Kant on the Communicability of Empirical Knowledge
--- VERY rough draft --Alexandra Newton
It is striking that, despite its indisputable pervasiveness in our cognitive activities,
knowledge from testimony does not appear alongside empirical knowledge or experience as
a kind of theoretical knowledge in the core sections of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The
lacuna has led several contemporary philosophers to present Kant as a radical individualist
who advocates the ‘epistemic autonomy’ of the epistemic agent in making up her own mind
about what she should think, without relying on the authority or competence of others. This
‘individualist’ position is often contrasted with a ‘social’ epistemology that endorses mutual
dependence and the loss of individual hegemony. Only if we relinquish some of our personal
freedom, and allow ourselves to be constrained by what others tell us, will we achieve the
higher freedom of those who have been initiated into a social practice of giving and asking
for reasons. In this way we may come to view our role as individuals in these discursive
practices as that of (more or less distinguished) members, and to reign in our arrogant desire
to usurp the position of the whole.
In this paper I wish to argue that this narrative of the self-conceit of Kantian reason,
and its inevitable fall, overlooks one of the most important lessons of Kant’s first Critique.
For the narrative is predicated on the empiricist assumption that the subject of empirical
judgment or knowledge is a singular individual, and that her acts of judging are her acts of
judging only if they are brought about by her individual acts of making up her own mind. As
I will argue here, the Kantian self-conscious subject of judgment must be universal, in the
sense that any judgment that constitutes knowledge is conscious of itself as possibly shared
by any other individual subject. Indeed, contrary to empiricism, Kant shows that experience
itself would not be possible if it were not the exercise of a universally shared capacity for
knowledge. Reason is not arrogant, although the individuals who embody it may be.
Once we introduce the idea of a universal subject of knowledge, a second myth
about the Kantian subject begins to make its appearance, thus obscuring his universalist
insight from another angle. For it may now seem that Kant adopts the rationalist position of
thinking that the universal subject of knowledge is entirely indifferent to the empirical
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individuals in which it comes to be embodied. If this is so, our practices of communicating
knowledge with one another will appear to be a dispensable aid to the exercises of a
universal capacity for knowledge, rather than an essential milestone on its path of selfrealization. But this overlooks the importance of experience in Kant’s account of discursive
cognition. As I will argue here, by showing that our universal faculty of cognition can be
actualized only through experience, Kant also shows that the universal subject nonaccidentally develops through its embodiment in the individual to its realization in a
community of individuals.
Kant thus does not need to discuss testimony explicitly in the first Critique, since the
possibility of sharing knowledge is already the upshot of his anti-empiricist conception of
knowledge, and the necessity of its actually coming to be shared by others is the upshot of
his anti-rationalism.
1.
Let us begin by assuming, with the empiricists, that the self of which I am conscious
in self-consciously judging ‘S is P’ is a singular, individual self distinct from those with whom
I converse. There are two reasons why this assumption can seem to be obvious. If, following
Hume, judgment or “assent” is understood to be “an immediate impression of the senses, or
a repetition of that impression in the memory”, then the subject of the judgment must be a
single individual (T 1.3.6, p. 61). For if judgment consists in sensible affection, the subject of
judgment must be the individual thus affected. Judgment may also seem to be inseparable
from the individual subject if it is taken to consist in a kind of choice or act of ‘making up
one’s mind’. I can only make up my own mind about what I should think, based on my own
epistemic deliberation about what is true; but this is not something I can do for you. Just as
my free actions are mine only, since they are attached to my individual choices about what to
do, my mental actions of judging are attached to my choices about what to think. In his logic
lectures, Kant discusses these two ways in which judgment comes to be attached to the
individual subject as resting on the influence either of ‘sensibility’ or of the ‘will’ on the
understanding (the faculty of judgment).
