How Does Kant Prove We Perceive, Not Merely Imagine, Physical Objects?

This chapter summarises the key steps in Kant’s transcendental proof that we perceive, not merely imagine, physical objects. These steps begin with Kant’s method (§49) and highlight the spatio-temporal character of our representational capacities (§50), Kant’s transcendental proofs of mental content externalism (§51), his proof that we can only make causal judgments about spatial substances (§§52, 53), the transcendental conditions of our self-ascription of experiences (§54), Kant’s semantics of cognitive reference (§55), perceptual synthesis (§56), Kant’s Critical commonsense realism, which highlights our embodied, perceptual-motor behaviour, perceptual affordances and sensory re-afference (§57), and the cognitive transcendence of global perceptual hypotheses (§58). Understood in this way, Kant’s epistemology is directly relevant to contemporary philosophical issues. These findings are corroborated by critical comparisons with interpretations of Kant’s account of perceptual knowledge by Melnick, Sellars and McDowell (§59). I summarise my key philosophical conclusions (§60) and include a postscript on scientia and ‘the’ analytic/synthetic distinction (§61).