feeling (of
pleasure and displeasure) as an effect of the sensation." CPR, A28-29.

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378 CHONG-FUK LAU

subjective necessity, arbitrarily implanted in us, of combining certain

empirical representations according to such a rule of relation.10

In short, the cognitive structures that form an account for the possibility
of objective cognition cannot be contingent features of the phenomenal
mind.

A more fundamental problem is that the phenomenal interpretation

fails to acknowledge that the conditions of the possibility of appearance
cannot themselves be an appearance.11' Kant's conclusions cannot be
achieved by describing mental processes or operations of the
phenomenal mind, since all such processes or operations take place in
time. The formal conditions that account for empirical reality cannot
themselves be temporal processes nor anything determinable in time.
Time is the form that has to be accounted for and cannot be taken for

granted. It does not make sense to explain why things must be arranged
in a temporal order by describing processes in which the temporal order
has already been assumed. Simply put, a temporal entity or existence
cannot constitute a condition of temporality; or in Kant's words, "the
subject, in which the representation of time originally has its ground,
cannot thereby determine its own existence in time."17 Taking Kant's
faculty of cognition as a system of cognitive processes or operations
that are executed by the phenomenal mind, or the human brain, would
mistake Kant's project for "a certain physiology of the human
understanding (by the famous Locke).
As a functionalist interpreter who identifies Kant's psychology with
the phenomenal mind, Kitcher is aware of the conflict with Kant's
metaphysics, but she chose to bite the bullet, giving up Kant's
metaphysical position and the ideality of time in particular:

15 CPR, B167-68.
16 Henry E. Allison, "On Naturalizing Kant's Transcendental Psychology,"
in Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant's Theoretical and Practical
Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 65.
17 CPR, B422.
18 CPR, Aix. Strawson calls it the ad hominem objection: "The theory of
synthesis, like any essay in transcendental psychology, is exposed to the ad
hominem objection that we can claim no empirical knowledge of its truth; for
this would be to claim empirical knowledge of the occurrence of that which is
held to be the antecedent condition of empirical knowledge." Strawson, The
Bounds of Sense, 32.

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KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL FUNCTIONALISM 379

The various activities that are described in the Deduction's account

of how the mind influences (or might influence) what we know can
only be understood temporally. They are processes and so take time.
According to the Aesthetic, however, the mind's activities produce
time. So they cannot take place in time. . . . Under these
circumstances I see no choice but to reject the metaphysical claim.19

Kant aimed to account for the objectivity of cognition by grounding

the structure of empirical reality in the cognitive subject. If the form of
time could not be attributed a priori to the subject, then the
temporalized schemas and the synthetic principles of experience would
be devoid of the objectivity that Kant attempted to establish. The
ideality of time is so crucial to Kant that the whole Copernican
revolution would stand or fall with it. Rejecting the ideality of time
would be, as Kitcher admits, "a drastic move within Kant's system."20
Functionalist interpreters accept the phenomenal interpretation in
order to revive important insights from Kant's psychology, but they do
so at the cost of abandoning central tenets of Kant's epistemology and
metaphysics. Yet, this cost, as I will show, is not necessary.

II

The Transcendental Subject and Its Empirical Realizations. Kant

has a systematic picture of the human mind, which is divided into the
faculties of cognition, desire, and the feelings of pleasure and
displeasure according to their different functions. These three basic
faculties correspond roughly to the themes of the First, Second, and
Third Critiques respectively, with a comprehensive discussion of the
human mind being presented in the Anthropology from a Pragmatic
Point of View. Even if the forms of cognition and reality depend on the
structure of the human mind, their dependence is only restricted to part
of the mental powers. There is no necessity that the human mind must
consist of exactly these three basic faculties, and the possibility of
cognition does not presuppose the tripartite faculty either.21 Even

Kitcher, Kant 's Transcendental Psychology, 140-41.

20 Ibid., 141.
21 For example, damage of the prefrontal cortex of the human brain can
lead to the loss of emotional responses without substantial impairment of
cognitive powers. See Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error-: Emotion, Reason,
and the Human Brain (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1994), 34-79.