The question I wish to focus on here is whether the assumption that the subject of
judgment is the individual in either of these senses enables us to make sense of the
possibility of communicating my judgment with others. This question may be heard in two
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registers: first, can the content of my judgment be accessible to you if the I that thinks this
content is distinct from your I? And second, can you agree or disagree with my judgment if my
I is distinct from yours?
In the following I will set aside the first question and assume that, in any act of
communication, two subjects come to grasp the same thought content. My focus will instead
be on the consequences of thinking that the subject of judgment is a single, unrepeatable
individual. That is, in communication, how does it happen that you not only understand
what I say, but also agree or disagree with my judgment about what is the case?
Notice that an answer to the first question will not settle the second question. That
is, the agreement in our judgments cannot consist in the mere identity of the content judged,
just as disagreement cannot consist in mere negation in the content judged. For mere
identity of content does not explain why your judgment supports mine, just as the difference
in the contents of our judgments does not explain why your act of judging opposes mine, or
cancels it out. That is, it cannot explain why your judgment may issue a demand on me to
revise my judgment. The contents of judgments may be identical or different without the
subjects who judge them ever coming into harmony or conflict with one another in
conversation. To understand agreement and disagreement among subjects in conversation,
then, we must focus on the act of judging or assertion.
Now, if the act of judging is understood as resting on sensibility or an act of choice,
then it is conceivable that we each judge the same proposition to be true and yet disagree
with one another. For instance, if judgment is understood as a kind of inclination towards
taking a certain proposition to be true, it may so happen that I feel positively inclined
towards a proposition in this way, but feel no inclination towards your inclination towards it.
Hence, although I may defend myself, I am not inclined to support your judgment when you
face challenges to it from a third party. Or again, although I deliberate about what I should
think by considering what is true, I may choose to mislead you by telling you falsehoods.
Thus, my judgment does not necessarily support your judgment, even when the contents of
our judgments are the same.
But if agreement and disagreement in our judgments can come radically apart from
the contents judged, the phenomenon of communication will appear to be mysterious. For if
I cannot know whether your saying ‘yes’ to my judgment means ‘no’ towards its content, or
whether your disagreement with my judgment is due to your aversion towards me rather
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than towards the content of my judgment, I will not be able to understand what you say as
supporting or opposing what I judge. Hence, conversation with you will be impossible. The
problem with individualist conceptions of judgment is that they leave it mysterious how
knowledge of another’s judgments, and hence conversation, is possible: how can I know that
you feel positively inclined towards a proposition, or have made up your mind about its
truth? And how can I know that your inclinations are towards the truth at all?
Even assuming that such knowledge is possible, further problems arise from
thinking that your judgment’s agreement with mine is a different reality from our knowledge
of their agreement. For if agreement and disagreement were properties that our judgments
could have independently of our consciousness of them as such, we could converse without
realizing that we do. But this is absurd. We cannot come into agreement if we fail to
understand ourselves as agreeing about what we judge. Of course, I may cause you to judge
as I do through brainwashing, and without your noticing. But that is different from our
agreeing with one another in a conversation. Likewise, when I induce you to suppress a
judgment, there may be a sense in which I disagreed with you. But this is different from
disagreement in conversation, which requires our joint understanding of a disharmony in our
judgments. Without this common consciousness of an opposition, there would be no
demand to resolve the dispute, and hence no real opposition.
We have been led into this predicament because we began with the assumption that
judging rests on sensibility or an act of choice, which are accessible only to the individual
who is affected or who chooses. It is certainly true that we sometimes hold something to be
true merely because of the way we have been passively influenced or affected, or because of
a choice we have made (as in wishful thinking). But if we judge correctly, we will judge from
a consciousness of the truth of what we judge, and not from merely subjective causes.
Assuming that all judgments purport to be correct or true, erroneous judgment must
therefore rest on the illusion that merely subjective grounds – i.e. grounds that have their
source in the “constitution of the subject” - are objective, or ground the truth of what is
judged. Kant calls this illusion persuasion [Überredung] (KrV A820/B848). By contrast,
judging that self-consciously rests on objective grounds, or that is conscious of its source not
in subjective causes but in a capacity for objective cognition, is called conviction
[Überzeugung].
