PART TWO

THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL UNDERPINNINGS

OF KANT'S SYSTEM

by Stephen Palmquist (stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk)

I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith. [Kt1:xxx]

Knowledge and Experience

There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience.... But ... it does not follow that it all arises out of experience. [Kt1:1]

1. The Fundamental Epistemological Distinction

Kant's Critical philosophy is notorious for its terminological ambiguity and apparent inconsistency. The interpretive confusion that often results is at least a contributing factor to the conclusion of many commentators, such as Strawson, that large chunks of Kant's System (e.g., his 'transcendental idealism') are 'unintelligible' and 'incoherent'.[1] Yet I believe, with Kant [Kt1: Axxi], that if his works are approached with 'the patience and impartiality of a judge' (and perhaps even with 'the benevolent assistance of a fellow-worker'), rather than with a set of analytical tools with which to dissect his every sentence, then almost all of his theories can be understood in surprisingly simple and consistent terms. Accordingly, I shall make a further step in this chapter towards the substantiation of this supposition by interpreting and interrelating some of the fundamental epistemological distinctions which serve to structure all three Critiques.

The primary epistemological distinction, underlying directly or indirectly all others in Kant's System, is that between 'knowledge' (Erkenntnis) and 'experience' (Erfahrung). Unfortunately, in spite of (or perhaps, because of) its ubiquity in Kant's writings, it tends to remain an obscure and uncriticized presupposition for both Kant and his many interpreters and critics. The main reason for this neglect seems to be that he invokes a variety of distinctions which define knowledge and experience more precisely, with the result that these more common terms naturally appear to be less technical and in no need of special treatment. The purpose of this chapter will be to explicate the knowledge-experience distinction implicit in Kant's System by integrating it with the most important of these more obviously technical distinctions: first with his pure-empirical and subject-object distinctions, secondly with his a priori-a posteriori and analytic-synthetic distinctions, and thirdly with his distinctions between the empirical, transcendental, logical, and hypothetical perspectives.

The wide range of connotations the terms 'knowledge' and 'experience' have in ordinary language might induce an interpreter to regard any secondary distinctions with suspicion. One might insist that they must inevitably share the indistinct nature of the primary distinction from which they are derived, notwithstanding any intelligibility they seem to have on their own. Such a proposal, however, is unsound; for, as I shall attempt to demonstrate, Kant's own explanations of these distinctions can be interpreted in a relatively clear and plausible fashion. Moreover, even though he does not say much about the terms 'knowledge' and 'experience' as such, he does say enough to provide a basis for a sufficiently coherent interpretation.

In ordinary use, 'experience' can refer generally to the concrete, immediate (i.e., uninterpreted) encounter between a subject[2] and an object. This 'immediate experience' provides the raw material upon which more abstract functions such as 'determinant judgment' and 'reflective judgment' operate [see e.g., Kt7:385-6; s.a. IV.3], for in such experience the subject has neither determined the given object to be an object of knowledge nor reflected upon its epistemological status. Kant uses the word 'immediate' to define 'experience' four times in Kt1, most notably in the Refutation of Idealism, the main purpose of which is to prove that 'outer experience is really immediate ...'[3] But in many other passages he uses 'immediate(ly)' to qualify more specific words such as 'sensation' or 'perception'. In Kt1:A371, for instance, 'immediate' describes both the 'self-consciousness' of 'inner sense' and the 'perception' of 'outer sense'. Moreover, Kant frequently uses the phrase 'possible experience' to refer to this immediate starting point for all knowledge; as such, it denotes 'not only the totality of the objects of experience but also Erfarhen itself as spiritual act' [V4:96; see VII.2.A]. Thus as we shall see, this ordinary, indeterminate and nonreflective sense of 'experience' crops up on numerous occasions throughout Kant's Critical works.

