ABSTRACT
By incorporating the ‘I think’ into sensations, images, associations, and other representations lacking true logical universality, they are straightaway transformed into universals capable of being logically combined to form propositional representations, and so count as concepts in a genuinely logical sense. Yet, the ‘I think’ by itself does not suffice for the actual logical combination of concepts in propositions. It must instead be supplemented by innate logical forms of judgment capable of synthesizing any ‘I think’–generated concept with any other in a proposition, thus making possible a single a priori consciousness in which all possible such concepts (and subsequently all propositions) are united—not literally, to be sure, but rather as a synthetic unity.
By far the most important of the representations psychologistically explicable through the logical ‘I’ are the pure concepts of the understanding that result by representing restrictions on the logical freedom inherent in forms of judgment. Yet, because their meaning derives entirely from logical forms devoid of objective content, a gulf opens up that has to be bridged before Kant could utilize them to psychologistically explicate the objective categories of traditional metaphysics. The steps he required to solve this heterogeneity problem are examined in succeeding chapters. Subjects/authors discussed include concepts, propositions, universe of discourse, self-consciousness, language, mathematical logic, cognitive evolution, the private language argument, platonism, Wittgenstein, Aristotle, Frege, and Chomsky.
