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Kant: Transcendental Mind and Intelligible Mind
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Kant: Transcendental Mind and Intelligible Mind
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S271326680031476-3-1
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10.18254/S271326680031476-3
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Published
Authors
Andrew Brook 
Affiliation: Carleton University
Address: Ottawa, Canada
Edition
Volume 5 Issue 1-2
Abstract

Kant talks about a transcendentally necessary mind and, less often, about an intelligible mind. The two characterizations of the mind have similarities. However, there are also important differences. The properties grouped under ‘transcendental’ are cognitive, those grouped under ‘intelligible’ are conative. The properties grouped under ‘transcendental’ are nearly all congenial to cognitive science. Many grouped under ‘intelligible are not. 

Keywords
Kant, transcendental vs. intelligible mind, Kant and cognitive science, Kant and free will
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29.03.2024
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31.05.2024
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1

Introduction
2 Kant’s ideas about cognition have had an enormous influence on cognitive research the world over, beginning as early as Wundt and Helmholtz, both of whom regarded themselves as Kantians. The influence of his doctrines waned during the heyday of behaviourism but increased again with the cognitive revolution of the 60s and 70s, though by then it was no longer well-known that they came from Kant. Some of his ideas about cognition have not been assimilated by contemporary cognitive science but even they could easily be added. In previous writings on the topic, I have emphasized this congeniality, seeking to make Kant accessible to contemporary cognitive researchers.
3 However, there is another side to Kant’s views on the mind. It concerns the conative, not the cognitive, decision and action, not acquisition. It is not nearly so congenial to cognitive science. I have not discussed this side of his views and it is time to address that deficiency.
4 I will call the side of Kant’s writing on the mind (one could also speak of the subject of experience or the self) that is cognitive-science-friendly the transcendental mind, after such locutions as ‘transcendentally necessary unity of apperception’. It is dominant in his writings on knowledge and cognition, so in the Analytic in the Critique of Pure Reason (hereafter CPR) and Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798).
5 However, he also speaks of an intelligible mind. This locution appears when he is talking not about cognition but about conation – agency, free will –, so in his Solution to the Third Antinomy in CPR and in the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, 3rd section. Being intelligible is a way of knowing about the mind, directly via the Understanding, not via sense-experience. Thus it is not a label for a kind of mind. Indeed, the transcendental mind is intelligible. However, the properties of the mind that he is discussing when he calls the mind intelligible are agency and moral responsibility. His treatment of these properties is not very congenial to cognitive science.
6 Central properties of the transcendental mind include: unified consciousness, ability to synthesize complex input and remembered content into unified experiences using concepts; ability to do a rich array of kinds of mathematics; ability to use a template common to all experience to extract patterns in experience and tie them together under overarching general theories; and so on. In short, the properties of a cognitive system that can do science. We have no direct, non-inferential knowledge of the mind thus described but we can readily infer its features by studying the necessary conditions of (conscious, conceptualized) experience.
7 The central properties of the intelligible mind are very different. It too does not appear in experience (it is only intelligible) but now Kant emphasizes that, space and time being imposed by the mind on sensible experience, it is not in space or time. He further ascribes to it the power to initiate actions, i.e., to be the first cause of actions, actions that therefore have no causal antecedents, and that the uncaused actions that it initiates affect the causally determined world of appearances. As I said, his treatment of this group of properties is not congenial to cognitive science.
8 For Kant, how did the two groups of properties relate to one another? Are the two incompatible or compatible? If compatible, are they just two separate clusters of features or, for example, does one include the other. If one includes the other, did Kant think of the intelligible mind as including the transcendental mind, so in a part/whole relationship, or did he think of the mind as always having both set of features, on one or the other of which he focussed at different times? If the latter was Kant’s view, that would imply that there is something uncongenial to cognitive science at the very heart of his whole picture of the mind.
9 One would hope that Kant discussed the relationship of the two sets of properties of the mind to one another somewhere. That would be a vain hope – he did not.
10 Two general comments before we dive in. First, Kant uses the term ‘transcendental’ in many different ways, explored nicely by Birken-Bertsch [Birken-Bertsch 2021]. I will use the term in its basic sense: Necessary features – of the mind, experience, etc. – are transcendental. That is because we cannot know that anything is necessary from experience, only by reasoning of some kind, hence transcendentally (and also a priori, though that does not matter here). For more on this approach to the transcendental, see [Brook 1992].
11 Secondly, talk of transcendental and intelligible minds is not talk about two minds. It is talk about two sides, two different groups of properties, of the single mind (single self) that each of us is. The same is true even of what is distinguished by the more radical distinction between that mind as it appears in apperception and the mind as known via inner sense. (This difference is more radical than the transcendental/intelligible difference because the empirical properties of the mind are more different from the properties of the transcendental mind than the properties of the intelligible mind are.) Even here, the distinction, between the transcendental mind and empirical mind, is not a distinction between two minds, just two ways of knowing the single mind.
12 The paper will have three parts. In the first, I will sketch Kant’s overall project and show how the two groups of properties of the mind fit into it. Next, I will review some of the things that I have said about where Kant’s views have been taken into contemporary cognitive science and show how Kant’s cognitive views that have not been taken up by cognitive science could be. In the third, I will expand on the sketch just given of the properties of the intelligible mind and argue that Kant’s views here could not easily be taken into cognitive science.
13