Certainly the most important example of Kant's use of this sense of 'experience' is when he begins the Introduction to Kt1 with the proclamation: 'There can be no doubt that all our knowledge begins with experience' [1]. That is, all knowledge must be related to someone's immediate experience in order for it to qualify as actual knowledge [cf. 629]. Kant stresses the philosophical significance of this type of experience in Kt18:347(82) when he says an 'impression of the senses precedes all the judgments of reason, and carries with it immediate evidence, far excelling all other persuasion.' Yet the priority of immediate experience does not preclude the possibility that certain aspects of our knowledge might be derived from some other source. For several sentences later in Kt1:1 he adds that, although 'all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it all arises out of experience.'

In explaining how some knowledge is grounded in a source other than immediate experience, Kant does indeed develop another, less conventional, meaning for 'experience'.[4] He describes this more determinate type of experience as a concrete 'synthesis of perceptions' [Kt1:792,161] in which various 'objects of possible experience' [73] are made actual objects of knowledge through the cooperation of the subject's two main powers of cognitive judgment: intuitive sensibility (which produces sensation) and conceptual understanding (which produces thought).[5] This process, known also as 'determinant judgment', implies a differentiation between two kinds of knowledge: the validity of 'empirical' knowledge is determinable only by appealing at some point to sensible experience [Kt1:2-3; cf. 34], while that of 'pure' knowledge is determinable without reference to sensibility, to the extent that 'there is nothing that belongs to sensation' in it.[6] Kant claims empirical knowledge is tied so closely to experience that the two can, for us, be equated: 'Empirical knowledge is experience.'[7] In this new sense (developed fully only in the second edition of Kt1), experience is no longer the immediate chronological starting point of all knowledge, but one of several 'species of knowledge' [xvii,196; cf. 314]. Unlike empirical knowledge, pure knowledge is related only indirectly to experience: it arises out of the subject's abstract reflection on the general nature of experience [316-9], and is pure in virtue of its primary dependence on the subject rather than the object of knowledge.[8] But in order to engage in such reflection, we must be consciously aware of our experience, not in its immediate state, but as empirical knowledge; for experience in itself is 'the ultimate unconditional given, within which all reflection arises' [G1:348-9].

So far, Kant's use of the words 'knowledge' and 'experience' seems to be relatively clear. The latter refers either to the original encounter between subject and object (i.e., 'immediate experience') which yields actual knowledge through determinant judgment, or to the 'empirical knowledge' which is so produced; and the former refers either to this same empirical knowledge, or to the knowledge which can be inferred from experience by reflecting in other, more abstract ways. But this account of his primary distinction will be of use to the interpreter only if it provides an adequate context for interpreting Kant's secondary distinctions. In IV.2, therefore, I will introduce the four classes of knowledge which arise out of two of his secondary distinctions, after which I will examine in IV.3 the type of reflective perspective which produces each class of knowledge. Finally, in IV.4 I will integrate the various results of this inquiry into a single picture, delineating the essential perspectival pattern which determines the epistemological form of each of Kant's Critical systems.

2. Two Secondary Epistemological Distinctions

The knowledge-experience distinction is rarely discussed as such by either Kant or his commentators because, as mentioned above, experience (even though it has chronological priority in its immediate form) is defined in terms of knowledge. Despite the negligible attention it has been given, this distinction will turn out to form the context in which all Kant's other epistemological distinctions are set. But before this can be fully demonstrated, a good deal more will have to be said about the 'knowledge' side of the distinction. In this section, therefore, I will specify how four basic types of knowledge arise out of the two most prevalent of Kant's secondary epistemological distinctions, between the a priori and the a posteriori and between the analytic and the synthetic, both of which are concerned not only with knowledge, but with the various ways reflective knowledge and immediate experience are related.

