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Kant, Husserl, and Analyticity

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Kant, Husserl, and Analyticity Kant, Husserl, and Analyticity Author: Evan Clarke Persistent link: http://hdl.handle.net/2345/bc-ir:103735 This work is posted on eScholarship@BC, Boston College University Libraries. Boston College Electronic Thesis or Dissertation, 2014 Copyright is held by the author. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Boston College The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Department of Philosophy KANT, HUSSERL, AND ANALYTICITY a dissertation by EVAN CLARKE submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2014 © EVAN DOUGLAS CLARKE 2014 KANT, HUSSERL, AND ANALYTICITY Evan Clarke Advisor: Andrea Staiti This study concerns the nature and role of analyticity in the work of Immanuel Kant and Edmund Husserl. Its initial goal is that of clarifying the place of analytic judgment in Kant's critical project. Against the widely held assumption that analytic judgment has no role to play in the critical project, I show that analytic judgment has a precise and genuinely important role to play in the context of Kant's metaphysics. Analytic judgment has the role of clarifying our a priori conceptual repertoire and thus of making possible the synthetic a priori judgments that are properly constitutive of metaphysics. The next goal of the study is that of unifying and defending Kant's various characterizations of analytic judgment. Whereas a number of commentators have suggested that Kant is vague or ambivalent as regards the properties of analytic judgment, I show that we can extract a clear, consistent picture of analytic judgment from his work. The key to seeing this, I argue, is becoming clear on Kant's basic assumptions concerning concepts, logic, and propositional form. Subsequently, I turn to Husserl. Picking up on the fact that for Husserl, too, analyticity has metaphysical, or ontological significance, I spell out his conception of analyticity in detail. I show that analyticity for Husserl embraces two essentially symmetrical domains of law: the a priori laws of objective givenness and the a priori laws of propositional form. I then bring Husserl and Kant together. After showing that Husserl fails to capture the essence of Kant's theory of analytic judgment, and so fails to see exactly where he stands relative to Kant, I argue that what ultimately distinguishes Husserl from Kant is the claim that analytic truth is properly articulated in a purely formal context. I show that this departure from Kant has extremely significant consequences. For example, it enables Husserl to describe whole systems of judgment, such as mathematics or logic, as analytic; and it enables Husserl to defend the possibility of analytic judgments having empirical content. TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 1 Chapter 1 – Analytic Judgment and the Critical Project 11 Chapter 2 – Kant's Theory of Analytic Judgment 76 Chapter 3 – Two Questions About Concepts 114 Chapter 4 – A Kantian Defense of Analytic Judgment 138 Chapter 5 – Husserl's Theory of Analyticity 186 Chapter 6 – Kant and Husserl on Analyticity 245 Conclusion 271 Works Cited 278 Acknowledgments First and foremost, I want to thank Andrea Staiti. I couldn't have asked for a more supportive and responsive advisor. I look forward to many more years of friendship and collaboration. I also want to thank Robert Hanna for all of the support and guidance that he has provided me over the last three years. His work was a major source of inspiration for the dissertation, and it was a great pleasure to be able to work with him directly. Thanks also to Marius Stan and Susan Shell for serving on my defense committee. I am very grateful for the feedback that they have given me on my work. Finally, I want to thank Sophie and Agnes for all of the love, support, and goodness. This dissertation is dedicated to them. Introduction In the Introduction to the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposes an apparently exhaustive distinction between two different kinds of subject-predicate judgment. "In all judgments in which the relation of a subject to the predicate is thought", he explains, "this relation is possible in two ways". Either the predicate concept already belongs to the subject concept, "as something that is (covertly) contained in this concept", or the predicate concept "lies entirely outside" the subject concept. In the first case, we have what Kant calls an 'analytic' judgment; in the second case, we have a 'synthetic' judgment " (A7/B10).1 Why does Kant introduce this distinction? Is it merely a formal distinction for the sake of a formal distinction? On the contrary, the context in which Kant introduces this distinction makes it clear that he has something rather more ambitious in mind. What Kant wants to do, it seems, is to illuminate the nature of scientific