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380 CHONG-FUK LAU

within the cognitive powers there are many human features, such as the
five senses, that are irrelevant to the conditions of the possibility of
objective cognition. If sensibility and understanding are two indispens
able roots of cognition, they must be necessary in a relevant sense. The
five senses belong to factual but contingent features of the human
cognitive system, while the faculties of sensibility, understanding, and
reason cannot be mere factual characteristics if they are the very
conditions that not only make objective cognition possible but even
confer objectivity to empirical reality. The former types of cognitive
functions describe features of the human being as a biological species
and thus belong to the empirical psychology that is discussed by Kant
in the Anthropology, whereas the latter constitutes a peculiar Kantian
discipline in the first Critique that can be called transcendental
cognitive psychology.
While empirical psychology describes factual characteristics of the
human mind as a phenomenal being in the spatiotemporal reality,
transcendental cognitive psychology does not refer to any concrete
entity, neither the phenomenal nor, if any, the noumenal mind, but to an
abstract entity which represents a logical or conceptual unity of the
functional requirements for anything that can be qualified as a cognizer.
Kant refers to it as the "I, or He, or It (the thing), which thinks" or "a
transcendental subject of thoughts = x."22 The transcendental subject,
as I have argued in another paper,23 is not anything to which the category
of existence can be applied, as it is only a theoretical construct as the
hypothetical bearer of the faculty of cognition. Transcendental
cognitive psychology is thus a theory about an "imaginary subject" that
is equipped with all the necessary functions for objective cognition. Yet,
if there is anything in the world that is capable of cognition, it must be
a particular realization of the transcendental subject. Analyses of
cognitive faculties such as sensibility and understanding are not
straightforward descriptions of the human mind, but rather descriptions
of the functional constraints that apply to all potential cognizers,
including, but not limited to, humans. Robert Hanna is right in saying
that "Kant's transcendental psychology is a non-naturalistic a priori

22 CPR, A346/B404.
23 Chong-Fuk Lau, "Kant's Epistemological Reorientation of Ontology,"
Kant Yearbook 2 (2010): 134-38.

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KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL FUNCTIONALISM 381

theory of any actual or possible mind possessing a unified system of

innate cognitive capacities just like ours—whether that creature
happens to be biologically human or not."24
In criticizing the psychological interpretation of Kant's
transcendental deduction, Paul Guyer makes a similar point: "Kant's
premise is not a psychological claim but a basic constraint on any
system for synthesizing data that are only given over time."25 The
constraints are not general facts about human psychology but
conceptual truths or functional requirements for any potential cognizer,
including, as Guyer suggests, even computers or forms of artificial
intelligence.26 Although Kant often addresses philosophical problems
from a human perspective, claiming that all basic philosophical
questions relate to the question "what is man?",27 his epistemology and
metaphysics cannot be understood as anthropological. Kant's faculty of
cognition represents an abstract model of cognitive functions that are
necessary for any cognizer. It can be compared to the description of a
Turing machine, which is an abstract device to represent mechanical
procedures or algorithms. The Turing machine does not refer to
anything existent in the real world, although it is presented as a physical
device that manipulates symbols on a strip of tape according to a table
of rules. It is only a theoretical construct, but every concrete computer
can be viewed as a particular realization of it. Similarly, Kant's
transcendental cognitive psychology specifies the necessary functional
constraints for all potential cognizers, of which the human cognitive
system is just a particular realization. If there are Martian scientists,
they must somehow, in their own way, have materialized the same set
of functions.

Strawson was not mistaken in calling Kant's transcendental

psychology an "imaginary subject," but he failed to recognize the crucial
importance of this theoretical construct to Kant's epistemology and
metaphysics. If the functional requirement of the transcendental sub
ject is valid to all potential cognizers, then the required functions are not

24 Robert Hanna, Kant and the Foundations of Analytic Philosophy

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 35-36.
25 Paul Guyer, "Psychology and the Transcendental Deduction," in Kant's
Transcendental Deductions: The Three Critiques and the Opus Postumum,
ed. Eckart Forster (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 65.
26 Ibid.
27 AA 9:25.