On the surface, the bifurcation of knowledge into a priori and a posteriori types seems to be readily comprehensible. A posteriori knowledge is knowledge derived directly from-or the truth of which is contingent upon-the meeting of subject and object in immediate experience. A priori knowledge, on the other hand, is 'given' or 'innate' knowledge which is derived from a source-or the truth of which is-'absolutely independent of all experience' [Kt1:2-3]; hence it is both necessary[9] and universal [3-4]. But upon closer investigation, two problems arise: first, How does this distinction differ from that between pure and empirical knowledge? and secondly, If 'all our knowledge begins with experience', then what sense is there in saying a priori knowledge is somehow 'independent of all experience'? I will address these problems in the following two paragraphs.

Although Kant ordinarily uses the terms 'pure' and 'a priori', as well as the terms 'empirical' (i.e., impure) and 'a posteriori', interchangeably, they should not be regarded as mere synonyms [as in P14:4n], for he does occasionally make a technical distinction between them. The pure-impure distinction discriminates between knowledge which does (impure) and does not (pure) depend directly on some particular sensation, whereas the a priori-a posteriori distinction discriminates between knowledge which is grounded in the subject's experience of some particular object (a posteriori) and that which the subject brings to experience, which must therefore be grounded primarily in the subject itself (a priori). Presumably, knowledge can be a priori even if it involves sensation in some way [Kt1:3,28-9]; or it can be a posteriori without having anything to do with sensation. These possibilities cannot be rejected merely by virtue of the meanings of the words involved. Hence, although examples of pure a posteriori and impure a priori knowledge might be hard to come by, the distinct classes must be acknowledged as logically possible. Nevertheless, they are of minimal importance, since the two pairs are almost always treated coextensively: impure a posteriori knowledge is knowledge derived from a subject's experience of an object (a posteriori) and requiring sensation (impure), while pure a priori knowledge is knowledge brought to experience by the subject (a priori) and requiring no sensation (pure) [x,4-5,124-5].

The status of a priori knowledge in relation to experience should become more evident when I relate the distinctions of this section to the four fundamental reflective perspectives in IV.3. But for now several remarks can be added to dispel some of the ambiguity shrouding the meaning of the word 'knowledge' in the phrase 'a priori knowledge'.[10] Knowledge which arises a posteriori seems not to be troublesome because it is by definition based on experience. A priori knowledge, by contrast, 'which I must presuppose as being in me prior to objects being given to me' [Kt1:xvii; s.a. xviii,xxiii, A128-9], and which is therefore objectively valid 'antecedently to all experience' [198], is rather more ambiguously called 'knowledge'. This ambiguity can be cleared up by recalling the distinction made in IV.1 between immediate experience (which can lead to 'empirical knowledge') and reflective knowledge (which is known only if experienced, but which might be traceable to some other source). When this is stressed, both a posteriori and a priori knowledge can be regarded as abstractions from immediate experience-though, as will become evident in IV.3, they abstract in different directions. 'A priori' does not denote knowledge which is actually known apart from experience; rather, it refers to knowledge whose validity does not depend on a subject's encounter with particular objects in experience. (Thus, for example, although we cannot actually know, in the a posteriori sense, space and time as wholes, we can claim to have a priori 'knowledge' of these wholes whenever we have a posteriori knowledge of anything.) Kant could have made his meaning less confusing either by not calling the determinate form of experience 'empirical knowledge', or by not using the word 'knowledge' for that which arises out of our reflection on experience. (For instance, he could have referred only to the a priori 'source' or 'conditions' of our actual knowledge.) Using 'knowledge' for both empirical knowledge and its conditions gives rise to uncertainty on the part of the reader as to which sense of the word he intends when he uses it without a qualifier (as in Kt1:26, where he seems to fluctuate between both meanings). Fortunately, once the choices are explicated, the context usually makes his intention sufficiently clear.