Two main philosophical objectives
14 As said, so far as I know Kant never related the properties of the transcendental mind to the properties of the intelligible mind. Once we see how the two fit into Kant’s overall projects in, for example, CPR, this will become less surprising. In CPR, Kant had two principal aims:
15
  • Justify our conviction that physics, like mathematics, is a body of necessary and universal (synthetic a priori) truth.
  • Insulate religion, specifically belief in God, free will, and immortality from the corrosive potential of this very same science.
16 No one is apt to disagree with attributing the first objective to the work. The question, ‘How are a priori synthetic judgments possible? [B19]1, is the question that launches the work (explicitly only in the B-edition but clearly in the A-edition, too). As for the second, consider [BXXX]: “I have found it necessary to deny reason in order to make room for faith”. Reason in connection with what? God, freedom, and immortality. As I read the passage, Kant is aiming to find a way outside of science to justify his conviction that God, freedom and immortality exist. The fear is that, if science – evidence and argument – can touch the question of their existence at all, it will tend to show that they do not exist. Fortunately, as he saw it, science is quite powerless to rule on their existence. He talks about rational faith near the end of the Groundwork, too. [Ak 4: 462]
1. References to CPR are in the standard pagination of the 1st (A) and 2nd (B) editions. A reference to only one edition means that the passage appeared only in that edition.
17 Now we can understand why it would have been easy for Kant never to look at how the two groups of properties fit together. The transcendental mind is part of the first project. The intelligible mind is part of the separate and very different second project.2
2. Some commentators have suggested that Kant would have benefitted from having graduate students to push him on how the parts of his point of view fit together. I agree.
18

