Against a Common Presupposition about Kant's Transcendental Deduction of the Ideas

The Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic from the Critique of Pure Reason contains a remarkably brief passage in which Kant claims to be offering a transcendental deduction of the transcendental ideas. In contrast to the great variety of interpretations of this deduction and the topics related to it, most interpreters take it to go beyond what is already established in the dialectic by showing how a) ideas add something to our empirical cognition; b) this something is desirable/rational; c) ideas thus have some kind of objective validity. In this paper, I go against this interpretative scheme by showing: (1) how Kant’s account of the origin of the ideas at the beginning of the transcendental dialectics already establishes all that is necessary for determining their objective status; (2) that the transcendental deduction of the ideas from the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic merely spells out the consequences that such an account has for the validity of the ideas. To do so, I show, provides a vantage point both for explaining the remarkable brevity of Kant’s statements about the transcendental deduction of the ideas and providing a straightforward reading of them.