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382 CHONG-FUK LAU

contingent human features but necessary conditions of the possibility

of cognition. They are necessary in the sense that if any creature is
qualified as a cognizer, it must have adequately realized them. It is
possible that the world has never produced any cognizer at all. This can
be simply because no creature has ever evolved a cognitive apparatus
that fulfills the necessary functional requirements, although the world
could have been cognizable if any creature had developed an adequate
cognitive apparatus. However, the failure to produce cognitive agents
could lie more fundamentally in the constitution of the world itself. If
the world were organized in such a way that the spatiotemporal and
categorial forms of cognition could never find appropriate applications,
then Kant would refer to this as the case in which objects did not
conform to our cognition.28
There is no metaphysical necessity that the world must be
organized in a way that matches with the forms described by the
transcendental cognitive psychology. The world is not necessarily
cognizable, but Kant's Copernican revolution amounts to showing that
necessarily, if the world is cognizable, then it must conform to the
transcendental cognitive functions. It is, as Guyer points out, a
conditional, relative, or hypothetical necessity instead of an
unconditional and absolute one."' Kant does not start from nowhere;
instead he takes certain basic features of cognition for granted and
searches for the necessary conditions of their possibility. The project
of transcendental cognitive psychology is to determine the necessary
functions that make cognition possible. If human beings turn out to be
qualified cognizers, this implies not only that the human cognitive
system has sufficiently realized the required functions, but also that the
empirical world in which human beings live is in fact organized in such
a way that the spatiotemporal and categorial forms of our cognition can
legitimately be applied to objects. Kant's psychology is thus essentially
connected with his epistemology and metaphysics.
However, it is to be noted that the cognitive powers discussed in
the Critique can mean two different things. In the first place, they refer
to the necessary cognitive functions that are ascribed to the
transcendental subject and account for the forms of cognition and

;8 CPR, Bxvi.
29 Paul Guyer, Kant and the Claim of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), 54-57; 121-24.

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KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL FUNCTIONALISM 383

reality, but they can also describe the particular realizations of

functional constraints in human beings. In Kant's terms, they can be
considered either transcendentally or empirically. This twofold
perspective is explained by Kant most clearly in the following passage
in reference to the three basic cognitive powers:
The possibility of an experience in general and cognition of its
objects rest on three subjective sources of cognition: sense,
imagination, and apperception-, each of these can be considered
empirically, namely in application to given appearances, but they are
also elements or foundations a priori that make this empirical use
itself possible. Sense represents the appearances empirically in
perception, the imagination in association (and reproduction), and
apperception in the empirical consciousness of the identity of these
reproductive representations with the appearances through which
they were given, hence in recognition.'10

Here Kant uses the concepts of sense and apperception instead of

sensibility and understanding, but let us set aside the terminological
issue. What is important is Kant's distinction between two ways to
consider the three basic cognitive powers. Sense/sensibility, imagi
nation, and apperception/understanding can be considered, on the one
hand, transcendentally as a priori conditions of cognition and, on the
other hand, empirically in application to given appearances.
The empirical and transcendental aspects of a cognitive power
share the same functional characteristics. Kant calls a cognitive power
empirical when it is considered "in application to given appearances,"
that is, when it is no longer an abstract function but a real mental
process of the phenomenal mind that processes information in a
specific way. The transcendental functions serve as a foundation for
their empirical counterparts, in such a way that
pure intuition... grounds the totality of perception a priori-, the pure
synthesis of the imagination grounds association a priori-, and pure
apperception, i.e., the thoroughgoing identity of oneself in all
possible representations, grounds empirical consciousness a
priori.31

What Kant calls the a priori grounding relation is, in my

transcendental-functionalist interpretation, the concrete realization of a
transcendental cognitive power by its empirical counterpart. While a

30 CPR, A115; compare A94.

31 CPR, A115-16.

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384 CHONG-FUK LAU

transcendental cognitive power stipulates abstract conceptual

requirements, its empirical counterpart realizes the functional
constraints in appearances within the spatiotemporal and causal
framework of empirical reality.