Kant’s Picture of the Transcendental Mind
19 If it was the pursuit of the first aim of putting physics on a secure footing that led Kant to his views about how the mind works, how does this go? He sought to secure the foundations of physics by asking: What are the necessary conditions of experience? [A94] Put simply, he held that for our experience, and therefore our minds, to be as they are, our experience must be tied together in the way that physics says it is. But this argument also tells us a lot about what our minds must be like. His prosecution of this approach led him to an extraordinary new picture of the mind.
20 Indeed, Kant had a number of original ideas concerning the mind in the Transcendental Analytic. The first and most famous is his claim that representation requires concepts as well as percepts – rule-guided acts of cognition as well as deliverances of the senses. As he put it, "Concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind" (CPR, [A51=B75]). In more contemporary terms, the claim is that to discriminate anything from anything else, we need information; but for information to be of any use to us, we must also be able to process the information.
21 Kant held that processing information requires two kinds of synthesis. The first ties the raw material of sensible experience together into objects. To put his point in terms of contemporary binding theory, colours, lines, shapes, textures, etc., are represented in widely dispersed representations. These dispersed representations have to be brought into relation to one another and bound together into a representation of a single object.
22 The second kind of synthesis ties these individual representations together into what might be called global representations (= Kant’s general experience [A110]). A global representation connects representations to one another in such a way that to be aware of any of the representations thus tied together is to be aware of some of the others, and of the group of them as a single group. Kant thought that the capacity to form global representations is essential both to the kind of cognition that we have and the kind of consciousness that we have.
23 Though by no means all representations are conscious (Kant is widely misunderstood on this point [Brook 2021]), the unity found in global representations is also a feature of consciousness. In his view, briefly, unified global representations are the result of unifying acts of synthesis, and it takes a unified consciousness to perform such acts of synthesis.
24 The second big idea: To study the mind, study its functions. Kant was a functionalist 175 years avant le mot. Given that most philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists now are functionalists of one stripe or another, the extent of Kant’s functionalist leanings are impressive. Kant focused entirely on what functions the mind must have to work as it does. Like functionalists of the late 20th century, he paid no attention to how such a system might be constituted, indeed thought that we cannot know how the mind is constituted. He even shared functionalism’s lack of enthusiasm for introspection, as we will see shortly.
25 Functionalism now comes in many flavors. Kant had no notion of such variations, of course. His functionalism was of a rather general sort. Nevertheless, he had a functionalist view of the mind.
26 The thought that Kant was a functionalist is not new. W. Sellars [Sellars 1970] was perhaps the first to read Kant as a functionalist or protofunctionalist; more recently D. Dennett [Dennett 1978], P. Kitcher [Kitcher 1984], R. Meerbote [Meerbote 1989], C. Powell [Powell 1990], and others have joined him. It is less often noticed that Kant was committed to a vital negative doctrine of functionalism, too, the doctrine that function does not determine form. For the noumenal mind to be unknowable, the noumenal mind must be able to take different forms. Otherwise, how it functions would tell us how it is. Indeed, function imposes so few constraints on form that, so far as we can infer from function, we cannot determine even something as basic as whether the mind is simple or complex [A353]. Thus, Kant accepted a strong form of the notion that function does not dictate form. Nor is noumenalism an optional extra in his system. On the contrary, the doctrine was vital to him. The very possibility of free will and immortality hangs on it. (The possibility of the third of the big three, God, depends on noumenalism, too, but noumenalism about the world, not the mind.) In short, Kant’s functionalism is very deep-running.
27 Third big idea: A new method. In addition to his new claims about the nature of the mind, Kant also introduced a new method for studying the mind. Like functionalism, this method is now ubiquitous, so we should say a word about it. I have in mind the method of transcendental argument.3 In Kant, transcendental arguments (TAs) work by seeking the unobservable necessary conditions of observables, most notably experience [A94]. Kant was the first to develop the method explicitly.
3. Transcendental argument was not the official method of CPR. The official method was construction in the imagination, something like our method of exploring thought-experiments [Brook 1992]. This method is sketched in A at [A9=B13] and used in B at [B15-17]. However, it does not make an explicit appearance again until [A713 = B741] and in between most of the arguments are TAs, so I will limit myself to that method.
28 Because TAs go from experience to causes that we cannot experience, the method of TAs is not simply empirical. Indeed, Kant thought that psychology could never be a [n empirical] science. Once, after saying that chemistry would never be a science, he went on, "the empirical doctrine of the soul ... must remain even further removed than chemistry from the rank of what may be called a natural science proper" (Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, [Ak. IV: 471]). To be sure, he was going after introspective psychology here and had no problem with what he called anthropology, a behavioural study not unlike what we call experimental psychology now. Anyway, how should we study the mind? By thinking through what the mind must be like and what capacities it must have to represent things as it does. This is TA. Despite its nonempirical component, it has become a key method for doing cognitive research, as we will see.
29 In addition to what he said about the unity of consciousness in general, Kant made some remarkably original claims about consciousness of self. Not often but often enough to be significant. These claims arose initially in the course of pursuing his second objective, insulating God, freedom, and immortality. The target was immortality and the text is the A-edition chapter on the paralogisms. There Kant attempts to put the possibility of immortality beyond the reach of either empirical or inferential knowledge, thereby to protect it from the dangers of science. His rationalist predecessors thought that they could prove that the mind is substantial, simple (without parts), and persists in a special way. If true, this would open the door to a proof of immortality. Descartes, Leibniz, Reid and Wolff all took this approach. However, if arguments are relevant to immortality, then science would also be relevant and, Kant thought, would tend to undermine its possibility.
30 Arguments for immortality all begin with consciousness of oneself as the subject of unified acts of apperception, as Kant called them (the contrast is with consciousness of self in inner sense), and proceed in one or the other of two ways. One is inferential arguments, usually that unity of consciousness requires simplicity of the soul and a special kind of personal identity. Simplicity would thus make immortality at least possible. Many of Kant’s predecessors offered this argument. The other is how we appear to ourselves when we appear as the subject of acts of apperceiving: We appear to be not complex, not a system of components. (Kant’s name for the combination of these two approaches was ‘rational psychology’.) It was in reflecting on how we appear to ourselves when apperceiving that Kant achieved his insights into consciousness of self. His objective was to show that how we thus appear to ourselves is no evidence that we actually are simple and not made out of parts. In the course of this deflationary attack, Kant made a number of claims. I will sketch six:
31 1. When one is conscious of oneself as subject, one is conscious of oneself in a way that is more than and does not require consciousness of features of oneself, a way in which "nothing manifold is given." (CPR, [B135]). We are aware of ourselves as the "single common subject" of a number of representations (CPR, [A350]) but consciousness of self as subject does not require consciousness of any other properties.
32 2. The semantic machinery used to obtain awareness of self as subject is quite unusual. In it, we “denote” but do not “represent” ourselves (CPR, [A382]). Put otherwise, we designate ourselves without noting “any quality whatsoever” in ourselves (CPR, [A355]). Contemporary philosophers have called this sort of reference to self non-identifying [Shoemaker 1968] or non-ascriptive [Brook 1994]. Kant called it transcendental designation.
33 3. (1) and (2) go with another claim, that consciousness of self cannot be reduced to or replaced by consciousness of properties of oneself. Here is a well-known expression of the idea:
34 Through this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts = X. It is known only through the thoughts which are its predicates, and of it, apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever, but can only revolve in a perpetual circle, since any judgment upon it has always already made use of its representation. [A346=B404; see A402 and B422]4
4. . The quoted passage is part of Kant's concluding remarks in the Introduction to the chapter on the Paralogisms and thus appears in both A and B. Thus it is particularly authoritative. I explore what Kant might be saying in this and the other referenced passages in [Brook 2022], so will not do so here.
