Does Kantianism Imply Some Sort of Conceptual Creationism?

Abstract

I argue in the essay that the conceptualist understanding of the mind-world relation ultimately leads to the kind of view that Panayot Butchvarov calls conceptual or linguistic creationism. According to this view, “there is nothing we have not conceptualized”. In addition to being an antithesis of metaphysical realism, which maintains that there is a reality independent of us, the term refers to the kind of thinking that sees human cognitive experience (and reality itself) as thoroughly constituted according to our concepts. While it might be easy to attribute this kind of position to Kant as well, especially when read through a conceptualist lens, I argue that such a position is not in accord with Kant’s philosophical intentions. Using the Deduction and Schematism chapters of the Critique of Pure Reason as examples, I also argue that on the conceptualist understanding of the mind-world relation too much is read into Kant’s idea that sensibility and understanding must be cognitively compatible with one another.

Keywords

• concept
• intuition
• kant
• mind
• understanding
• sensibility
• world