Kant also has a more general use for the a priori-a posteriori distinction which should be mentioned briefly at this point. Sometimes he equates all philosophical or 'metaphysical' knowledge with the a priori and all ordinary or 'physical' knowledge with the a posteriori [e.g., Kt7:174,475]. Thus he says 'knowledge through reason and a priori knowledge are the same thing' [Kt4:12; s.a. Kt7:167-8]. This is the sense England has in mind when he says a priori truths 'enable us to understand the "why" of a thing or event', while a posteriori truths 'enable us to know its existence as a fact' [E3:45]. Wolff rightly criticizes Kant's tendency to identify 'the formal (space, time, categories) with the a priori and the material (sensation, empirical concepts) with the a posteriori';[11] but he goes too far when he adds that this causes Kant to 'be irresistibly drawn to assimilate all knowledge to a priori knowledge.' For Kant's general usage of these terms is never more than a tendency: as we shall see, he is ordinarily very careful to limit the a priori to certain specific sorts of philosophical knowledge, and to allow a definite place for the a posteriori (or material) in his System. Moreover, the dual meaning of 'a priori' (as a specific kind of philosophical knowledge or as all philosophical knowledge) is related to the distinction between Kant's broad and narrow uses of the term 'transcendental' [see e.g., Kt1:80-1], which, as we saw in II.4 and III.4, is quite legitimate once the broad use is understood in connection with the overall Perspective of his Critical philosophy.[12] Nevertheless, since an equivocal use of technical terms is likely to lead to misunderstanding, it should be avoided wherever possible. Accordingly, I shall henceforth treat 'a priori' (and 'transcendental', whenever it is not capitalized) in the narrow sense, and attempt to differentiate more precisely the various sorts of knowledge with which Kant is concerned.

The other important secondary distinction Kant makes between types of (reflective) knowledge is that between 'analytic' and 'synthetic' judgments.[13] Unfortunately, he describes this contrast in a wide variety of ways, which are difficult if not impossible to integrate into a single, consistent picture. Garver, for instance, finds no less than 'twelve theories of analyticity contained in or suggested by Kant's discussion' [G3:245; s.a. V1:1.253f]! Moreover, perhaps as a result of such variety, the nature and validity of this distinction has been a matter of considerable debate in recent years. Although it is not necessary for our purposes to embark on a thoroughgoing study of this topic, examining a selection of the most significant comments of both Kant and his critics will help differentiate Kant's version of the distinction from some of the unkantian versions which have recently been suggested.

Probably the best known of Kant's descriptions of these terms is that in an analytic judgment the predicate is already 'contained in' the subject, while in a synthetic judgment the predicate 'lies outside' the subject [Kt1:10; cf. Kt22:232; see e.g., H4:lii]. A more illuminating, yet less frequently cited description of this distinction is Kant's claim that judgments are analytic only if their truth is 'based entirely on the principle of [non]contradiction',[14] while judgments are synthetic only 'under the condition that an intuition underlies the concept of their subject'.[15] As Allison says: 'Synthetic judgments assert [real] relations [of concepts to objects], while analytic judgments merely assert logical relations between concepts' [A7:54]. With these descriptions in mind, we can use Kant's own pictorial representation of 'particular judgments' in Kt10:103(108-9) (according to which the subject is depicted as a square and the predicate as a circle), to show how (e.g.) 'Yellow is a color' and 'This table is yellow' are propositions representing analytic and synthetic judgments, respectively:

(a) 'Yellow is a color.' (b) 'This table is yellow.'