35 4. The representational basic of awareness of self as subject is not a special experience of self but any experience of anything whatsoever. (For reasons of space, I will not explore this idea.)
36 5. When one is conscious of oneself as subject, one is not conscious of oneself as an object. Rather, one is conscious of oneself (and also of space and time) as the form of all experience.
37 Consciousness as such [he means consciousness of oneself as subject] is not a representation distinguishing a particular object but a form of representation in general, … [A346=B404; see A382]. It is ... very evident that I cannot know as an object that which I must presuppose to know any object… [A402; see B421 and B422].
38 In short, when we are conscious of ourselves as subject, that subject does not appear in the form of an object. This consciousness is not experience-dividing, to use a term of Bennett's: “i.e. [statements expressing it have] no direct implications of the form ‘I shall experience C rather than D’”.5 In a statement such as, ‘I find Kant puzzling’, the verb expression and the object expression may divide experience but the subject expression does not. As Wittgenstein once put it [Wittgenstein 1968, pp. 241, 253, 255-6], in consciousness of oneself as subject, one ‘has no neighbours.’ Presentation of self in apperception does not function in experience in the way that representations of objects function.
5. . Bennett uses the notion in the context of imagining one's own non-existence, but it has applications much wider than that [Bennett 1974, p. 80].
39 That we are not conscious of ourselves as an object is a view that Kant maintained throughout at least the whole Critical Period. It appears prominently in Opus Postumum (see for example [Brook 2022]). So it was not a passing thought.
40 6. The last claim about conscious of self as subject in apperception that we will examine is this. In apperception, “I am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself, nor as I am in myself, but only that I am” [B158; see B423n, B429].
41 Kant’s idea here, first fully articulated in the B-edition Transcendental Deduction, is that in acts of apperception, one is conscious of one’s actual self, not just an appearance of that self, but one is not conscious of its properties (beyond the purely formal and uninformative property/ies of being oneself, the subject of one’s experience, and being the same subject across one’s experience) and so one has no knowledge of one’s actual self. “Consciousness of self is … very far from being a knowledge of the self.” [B158]. In this “bare consciousness” of self [A346=B404], “nothing manifold is given” [B135].6 However, one knows oneself only as one appears to oneself [B152-3, B158; see B423n]. So one is conscious of one’s actual self but has no knowledge of it – just the conclusion that Kant sought in his attack on the paralogisms, even though this analysis occurs in the B-version of the Transcendental Deduction.
6. . Later on the same page, as Colin MeLear pointed out in a discussion, Kant does allow that one is conscious at least of one’s “power of combination” [B158]. This may appear to be a significant concession but I am not sure that it is. Though this is not often noted, Kant held that we are conscious of many functions of the understanding as it is.
42 To sum up, on consciousness of self Kant had some deep-running ideas about what it is like and about how the machinery by which we acquire it works. He did not discuss some of them often, transcendental designation for example, but he did discuss all of them. He first discussed them in the context of attempting to insulate the existence of immortality from argument and evidence in the chapter on the paralogisms in the Dialectic but he must have viewed them as detachable from that context and important in their own right because in the second edition, he moved most of them to Sections §24 (the last half) and §25 of the Transcendental Deduction. Some of them appeared again near the end of his life in the Anthropology [Ak7:133, 140, 141, 142, 162]. (I discuss this strand in Kant’s thought at greater length in [Brook 2004] and [Brook 2022]).
43 The Intelligible Mind As will be clear, most of the properties of the mind explored above either are part of cognitive science or could be added fairly readily. Before I say more about that, I should fill out the other side of the picture, the intelligible mind. Above we said that for Kant, the intelligible mind does not appear in experience. This means that it is not part of the realm of cause and effect, which is Kant’s reason for insisting that it is only intelligible. If it is not in experience, it is not in space or time, these being properties imposed by the mind on experience. Thus there is no activity in it. XX Yet it has the power to initiate actions, actions that have no causal antecedents – actions that are not in itself (in which there are no changes) but – somehow – in the causally determined world of appearances. In CPR, most of the passages in which Kant makes the claims occur in the solution to the 3rd Antinomy [A532=B560]. Here is a sample:
44 On the intelligible mind not being in space or time and there being no change in it: “[The] acting subject would not stand under any conditions of sensibility, … any conditions of time. … In this subject, no action would begin or cease” [A539=B567, italics in original]. Thus any causality it has would not be events in space or time. “In its intelligible character, … nothing happens in it.” [A540=B568].
45 On the power to initiate actions and initiate them in the causally determined world of appearances: “the active [intelligible] being of itself [ab initio] begins … effects in the sensible world.” [A541=B569] “Reason though it be, it must nonetheless exhibit an empirical character.” [A549=B577] “This freedom [is] the power of initiating a series of events.” [A554=B582]
46 In the Groundwork for a Metaphysics of Morals, we find similar oracular statements:
47 On the basic distinction: “In respect to mere perception and receptivity to sensation, man must count himself as belonging to the world of sense; but in respect of that which may be pure activity in himself, .., he must reckon himself as belonging to the intelligible world.” ([Ak4:451; Kant makes the same distinction on [Ak4:457]).
48 On the power to initiate actions: “As belonging to the intelligible world, … the causality of [man’s] own will is … independent[t] from the determining causes of the world of sense” [Ak 4: 452] and is thus able to initiate events that are otherwise uncaused (the ‘pure activity’ of the previous quotation).
49 Of course, the big question for free will and morality is how the intelligible being could possibly make any difference in the causally-determined realm of appearances, as it must if free decisions based on the moral law are to have any effect. I don’t see that Kant offers anything by way of an answer to this question in CPR except, maybe, this: Given our certainty that we are moral beings, we are entitled to have faith that it can! Even this ascription is inference from the lack of anything else in Kant, not something that he says explicitly. The Groundwork offers even less, just a bald assertion that “there is not the least contradiction between a thing in appearance (as belonging to the world of sense) being subject to certain laws of which it is independent as a thing … in itself.” [Ak 4: 457]7
7. This is why I have never written anything on Kant on free will and determinism.
50 To be sure, the idea of causing without moving is less strange than it might look. There are ways in which things can cause change without themselves changing. Being desirable brings about effects without the desired thing changing, for example. Another form of cause without movement is semantic meaning. Propositions bring about effects by what they mean, so without themselves changing. Indeed, this is part of what Kant had in mind when he said [A547-8=B575-6] that the existence of moral oughts is an argument for the possibility of free will. That said, neither kind of cause is non-spatial, non-temporal, or unchanging. And neither helps with the big problem: How could anything make a difference to appearances that have already been causally determined to be as they are?
51 In CPR, Kant sketches a framework that is supposed to help: The causally-determined realm of appearances is a product (somehow) of reason. “Empirical causality … is itself the effect of a causality that is not empirical but intelligible” [A544=B572; see A545=B573, A556=B584]. Empirical character, though determined by empirical character, is also “determined by intelligible character” [A551=B579]. Even though Kant has no concept of intelligible-to-empirical causality and on his own terms cannot have such a concept, let us grant this, that is to say, let us grant that the intelligible is somehow the form and source of the empirical.8 Even this idea would not help. It speaks only of how the whole system of appearances comes to be and says nothing about how something outside the realm of appearance could affect individual appearances that have already been causally determined to be as they are by other appearances. There would simply be no room for such outside intervention.
8. Form/matter moves of this kind run deep in Kant. The distinction between transcendental idealism and empirical realism is another example.
52 I think, though it is hard to be sure, that Kant was working with a modified notion of causal determinism – something like this. Appearances appear, and must appear, to be causally determined by other appearances, so completely that from current and past appearances, all future appearances could be predicted [A550 = B578]. However, and this is the modification to the notion of causal determinism, complete determinism of appearance by appearance is compatible with causes other than appearances also affecting appearances. And that is what happens in free decision making. Thus the intelligible not only produces the whole system of appearances, it also affects particular appearances. The problem, of course, is that if this were so, causal determinism among appearances, no matter how tight, would not be complete causal determinism. Can sense be made of this picture? Yes or no, it seems to have been Kant’s picture.
53