inquiry. By developing a language in which to characterize the kinds of judgments that this or that science generates, Kant hopes to shed light on the sciences themselves. Mathematics offers a good example of what Kant has in mind here. Just a few lines after he first introduces the analytic-synthetic distinction, Kant takes up the judgment 7 + 5 = 12. He notes that while this judgment might look initially like an 1 References to the Critique of Pure Reason will be given, as above, as parenthetical citations specifying the edition(s) of the first Critique to which I am referring and the page number on which the passage in question appears. The page numbers are taken from the Academy edition of Kant's works. (The A-edition of the Critique of Pure Reason is the third volume in the Academy edition; the B-edition of the Critique of Pure Reason is the fourth volume). References to other works by Kant will be given as parenthetical citations listing the volume and page number from the Academy edition. All quotations of Kant in English are taken from the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant (Cambridge University Press). 1 analytic judgment, because it might look as if the concept of the number 12 is contained in the concept of the sum of 7 and 5, this appearance is deceptive. In reality, Kant suggests, the judgment is synthetic in nature: when we reflect on the concept of 7 + 5, we find that the concept 12 is actually not contained in the former after all. This makes possible an important conclusion about mathematics in general: although the judgments of mathematics are manifestly a priori, in the sense that they hold with absolute necessity and can be known without recourse to experience, they do not owe their apriority to their formal, propositional structure. This in turn makes possible an important task for the philosopher of mathematics—that of unearthing the extra-conceptual principle on which the apriority of mathematical judgments actually rests. Given that 7 + 5 = 12 is not simply a statement of identity, how can we explain the fact that this judgment admits of no counter-example and can be grasped independently of experience? The case of natural science is similar. Although we might think that judgments like "matter persists" are analytic, because we might think that what distinguishes matter as such is the fact that it survives the deformation and reformation to which it is subject, reflection on what we actually think in the concept matter suggests that this is not the case. According to Kant, what we actually think in the concept matter is "only its presence in space through the filling of space" (B18). The understanding that matter endures across changes in its sensible properties reflects a logically subsequent judgment, a judgment that is synthetic in the sense that it draws together essentially distinct concepts. How, therefore, are we to explain the apparent necessity of this judgment? Again, since we cannot appeal to propositional form or to conceptual content, we are obliged to seek out a "completely different principle". Supposing that we can identity 2 such a principle, according to Kant, then it will be possible to give a meaningful account of natural scientific judgments like "matter persists". The case of metaphysics is slightly different. As Kant explains in the Preface to the second edition of the first Critique, he is less concerned to understand how metaphysics actually works than to reform it. Since metaphysics has hitherto been "a mere groping, and what is the worst, a groping amount mere concepts", it is necessary to set metaphysics on a more fruitful, progressive path. Having just learned something about successful sciences such as mathematics and natural science, it is possible to see what this will entail. Rather than remaining at the level of conceptual analysis, metaphysics should pursue conceptual synthesis. Like mathematics and natural science, metaphysics should seek out the principle that will enable it to grasp the a priori relations between essentially distinct concepts. What, therefore, can we conclude regarding scientific inquiry? On the one hand, it looks as though the sciences that Kant is concerned with are strongly oriented toward the production of synthetic judgments. Conversely, it looks as if analytic judgment plays no real role in scientific inquiry. In each case, the idea of analytic judgment seems to be introduced in a purely negative sense—as way of clarifying what successful sciences are not, or should not, be engaged in. This, perhaps, is one way of understanding a widespread tendency, that of illustrating Kant's theory of analytic judgment by means of the judgment "all bachelors are unmarried men". Perhaps since Kant does not give analytic judgment anything to do, epistemologically speaking, it is appropriate to exemplify analytic judgment by means of a judgment that does very little.
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