Figure IV.1: Analytic and Synthetic Judgments

Beck translates Kant's distinction into less metaphorical terms: if '"X is A" implies logically "X is B", the judgment is analytic', but if B is 'related to A by virtue of the fact that both are predicates of the same X', then it is synthetic.[16] Synthetic judgments, then, are informative: they extend our knowledge by providing information about the subject which is not necessarily implied by the meanings of the words (e.g., this table would still be a table whatever its color). Analytic judgments, on the other hand, are, strictly speaking, not informative:[17] the predicate does not extend our knowledge, but provides only what can be inferred from the subject by means of the laws of logic.[18] Although this description of Kant's analytic-synthetic distinction is given predominantly in terms of simple, subject-predicate propositions, it is unfair to charge Kant with limiting his logic to such propositions [as in F6:88]. On the contrary, says Wolff, 'nothing could be further from the truth' [W21:188]. The great variety of applications Kant offers for his analytic-synthetic distinction [s.e. H4:xxii-cxv] is evidence enough of his awareness of the potential complexities of propositional logic. More complex judgments, as Allison explains, are viewed by Kant 'as logical compounds of [these simple] categorical judgments' [A11:25]. Subject-predicate examples, therefore, provide a manageable way of grasping the general characteristics of the analytic-synthetic distinction.

Kant leaves no doubt as to how all this applies to empirical knowledge: 'Judgments of experience, as such, are one and all synthetic' [Kt1:11]. Only when we attempt to interpret such determinate judgments by reflecting upon them does some knowledge come to be regarded as analytic. The bulk of the discussion of the analytic-synthetic distinction by recent philosophers has suffered needlessly by neglecting the implications of this salient qualification. The result has been a running debate over whether the terms refer to a difference of kind or merely to one of degree.[19] The position Kant would adopt on this point becomes evident once his admittedly subtle distinction between immediate experience and reflective knowledge is sharpened (as I am attempting to do in this chapter): both views would be accorded a measure of validity. Kant himself uses the analytic-synthetic distinction primarily as a tool for organizing various forms of reflective knowledge according to their logical status. Thus, his distinction is clearly one between different kinds of knowledge. But, in order to locate the sources of both analytic and synthetic knowledge in immediate experience, this rigid distinction of kind would have to be reinterpreted in terms of varying degrees. The point of Kant's assertion that all judgments of experience are synthetic is simply to emphasize that the term 'analytic' will apply only to certain forms of reflective knowledge, and never to nonreflective experience. It in no way disallows the legitimate formulation of a less restrictive analytic-synthetic distinction, such as those discussed in Appendix IV, in which the terms are not so mutually exclusive.

The main question raised by Kant's introduction of the distinction between analytic and synthetic kinds of reflective knowledge is: How does he intend to integrate it with his distinction between a priori and a posteriori kinds of reflective knowledge? Some philosophers tend to equate the two distinctions (as well as that between 'pure' and 'empirical'); but such an oversimplified approach is not only inadequate [B19:227f], but obviously unkantian [see K2:11.38(Z1:141)]. If, then, the two distinctions are not equivalent, four possible classes of reflective knowledge arise out of their combination: knowledge by reflection might be classified as 'analytic a posteriori', 'analytic a priori', 'synthetic a priori' or 'synthetic a posteriori'. I shall conclude this section by examining briefly what each of these four classes would entail.

To begin with, the impossibility of analytic a posteriori knowledge is generally considered to be 'quite evident' [P5:182-3]: indeed, it is a nonsensical contradiction in terms for those who equate 'analytic' and 'a priori' [see Ap. IV]. Even though Kant argues against those who identify analyticity and apriority [e.g., in Kt1:1-10], he joins them in dismissing this class of knowledge with only a brief explanation: 'it would be absurd to found an analytic judgment on experience. Since, in forming the judgment, I must not go outside my concept, there is no need to appeal to the testimony of experience in its support' [Kt1:11; cf. Kt2:268 and Kt4:12]. There are, however, a few theorists who do regard the analytic a posteriori as providing the best description of certain types of knowledge.[20] Notwithstanding Kant's lack of concern for this class of knowledge, I shall argue in IV.3 that certain aspects of his philosophy can best be understood by reinterpreting them in terms of the analytic a posteriori. At this point, though, it will suffice to say that we should expect such knowledge, if it is possible, to have its validity grounded in some way in experience (a posteriori), and yet also to proceed by making inferences solely on the (analytic) basis of an application of the laws of logic to the concepts or propositions involved.

