Animals and Objectivity
This chapter examines the question of whether animals could ever, on Kant’s account, enjoy objective representational states of their environment by addressing Kant’s discussion of the conditions under which a mental state can be said to enjoy what Kant calls a ‘relation to an object’. I examine Kant’s discussion of this relation in the B-Deduction of the Critique of Pure Reason, which is standardly interpreted as arguing that a ‘relation to an object’ is possible only with the presence of intellectual faculties, and thus with the capacity for conceptual representation and judgment. I present an alternative interpretation that emphasizes the importance, in reading Kant’s argument, of distinguishing between acquaintance (Kenntnis) and cognition (Erkenntnis). On this alternative picture, although an animal does not rationally cognize the objective world, the world with which the animal mind is nevertheless acquainted is a world with particular qualities bundled or unified according to basic cognitive principles such as spatial continuity, cohesion, or proximity. I thus argue that there is a plausible interpretive case for Kant’s holding that animals enjoy objective states in a relevant sense of ‘objective’ but do not represent ‘objects’ in the sense with which Kant is primarily concerned in the Critique of Pure Reason.