Transcendental Mind: A Main Source of Cognitive Science
54 I have urged [Brook 1994, 2007] that Kant may be the single most influential figure in the pre20th century history of cognitive research, indeed the intellectual grandfather of contemporary cognitive science. The three central ideas in Kant’s model of the transcendental mind that I laid out earlier XX all decisively shaped the model of cognition dominant in contemporary cognitive work:
55
  1. The idea that cognition requires application of concepts as well as sensory input and that synthesis and mental unity are central to cognition.
  2. The functionalist picture of the mind.
  3. The method of transcendental argument. It is not called ‘transcendental argument’ now (and the term has been co-opted for other uses) but the idea lives on in inference to the best explanation (IBE). Much of cognitive research consists of inferences from observable behaviour to unobservable possible causes, so IBE is at the very centre of most cognitive research.
56 In short, the picture of the mind dominant in contemporary cognitive science is deeply Kantian. Moreover, most of Kant’s ideas about the transcendental mind that have not be taken up in contemporary work could easily be added. Indeed, that is already happening. Until recently the idea that the unity of consciousness and unity of cognition are central to cognition played little role in cognitive science. That is changing (see [Bayne 2010] for example).
57 Kant’s claims about the special features of consciousness of self in acts of apperception have also played little role in empirical cognitive research. However, they have (re)entered philosophy of mind. Reference to self without ascription and the idea that it yields extremely meagre information about the self is part of Shoemaker’s [Shoemaker 1968] notion of reference to self without identification (mentioned earlier; see [Strawson 1966]).
58 Similarly, Kant’s idea that consciousness of one’s inner states presupposes conscious of, and therefore reference to, oneself is related to Perry’s view that indexical references using ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my, ‘mine’ and cognates are essential, i.e., cannot be eliminated in favour of any other kind of reference or attribution [Perry 1979].
59 Kant’s claims that any representation can serve as the representational base of reference to self would be equally easy to add. And the idea that we are conscious of ourselves only as we appear, not as we are, so that consciousness of self is on a par with consciousness of the world, the body, and the like, is already there, in the work, among others, of the Churchlands and Dennett.
60 The idea in Kant’s picture of the transcendental mind that would be least congenial to cognitive science is the idea that when we are conscious of ourselves in acts of apperception, we are not conscious of ourselves as an object. Shoemaker [Shoemaker 1968, p. 563] is one of the very few cognitive researchers who has even thought of such a possibility in recent times. But cognitive science need not be hostile to the idea, so far as I can see.
61

