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 Husserl: 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.
Now, while a reflection on the pure intuition of space was sufficient in the case of the schemata of geometrical figures, and therefore the schema could be drawn from the very constitution of our intellect, this is certainly not the case for the schema (and therefore the concept) of dog. Otherwise we would have a repertoire, if not of innate ideas, of innate schemata, including the schema of doghood, horsehood, and so on, until the whole furniture of the universe had been exhausted.
If that were the case, we would also have innate schemata of things we didn’t yet know, and Kant would certainly not subscribe to this type of Platonism—and it is debatable whether Plato himself subscribed to it.
The empiricists would have said that the schema is drawn from experience, and the schema of the dog would be nothing but the Lockean idea of the dog. But this is unacceptable to Kant, seeing that we have experience precisely by applying the schemata. We cannot abstract the schema of the dog from the data of intuition, because that data becomes thinkable precisely as a result of applying the schema. And therefore we are in a vicious circle of reasoning from which, it would seem, the first Critique does nothing to help us escape.
There is one other solution left: that by reflecting on the data from the sensible intuition, by comparing it and evaluating it, by activating an arcane and inborn art hidden in the depths of the human soul (and therefore existing within our own transcendental apparatus), we do not abstract but rather we construct the schemata. The schema of the dog comes to us from our education, and we don’t even realize that we are applying it since, by a vitium subreptionis, we are led to believe that we are seeing a dog because we are receiving sensations.
That Kantian schematism implies—in the sense that it cannot help leading us to think of it—a kind of constructivism is not an original idea, especially given the sort of return to Kant discernible in many contemporary cognitive sciences. But to what degree the schema can and must be a construction ought not to emerge from the fact that preconstructed schemata (such as that of the dog) are applied; the real problem is What happens when we have to construct the schema of an object we do not yet know?
13.5. How to Construct the Schema of an Unknown Object
In Eco 1997, we discussed at length the history of the platypus, which was discovered in Australia at the end of the eighteenth century. When a stuffed platypus was brought to England, the naturalists believed that it was a taxidermist’s joke. Not surprisingly, the debate became even more heated when this animal with a bill and webbed feet, but at the same time covered in fur and with a beaver’s tail, was found to nurse its young and lay eggs. The platypus appears in the Western world when Kant had already written his works—and indeed had already fallen into a period of mental obnubilation—and when it was finally decided that the platypus is a mammal that lays eggs, Kant had already been dead for some eighty years. To ask ourselves how Kant would have reacted when confronted with a platypus is no more than a mental experiment, but the experiment is useful precisely because it provides an occasion for reflection on how the theory of schematism might explain the experience of an unknown object.
Kant would have had to figure out the platypus schema, starting from sense impressions, but these sensible impressions would not have fit into any previous schema (how could Kant have conceived of a quadruped bird, or a quadruped with a beak?). Kant, the confuter of idealism, would have been well aware that if the platypus was offered to him by sensible intuition, it existed, and therefore must be thinkable. And, wherever the form he would give it might come from, it had to be possible to construct it. So what problem would he have found himself faced with?
By introducing schematism into the first version of his system, as Peirce suggested, Kant finds himself holding an explosive concept that compels him to go further: in the direction of the Critique of Judgment. Judgment is the faculty of thinking of the particular as contained in the general, and if the general (the rule, the law) is already given, the judgment is determinant. But if only the particular is given and the general must be sought, the judgment is then reflecting or reflective. Once one arrives at reflective judgment from the schema, the very nature of determinant or determining judgments becomes problematic. Because the capacity of determinant judgment (as we learn in the chapter in the Critique of Judgment on the dialectic of the capacity of teleological judgment) “does not have in itself principles that found concepts of objects.” Determinant judgment limits itself to subsuming objects under given laws or concepts such as principles. “Thus the capacity of transcendental judgment, which contained the conditions for subsumption under categories, was not in itself nomothetic, but simply indicated the conditions of the sensible intuition under which a given concept may be given reality.” Therefore, for any concept of an object to be well-founded, it must be fixed by the reflective judgment, which “is supposed to subsume under a law that is yet to be given” (CJ, para. 69, 257).
His fundamental realistic assumption prevents Kant from thinking that natural objects somehow do not exist independently from us. They are there in front of us, they function in a certain manner, and they develop by themselves. One tree produces another tree—of the same species—and at the same time it grows and therefore also produces itself as an individual. The bud of one tree leaf grafted onto the branch of another tree produces one more plant of the same species. The tree lives as a whole on which the parts converge, since the leaves are produced by the tree, but defoliation would affect the growth of the trunk. The tree therefore lives and grows by following its own internal organic law (CJ, para. 64).
But one cannot learn from the tree what this law is, since phenomena do not tell us anything about the noumenal. Nor do the a priori forms of the pure intellect have anything to tell us about it, because natural beings respond to multiple and particular laws. And yet, they should be considered necessary according to the principle of the