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If a judgment is conviction, its grounds are “objectively sufficient”, which is to say
that it constitutes knowledge. And if a judgment is knowledge, then it will be in necessary
agreement with all other judgments that constitute knowledge, and will exclude any
judgment that opposes it. To be conscious of this agreement of a judgment with itself and
with others in a whole of cognitions is to be self-conscious: we are conscious of what we
necessarily think when we are conscious of what we know. But if the self thus constituted by
the necessary unity of all my judgments were myself as distinct from your self, then this
‘necessity’ will be merely subjective. It would merely reflect how I must combine
representations together, for instance, due to the ways in which I have been passively
influenced to think. But it would not reflect how representations must be combined in order
to constitute objective knowledge of a shared world. The self of self-conscious knowledge
therefore must be one that can be shared by others: my judgment must agree not only with
other judgments that I hold, but with the judgments of any other (possible) knowing subject.
Self-consciousness of a judgment must, that is, consist in the consciousness that the
judgment has of itself as necessarily agreeing and opposing other judgments, regardless of
whether those judgments issue from you or me.
Self-consciousness in judging that constitutes knowing thus is consciousness of
myself not as an individual or singular ‘I’, but as a “consciousness in general” [Bewußtsein
überhaupt] that can be shared by any thinker (B143). This of course does not mean that I may
not also be conscious of myself as an individual subject in making a judgment, but I am not
conscious of myself in this way merely through the exercise of a capacity for judgment.1 As
an exercise of a capacity for knowledge, judgment is not the possession of an individual, but
essentially belong to any rational subject capable of knowledge. A judgment that constitutes
knowledge thus does not need to be supplemented by the desire to communicate it to
others, or by an inclination to support their judgments, in order to enter relations of
agreement and disagreement with the judgments of others. That is to say, knowledge has its
own, inner power to sustain itself, to be sustained by the judgments of other knowing
subjects, and to oppose error. Simply as knowledge, it essentially demands agreement from
other knowers, and demands revision of judgments that oppose it. This is Kant’s point in
the Prolegomena when he says that the “objective validity” of a judgment (i.e. its non-
1
Kant marks this distinction by distinguishing between transcendental apperception and inner sense.
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accidental truth or validity as knowledge) and its “necessary universal validity (for everyone)
are […] interchangeable concepts” (P 4:298).
Only under the assumption that the subject of judgment is general in the above sense
can we make sense of the possibility of agreement and opposition among the judgments of
different subjects. For if we did not assume that these subjects share a common capacity for
judgment, they would each operate as isolated communities, in accordance with their own
laws and principles of organization. But there would be no common law that demands that
one subject relinquish her judgment when challenged by another on objective grounds, and
no law in accordance with which harmony could be established. In short, in order to
communicate with others we must stand under common laws of the understanding, which is
just to say that we must judge from a consciousness of a common capacity to judge.
We are now in a position to see how empiricism about the judging subject may have
its source in a common error. Sometimes we think that another person has communicated
their knowledge with us when in fact we have allowed ourselves to be persuaded by them on
the grounds of their influence and prestige. And conversely, we sometimes think we are
reasoning when in fact we are obstinately refusing to hear the voice of reason in others.
