Chapter 3 Section 3: Concepts of the Pure Understanding—The Discovery of Categories
The concept of understanding is divided into the concept of experience and the concept of pure understanding .
Experience concept: It is what we usually call the concept, such as: people, flowers, cattle...etc. The concept of experience is formed from the generalization of perceptual experience, and there are elements of experience, so it is called the concept of experience.
Pure intellectual concepts (pure concepts): such as causality, etc., are not generalized from experience. It does not contain an element of experience, so it is a pure concept.
Category : Describes a general classification. It is a term translated from the law. In litigation, the special criminal facts are always classified into certain legal provisions, and then convicted. This categorization of the particular into a general type is the original meaning of the category.
Kant believed that true knowledge is judgment. Judgment links different concepts together by form, and this specific form embodies a specific rule. This kind of rule is an important form of knowledge. This comprehensive function of controlling representations according to certain rules is a pure concept (category), that is, when all phenomena are recognized by us, they must pass through a judgment function, and each judgment is a function of judgment. are the connections of phenomena, each of which must be conditioned by pure concepts (categories) of the understanding. For example, "the sun heats the stone", this judgment is connected by the two concepts of "sun drying" and "stone heat". The concept of "cause and effect" cannot be analyzed from the two concepts of "sunshine", so the concept of "cause and effect" is added to the judgment a priori by the intellect.
Then the next question to ask is:
First, what are the categories of intellect? How did Kant discover these categories?
The answer to this question is called the metaphysical deduction of categories.
Second, why are innate categories applied to perceptual objects objectively valid?
The answer to this question is called a priori deduction of categories.
The origin of "category" The
meaning contained in the category is a meaning with a fundamental nature, that is, the most general and general concept.
The next definition is to specify it in the form of "species plus generic difference" in formal logic. For example, when we define a rose, first, we must determine that the rose belongs to a "flower" (species), and then explain how it is different from other flowers. Aristotle thinks that existence is impossible to define in this way, because existence is the highest concept, so there is no "genus" that is juxtaposed with it, and there is no higher level (species). Therefore, we cannot know what existence is, but only how existence exists.
There are two types of ways of being: "accidental ways of being" and "natural ways of being". For example, "the architect is virtuous", it expresses the architect's "accidental way of being", because an architect's "natural way of being" is to have knowledge of architecture. Without morals, it has nothing to do with being an architect. Aristotle determined the task of metaphysics to study the natural way of existence of "being", which he also called "category".
"Category" role
Category is the most basic class concept, "category" is the most general "description" of things. Aristotle proposed ten categories.
Take the example of describing a person.
(1) Entity: Person, the category of individual belongs to the category of "entity"
(2) Quantity: He is 2 meters tall and weighs 100 kg
(3) Nature: He is a highly educated person
(4) Relationship: He is more than The average person is taller
(5) Location: He lives in Beijing
(6) Time: He went abroad yesterday
(7) Status: He lives in a hotel
(8) Action: He bought a book
(9) All (active) : He owns a book
(10) Bear (passive): He is deeply influenced by this book
The significance of Aristotle's classification of
categories is first, categories are the most basic classifications. For example, we say that A is a man, a man is an animal, and an animal is an entity. In this way, all beings are finally classified into the most general category (substance). Therefore, from this point of view, the meaning of Aristotle's category table: a summary of experience, it reflects the relationship of the most fundamental nature of objective things.
Second, this category table has epistemological significance. Since categories are used to describe the relationship between the general properties of things, then when we know any specific thing, we can also know this thing from the properties and relationships represented by these categories. Therefore, these categories guide us to classify and understand objective things.
Kant draws on Aristotle's categories and puts forward new contents
Kant found that there are two "leads" in the channel of pure conceptual categories. One is from historical investigation, that is, by transforming Aristotle's categories, so as to lead out the categories of understanding; the other is from the function of thinking, from the formal logic. Judgment leads to the category of understanding, and all thinking is judgment.
Kant does not agree with Aristotle's collection of categories through experience. The categories of empirical observation are random rules without order, without logical necessity and a priori certainty.
Kant believes that pure concepts (categories) should meet the following conditions:
1. Purely a priori;
2. From thinking or understanding;
3. The most basic rather than derived;
4. Complete and systematic.
Whether it is an empirical concept or a pure concept, as long as it is a concept, it is not intuition, it does not belong to sensibility, but only belongs to understanding. That being the case, Kant argues that categories need not, like space-time, need to prove their a priori intuitive properties.
Kant believes that "place", "time" and "state" in Aristotle's categories actually belong to the perceptual intuition of space and time, so they cannot be regarded as categories of understanding.
"Active" and "passive" refer to the use of cause and effect. The cause is active and the result is passive. Therefore, "active" and "passive" are classified into the category of "relationship".
"Action" is rather a characteristic of all forms of thinking, and its meaning is not clear, so it should be classified into the category of "style". Kant also pointed out that since there are "substances", there are "accidents" (attributes), for example: if you talk about individual things such as people or horses, you should talk about its attributes (such as what color the horse is, etc.), so if there is an entity, there will be Accidental, in this way, "entity" can be juxtaposed to the category of "relationship".
Kant believed that the establishment of knowledge is judgment. The judgment of formal logic is formed on the basis of forming concepts through analysis to control different representations. For example, the concept of "human" has certain characteristics, and all individual objects with these essential characteristics are the concept of "human". Conversely, everything that belongs to the concept of "people" must have these essential characteristics of the concept of "people".
We call this analysis of particular aspects of many individual things the unity of the analysis of the understanding that produces the function of a single representation representing the particular aspects of many individual things .
Kant believes that formal logic abstracts away the content of knowledge, and does not ask how representations are formed, but only analyzes them as given; and does not ask about the source and nature of the connection between subject and predicate in judgment, but only regards judgment as ready-made. of analysis. That is, formal logic ignores that different representations can be analytically contained in a representation because they themselves have been given as composite representations.
From the point of view of transcendental logic, "Socrates is a man" has a more fundamental function besides classifying the object of Socrates under the concept of "man" according to the characteristics of the concept of "man", that is, to put some The representations are synthesized, and in a certain way, these representations constitute an object, so that it can be expressed that it has certain essential characteristics, that is, the essential characteristics of human beings. For example, the concept of "human" involves many representations, such as "rational", "death", "Socrates" and so on. We call the unity of understanding, the function of synthesizing representations into a whole, the unity of synthesis .
To sum up, we can know that the unity of synthesis is the premise of unity of analysis, and there is no unity of analysis without unity of synthesis
According to formal logic, judgment has a certain form, and any form of it reflects the unity of analysis, that is, it embodies specific rules. The unity of analysis is premised on the unity of synthesis, so these rules should be the fundamental of understanding Cognitive function - the direct manifestation of comprehensiveness.
The form of judgment must be the reliable basis for discovering all the categories of the understanding, that is, every judgment (every synthesis) must have a category (pure concept) as its basis in order to be established. Therefore, Kant's first step is to analyze the judgment form of the understanding; the second step is to analyze the categories of the understanding according to the judgment form analyzed.