No Inference Necessary: Kant’s Account of the Experience of a Causal Connection

The near consensus among Kant’s interpreters is that if he holds experience of a causal connection to be possible, then cognition of necessity gets ‘injected’ into that experience through reason when we infer the connection from a particular causal law. Kant, however, does not write of such injection. Rather, in its least scientifically developed form, he seems to hold that experience of a causal connection is constituted merely through present perceptions and the categories—especially cause and necessity—in a judgment of the understanding. I present an interpretation on which experience of a causal connection is so constituted, and the cognition of necessity in it need not be grounded in cognition of a particular causal law.