When, for instance, I am persuaded by what you say, your taking something to be true
causes my taking it to be true through my wish to believe what you say. The influence of the
prestige and authority [Ansehen] of the speaker on my judgment is here mistaken for the
power of insight or reason in her judgment. When this passive use of reason becomes
habitual, and thus gives rise to “determining judgment”, it becomes prejudice (“the prejudice
of the prestige of the person”). Similarly, one may fall under the illusion that one’s own
judgments are true simply because they are one’s own. Here one mistakes a subjective
propensity to self-love, an inclination to believe only “that which is the product of one’s own
understanding”, for the capacity to judge on objective grounds (i.e. for a universally shared
capacity for knowledge) (JL 9:80). This “prejudice based on self-love” is called “logical
egoism” (ibid.), and is just as harmful as blind submission to the prestige of others. In both
kinds of prejudice, the particular constitution of the individual (whether oneself or another)
is confused with a universal capacity for reason, which is just to say that subjective grounds
of judgment are confused with objective ones.
Kant’s point is thus not, as some of his readers have maintained, that the claims of
the logical egoist are merely in need of qualification. Although Kant denies that ‘a priori
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truths of reason’ can be learned from testimony, this does not mean that logical egoism is an
appropriate position to adopt with respect to them (cf. Guyer 1997). Truths of reason
cannot be learned from testimony not because they arise from self-love, but because they are
already had by others prior to communication: they flow not from the individual, but from a
universally shared capacity for cognition that is a necessary condition of the possibility of
communication. Communication of these truths thus does not serve the purpose of teaching
or learning, but of clarifying knowledge we already share. Kant denies that philosophy,
which is concerned only with truths of reason, can be taught, but not that it can be
communicated; we cannot learn philosophy from others, but we can certainly learn how to
philosophize with them.
Hume, the most consistent of all empiricists, avoids the above error of confusing the
individual subject of judgment with a universal faculty of cognition, and thus does not
maintain that his individualist conception of judgment enables communication in our sense.
Rather than admitting that the judgments of others can agree with or oppose my judgments,
Hume maintains that they can merely provide me with evidence that I may or may not take
up in my judgment, which may then oppose other judgments of mine. For instance, if I have
repeatedly noticed that what you say is true, I may take your statement as evidence that a
certain claim is true, and hence come to revise my previous judgment to the contrary. It is
not your judgment, but rather an inclination in me, that opposes my previous judgment and
demands a revision. Thus, testimony will consist not in a communication of knowledge
through the internal demand of agreement that your judgment issues on me, but in the
communication of thoughts that may or may not become knowledge in the hearer,
depending on the ‘force’ that the evidence of the testifier’s statements have in the hearer’s
assessment.
Hume’s failure to see how genuine communication is possible is due to his inability
to see how judgment could have its source in a universal capacity for knowledge. From a
Humean perspective your knowledge is added to mine only accidentally, not because my
knowledge necessarily contains within itself the potentiality of its communication with you.
A Humean may argue that knowledge grows as gossip does, i.e. not because of its inner
character as knowledge, but because of the desires in those who share it (e.g. the desire to
hear of the misfortune of others). But while it is certainly true that the communication of
gossip is driven by such desires, it does not follow that there is not a tendency internal to
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knowledge as such, in abstraction from the influence that sensibility or desire has on
judgment, towards its communication with other knowers.2
2.
In the above section we emphasized that communication presupposes consciousness
of a common capacity for knowledge as shared by those who communicate. In accepting what
you say, I must be conscious of your judgment as issuing from a universal capacity that I
share with you. At the level of reflection in the self-consciousness of judgment, I do not
distinguish between my and your thoughts, just as I am not conscious of the differences
between this tree and that tree merely through the concept or general representation <tree>.
There is no difference in this respect between agreement and opposition among my own
judgments, and agreement and opposition with your judgments: in both cases, the judgments
either sustain one another or demand a resolution of conflict merely in virtue of being
exercises of a common capacity for knowledge, and not because I or you desire its
resolution. When we communicate, we speak with one voice, one ‘I’ of self-consciousness.