Ill

Transcendental versus Empirical Cognitive Psychology. Failing

to distinguish transcendental cognitive functions from their empirical
realizations, functionalist interpreters such as Kitcher mistake what is
described in the Critique for the temporal-causal processes performed
by the phenomenal mind—a mistake that leads them to reject Kant's
theory of the ideality of time. However, the fact that Kant's transcen
dental cognitive functions cannot be analyzed in temporal-causal terms
has also been brought up as a challenge to functionalist interpretations
of Kant. As far as transcendental cognitive functions are concerned,
Matt McCormick is right in saying that "[f]or Kant, our account of the
processes of mind is not and cannot be a causal account of the
relationships between mental states since causal ordering of events is a
result of cognitive processing."32 McCormick argues that Kant cannot
be a functionalist because functionalism is built upon what Kant aims
to explain, as it "presupposes a causal mechanism of some sort and
seeks out the exact arrangement of causally related components."13 It
is true that many forms of functionalism in the contemporary
philosophy of mind define mental states in virtue of their causal
relationships, but this is not an essential feature of functionalism.
Functionalism is not bound to define mental states in causal terms; the
input-output relationships can be characterized abstractly, for example,
in terms of machine tables.34 The fact that Kant's faculty of cognition

32 Matt McCormick, "Questions about Functionalism in Kant's Philosophy

of Mind: Lessons for Cognitive Science," Journal of Experimental and
Theoretical Artificial Intelligence 15, no. 2 (2003): 256.
33 Ibid, 264.
34 Machine-state functionalism appeals extensively to the model of Turing
machine as a hypothetical device, with which I also compared Kant's faculty of
cognition. See Hilary Putnam, "The Nature of Mental States," in Mind,
Language, and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 429
40.

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KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL FACTIONALISM 385

cannot be defined in causal terms does not speak against a functionalist

interpretation of Kant; it rather indicates that Kant's functionalism is of
a peculiar sort.
Certainly, for Kant, the cognitive functions that account for the
objectivity of temporal-causal relations cannot themselves be defined in
proper causal terms; instead, they must be defined by abstract logical
concepts. Kant does allow a nonempirical, preschematized use of the
concept of causality, which is the pure category of causality signifying
a logical relation between ground and grounded.35 Admittedly, this use
of the concept of causality sometimes creates the wrong impression that
Kant conceived the necessary cognitive functions as temporal processes
or causal operations, but a careful distinction between transcendental
and empirical cognitive psychology can help clear up the confusion.
The difference between transcendental and empirical cognitive
powers can be illustrated by Kant's idea of the schematism of
categories. Pure categories are fundamental concepts of understanding
which determine the basic forms of thought and do not involve the
temporal content of sensibility, but in order to become applicable to
empirical objects, categories must be transformed into temporal
schemas. The purely logical content of a category is enriched with
temporal determination to make it homogeneous to sensible intuitions.
In the category of causality, for example, the logical relation between
conditions and conditioned is schematized to become applicable to
temporal relations between successive events as cause and effect. A
logical order becomes a rule-governed temporal order. Similarly,
cognitive faculties taken transcendentally are not temporal-causal
processes but purely conceptual determinations that describe the
functional constraints for all finite cognizers.
These functions can be realized by different cognizers in multiple
ways, but if time is a universal form of intuition, not restricted to the
human sensibility, then the different ways of realization must share the
form of temporality, fulfilling the functional requirements by specific
temporal processes and causal operations. Thus, the relation between
transcendental cognitive faculties and their direct empirical realizations
resembles the relation between pure categories and their respective
temporal schemas. Transcendental cognitive faculties such as intuition,
imagination, and apperception are formal-functional structures, while

35 AA 5:195.

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386 CHONG-FUK LAU

their empirical realizations in perception, association, and recognition

are cognitive mechanisms of the mind that process information in a
temporal-causal fashion. Detailed mechanisms of empirical realizations
could vary significantly across different species of cognizers, but the
basic structures in any empirical cognizer are determined by their
transcendental grounds. 511
Take sensibility and understanding as examples. They are two
independent and indispensable faculties of cognition because cognition
depends on both the functions of referring to objects and applying
concepts to them. Kant defines the function of intuition as the capacity
to "relate to objects."37 Taken transcendentally, it does not refer to any
particular causal process of the mind through which objects are
perceived, but merely a logical relation that stands between a mind and
its objects. The Aesthetics argues that the possibility of relating to
objects has to rely on the spatiotemporal forms of intuition. This
amounts to saying that relating to any particular object means, in its
most fundamental way, the possibility of identifying or locating it within
a spatiotemporal framework. This logical relation must be realized by
causal mechanisms through which the phenomenal mind can become
related to the object by being affected by it. The empirical realization
of intuition involves psychological processes that Kant characterizes as
sensation: "The effect of an object on the capacity for representation,
insofar as we are affected by it, is sensation. That intuition which is