The second class of reflective knowledge, the analytic a priori, is rather more clearly delineated by Kant. It includes any judgment which, given some previously understood meaning for the terms involved, can be reduced to a logical tautology. This definition of analytic knowledge is what Kant has in mind when he makes such statements as: 'if the judgment is analytic ... its truth can always be adequately known in accordance with the principle of [non]contradiction' [Kt1:190; cf. Kt2:267]. The truth value of such knowledge is both independent of experience (a priori) and determinable solely by the application of logical laws to the concepts involved (analytic).

The third class of reflective knowledge, the synthetic a priori, is by far the most important for Kant, at least within his Critical philosophy [see note III.26]. Indeed, he says in Kt1:19 that 'the proper problem of pure reason is contained in the question: How are a priori synthetic judgments possible?'[21] It is a problem because it is not immediately evident how a judgment could be a priori without being analytic [see Ap. IV]. Such knowledge would be valid independently of any particular experience (a priori) [Kt1:171-2], yet it would also supply new information about the concepts involved (synthetic)-information not deducible by means of formal logic [cf. S15:10 and K9:22-7]. This class of knowledge is of utmost importance to the philosopher because the propositions composing it would be necessarily true without being in any sense trivial: just as the analytic laws of logic determine the general form of what a person can think coherently, so also these synthetic a priori judgments would determine the general form of what a person can experience coherently (i.e., of how a person can convert immediate experience into empirical knowledge). They would therefore provide a solid foundation upon which not only empirical knowledge, but also a philosophical system of knowledge, could rest.

Finally, synthetic a posteriori knowledge is the least troublesome (but also, for Kant, the least philosophically interesting) of the four classes of knowledge. All the knowledge arising out of such empirical factors as scientific experimentation, psychological introspection, the citing of examples, and appeals to 'common sense', falls into this class. Consequently, the word 'knowledge' is usually intended in this sense when it is uttered in ordinary language. Such knowledge consists, quite simply, in judgments which have their validity grounded in various facts of experience (a posteriori), and in which intuitive content is supplied to the concepts involved-content which is not logically implied by the conventional meanings of the words used (synthetic).

3. The Four Reflective Perspectives

The foregoing discussion of Kant's two secondary distinctions between types of knowledge and of the four classes to which they give rise has relied heavily on the supposition that these divisions are intended by Kant as classifications only of knowledge by reflection, and not of immediate experience. In this section I propose to support and enlarge upon this claim by discussing the four methods of reflection, or perspectives, which Kant says can be adopted in considering various objects of knowledge. As suggested in II.4, these will include the empirical, transcendental, logical and hypothetical perspectives, respectively. But first it will be helpful to make some general comments about Kant's use of the word 'reflection'.

Kant distinguishes 'reflection' (Reflexion) from 'comparison' and 'abstraction' by defining it as the act of 'going back over [Überlegung] different representations' in order to determine 'how they can be comprehended in one consciousness' [Kt10:94(100)]. These three 'acts of the understanding' are similar inasmuch as they are all 'logical acts ... by which concepts are generated as to their form' [94(100)]. But elsewhere he puts special emphasis on reflection as the only act by means of which truly philosophical concepts can be generated, for 'reflective judgement' is 'our critical faculty' [Kt7:408; s.a. 395; Kt7i:211; V2:446,451n]. The description 'going back over ...' implies that the representations which give rise to various philosophical perspectives have already been 'gone over' once. This indeed is precisely what Kant intends to get across by his distinction between 'determinant [bestimmende] judgement' and 'reflective [reflectirende] judgement' [Kt7:385-6]. 'Determinant judgment', interprets van de Pitte, 'is constitutive of the world of factual experience and is thus objectively valid. Reflective judgment, on the other hand, is merely an interpretive technique which we employ in order to bring organic entities and systematic unities within our powers of comprehension. It thus carries only a subjective validity.'[22] This distinction is closely related to that between immediate experience and reflective knowledge: determinant judgment converts immediate experience into empirical knowledge by subsuming a particular intuition under a universal concept, and reflective judgment converts empirical knowledge into more abstract forms of reflective knowledge by positing the universal which serves as the guiding principle for a given set of particulars [Kt7:179-80]. With this distinction clearly in mind, we can now examine the nature of the four fundamental perspectives which operate throughout Kant's System.

