Why, then, are perceptual judgments “judgments”? Judgment is nonimmediate but mediated knowledge of an object: in every judgment there is a concept valid for a plurality of representations (CPR/B: 85). It cannot be denied that having the representation of the stone and its warming already represents a unification effectuated in the manifold of the sensible. To unite representations in a consciousness is already “to think” and “to judge” (P, 22), and judgments are a priori rules (P, 23), “all synthesis, without which even perception would be impossible, is subject to the categories” (CPR/B: 125). It cannot be that (as Kant says in P, 21) “the a priori principles of the possibility of all experience … are nothing other than propositions (Sätze) that subsume all perception … under those pure concepts of the understanding (Verstandesbegriffe)”. A Warnehmungsurteil is already woven, penetrated with Verstandesbegriffe. There can be no argument: recognizing a stone as such is already a perceptual judgment, a perceptual judgment is a judgment, and therefore it too depends on the legislation of the intellect. The manifold is given in the sensible intuition, but the conjunction of a manifold in general can enter into us only through an act of synthesis on the part of the intellect.8
In short, Kant postulates a notion of empirical concepts and perceptual judgment (a crucial problem for the empiricists), but he does not succeed in rescuing both from a quagmire, from the muddy terrain between sensible intuition and the legislatory intervention of the intellect. But for his critical theory this no-man’s-land cannot exist.
The various stages of knowledge, for Kant, could be represented by a series of verbalizations in the following sequence:
1. This stone.
2. This is a stone (or: Here there is a stone).
3a. This stone is white.
3b. This stone is hard.
4. This stone is a mineral and a body.
5. If I throw this stone it will fall back to earth.
6. All stones (being minerals and therefore bodies) are heavy.
The first Critique certainly deals with propositions like (5) and (6). It is doubtful whether it really deals with propositions like (4), and it leaves vague the legitimacy of propositions from (1) through (3b). We are entitled to wonder if (1) and (2) express different locutionary acts. Except in infantile holophrastic language, it is impossible to conceive of someone uttering (1) when confronted with a stone—if anything, this syntagm could only occur in (3a) or (3b). But no one has ever said that there must be a verbalization, or even an act of self-consciousness, that corresponds to every phase of knowledge. Someone can walk along a road, without paying attention to the heaps of stones piled up on either side; but if someone asks the walker what there was by the side of the road, the walker could very well reply that there were only stones.9 Therefore, if the fullness of perception is actually already a perceptual judgment—and if we insist on verbalizing it at all costs, we would have (1) which is not a proposition and therefore does not imply a judgment—by the time we get to verbalizing it we are immediately at (2).
Therefore, if someone who has seen a stone is questioned about what they have seen or are seeing, they would either answer (2) or there would be no guarantee that they had perceived anything. As for (3a) and (3b), the subject can have all possible sensations of whiteness or hardness, but when he predicates whiteness or hardness he has already entered into the categorial, and the quality he predicates is applied to a substance, precisely to determine it at least from a certain point of view. They may start with something expressible, such as this white thing, or this hard thing, but even so he would already have begun the work of hypothesis.
It remains to be decided what happens when our subject says that this stone is a mineral and a body. Peirce would have said that we had already entered into the moment of interpretation, whereas for Kant we have constructed a generic concept (but, as we have seen, he is very vague about this). Kant’s real problem, however, concerns (1–3).
There is a difference between (3a) and (3b). For Locke, while the first expresses a simple secondary idea (color), the second expresses a simple primary idea. Primary and secondary are qualifications of objectivity, not of the certainty of perception. A by no means irrelevant problem is whether someone seeing a red apple or a white stone is also able to understand that the apple is white and juicy inside, and that the stone is hard inside and heavy. We would say that the difference depends on whether the perceived object is already the effect of our segmentation of the continuum or whether it is an unknown object. If we see a stone, “we know” in the very act of recognizing that it is a stone what it is like inside. The person seeing a fossil of coral origin for the first time (a stone in form, but red in color) did not yet know what it was like inside.
But even in the case of a known object, what does it mean that “we know” that the stone, white on the outside, is hard on the inside? If someone were to ask us such an irritating question, we would reply: “I imagined so: that’s how stones usually are.”
It seems curious to put an image at the base of a generic concept. What does “imagine” mean? There is a difference between “to imagine1,” in the sense of evoking an image (here we are in the realm of daydreams, of the delineation of possible worlds, as when we picture to ourselves in our minds a stone we would like to find to split open a nut—and this process does not require the experience of the senses) and “to imagine2,” in the sense that, upon seeing a stone as it is, precisely because of and in concomitance with the sensible impressions that have stimulated our visual organs, we know (but we do not see) that it is hard.
What interests us is “to imagine” in this second meaning. As Kant would say, we can leave the first meaning to empirical psychology; but the second meaning is crucial for a theory of understanding, of the perception of things, or—in Kantian terms—in the construction of empirical concepts. And, in any case, even the first meaning of “imagine” is possible—the desire for a stone to use as a nutcracker—because, when we imagine1 a stone, we imagine2 it to be hard.
Sellars (1978) proposes reserving the term imagining for “imagine1” and using imaging for “imagine2.” I propose to translate imaging with “to figure” (both in the sense of constructing a figure, of delineating a structural framework, and in the sense in which we say, on seeing the stone, “I figure” it is hard inside).
In this act of “figuring” some of the stone’s properties, a choice is made, we “figure” it from a certain point of view. If, when seeing or imagining the stone, we did not intend to crack a nut but rather to chase away a bothersome animal, we would also see the stone in its dynamic possibilities, as an object that can be thrown and, due to its heaviness, has the property of falling toward the target rather than rising up in the air.
This “figuring” in order to understand and understanding through “figuring” is crucial to the Kantian system, both for the transcendental grounding of empirical concepts and for permitting perceptual judgments (implicit and nonverbalized) such as (1).
13.3. The Schema
In Kant’s theory, we must explain why categories so astrally abstract can be applied to the concreteness of the sensible intuition. We see the sun and the stone and we must be able to think that star (in a singular judgment) or all stones (in a still more complex, universal judgment, because we have actually seen just one stone, or a few stones, warmed by the sun). Now, “Special laws, therefore, as they refer to phenomena that are empirically determined, cannot be completely derived from the categories.… Experience must be superadded” (CPR/B: 127). But, since the pure concepts of the intellect are heterogeneous with respect to sensible intuitions, “in every subsumption of an object under a concept” (CPR/B: 133; though in fact we should say “in every subsumption of the subject of the intuition under a concept, so that an object may arise”), a third, mediating element is called for that makes it possible, so to speak, for he concept to wrap itself around the intuition and renders the concept applicable to the intuition. This is how the need for a transcendental schema arises.