Since the I of self-conscious judgment is entirely general in this sense, it does not
matter whether I know something from my own experience or from your testimony:
[W]e can just as well accept something on the testimony of others as on our
own experience. For there is just as much that is deceptive in our experience
as in the testimony of others. Our thinking, when we hold an experience to
be true, is subject to many hazards. To be sure, the testimony that we accept
from others is subject to just as many hazards as our own experience is
subject to errors. But we can just as well have certainty through the
testimony of others as through our own experience. (VL 24:896; cf. LB)
Testimony thus does not give us a kind of knowledge that is distinct from our own
experience. The difference in the subjects of knowledge is irrelevant for the relations of
agreement and disagreement that any judgment enters with other judgments in a whole of
cognitions: whether you or I see a black swan, for instance, the empirical judgment that there
Thus, we should distinguish between this inner tendency towards subjective expansion through
communication and the desire for sociability, which we doubtless also have – “Daß seinen Gemütszustand,
selbst auch nur in Ansehung der Erkenntnisvermögen, mitteilen zu können, eine Lust bei sich führe, könnte
man aus dem natürlichen Hange des Menschen zur Geselligkeit (empirisch und psychologisch) leichtlich
dartun” (KU §9, 29).
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are black swans must cancel out any judgment that all swans are white. Whereas the
‘groundedness’ of a judgment is an internal criterion of its truth, since it shows the judgment
to be in necessary agreement with other judgments, the subjective universality or
communicability of a judgment is a merely “external mark” of its truth (Logic…).3 For
although it is not accidental that knowledge is communicated with others (as we have seen
above), whether or not it is shared by one or more subjects has no relevance for the question
whether its internal agreement with other judgments in a whole of cognitions is necessary.
The subjective universality of the judgment (i.e. its being shared by others) is thus external to
the inner agreement of judgments, and hence to their character as knowledge. Much of our
epistemic discourse can be carried out in foro interno.
This is not to deny that testimony is necessary for expanding our individual
experience of the world. But the limits of individual experience that are extended by
testimony are contingent. If I had been in a different place or time, or had access to
machines for faster travel to distant places, I would have acquired knowledge from my own
experience instead of from others. Reliance on testimony in any given case is therefore
contingent. Moreover, there is an element of contingency in the subjective generality that
knowledge acquires through testimony. As we have seen, the universality of the ‘I’ of selfconscious judgment is necessary and presupposed as internal to the subjects who
communicate their knowledge with one another. But in addition to the universality of the
capacity for judgment, there is also the question whether the empirical judgment that is
actual in me is also actual in you and others. Unlike the self-consciousness of judgment in
communication discussed above, consciousness of the completion of an act of
communicating knowledge with others through testimony rests on factors external to the
act: whether or not you learn from me will depend not only on our possession of a common
faculty of cognition, but on whether you understand what I say in the concrete situation in
which I say it, and are not inhibited from learning it through suspicions about my honesty.
Whereas I cannot fail to share a faculty of cognition with you if I am in a position to
communicate with you at all, I may fail to actually share my knowledge with you. Thus,
unlike the universality of the capacity for knowledge, which is presupposed by the
“The touchstone of whether taking something to be true is conviction or mere persuasion is […] externally,
the possibility of communicating it and finding it to be valid for the reason of every human being to take it to
be true” (A820/ B848).
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individuation of particular acts of the capacity, the subjective generality of an act of judging
(its being shared by a plurality of subjects) presupposes the contingent actuality of that act in
particular subjects.4
We should not conclude from these contingent features of knowledge from
testimony that the universality of a capacity for knowledge is entirely indifferent to its
embodiment in one or more empirical subjects. If the central anti-rationalist tenets of Kant’s
critical philosophy are correct, then a universal capacity for knowledge cannot be actualized
except under conditions in which an object is given to me in sensibility. But it is only the
individual subject that can be affected by the object, and hence only through the individual
that the universal capacity can be actualized. Whereas the capacity itself is an ‘analytic unity’,
or an identical capacity in a manifold of representations, and hence is indifferent to the
differences in the subjects in which it is actualized, the exercises of the capacity in experience
bring difference into this identity: a plurality of (possible) subjects emerges due to the
reliance of cognition on sensibility. But rather than leaving this plurality external to the
universal subject of cognition, Kant has shown that any experience, insofar as it can be
integrated into systematic cognition, has an internal tendency to be communicated with
others. This inner generalizing tendency of judgment requires that the knowledge belonging
to the individual be brought back to the unity of the universal subject through its
communication with others. The three stages of unity, plurality, and totality that cognition
must traverse to attain inner or objective perfection thus also seem to apply to its essential
development in the attainment of outer or subjective perfection, i.e. in harmonious discourse
with others (B114). [???]