Intelligible Mind and Cognitive Science
62 By contrast, the properties that Kant explored in connection with the intelligible mind are not at all congenial to cognitive science. The claim that there is non-sensible but still direct and non-inferential consciousness of oneself? A non-starter. The idea that only appearances, objects of representation, are spatial or temporal, not things in themselves. For the most part, not even Kant scholars are sympathetic to it. The idea that an unchanging, therefore not acting, entity even exists, let alone is able to initiate changes, changes not otherwise caused, in a causally-determined spatio-temporal world? Few would even entertain the idea. Zero for three so far.
63 A natural objection to the claim that Kant has no solution to the problem of how anything outside of appearance could make a difference to appearances causally determined by other appearances is this: Kant was a compatibilist about free will and determinism. Since most people who think about free will now are compatibilists, surely there is room for a meeting of minds. Well, not much room. Contemporary compatibilists hold that free choice is a kind of causal determinism – when decisions are caused in the right way, they are free. Kant attempted to secure free will by moving it out of the realm of causal determinism. His move faces the problem of how free choice thus understood could make any difference to causally-determined appearances, as we have seen. Contemporary compatibilism has no such problem.
64 From which I conclude that people who have pushed the line that Kant and cognitive science are compatible, me included, need to expand their story. If Kant had a huge influence on contemporary cognitive research, he also said things that are far from congenial to it.
65

