Commentary: is objective validity subjective?

Question:

If objectivity validity results from the pure concepts ofthe understanding and the pure concepts of the understanding come from the mind,why isn’t “objective validity” merely subjective?

When we say that something is subjective we typically mean that it remains relative to the specific mind of the person making that judgment. Thus, we say that the judgment, “pineapple is the best fruit,” for example, reflects unique perceptive conditions of a person’s mind.  This is a relative judgment, and therefore has no universality.

Yet for Kant objective validity is the goal of the critical account of theoretical cognition. Following Hume, causal judgments could not have objective validity, insofar as that means universality and necessity, because the concept of causality is an imaginative association of repeated observations of the phenomena of cause and effect. Kant follows Hume’s critique of the philosophical tradition that has always assumed the analytic, rational insight into the judgment of causality. But Kant thinks there is an alternative explanation of the concept of causality that secures its universality and necessity. He explains that it is a synthetic a priori judgment, just like those of mathematical propositions.

Nonetheless, if subjective means “of the individual mind,” isn’t the “objective validity” of the pure concepts still “subjective”. Yes, the pure concepts are “subjective” if subjective merely means “of the mind.”  But that is not what “subjective” means for Kant. For Kant, “subjective” means, in part, that it reflects on the unique constitution of each person’s sensibility (her senses). But the more important meaning of “subjective,” for Kant, is that it lacks universality and necessity and is instead individual and contingent.

Someone might ask, continuing from the preceding, how Kant knows that the pure concepts are not merely a unique characteristic of his mind.  How does he know that the pure concepts of the understanding pertain to all minds?  Isn’t this another sense in which the pure concepts of the understanding could be “subjective”?

This is a very reasonable question, particularly insofar as Kant is discussing consciousness and experience and these are all things that we know about primarily through our own unique personal conscious life. First, we must keep in mind that for Kant, experience does not really refer to the experience of consciousness. Instead, it means knowledge. Thus, already, experience has a sense alien to the way that we most frequently use the word. Second, because experience means knowledge, speaking of “minds” is even to a certain degree misleading, especially insofar as the word “mind” has a psychological sense. This knowledge does not belong to a single mind, but instead refers to knowledge irreducible to any particular mind. This is the mind in a transcendental sense. In this sense, “mind” and “experience” should not even be confused with my consciousness or my conscious life. This account of transcendental subjectivity may explain how I know, but it is never reducible to my knowledge.  Therefore, it is not, nor could it be, (ironically) subjective.