Kant’s Conception of Cognition and Our Knowledge of Things in Themselves

Abstract

Abstract This chapter develops a unified account Kant’s conception of cognition (Erkenntnis) and shows that this conception generates two crucial constraints on cognition of an object: (i) a real possibility constraint and (ii) a determinate content constraint. This account stresses the differences between Kant’s conception of cognition and our contemporary conception of propositional knowledge, while connecting together important strands in the recent scholarly literature on these topics. Finally, this improved understanding of cognition is used to better understand why Kant claims that we cannot cognize things in themselves, while also appearing to claim that we can know certain abstract facts about things in themselves in general.

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