13.4. Does the Dog Schema Exist in Kant?
So much for the schemata of the pure concepts of the intellect. But it so happens that it is in the very same chapter on schematism that Kant introduces examples that concern empirical concepts. It is not simply a question of understanding how the schema allows us to homogenize the concepts of unity, reality, inherence, subsistence, possibility, and so on, with the manifold of the intuition. There also exists the schema of the dog: “the concept of a dog indicates a rule, according to which my for imaginative capacity can universally trace the figure of a four-legged animal, without being restricted to either a unique particular figure supplied by experience, or to any possible image that I am able to portray in concrete” (CPR/B:136).
Right after this example, a few lines further on, Kant writes the famous sentence stating that this schematism of our intellect, which also concerns the simple form of appearances, is an art hidden in the depths of the human soul. Schematism is an art, a procedure, a task, a construction, but we know very little about how it works. Because it is clear that our analogy of the flowchart, which was useful in understanding how the schematic construction of the triangle takes place, doesn’t work as well for the dog.
What is certain is that a computer is able to construct the image of a dog, if it is provided with the appropriate algorithms. But if someone who had never seen a dog were to study the flowchart to see how it was constructed, they would have trouble forming a mental image of it (whatever a mental image may be). We would find ourselves once more faced with a lack of homogeneity between categories and intuition, and the fact that the schema of the dog can be verbalized as a four-legged animal only brings us back to the extreme abstractness of every predication by genus and specific differentia, without helping us distinguish a dog from a horse.
Deleuze (1963:73) reminds us that “the schema does not consist in an image, but in spatiotemporal relations that incarnate or realize some purely conceptual relations” (my emphasis), and this seems right as far as the schemata of the concepts of the pure intellect go. But it doesn’t seem sufficient when it comes to empirical concepts, since Kant was the first to tell us that to think of a plate we must resort to the image of the circle. While the schema of the circle is not an image but a rule to follow in constructing the image, nevertheless in the empirical concept of plate the constructability of its form should find a place somehow, and precisely in a visual sense.
We can only conclude that when Kant thinks of the schema of the dog he is thinking of something very close to what Marr and Nishishara (1978), in the field of modern cognitive sciences, called a “3D Model,” which is nothing but a three-dimensional schematization (through the composition and articulation of more elementary forms) of various objects that we are able to recognize. To put it plainly, the 3D model of a human being—thinking of it only in the form of cylindrical elements—is composed of a smaller cylinder attached to a longer cylinder, from which cylindrical joints branch off, corresponding to the upper and lower limbs, including the elbows and knees.
In the perceptual judgment the 3D model is applied to the manifold of experience, and an x is distinguished as a man and not as a dog. This should demonstrate how a perceptual judgment is not necessarily resolved into a verbal statement. In point of fact, it is based on the application of a structural diagram to the manifold of sensation. The fact that further judgments are required to determine the concept of man with all his possible characteristics is something else entirely (and, as is the case for all empirical concepts, the task appears to be infinite, and never fully realized). With a 3D model, we could even mistake a man for a primate and vice versa—which is exactly what sometimes happens, although it is unlikely that a man would be confused with a snake. The fact is that we somehow start out with this type of schema, even before knowing or asserting that man has a soul, speaks, or even has an opposable thumb.
We might go so far as to say, then, that the schema of the empirical concept turns out to coincide with the concept of the object and that therefore schema, concept, and meaning are being identified with one another. Producing the schema of the dog implies having at least an initial essential concept of it. A 3D model of a man does not correspond to the concept of man in the classic categorial definition (“mortal rational animal”). But it works as far as recognizing a human being goes, and subsequently adding the characteristics that derive from this first identification. Which explains why Kant (L II, 103) pointed out that a synthesis of empirical concepts can never be complete, because over the course of experience it will always be possible to identify further notes of the object dog or man. Except that, with an overstatement, Kant declared that empirical concepts therefore “cannot even be defined.” We would say instead that they cannot be defined once and for all, like mathematical concepts, but that they do allow a first nucleus to be formed, around which successive categorial definitions will gel (or arrange themselves harmoniously).
Can we say that this first conceptual nucleus is also the meaning that corresponds to the term with which we express it? Kant doesn’t often use the word meaning (Bedeutung), but he does use it precisely when he is speaking of the schema.10 Concepts are completely impossible, nor can they have any meaning, unless an object is given either to the concepts themselves or at least to the elements of which they consist (CPR/B: 135). Kant is suggesting in a less explicit way that coincidence of linguistic meaning and perceptual meaning, which will later be energetically asserted by Husserclass="underline" it is in a “unity of act” that the red object becomes recognized as red and named as red. “To ‘call something red’—in the fully actual sense of ‘calling’ which presupposes an underlying intuition of the so called—and to ‘recognize something as red,’ are in reality synonymous expressions” (Husserl 1970a: II, 691).
But, that being the case, not only the notion of empirical concept, but also that of the meaning of terms referring back to perceivable objects (for example, the names of natural genera) opens up a new problem. This first nucleus of meaning, the one identified with the conceptual schema, cannot be reduced to mere categorial information: the dog is not understood and identified (and recognized) because it is a mammiferous animal, but because it has a certain physical form. The form of circularity must of necessity correspond to the concept of plate, and Kant has told us that the fact that the dog has paws (four of them altogether) is part of the schema of the dog. A man (in the sense of a member of the human race) is nonetheless something that moves fin accordance with the articulations provided for by the 3D model.