Abstract:

In previous work, I’ve defended two claims: (1) Kant’s idealism is best understood as a form of phenomenalism according to which empirical objects are fully mind-dependent; they are “mere intentional objects” in the sense that their ontological status reduces to their being the content of representational states. (2) Kant’s theory of intentionality is not satisfyingly construed in terms of a causal (or “tracking”) theory nor in terms of the “acquaintance” relation defended by direct realists. This naturally raises a question: what sort of theory of intentionality could underwrite the metaphysical position described in (1), given that it’s not one of the theories described in (2)? In this presentation, I will offer a partial answer to this question, and explain why I think that Kant’s views on intentionality are best construed along internalist lines.

What do I mean by an “internalist” conception of intentionality? If questions of the form “what is the intentional object of this representation?” can be exhaustively answered by appeal only to facts about the mind and its representational states, then the account of intentionality is internalist. If that sort of question cannot be answered without appealing to facts about things that exist (“transcendentally”) outside the mind, then the account is externalist.

My primary textual evidence for the internalist reading comes from the Metaphysical Deduction, the A-Edition Transcendental Deduction, and the Second Analogy of Experience. In these passages, Kant insists that the “dignity” of “relation to an object” consists merely in “making the combination of representations necessary in a certain way” (A197/B242). In Kant’s telling, the object is something that we “posit.”

Kant unfortunately doesn’t say much to spell out what he means by “object-positing.” But I appeal to recent work by Michelle Montague (OUP 2016), whose radically internalist, “Brentanean” theory of intentionality provides, I claim, a good model for Kant’s primary conception of object-relatedness. This is especially true for those of us who take seriously Kant’s claims about the non-spatiotemporality of things in themselves, and who conclude that there is no hope for any substantive kind of intentional directedness to those things.

I conclude with a discussion of an objection that is often leveled against views like mine, viz., that the view I describe undermines Kant’s empirical realism, and destroys any meaningful sense in which the objects of experience are public. For if the object I represent is no more than the content of a private representation, then there is no sense in which you and I can represent the same object. Call this the publicity objection.

In reply, I first note that Kant himself never discussed publicity in the way that contemporary philosophers do, and so it’s not clear that the publicity of objects is something he would have cared about in the first place. However, I also show how my reading can get something that is just about as good as publicity. I develop this idea in terms of an analogy with multiple simultaneous renderings of video game environments in online games.