Kant is certainly among those who have convinced philosophers that it is legitimate to construct a sentence that in the Academy edition runs to twenty-two lines before the full stop finally arrives, but he makes a good job of telling us how to develop an abduction worthy of Robinson Crusoe. And if someone were to observe that in this case art has nonetheless imitated a regular figure, which is not invented by art but produced by pure mathematical intuition, it should suffice to mention an example given shortly before the one quoted here: where, by way of an example of empirical ends (as opposed to the pure one of the circle, which seems to have been conceived with a view to highlighting all the demonstrations that can be deduced from it), he proposes a fine garden, and certainly a fine garden in the French style, in which nature bows before art, with its well-ordered flower beds and avenues; and talks of ends, empirical ones, agreed, and real, insofar as we are well aware that the garden has been arranged in accordance with a purpose and a function. It can be said that seeing the garden or the chair as organisms with ends calls for a less adventurous hypothesis, because I already know that artificial objects obey the intentions of the creator, while for nature judgment postulates the end (and indirectly a creative constructiveness, a sort of natura naturans) as the only possibility of understanding it. But in any case even the artificial object cannot but be informed by reflective judgment.
It would be optimistic to say that this teleological version of the schema is exposed with absolute clarity in the third Critique too. See, for example, the celebrated §59, which has caused rivers of ink to flow on the part of those who have sought to rediscover in Kant the elements of a philosophy of language. Above all he delineates therein a difference between schemata, proper to the pure concepts of the intellect, and examples (Beispiele) that hold good for empirical concepts. In itself the idea is not devoid of charm: in the schema of the dog or the tree «prototypical» ideas come into play, as if through the ostension of one dog (or of the image of a single dog) one could represent all dogs. Nonetheless, we would still have to decide how this image, which must mediate between the manifold of the intuition and the concept, may not already be interwoven with concepts—to be the image of a dog in general and not of that dog. And, once again, which «example» of dog would mediate between intuition and concept, seeing that for empirical concepts it really seems that the schema comes to coincide precisely with the possibility of figuring a generic concept?
Immediately afterward it is said that the sensible exhibition of something («hypotyposis») can be schematic when a concept grasped by the intellect is given a corresponding intuition (and this holds good for the schema of the circle, indispensable for understanding the concept of «plate»); but it is symbolic when a concept that only the reason can think of, there being no corresponding intuition, is supplied by analogy: as would happen if I wanted to represent the monarchical state as a human body. Here Kant is certainly talking not only of symbols in the logical-formal sense but also of phenomena such as metaphor or allegory.
Therefore a gap still remains between schemata and symbols. While for the platypus I can say that the first impact was metaphorical («water mole»), the same cannot be said of the dog.
There is a gap, which I believe Kant tried to bridge in the Opus Postumum. Of which, without going into its labyrinthine complexities, one can say that Kant was trying even harder to determine the various particular laws of physics that cannot be deduced from the categories only. In order to ground physics, Kant had to postulate the ether as a material that, diffused throughout cosmic space, is found in and permeates all objects.
External perceptions, as the stuff of a possible experience, which lack only the form of their connection, are the effect of the moving (or driving) forces of matter. Now, to mediate the application of these motive forces to the relations that present themselves to experience, it is necessary to identify empirical laws. They are not given a priori but need concepts constructed by us (selbstgemachte). These are not concepts given by reason or experience but factitious concepts. They are problematic (and we should remember that a problematic judgment depends on the Postulate of Empirical Thought in General, whereby that which agrees with the formal conditions of experience is possible).
These concepts must be thought of as the foundation of natural inquiry. We must therefore postulate (in the case of the factitious concept of ether) an absolute whole subsisting in matter.
Kant repeats on various occasions that this concept is not a hypothesis but a postulate of reason, but his distrust of the term hypothesis has Newtonian roots: in fact a concept (built, so to speak, on nothing) that makes possible the totality of experience is an abduction that appeals, in order to explain some Results, to a Rule constructed ex novo.19 Nor should we let ourselves be distracted by the fact that the postulate of ether was subsequently proved erroneous: it worked well enough for a long time, and good abductions (just think of the theories of epicycles and deferents) endure for long periods, until a more suitable, more economical, and more powerful abduction comes onto the scene.
As Vittorio Mathieu observes with regard to Kant’s last work, «The intellect makes experience by designing the structure according to which the driving forces of the object can act.» Rather than observe (and thence produce schemata), the reflective judgment produces schemata to be able to observe, and to experiment. And «such doctrine goes beyond that of the first Critique for the freedom that it assigns to the intellectual designing of the object.»20
With this late schematism the intellect does not construct the simple determination of a possible object but makes the object, constructs it, and in the course of this activity (problematic in itself) it proceeds by trial and error.21
At this point the notion of trial and error becomes crucial. If the schema of empirical concepts is a construct that tries to make the objects of nature thinkable, and if a complete synthesis of empirical concepts can never be given, because new notes of the concept (LI §103) can always be discovered through experience, then the schemata themselves can only be revisable, fallible, and destined to evolve in time. If the pure concepts of the intellect could constitute a sort of atemporal repertoire, empirical concepts could only become «historic,» or cultural, if you will.22
Kant did not «say» this, but it seems hard not to say it if the doctrine of schematism is carried to its logical conclusions. In any case this was the understanding of Peirce, who put the entire cognitive process down to hypothetical inference, whereby sensations appear as the interpretations of stimuli; the perceptions as interpretations of sensations; perceptual judgments as the interpretation of perceptions; particular and general propositions as interpretations of perceptual judgments; and scientific theories as interpretations of series of propositions (see Bonfantini and Grazia 1976: 13).
In the light of the infinite segmentability of the continuum, both perceptual schemata and propositions regarding the laws of nature (what a rhinoceros is like, whether the dolphin is a fish, whether it is possible to conceive of the cosmic ether) carve out objects or relations that—albeit to different degrees—always remain hypothetical or subject to the possibility of fallibilism.
Naturally at this point transcendentalism will also undergo its Copernican revolution. The guarantee that our hypotheses are «right» (or at least acceptable as such until proved otherwise) will no longer be sought for in the a priori of the pure intellect (even though the intellect’s most abstract logical forms will be saved) but in the historic, progressive, and temporal consensus of the Community.23 Faced with the risk of fallibilism, the transcendental is also historicized; it becomes an accumulation of interpretations that are accepted, and accepted after a process of discussion, selection, and repudiation.24 This foundation is unstable, based on the pseudo-transcendental of the Community (an optative idea rather than a sociological category); and yet it is the consensus of the Community that today makes us favor Kepler’s abduction rather than Tycho Brahe’s. Naturally the Community has supplied what are called proofs, but it is not the authoritativeness of the proof in itself that convinces us or prevents us from falsifying it; it is, rather, the difficulty of calling a proof into question without upsetting the entire system, the paradigm that supports it.
This detranscendentalization of knowledge crops up again, through an explicitly Peircean influence, in Dewey’s notion of «warranted assertion,» or, as people now prefer to say, of warranted assertibility, and it is still present in the various holistic concepts of knowledge. But, even though in that sense an acceptable concept of truth depends on the structural pressure of a body of interdependent knowledge, within this body
