Phenomena and noumena
on the use and meaning of the categories
pp. 45-51
in: Lewis White Beck (ed), Kant's theory of knowledge, Berlin, Springer, 1974Abstract
According to Kant, all language is signification of thoughts (Anthropology, Part I, § 39). "Thought is the act which relates given intuition to an object" (B 304). Thus language as "the faculty of signification" attaches to the "objects' — which, according to Kant, constitute themselves only in the act of thinking — a specific sensuous intuition distinct from the intuition which immediately relates itself to objects. Accordingly, by the distinction of thoughts language also keeps the objects distinct. Thus "the faculty of knowledge" and "the faculty of signification", thought and language, cooperate. Transcendental philosophy claims to determine the constant activities of the understanding in the constitution of each specific empirical object. It claims to distinguish "the pure concepts of the understanding" from the linguistic terms which signify the objects in their particularity. According to Kant, the relation between concepts of the understanding and the empirical concepts is the same as the relation between rules for the use of words and the words themselves.