3.
In a passing remark from his logic lectures, which Kant based on G. F. Meier’s
Excerpts from the Doctrine of Reason, Kant criticizes Meier’s failure to distinguish between
‘believing something’ and ‘believing someone’:
One way to put this difference would be by saying that the subjective universality of the capacity is ‘strict’,
since it rests only on an ‘analytic unity of apperception’, whereas the subjective generality of its acts is ‘relative’,
since it rests on a plurality of acts. Whereas the former belongs to what Kant calls ‘transcendental unity of
apperception’ or self-consciousness, the latter belongs to empirical apperception or inner sense. Kant expresses
their relation by saying that empirical apperception presupposes transcendental apperception, or is derived from
the latter under empirical conditions (…).
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Our author relates belief merely to testimony. We distinguish, however,
between believing something and believing someone. We can believe
something without someone’s having said it to us. We can believe someone if
we have accepted something on someone’s testimony (VL 24:893).
We are now in a position to understand what Kant means by suggesting that testimony
involves believing not something or what someone says, but believing someone. First, a
condition on believing a person, rather than merely what she says, is that the person reveals
something of herself in what she says: she reveals that she takes what she says to be true.
What she thus reveals about herself, however, is not something particular to her as an
individual. It is instead a universal faculty for knowledge that I share with her, and that I
must be conscious of sharing, in order to accept her statement as knowledge. Of course, I
must also believe that she is honest in disclosing what she judges: the speaker must have “the
will to assert the true, or to declare the experiences as they were” (BL 24: 244; cf. VL 898).
But in acquiring knowledge from a speaker through testimony her honesty serves merely as a
negative condition enabling access to herself, i.e. to her judgment. Sincerity thus does not
characterize the (universal) person that I believe, but merely belongs to the conditions that
give access to that person.
But as we have seen in the second section, in learning from you through testimony I
do not believe a merely universal capacity for knowledge (reason), since that is a faculty I
share with you even prior to communication. I believe reason in your person, which is to say I
believe its embodiment in concreto, in relation to your experience of a spatio-temporal world.
The reason I believe an individual person in acquiring knowledge from testimony thus
relates not to sincerity or to the moral character of the person, but to his or her position in a
spatio-temporal world of objects that we must share, and therefore must divide. I treat you
as offering me knowledge from a particular perspective distinct from my own.
Kant does not deny that it is possible to believe what someone says merely from
belief in her person as a moral being, or as a being that embodies practical reason. But such
belief will not constitute knowledge of what she says. For instance, one may believe the
stories of revealed religion as the word of God, in whom one believes as a holy will. But this
does not mean that one believes these stories in letter; one’s belief does not amount to
theoretical knowledge, and hence is not knowledge gained from the testimony of religious
sources. One’s belief in the stories is rather self-consciously subjective, resting as it does
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merely on one’s belief in the virtue and holiness of the person who reveals them to us. Thus,
one believes the stories in spirit, or as expressions of a holy will.5
Belief, Kant says, is not communicable (R 2489, 16:391-92). He cannot mean that one cannot induce another
to share one’s belief. Rather, he means that belief, unlike knowledge, cannot be communicated in the sense of
shared (‘geteilt’). Beliefs will always be distinct acts in you and me (See also A820-31, RR 2422-2504, Logic 9:6573).
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