In the first two Critiques Kant does not use the word 'reflection' as a technical term for the activity of viewing objects from an empirical perspective. Instead, he uses phrases such as 'the empirical employment of understanding' or 'the empirical employment of reason' [see II.3.C] whenever he wishes to describe some aspect of the empirical perspective as it operates in one of these systems. (Many of the empirical elements introduced in these systems are presented merely as by-products of other perspectives [e.g., Kt1: 152; Kt5:390]; but the constitutive role of the empirical perspective in system_t will be discussed in VI.3 and VII.3.A, and that of system_p, in VIII.3.A.) However, Kant sometimes mentions in passing the role of reflection in the empirical perspective, as when he describes an 'empirical deduction' as one which 'shows the manner in which a concept is acquired through experience and through reflection upon experience' [Kt1:117; s.a. 503].

In the third Critique, by contrast, Kant's use of the phrase 'reflective judgment' is, as Evans argues, equivalent to his former use of the phrase 'empirical employment of pure reason' [E4:483; s.a. G6:457], thus implying that the perspective which determines Kant's standpoint for examining such judgment in system_j is the empirical. As we saw in II.4, each of Kant's three systems adopts one perspective in this way as the standpoint to guide the operation of all four perspectives in that system. Although my main focus in this section will be on their role as perspectives in system_t, I will also refer at several points to the way in which each forms the basis for a discrete standpoint. This will prove to be especially important in our discussion of Kant's hypothetical perspective. (In Part Three we will discuss various ways in which the four perspectives change when they are applied from standpoints other than the theoretical.)

A person who adopts an empirical perspective reflects upon particular objects of experience without attempting to 'go beyond' their nature as given in immediate experience. In empirical reflection as such there is no need to discriminate between the respective roles of the knowing subject and the known object, because the two are fused in experience. This continuity between immediate experience and knowledge resulting from empirical reflection is, no doubt, what leads Kant to make the (potentially misleading) claim that 'empirical knowledge is experience' [see IV.1]. Strictly speaking, 'empirical knowledge' should denote only that synthetic a posteriori knowledge which arises out of empirical reflection on the objects of one's experience.[23] Thus, empirical knowledge of 'cause', for instance, refers neither to the actual (i.e., immediate) experience of some particular cause, nor to the ability to determine its subjective or objective ground; rather it consists in the ability to answer the question 'What is the cause of X?' by thinking and reasoning straightforwardly about the objects of one's experience.

Ordinarily, we do not distinguish between our experience and our reflection on experience, since any type of reflection must itself be part of our immediate experience in order to bring forth knowledge which is actually known [see IV.2]. Thus, in everyday life all reflective perspectives tend to be mixed indiscriminately.[24] (This is the situation, incidentally, which gives rise to the need for a Transcendental Perspective as the foundation for a philosophical System, within which our various perspectives can be distinguished in an orderly fashion.) All types of reflective experience attempt to give elegance to their vulgar counterpart, nonreflective experience. In the case of empirical reflection, the transition from vulgarity to elegance tends to be gradual, because of the affinity between immediate experience and empirical knowledge-i.e., because of the need to appeal to our sensible experience whenever we try to establish synthetic a posteriori knowledge. But in each of the other three types of reflection, to which we shall now turn our attention, the qualitative transition tends to be rather more abrupt.

