cept in a merely physical sense".
About roses and violets and their colors the judgment is not false as long as we understand that all we actually know of those belong to the sphere of phenomena and not noumena, but if we think of them as noumena, it is false to clai m that we know anything more about them that they exist somehow affecting our sensibility, which we construe as flowers and their colors.
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14. Explain what Kant's Transcendental Deduction of the Categories tries to prove, and, at least roughly, how the argument goes. Make clear, in passing, what Kant means by "deduction", "Synthesis", and by "transcendental unity of apperception".
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Kant calls "the explanation of the way in which concepts can relate to objects a priori their transcendental deduction "(A85). So he wants to prove that it is possible and to explain how it is possible for non-empirical concepts to relate to empirical objects.
He distinguishes it from "the empirical deduction, which shows how the concept is acquired through experience and reflection on it "(A85).
There are two kinds of a priori concepts: categories are a priori concepts of understanding of all possible experiences, while the pure intuitions of space and time are a priori forms of sensibility (B118). As it was shown before, to have any experience at all we need sensibility and concepts (without which the sensibility would be blind). But why the pure ones? Because we could not have understood anything particular without general rules for all experiences already presupposed, as we could not have any particular sensible intuition without general pure intuitions of space and time already presupposed.
In B127-128 Kant criticizes Locke and especially Hume for that "their empirical derivation. . . cannot be reconciled with the reality of the scientific cognition a priori that we possess, that namely of pure mathematics and general natural science , and is therefore refuted by the fact ". Kant now attempts to "steer human reason between Lock's enthusiasm and Hume's skepticism ". He further explains the categories as "concepts of an object in general, by means of which its intuition is. . . determined with regard to one of the logical functions for judgments ".
Speaking of the latter he is concerned with the relationship of the subject to the predicate, saying that object's "empirical intuition in experience must always be considered as subject, never as mere predicate "(B129) with all categories.
"Pure a priori concepts can certainly contain nothing empirical. . . must nevertheless be strictly a priori conditions for a possible experience, as that alone on which its objective reality can rest "(A95)
"Now these concepts, which contain a priori the pure thinking in every experience, we find in the categories, and it is already a sufficient deduction of them and justification of their objective validity if we can prove that by means of them alone the object can be thought . . . we must first assess the transcendental constitution of the subjective sources that comprise the a priori foundations for the possibility of experience "(A97).
Kant further describes the faculties which make cognition possible. Receptivity here must be combined with spontaneity. " This is now the ground of threefold synthesis, which is necessarily found in all cognition: that, namely, of the apprehension of the representations, as modifications of the mind in intuition; of the reproduction of them in the imagination; and of their recognition in the concept "(A98).
Synthesis here means a combination of intuition an thinking. A merely analytical cognition is applicable only to the words, but not to the objects. It obviously could not be used for the deduction of categories for empirical knowledge. We have to remember that even the knowledge of pure mathematics is a synthetic one for Kant.
"Every intuition contains a manifold in itself, which however would not be represented as such if the mind did not distinguish the time in the succession of impressions on one another; for as contained in one moment no representation can ever be anything other than absolute unity . Now in order for unity of intuition to come from this manifold (as, say in the representation of space), it is necessary first to run through and then to take together this manifoldness, which action I call the synthesis of apprehension "(A99) .
It must be exercised a priori. For without it we could not...
