Kant’s Transcendental Analytic: Categories and Concepts
Categories in Kant’s Philosophy
To determine which categories exist, Kant believed that there was a pure concept for every way of understanding experience. Each of these is expressed in a different type of judgment. There are as many categories as types of judgments, and relying on Aristotle’s logic, there are twelve:
- Unity, plurality, and totality (corresponding to judgments of quantity)
- Reality, negation, and limitation (corresponding to judgments of quality)
- Substance, cause, and community (corresponding to judgments of relation)
- Possibility, existence, and necessity (corresponding to judgments of modality)
A Priori Synthetic Judgments in Physics
Fundamental principles of physics are synthetic judgments that express knowledge of the pure a priori concepts (categories), and the principle of causality. Therefore, they are themselves a priori, ensuring their universality and necessity.
For Kant, the principle of causality is not based on a custom of the human mind, as Hume stated. It does not come from experience, but rather, causation is set by the subject to think about experience. That is, it is not in the phenomena themselves, but in the way of thinking. But even as a pure concept, applicable to all phenomena that the understanding knows or can know, it is no less a real experience.
Phenomena and Noumena
Another important section of the Transcendental Analytic is the distinction between phenomenon and noumenon. A phenomenon, which is the subject of knowledge, is a composite of the data of sensation and the order imposed by the a priori forms of space and time. A noumenon (Greek noumenon, intelligible), is a thing in itself, devoid of the form imposed on the subject to know. Kant did not deny its existence but admitted it is impossible to know because noumena are beyond the limits of our experience. However, while reality itself is unknowable, it provides the field of knowledge.
Understanding and Concepts in the Transcendental Analytic
In the Transcendental Analytic, Kant dealt with understanding, which is the power of thinking about objects given in intuition, and performs a dual function: to construct judgments and to chain them, forming arguments.
The study of judgments leads to the analysis of the elements that compose them: concepts. Understanding a phenomenon is to refer it to a concept in a judgment: A is B. According to Kant, this requires collaboration between sensitivity and understanding. Sensitivity provides a multitude of views in space and time, and understanding provides the concepts used to unify the multiple and dispersed material.
Categories
Concepts can be empirical or pure.
- Empirical concepts are those that understanding creates from what is captured in sensory experience; therefore, they are a posteriori concepts, drawn from observation of the similarities and commonalities of certain individuals: man, tree, table, etc.
- Pure concepts, or categories, do not come from experience; they are a priori, made directly by understanding, like space and time in sensitivity. They represent the ways that understanding unifies what comes from experience. They are the laws of thought, thanks to which we can make judgments about phenomena. Understanding cannot think about phenomena unless they fall under the categories, but these alone do not have any content; they are only sources of knowledge when applied to phenomena produced by sensitivity.