36 In explaining his machine-state functionalism, Hilary Putnam draws a

similar distinction between "two possible descriptions of the behavior of a
Turing machine—the engineer's structural blueprint and the logician's
'machine table.'" Putnam, "Minds and Machines," in Mind, Language, and
Reality, 372. The latter refers to the Turing machine as an abstract device and
the former to its physical realization. The twofold distinction also applies to
human psychology: "The 'behavioristic' approach . . . aims at eventually
providing a complete physicalistic description of human behavior, in terms
which link up with chemistry and physics. This corresponds to the engineer's
or physicist's description of a physically realized Turing machine. But it would
also be possible to seek a more abstract description of human mental
processes, in terms of 'mental states' (physical realization, if any, unspecified)
and 'impressions' (these play the role of symbols on the machine's tapes)—a
description which would specify the laws controlling the order in which the
states succeeded one another, and the relation to verbalization (or, at any rate,
verbalized thought)." Ibid., 372-73.
37 CPR, A19/B33.

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KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL FUNCTIONALISM 387

related to the object through sensation is called empirical,"38 Empirical

or sensible intuition is a causal process of affection, that is, "real
affection"39 that takes place between empirical objects and a phenom
enal mind, whereas intuition as such is an abstract relation that is not
described in causal terms.40
The above analysis also applies to the faculty of understanding,
which consists basically of the function of using concepts in judgments.
The Analytic may be seen principally as explaining the conditions for
concept application, thereby arguing for the universal validity of
categories. The most fundamental condition in this regard is what Kant
calls the transcendental, pure, and original apperception, that is, the
self-consciousness that produces "the representation I think, which
must be able to accompany all others and which in all consciousness is
one and the same."41 The transcendental apperception represents the
ultimate logical unity of a transcendental subject, to which all
representations of a cognizer must be ascribable. It is thus "the
thoroughgoing identity of oneself in all possible representations."42
However, this transcendental unity or identity is not anything that a
cognizer can be introspectively conscious of because it is neither given
in empirical intuition nor determinable in time. In the phenomenal
mind, there must be an empirical apperception which realizes the
logical requirement of unity through particular psychological processes.
As the schematized counterpart of a logical unity, empirical apper
ception is nothing but an identity over time. The transcendental apper
ception of an abstract cognizer must be realized by concrete cognitive
mechanisms through which an empirical cognizer in spatiotemporal
reality can determine its own identity despite its changing internal states
over time. In this sense, the logical unity is "schematized" into an
empirical identity over time.43

38 CPR, A19-20/B34.
39 AA 15:165.
40 If affection is considered a proper causal process, then it can be about
only the relation from empirical objects to an empirical perceptive mind, but
not between things in themselves and sensibility.
41 CPR, B132.
*CPR, A116.
43 Interesting is Kant's idea that the identity of an empirical cognizer or a
phenomenal self over time cannot be sustained by a single, thoroughgoing
identical representation because what "is customarily called inner sense or

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388 CHONG-FUK LAU

The empirical identity that belongs to a thinker exists in

spatiotemporal reality, while the transcendental or logical unity is only
an abstract condition for every potential thinker. The transcendental
apperception "I think" is not a factual description of my thinking activity
but merely a "logical function,"44 which serves as a unifying condition
for all representations that can be attributed to a thinking subject. In
other words, the pure "I think" describes neither the fact that I am
thinking, nor even anything about me. I can certainly use the statement
"I think" to describe the fact that I am now thinking. However, as Kant
explains, "the proposition 'I think,' insofar as it says only that I exist
thinking, is not a merely logical function, but rather determines the
subject (which is then at the same time an object) in regard to existence,
and this cannot take place without inner sense."45 There are two
different senses in which the phrase "I think" can be used. Kant
considers ordinary usages of the proposition "I think," including the
Cartesian cogito, as an empirical statement that describes the mental
state of an existing "I," but in Kant's transcendental cognitive
psychology, the "I think" is taken only problematically.46 Taking the "I
think" problematically means engaging in the analysis of the abstract
structure of a hypothetical entity. Although this imaginary
transcendental subject does not exist anywhere, it constitutes the
condition that accounts for the structure of empirical existence.4'

