Knowledge and Cognition in Kant

This thesis develops a new account of Kant's concepts of cognition and knowledge, as well as related concepts, such as belief, opinion, Fürwahrhalten (assent), persuasion, conviction, and objective reality. The key claims are as follows. First, by "cognition", Kant means a judgement that has objective reality. The concept of "objective reality" functions as an epistemic criterion of success, similar to that of "truth" in contemporary accounts of knowledge as justified true belief. Thus, Kant's concept of cognition has the greatest similarity to our contemporary concept of knowledge of all Kantian epistemic concepts considered in this thesis. Second, by "Fürwahrhalten" (frequently translated as "assent"), Kant does NOT mean a propositional attitude. Instead, Fürwahrhalten is Kant's concept of a concrete judgement (considered in general). It is argued that Kant's introduction of the notion of Fürwahrhalten is necessitated by the fallibility of real-world, concrete judgements, as a result of which a distinct set of epistemic norms are required for concrete judgements (opinion, belief, knowledge) as opposed to the capacity-based concept of cognition. Third, Kant's distinction between "opining, believing, and knowing" is NOT primarily based on a distinction between objectively or subjectively sufficient GROUNDS. Instead, the condition of subjective sufficiency describes a state of "individual conviction" in one's judgement, whereas the condition of objective sufficiency describes a state of "universal certainty", i.e., the factual agreement of a relevant group of reasoners. The conditions of subjective and objective sufficiency are thus primarily psychological and only indirectly indicative of epistemic grounds. Fourth, a new interpretation of Kant's account of objective reality is introduced, according to which objective reality should be understood as a nomic concept, i.e., as requiring the correspondence with relevant applicable laws.