Kant’s Transcendental Functionalism

It IS NO LONGER A NOVELTY TO VIEW KANT as a functionalist about mind or self. Wilfrid Sellars may have been first to bring this line of interpretation onto agenda, (1) and a number of scholars including Andrew Brook, Patricia Kitcher, Ralf Meerbote, Thomas Powell, and Jay Rosenberg have further explored different functionalist interpretations of Kant. (2) These interpreters credit Kant with original insights into nature of self-consciousness, mental representation, and human cognition, but they tend to uncouple Kant's from his epistemology and metaphysics. Brook, for example, considers Kant's epistemology merely a cultural artefact, (3) which belongs to what is dead in Kant, while maintaining that what is still living is his analysis of cognitive mind. (4) Kitcher concedes that Kant's transcendental psychology, being incompatible with ideality of time, does not fit well into metaphysics of transcendental idealism. (5) Separating Kant's epistemology and metaphysics from his has a long tradition, which can be traced back to neo Kantianism, (6) but this antipsychological interpretation has become particularly influential since Peter Strawson called for an abandonment of the imaginary subject of transcendental psychology in favor of the strictly analytical argument for necessary structure of objective experience. (7) By contrast, functionalist interpretations attempt to revive subjective side of Kant's Critique, at cost of surrendering certain central tenets of transcendental idealism. Yet, I think both Strawson and functionalist interpreters fail to do justice to Kant's strategy to reveal necessary structure of cognition and reality by analyzing faculty of cognition (Erkenntnisvermogen). The way that Kant characterizes cognitive faculties such as sensibility, understanding, and apperception does give prima facie evidence for a functionalist interpretation. The problem is how a functionalist interpretation can be brought into line with Kant's overall position of transcendental idealism. In this paper I will develop an interpretation called transcendental functionalism, which explains Kant's way to account for objective structure of reality based on a theory of necessary cognitive functions. While ordinary functionalism of mind describes mental states in terms of their functional roles, transcendental functionalism determines what functions mind has to realize if it is to be capable of objective cognition. It is not directly about human cognitive system, neither at phenomenal nor noumenal level, but about an abstract functional structure that Kant refers to as transcendental subject. Accordingly, Kant's cognitive does not aim directly at factual knowledge of human mind's workings, but rather, by analyzing concept and structure of objective cognition, to reveal cognitive functions that are necessary for all potential cognizers including, but not limited to, human beings. It is a theory of rational cognition as such, which at same time accounts for basic structure of reality that can be cognitively accessible to any finite rational agents. This paper begins with an analysis of Kant's faculty of cognition, followed by an examination of apparent conflicts of ordinary functionalist interpretations with Kant's transcendental idealism (I). Kant's faculty of cognition represents a theoretical construct of transcendental subject, but if human beings can be qualified as rational cognizers, they must have somehow realized functional constraints that define transcendental subject (II). It is important for a coherent interpretation of Kant to distinguish between two ways of viewing faculty of cognition: it can either be considered transcendentally as a set of abstract functional constraints that are valid to all potential cognizers, or empirically as a particular realization by a complicated system of mental operations that take place in time (III). …