Of all the perspectives in Kant's System, the transcendental perspective plays the most important role [Kt1:25-6; cf. P2:1.226-30 and E5:29]. Indeed, the a priori-a posteriori distinction itself first arises in this context. Unfortunately, the fundamental significance of the 'transcendental reflection' with which this new perspective is concerned could be easily overlooked by the reader, because Kant waits until an Appendix in the middle of Kt1 to discuss its importance in detail.[25] The reason he waits until this point is that, before he can show how transcendental reflection reveals the errors in any non-Critical philosophy [see note IV.25], he first has to specify the doctrines which can be established by adopting this transcendental alternative. But this gives the misleading impression that transcendental reflection is more a convenient tool for the comparison of various treatments of specific philosophical issues than (as we have seen in II.4, III.4 and IV.2) the essential methodological tool defining the overall Perspective for all three Critical systems!

Kant does, however, give one of his clearest accounts of what the transcendental perspective entails as early as Kt1:25 [cf. 185,196-7]: 'I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with our Perspective on knowledge of objects in so far as this Perspective on knowledge is to be possible a priori. A system of such concepts might be entitled transcendental philosophy.' Kant elsewhere says his task as a transcendental philosopher is to 'enquire what are the a priori conditions upon which the possibility of experience rests, and which remain as its underlying ground when everything empirical is abstracted from appearances [i.e., from the objects of experience].'[26] A transcendental perspective, then, presupposes the subject-object distinction: it attempts to determine what there is in the subject a priori which makes possible our knowledge of the objects we experience. Because these conditions must be added by the subject to the objects given in intuition to produce such empirical knowledge, they are (both logically and methodologically) synthetic as well as being a priori. That the knowledge arising out of this radically epistemological perspective concerns only a set of synthetic a priori forms embedded in the subject is spelled out explicitly by Kant when he says 'the word "transcendental" ... never means a reference of our knowledge to things, but only to the cognitive faculty' [Kt2:293; s.a. Kt1:74-5].

When Kant finally gets around to describing what transcendental reflection is, he says it is the act of determining 'in which faculty of knowledge [given representations] belong together subjectively-in the sensibility or in the understanding' [Kt1:317]; in so doing one determines whether or not each representation is pure. Accordingly, such reflection is the necessary first step in adopting a transcendental perspective; for it would be impossible to abstract everything empirical from experience without first differentiating between what is pure and what is impure (i.e., empirical) [80-1]. But in a broader sense [see II.4 and IV.2], all the steps involved in determining the synthetic a priori forms of empirical knowledge can be regarded as arising out of transcendental reflection. Thus, transcendental knowledge of 'cause', for instance, refers neither to the actual experience of some particular cause, nor to the ability to determine such a cause through empirical reflection; rather, it consists in the ability to answer the question 'What is the status of causality in the general relation of a subject to an object?' by reflecting transcendentally on the synthetic a priori conditions for the possibility of experience.

Two remaining points should be made concerning the transcendental perspective to help guard against possible misunderstanding. First, some common uses of 'transcendental', according to which the word refers to a special kind of consciousness, or to 'the grasping of things as they are in themselves' [M12:163], or even to 'God's point of view' [C9:84], might lead to the mistake of confusing the transcendental perspective with the 'ivory tower' perspective of typical non-Critical metaphysicians, who assume they can ascend reflectively to such heights as to attain a perfectly objective view of transcendent reality. Kant, having devoted the bulk of the Dialectic in Kt1 to the task of disclosing the error inevitably bred by this 'logic of illusion' [349], explicitly rejects this interpretation in Kt2:373n: 'High towers ... are not for me. My place is the fruitful bathos of experience ...' Indeed, such error is precisely what he believes he can avoid by emphasizing the differences in the various perspectives which can be adopted legitimately in the quest for knowledge. By referring to the synthetic a priori as 'knowledge', he is not claiming to possess a special type of knowledge which is actually known independently of the limitations of experience; rather, like all knowledge, it can be known only when a person experiences a certain kind of reflection.[27] Kant supports this point when, in response to a misunderstanding of his use of the word 'transcendental', he sa