How Do the Transcendental Mind and the Intelligible Mind Relate to One Another?
66 Indeed, the revision needed may be more radical than so far indicated. Recall the questions raised in the Introduction about how the transcendental and intelligible groups of properties relate:
67 Compatible: Kant never treated the two groups of properties as incompatible. Intelligible includes transcendental: There is no reason to think that Kant thought of the intelligible mind as lacking any transcendental properties. Part-whole or co-extensive: So the question comes down to this. Did Kant think of the relationship as part/whole or did he think that the mind as a whole, minds capable of acts of apperception anyway, always has both groups of properties?
68 There are texts that suggest that Kant saw the relationship as part/whole. Consider this passage from the Groundwork:
69 Man, who … regards himself as intelligence, puts himself in a different order of things … when he thinks of himself as intelligence with a will and thus as endowed with causality [of freedom].9 [Ak4:457]
9. ‘Causality of freedom’ is a CPR term; the contrast is ‘causality of nature’.
70 This passage is not decisive. For the relationship to be part/whole, an intelligent being without a will would have to be possible. This would be understanding without (at least one form of) reason and there is no evidence that Kant would have embraced such a dissociation. Among other things, he saw the mind however described as autonomous from sense experience. More likely, in the passage just quoted Kant took for granted that when we add the will to our picture of ourselves, we are adding to our account something that was already there.
71 If the last thought has any merit, it would imply that for Kant there is a side to the mind in any of its transcendental functions that is uncongenial to cognitive science.
72