empirical apperception" is, according to Kant, "forever variable; it can provide

no standing or abiding self in this stream of inner appearances." CPR, A106
07.
44 CPR, BUS; B428.
45 CPR, B429.
46 CPR, A 347-48/B 405-06.
47 Kant's concept of transcendental subject is similar to Wittgenstein's
notion of metaphysical subject in the Tractatus: "there really is a sense in
which philosophy can talk about the self in a non-psychological way. . . . The
philo-sophical self is not the human being, not the human body, or the human
soul, with which psychology deals, but rather the metaphysical subject, the
limit of the world—not a part of it." Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico
Philosophicus, trans. David F. Pears and Brian F. McGuinness (London:
Routledge, 2001), §5.641, p. 70.

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KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL FUNCTIONALISM 389

IV

Subjective versus Objective Deduction. A significant difficulty in

understanding Kant's Critique is that the transcendental and empirical
aspects of cognitive functions are not always clearly separated, and the
failure to draw a consistent distinction has led to confusions, even by
Kant himself. Kant was not always consistent in distinguishing
transcendental from empirical cognitive functions. The problem is most
obvious in Kant's attempt to prove the objective validity of categories.
Kant almost completely rewrote the chapter on the transcendental
deduction of categories in the B-edition. He was certainly unsatisfied
with the A-deduction in certain aspects, for otherwise he would not have
troubled himself with a new version. Nevertheless, even in the A
edition, Kant also expressed reservations about the deduction. In the A
Preface, Kant draws a distinction between objective and subjective
deductions, a distinction which was dropped in the B-edition. This
distinction has caused considerable controversy among Kant scholars,
and the transcendental-functionalist framework outlined above can
offer a better explanation of Kant's distinction as well as the reason for
a fundamental revision in the B-deduction. Let us start with Kant's
remark on the deduction in the A-preface:
This inquiry [the deduction], which goes rather deep, has two sides.
One side refers to the objects of the pure understanding, and is
supposed to demonstrate and make comprehensible the objective
validity of its concepts a priori; thus it belongs essentially to my
ends. The other side deals with the pure understanding itself,
concerning its possibility and the powers of cognition on which it
itself rests; thus it considers it in a subjective relation, and although
this exposition is of great importance in respect of my chief end, it
does not belong essentially to it In view of this I must remind the
reader in advance that even in case my subjective deduction does not
produce the complete conviction that I expect, the objective
deduction that is my primary concern would come into its full
strength.48

Kant has not stated explicitly which parts of the deduction form the
subjective and objective sides respectively, but Kant scholars generally
agree in identifying the subjective deduction with the second section of

48 CPR, Axvi-xvii.

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390 CHONG-FUK LAU

the A-deduction49 and the objective deduction with the third section.50
The subjective deduction is mainly about the doctrine of threefold
synthesis.51 The fact that Kant discards a detailed analysis of the
threefold synthesis in the B-deduction is consistent with the
reservations he expressed in the A-preface. 2 However, it has been
widely debated as to why Kant considers the subjective deduction
inessential to his chief end and how the subjective deduction differs
from and is related to the objective one.
Kant values the objective over the subjective deduction because the
former deals with the objects of cognition, aiming to establish the
objective validity of categories, whereas the latter investigates the
subjective sources of cognition. Brook summarizes the difference as
follows:

Since the objective deduction is about the conditions of

representations having objects, a better name for it might have been,
"deduction of the object". Similarly, a better name for the subjective
deduction might have been "the deduction of the subject" or "the
deduction of the subject's nature."53

Accordingly, the objective and the subjective deductions would

represent two quite different types of inquiry: the former that deals with
objects is an analytic, epistemological project, while the latter that deals
with the subject's nature is psychological or generative in character.
The subjective deduction can offer us insights into the construction of
the human mind, but it may not help explain the necessary conditions
of objective cognition. This interpretation is shared by many Kant
scholars including Strawson and Kitcher,54 although, as mentioned
above, Strawson sees Kant's major contribution in the analytic project,

