Kant's Theory of Judgment,and Judgments of Taste: On Henry Allison's Kant's Theory of Taste

An examination of the currently fashionable thesis that scientists, and especially biologists in the wake of the Darwinian Revolution, can now solve the problems that traditional philosophers have only talked about. Past philosophers, for example during the Enlightenment, have themselves made use of contemporary, scientific techniques and theories. The present claim may only be another such move, to be welcomed by philosophers who would distinguish themselves from rhetoricians. Others may prefer to stake out the merely human or subjective world as their field, identifying 'truth' with 'what it's better to believe'. Both moderns and postmoderns must abandon the rational realism that actually sustained Enlightenment endeavours, and Darwinian explanation, on its own, must erode traditional ethical values and the meta-ethical assumptions that sustain them. Universal humanism is only one possible project among many - and Darwinian reasonings suggest that it is hypocritical. In this crisis there may after all be a rôle for traditional, Platonizing philosophers, believing that there is a truth, and that we can find it out. Such a theory is actually better able to explain our scientific successes, and our evolutionary past.     

Kant's Modalities of Judgment

Abstract: This paper proposes a way to understand Kant's modalities of judgment—problematic, assertoric, and apodeictic—in terms of the location of a judgment in an inference. Other interpretations have tended to understand these modalities of judgment in terms of one or other conventional notion of modality. For example, Mattey (1986) argues that we should take them to be connected to notions of epistemic or doxastic modality. I shall argue that this is wrong, and that these kinds of interpretation of the modality of judgments cannot be reconciled with a key claim made by Kant, namely, that the modality of a judgment does not contribute to its content, and has nothing to do with the matter that is judged. I offer an alternative interpretation based upon Kant's explicating these modalities in terms of the location of a judgment in an inference, whereby the modality of a judgment is determined by the role a judgment plays in a given course of reasoning. If I am right, then Kant in fact presents an intriguing thesis pertaining to the inferential status and potential of all our judgments.     

Kant's Conception of Analytic Judgment

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant appears to characterize analytic judgments in four distinct ways: once in terms of "containment," a second time in terms of "identity," a third time in terms of the explicative-ampliative contrast, and a fourth time in terms of the notion of "cognizability in accordance with the principle of contradiction." The paper asks which, if any, of these characterizations—or apparent characterizations—has the best claim to be Kant's fundamental conception of analyticity in the first Critique. It argues that it is the second. The paper argues, further, that Kant's distinction is intended to apply only to judgments of subject-predicate form, and that the fourth alleged characterization is not properly speaking a characterization at all. These theses are defended in the course of a more general investigation of the distinction's meaning and tenability.     

主观概率判断的支持理论

支持理论是一个关于主观概率判断的非外延性理论,它有以下几个主要观点：1.主观概率判断受到描述的影响,具有描述的依赖性;2.主观概率判断的结果是判断者对中心假设的相对支持的反映;3.主观概率在二元判断中表现出二元互补性,在多元判断中表现出次可加性;4.主观概率判断存在分解效应和促进效应     

The Free Harmony of the Faculties and the Primacy of Imagination in Kant's Aesthetic Judgment

This essay argues that, contrary to the prevailing view according to which reflection in Kant's aesthetic judgment is interpreted as ‘the logical actus of the understanding’, we should pay closer attention to Kant's own formulation of aesthetic reflection as ‘an action of the power of imagination’. Put differently, I contend in this essay that the rule that governs and orders the manifold in aesthetic judgment is imagination's own achievement, the achievement of the productive synthesis of the ‘fictive power’ (Dichtungsvermögen), entirely independent of the understanding. While this view does not entail that the faculty of the understanding is not necessary in aesthetic reflection, a stronger emphasis on the role of imagination in aesthetic reflection allows us to realize that its schematizing and interpretive activity, while consistent with, goes well beyond the discursive demands of the understanding insofar as it intimates the supersensible ground of freedom that manifests itself as ‘the feeling of life’. Therefore, I show in this essay that the imagination's unique interpretive power has a special role in completing Kant's critical system by facilitating the connection of the sensible to the supersensible, which further helps us appreciate imagination's practical as opposed to merely cognitive significance.     

类同一性:道德产生的主体基础

人最早的存在形态是类存在形态,人的类同一性是道德产生的主体基础,类自然同一性是道德产生的主体自然基础,类社会同一性是道德产生的主体社会基础。     

Absolute Positing,the Frege Anticipation Thesis,and Kant's Definitions of Judgment

Abstract: Kant follows a substantial tradition by defining judgment so that it must involve a relation of concepts, which raises the question of why he thinks that single‐term existential judgments should still qualify as judgments. There is a ready explanation if Kant is somehow anticipating a Fregean second‐order account of existence, an interpretation that is already widely held for separate reasons. This paper examines Kant's early (1763) critique of Wolffian accounts of existence, finding that it provides the key idea in his mature model of existential judgment, which is in fact sharply opposed to the Fregean strategy. By relating this to Kant's theory of judgment in general—in particular, to his claim for an isomorphism between the assertoric function of judgment and the category of existence—a preliminary case is made that absolute positing, far from being a marginal special case, accomplishes the primary function of judgment. This argument shows the importance of distinguishing between contexts in which Kant is treating judgment as a vehicle for inference (e.g. pure general logic) and contexts in which he is treating it, more robustly, as the cognition of an object.     

