Transcendental Conditions, Schematism, and Naturalizing Kant’s “I think”

Abstract

Considering how Kant’s synthetic unity of apperception could be “naturalized,” this paper seeks to liberate the Kantian theory of experience from any foundationalist renderings that blur the lines between the empirical and transcendental, without compromising Kant’s attempt to investigate how the invariant structures of experience condition and supply rules for our knowledge of the world. This paper begins with an overview of the Transcendental Deduction’s apperceptive “I think.” We then consider Sellars’ Myth of Jones and Sellars’ notion of noumenal reality as a “limit concept” not in metaphysical but alongside pragmatist lines, where the “in-itself” is schematized as a regulatory ideal that normatively orients science as a self-correcting enterprise. Providing a successor-account to Sellars’ naturalization of Kant’s ‘I think,’ we seek to develop hard-transcendental and soft-transcendental pragmatic conditions to describe protocols for revision and integration, proffering an anti-dogmatic metaphysical stance that, true to Kant, expands our understanding of perception and linguistic licensing to include the kind of sensory and conceptual capacities associated with sapient experience.