Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The contemporary relevance of Kant's work
- 2 Kant's theory of the subject
- 3 Kant's conception of awareness and self-awareness
- 4 Kant's theory of apperceptive self-awareness
- 5 The mind in the Critique of Pure Reason
- 6 The first-edition subjective deduction: the object of ‘one experience’
- 7 Kant's diagnosis of the Second Paralogism
- 8 The Third Paralogism: unity without identity over time
- 9 The second-edition subjective deduction: self-representing representations
- 10 Nature and awareness of the self
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index of passages cited
- General index
7 - Kant's diagnosis of the Second Paralogism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 The contemporary relevance of Kant's work
- 2 Kant's theory of the subject
- 3 Kant's conception of awareness and self-awareness
- 4 Kant's theory of apperceptive self-awareness
- 5 The mind in the Critique of Pure Reason
- 6 The first-edition subjective deduction: the object of ‘one experience’
- 7 Kant's diagnosis of the Second Paralogism
- 8 The Third Paralogism: unity without identity over time
- 9 The second-edition subjective deduction: self-representing representations
- 10 Nature and awareness of the self
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index of passages cited
- General index
Summary
Kant's chapter on the Paralogisms is a devastating attack on rationalism's theory of mind, the theory he called rational psychology (hereafter, RPsy), presumably after Wolff's Psychologia Rationalis. That theory has largely drifted off into the mists of history, unlamented (though remnants of it can still be found in such philosophers as Chisholm and Swinburne, as was noted in Chapter 5:3). Nevertheless, Kant's attack on it still has value. In the course of diagnosing the illusions behind RPsy, Kant gains major insights into three issues of great contemporary interest. We discussed two of them in Chapter 4: the nature of nonascriptive self-reference and its role in ASA. The third is how little we can infer about the mind's structural nature from its functions and awareness of itself. I will take the earlier discussions of the first two as read and focus on the third.
As many commentators have noted, Kant's thought has a strong functionalist strain (see Chapter 1:2–3). Nowhere does this show through more clearly than in his attack on the Paralogisms; even a function as central as TA turns out to tell us little about the mind's structure, not even about such basic features of structure as composition and mode of persistence. The fundamental tenet of functionalism is that function does not determine form. Kant's thinking adheres to this tenet throughout but nowhere more forcefully than in his attack on RPsy, one long argument that how the mind functions tells us virtually nothing about its structure, not even whether it is simple or complex.
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- Information
- Kant and the Mind , pp. 152 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994