The Influence of Ease of Retrieval on Judgment as a Function of Attention to Subjective Experience

The ease with which information comes to mind can impact judgment. We examine whether the influence of ease of retrieval is moderated by situational factors that call it to attention before judgment and by individual differences in experiential processing style, as measured by the rational experiential inventory scale (Pacini & Epstein, 1999). An ease of retrieval effect, indicated by less favorable evaluations of a proposal following the retrieval of many reasons advocating the proposal than following the retrieval of only a few, was found for high‐experiential style processors regardless of situational factors that made ease of retrieval salient. However, the effect was found among low‐experiential style processors only when ease of retrieval was explicitly called to their attention prior to judgment.     

Meaning in Life as a Subjective Judgment and a Lived Experience

Meaning in life has long been recognized as a central dilemma of human life. In this article, we review some of the challenges of studying meaning in life from the perspective of social psychology. We draw on the diary of Etty Hillesum, a young woman who was killed in Auschwitz, to argue for the relevance of current empirical approaches to meaning in life. We review evidence suggesting that meaning in life is an important variable in the psychology of human functioning while also acknowledging that there is no consensus definition for the construct. Drawing on Hillesum's diary and our research, we argue for the importance of considering meaning in life as the outcome of a subjective judgment process. We then review research showing the strong relationship between positive mood and meaning in life and suggest that such a relationship is born out in the phenomenology of meaning in life.     

The transcendental argument in Kant's

Conclusions From this summary account of the deduction we can draw a number of conclusions: In the first place, the guiding thesis used to make sense of the argument was that the argument needed to ground not just the moral law but a cognitive framework within which the moral law is the highest law. This distinction is important since it allows us to distinguish in the practical philosophy (as in the theoretical) a level of transcendental argumentation from a level of metaphysical argumentation: The concern of transcendental philosophy would be to establish the conditions of the possibility of a cognitive framework, whereas the concern of metaphysics (in Kant's sense) is to develop the principles of a given cognitive framework and to derive from them knowledge of objects (see KU, Introduction, Section V). (This distinction turns out to be invaluable in dealing with the problem of the application of the moral law.)In the second place, this interpretation allows us to avoid reducing the practical viewpoint to the status of a poor imitation of real knowledge, one whose inadequacies must be passed over in embarrassed silence for the sake of rescuing morality. If the argument is correct, practical knowledge is in one sense more firmly grounded than (and even subsumes) theoretical knowledge, even though its grounds do not allow of complete insight.And, finally, we can make at least some cautious generalizations about Kant's understanding of a transcendental argument. Two things in particular seem to characterize the deduction: (1) It is essential that the argument is concerned with a cognitive framework rather than with any specific knowledge within that framework; it is the possibility of knowledge at all that is in question, and it is that fact that requires a special kind of argument. (2) Kant's assumptions about the distinct roots of human knowledge are indispensable to the argument. The distinction between mere speculation (mere thinking, which requires only our rational faculties) and knowledge (which also requires sensibility) is essential: Without that distinction we cannot understand why the argument is necessary in the first place (since, as I argued above, we cannot see how the moral law is synthetic), nor can we understand what it means to ground a cognitive framework: Grounding a cognitive framework for Kant has turned out to involve showing how two irreducibly distinct faculties can cooperate in acts of cognition - here it is the faculty of desire and the pure will which are conceptually irreducible and for which grounds of a possible a priori unity must nevertheless be given. The fact that these two features are so central to the argument would indicate that they should be taken into consideration in any discussion of transcendental arguments framed along Kantian lines.     

异同判断中“快同效应”的大脑机制：一项ERP研究

采用高密度的事件相关电位（ERPs）技术,记录分析了大学生被试在执行异同判断任务[包括不同颜色刺激对（DC）,不同形状刺激对（DS）和相同刺激对（Same）]时的脑内时程动态变化。行为结果表明,“同”反应的确显著快于“异”反应,表现出明显的快同效应。ERP结果显示：在280-320 ms内,DS和DC条件均比Same条件诱发一个更负的N2成分。偶极子溯源分析表明,DC和DS条件下,N2可能起源于大脑的前扣带皮层（ACC）,可能与“异”反应早期不一致信息（颜色或形状）的认知监控和调节有关;反之Same条件下,N2成分可能起源于楔前叶,主要反映了“同”反应早期知觉识别中整体特征比较加工的过程（同一性指示器）。另外,在450 ms左右, DC和DS比Same条件均诱发了一个更负的P3成分,可能反映了对刺激局部特征的比较和识别（慢速比较器）,并与选择性注意和资源分配等高级认知活动有关;并且,Same条件下P3成分的潜伏期更短,与行为结果一致。以上研究结果表明,异同判断中“同”反应和“异”反应可能有着不同的比较通道和大脑机制,支持双过程模型理论;同时表明,慢速比较器和同一性指示器可能是序列加工的。     

The Location of Kant's Refutation of Idealism

Many philosophers have been puzzled by Kant's decision to insert the Refutation of Idealism into the second edition of the first Critique at the end of his elucidation of the Second Postulate. This article proposes a solution to the puzzle. It defends an explanation for the location of Kant's Refutation of Idealism that is plausibly expressed by Kant's claim at the end of his elucidation of the Second Postulate that the Refutation of Idealism is ‘here in its right place’ because ‘[a] powerful objection against these rules for proving existence indirectly is made by idealism’ (B274). According to this explanation, the Refutation of Idealism is Kant's response to the objection that the Second Postulate must be false since otherwise idealism is true. This article also considers and rejects a number of alternative explanations for the location of Kant's Refutation of Idealism.