ABSTRACT
Kant argues that any finite, temporally discursive cognition of a world requires or "correlates" objectively with certain a priori forms of conceptual and sensory representation in general. As such Kant's empirical realism is not based on gap-filling constructions from some actually given experiences, whether real or imagined, contra Meillassoux. Quentin Meillassoux takes it to be an anti-Kantian point to suggest that, as science indicates, "givenness could just as well never have emerged if life had not arisen". Meillassoux reconstructs the transcendentalist rejoinder as making the phenomenological point that what is already actually given in experience is always given against the background of aspects or regions that are not entirely given all at once in the experience. Kant's transcendental deduction concerns the lawful and structural forms. The relevant principles concern various norm-governed uniformities that reflect a given framework's implicit, socially maintained linguistic "ought-to-be" rules.
