The togetherness principle and Kant’s nonconceptualism
One of the best-known and most widely-quoted texts of the Critique of Pure Reason is this pithy slogan: “thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind†(A51/B76). This slogan encapsulates what can be called the togetherness principle. The “togetherness†here is the necessary cognitive complementarity and semantic interdependence of intuitions and concepts:
Intuition and concepts … constitute the elements of all our cognition, so that neither concepts without intuition corresponding to them in some way nor
intuition without concepts can yield a cognition.
Thoughts without [intensional] content (Inhalt) are empty (leer), intuitions without concepts are blind (blind). It is, therefore, just as necessary to make the
mind's concepts sensible — that is, to add an object to them in intuition — as to make our intuitions understandable — that is, to bring them under concepts.
These two powers, or capacities, cannot exchange their functions. The understanding can intuit nothing, the senses can think nothing. Only from their
unification can cognition arise. (A50-51/B74-76)
What does the togetherness principle mean? The famous texts just quoted have led many readers and interpreters of Kant — e.g., Sellars 1963, Sellars 1968, McDowell 1994, and Abela 2002 — to deny the cognitive and semantic independence of intuitions: intuitions without concepts either simply do not exist or else are wholly meaningless (i.e., neither objectively valid nor rationally intelligible) even if they do exist. And this denial appears to be supported by at least one other text:
The understanding cognizes everything only through concepts; consequently, however far it goes in its divisions [of lower concepts] it never cognizes through mere intuition but always yet again through lower concepts. (A656/B684).
But even so, this cannot be a correct interpretation of the famous texts at A50-51/B74-76, because of what Kant says in these texts:
Objects can indeed appear to us without necessarily having to be related to functions of the understanding. (A89/B122. emphasis added)
Appearances can certainly be given in intuition without functions of the understanding. (A90/B122, emphasis added)
Appearances might very well be so constituted that the understanding would not find them in accordance with the conditions of its unity…. [and] in the series of appearances nothing would present itself that would yield a rule of synthesis and so correspond to the concept of cause and effect, so that this concept would be entirely empty, null, and meaningless. Appearances would none the less present objects to our intuition, since intuition by no means requires the functions of thought. (A90-91/B122-123, emphasis added)
The manifold for intuition must already be given prior to the synthesis of the understanding and independently from it. (B145, emphasis added)
In other words, according to these last four texts, intuitions are nonconceptual cognitions, that is, cognitions that both exist and are objectively valid without requiring concepts. But now we are in a dilemma. How then can these two apparently contradictory sets of texts be reconciled?
The answer is that what Kant is actually saying in the famous texts at A50-51/B74-76 is that intuitions and concepts are cognitively complementary and semantically interdependent for the specific purpose of constituting objectively valid judgments. This in turn corresponds directly to a special, narrower sense of ‘cognition’ that Kant highlights in the B edition of the first Critique, which means the same as ‘objectively valid judgment’ (B xxvi, Bxxvi n.). But from this it does not follow that there cannot be “empty†concepts or “blind†intuitions outside the special context of objectively valid judgments. ‘Empty concept’ for Kant does not mean either “bogus concept†or “wholly meaningless conceptâ€: rather it means “concept that is not objectively valid,†and as we have seen in section 1.3, for Kant there can be very different sorts of concepts that are not objectively valid, including rationally intelligible concepts of noumenal objects or noumenal subjects. Similarly, ‘blind intuition’ for Kant does not mean either “bogus intuition†or “wholly meaningless intuitionâ€: rather it means “anthropocentrically empirically referentially meaningful nonconceptual intuition.†Therefore, despite its being true for Kant, according to the togetherness principle, that intuitions and concepts must be combined with one another in order to generate objectively valid judgments, nevertheless intuitions can also occur independently of concepts and still remain objectively valid. And in particular, to the extent that intuitions are cognitively and semantically independent of concepts, and also objectively valid, they contain nonconceptual representational mental contents. So Kant’s togetherness principle is also perfectly consistent with what we would nowadays call his “nonconceptualism†about mental content (Bermúdez 2003a).