49 CPR, A95-114.
50 CPR, A115-30.
51 CPR, A97.
52 Nathan Bauer recently proposed an alternative reading, identifying the
subjective deduction with the third section of the A-deduction and the objective
with the second section. Nathan Bauer, "Kant's Subjective Deduction," British
Journal for the History of Philosophy 18, no. 3 (2010): 433-60. However,
Kant's abandonment of the theory of threefold synthesis in the B-deduction
speaks strongly against his interpretation.
53 Brook, Kant and the Mind, 106.
54 Strawson, The Bounds of Sense, 31-32; Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental
Psychology, 65.

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KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL FUNCTIONALISM 391

whereas the functionalist inteipreters tend to emphasize Kant's insights

into human psychology.
This standard interpretation is problematic for a number of
reasons. Above all, it does not do justice to Kant's general strategy to
account for the objectivity of cognition. The basic idea of Kant's
Copernican revolution consists in the novel attempt to ground the
necessary forms of objective cognition on conditions that are ascribed
to the cognitive subject. The major task of the deduction of categories
is to show "how subjective conditions of thinking should have objective
validity, i.e., yield conditions of the possibility of all cognition of
objects."55 The deduction could never be successful without dealing
with "the pure understanding itself, concerning its possibility and the
powers of cognition,"56 which is supposed to belong to the subjective
deduction. Although a detailed discussion of the threefold synthesis is
discarded in the B-deduction, the doctrine itself is still maintained in the
B-edition.57 In fact, Kant's analysis of the subject's nature is not confined
to the subjective deduction; even the objective sides of the A-deduction
and the B-deduction also revolve around the subjective faculties of
sensibility, imagination, and understanding as well as the activities of
synthesis, judgment, and apperception. The deduction is, in a sense,
unavoidably psychological. 8 The difference between objective and sub
jective deductions cannot, as Brook formulated, be reduced to a
difference between deductions of the object or the subject. It must lie,
rather, in their different ways to deal with the subjective conditions of
objective cognition.
According to Norman Kemp Smith, the objective and the subjective
deductions focus on different aspects of experience in the following
ways:

In the subjective deduction experience is chiefly viewed as a

temporal process in which the given falls apart into successive
events, which, in and by themselves, are incapable of constituting a
unified consciousness. The fundamental characteristic of human
experience, from this point of view, is that it is serial in character.
Though it is an apprehension of time, it is itself also a process in time.
In the objective deduction, on the other hand, the time element is

55 CPR, A89-90/B122.
56 CPR, Axvi.
CPR, B104.
s Kitcher, Kant's Transcendental Psychology, 65.

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392 CHONG-FUK LAU

much less prominent. Awareness of objects is the subject-matter to

which analysis is chiefly devoted. '9

For Kemp Smith, the distinctive feature of the subjective deduction

is temporality in a double respect: it accounts for our consciousness of
time by analyzing mental processes that are themselves temporal in
character. The objective deduction, by contrast, addresses our con
sciousness of objects. Yet Kemp Smith suggests that not only is the
subjective deduction, despite Kant's reservation, essential to the
transcendental project, but the consciousness of time is even more
fundamental and indubitable than the consciousness of objects.6" Kemp
Smith thus considers the A-deduction superior to the B-deduction and
rejects the neo-Kantian (and thus the Strawsonian) attempt to separate
Kant's epistemology from all psychological considerations.61
Kemp Smith correctly identifies the key characteristic of the
subjective deduction, but he fails to explain the complex situation, that
is, why Kant on the one hand is convinced of his theory of the threefold
synthesis, but on the other hand concedes that it does not belong
essentially to his chief end. The framework of transcendental
functionalism offers a more reasonable explanation: Kant had to discard
the subjective deduction in the B-edition, not because it deals with the
cognitive system of the subject, but rather because it treats the cognitive
system as a series of temporal operations. Although both the objective
and the B-deductions also deal with the subject's faculty of cognition,
they treat it as a formal-functional structure instead of a series of
temporal processes. As explained above, describing temporal pro
cesses cannot account for the temporal character of empirical
consciousness. Surely, every individual cognizer finally realizes the
necessary cognitive functions by mental operations that take place in
time, but a story about the empirically realized functions does not
belong properly to the transcendental account of cognition. Now,
Kant's ambivalence toward the subjective deduction is due to the subtle
characteristics of its content: Although mental or psychological
operations do not constitute conditions that account for the objectivity
of categories, a sufficiently abstract description of temporal processes

59 Norman Kemp Smith, A Commentary to Kant's "Critique of Pure

Reason" (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 239-40.
60 Ibid., 241.
61 Ibid., 242; xlix.