References
73 Books by Kant References to CPR are in the standard pagination of the 1st (A) and 2nd (B) editions. A reference to only one edition means that the passage appeared only in that edition. All other references to Kant are in the pagination of the Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Koniglichen Preussischen Academie der Wissenschaften, 29 Vols. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter et al., 1902 – in the format Ak. XX: yy.

References

1. Kant 1781/1787 – Kant, I. (1781/1787) Critique of Pure Reason (trans. P. Guyer and A. Woods). Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.

2. Kant 1783 – Kant, I. (1783) Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics (trans. P. Carus, rev. with intro. by James Ellington). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishers, 1977 (Ak.4).

3. Kant 1785 – Kant, I. (1785). Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (trans. With intro. By Lewis White Beck). Indianapolis, IN: Library of the Liberal Arts, 1959 (Ak.4)

4. Kant 1786 – Kant, I. (1786) The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (trans. with intro. by James Ellington). Indianapolis, IN: Library of Liberal Arts, 1970 (Ak.4).

5. Kant 1798 – Kant, I. (1798) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (trans. Mary Gregor). The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974 (Ak.7).

6. Kant 1802 – Kant, I. (1796-1802) Opus Postumum (selection Eckart Förster, trans. Eckart Förster and Michael Rosen). Cambridge University Press (various volumes of Ak.)

7. Ameriks 1983 – Ameriks, K. Kant’s Theory of Mind. Oxford University Press, 1983 (2nd edition 2000).

8. Bayne 2010 – Bayne, T. Unity of Consciousness. Oxford University Press, 2010.

9. Bennett 1974 – Bennett, J. Kant’s Dialectic. Cambridge University Press, 1974.

10. Birken-Bertsch 2021 – Birken-Bertsch, H. Transcendental. In Wuerth, 2021, pp. 464-8.

11. Brook 1992 – Brook, A. Kant’s A Priori Method for Recognizing Necessary Truths. In Philip Hanson and Bruce Hunter, eds. The A Priori Revisited. Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume 18, 1992, pp. 215-52.

12. Brook 1994 – Brook, A. Kant and the Mind. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

13. Brook 2004 – Brook, A. Kant’s View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self. Stanford Electronic Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, 2004. — http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-mind/.

14. Brook 2007 – Brook, A. (2007). Kant and Cognitive Science. In A. Brook, ed. Prehistory of Cognitive Science. Basingstock, UK.: Palgrave Press, 2007.

15. Brook 2021 – Brook, A. Obscure Representations. In Wuerth, 2021, pp. 316-18.

16. Brook 2022 – Brook, A. Apperception and Related Matters in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Opus Postumum // Studies in Transcendental Philosophy – 2022. V. 3. Issue 3 [Electronic resource]. URL: https://transcendental.su/S271326680024029-1-1 (DOI: 10.18254/S271326680024029-1).

17. Churchland 1986 – Churchland, P. S. (1986). Neurophilosophy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1986.

18. Dennett 1978 – Dennett, D. Brainstorms. Montgomery, VT: Bradford Books, 1978.

19. Dennett 1991 – Dennett, D. Consciousness Explained. Boston: Little, Brown and Co, 1991.

20. Kitcher 1990 – Kitcher, P. Kant's Transcendental Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

21. Meerbote 1989 – Meerbote, R. Kant's functionalism. In: J. C. Smith, ed. Historical Foundations of Cognitive Science. Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1989.

22. Perry 1979 – Perry, J. The Problem of the Essential Indexical. Nous 13, 1979, pp. 3-21.

23. Powell 1990 – Powell, C.T. Kant’s Theory of Self-Consciousness. Oxford University Press, 1990.

24. Sellars 1970 – Sellars, W. "... this I or he or it (the thing) which thinks ...". In: Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, 44, 1970.

25. Shoemaker 1968 – Shoemaker, S. Self-reference and self-awareness. Journal of Philosophy 65(20), 1968, pp.555–567.

26. Strawson 1966 – Strawson, P. F. (1966). The Bounds of Sense. London: Methuen, 1966

27. Wittgenstein 1968 – Wittgenstein, L., Rush Rhees, ed. Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’ and ‘Sense-data’. Philosophical Review 77, 1935-6/1968, pp. 271-300.

28. Wuerth 2021 – Wuerth, J., ed. Kant’s Lexicon. Cambridge University Press, 2021.

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