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KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL FUNCTIONALISM 393

is not just empirically or contingently true of human beings, but a priori

true of any potential cognizer, provided that time is a universal form of
intuition.

In the previous section, I compared the relation of transcendental

cognitive functions to their empirical counterparts with the relation of
pure categories to their temporal schemas. Yet, it has to be noted that
empirical realization can be analyzed at different levels of abstraction,
involving different degrees of empirical contingency. The faculty of
sensibility, for example, is realized in human beings through a complex
sensory system. Kant divides sensibility into inner and outer senses,
and the latter further into the vital and the five organic senses of touch,
hearing, sight, taste, and smell. The faculty of outer sense, taken
transcendentally, is the capacity to relate to external objects, and its
empirical realization, at its most abstract level, is a certain temporal
causal process through which external objects become related to an
empirical mind. The fact that the faculty of outer sense in humans is
realized by the five senses is a biological and contingent fact. Martian
scientists may have other senses than ours, but still they must have the
capability of the outer sense to access information from the external
world. While concrete empirical realizations of a transcendental
function may vary among different species of cognizers, a sufficiently
abstract description of these empirical realizations in temporal-causal
terms is true to all.

In the framework of transcendental functionalism, a more refined

distinction should be made among transcendental cognitive functions,
their direct empirical counterparts, and their concrete realizations in
individual cognizers. The threefold distinction can be illustrated by the
relations among pure categories, their temporal schemas, and specific
empirical concepts. For example, while the pure category of causality
is a conceptual relation between conditions and conditioned, its
temporal schema is a rule-governed succession of events. Both the pure
category and the temporal schema of causality are, according to Kant, a
priori and universally valid, but applications of the causal schema to
specific natural phenomena are not. Causal laws of specific natural
phenomena are discovered a posteriori and subject to empirical
verification. In the same way, specific psychological mechanisms that
realize a transcendental cognitive function can be studied only
empirically, even though a highly abstract description of the basic

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394 CHONG-FUK LAU

temporal-causal processes that realize the transcendental function can

be achieved by philosophical reflection.
Applying the above distinction to the problem of subjective
deduction, it is not difficult to see why Kant considers the subjective
deduction inessential to his project despite being convinced of its
validity. The theory of threefold synthesis in the subjective deduction
is an abstract description of the temporal realization of the necessary
functions of sensibility, imagination, and understanding. The deduction
is subjective in the sense that it describes psychological mechanisms in
temporal terms, although the description is given at such an abstract
level that its truth is not restricted to human psychology. Kant indeed
has good reasons to include the empirical, psychological story in the
Critique in order to illustrate how the abstract functional structure has
to play out at the phenomenal level, but at the same time he runs the
risk of misleading readers to a psychological or phenomenal
interpretation of the faculty of cognition.
Despite its a priori, and universal validity, describing psychological
mechanisms is not a way to explain the objective form of reality.
Therefore, the subjective deduction, even if it truly describes the basic
psychological process of all potential cognizers, can be rightly accused
of psychologism, if it is understood as a deduction of the universal
validity of categories. This possible misunderstanding finally led Kant
to discard a detailed discussion of the threefold synthesis in order to
avoid the charge of psychologism. The B-deduction is depsychologized,
replacing much of the discussion of the synthesis in terms of temporal
sequential processes by an analysis of the structure of combination. The
depsychologization consists in the detemporalization in the formulation
of the necessary cognitive functions and structures. By restricting the
analysis of the B-deduction to nontemporal, conceptual terms, Kant
focuses on what is really essential to his chief end, that is, the functions
that can account for the necessary structure of the cognizable reality.62

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

62 The work on this paper was supported by a grant from the Research
Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Project No.:
CUHK 446912/12H).

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