H. P. Grice's Category of Conversational Mode

We come now to the second division of the book, viz, the Faculty of the Understanding. And this is subdivided into two parts, named the Understanding and the Judgment,—the office of the former being the furnishing of conceptions, and that of the latter being the subsumption of facts under these conceptions. The understanding furnishes conceptions, the judgment connects them with intuitions, and thus gives us a knowledge of things. If now we observe all the varieties of our judgments, we shall ascertain what and how many are the conceptions of the understanding. That is, by observing how many things we do in the act of judging, we may discern how many original conceptions we must have already in the mind as knowledges already possessed, in order to cognize and translate intuitions, and thus have a valid cognition of them. And these conceptions, thus found, are termed categories. Kant found that in cognizing we do four things :—1st. We measure or quantitize, i. e.,we unify,pluralify a.nd totalify. We take a point, add to it other points, and complete the series as one whole. Hence, we must have the conception of Quantity, as a category made up of the instants, unity, plurality and totality, the last being, of course, a combination of the first two. 2d. He discovers that we affirm, we deny, we limit. That is, we really affirm something; deny that it is something else, and distinguish it, and affirm it as separate from all else. Hence, we must have the conception of Quality, made up of the instants of reality, negation and limitation,—the last made up of the former two. 3d. He observes that we connect certain qualities together in a substance, observing that a certain roundness, color, odor, flavor, &c., are an apple: and that wo connect one phenomenon with another, following in a fixed and irreversible order, as cause and effect: and also that we regard phenomena as acting upon each other reciprocally. Thus from all these, we must have the category of Relations, made up of the instants, substance, cause and reciprocal actions, —the last composed of the first two. 4th. He observed that we affirm of things that they are possible, real, or necessary, as to the mode of their existence. And hence we have the category of Mode, made up of the three instants, possibility, existence, necessity,—the last, as in the other cases, being made up of the preceding two. So he makes twelve in all, as follows:

The first two leading categories, viz, Quantity and Quality, with their subordinate instants, are called mathematical / because they relate to objects of intuition in space. The second two, viz, Relation and Mode, with their instants, refer to the same objects as they relate to time, and are connected in substances and causes, and are therefore called dynamical. Add to these categories the two pure intuitions of the sensibility, viz, Space and Time, and we have fourteen original and primitive forms or knowledges, which are found a-priori in the mind before experience, and necessary as conditions to it, and with which the mind goes out in quest of new knowledge. For, according to Kant, the mind must have both faculties for knowing, and a knowledge of its own already in hand, before it is competent to go out into the world to cognize anything. And in the first contact of the mind with external things through the senses, these innate and a-priori knowledges diecover themselves as already in the mind—its original furniture given by the Creator with its existence. These categories of Kant are purely subjective conceptions, the clue to which is given by mental operations; while those of Aristotle are suggested either by grammatical distinctions or the objective genera of things. The former are simply the subjective unity of a mental operation; while the latter are the objective unity of things. Kant sought to ascertain what could be known, by examining the faculties of the mind. His predecessors sought to know the faculties of the mind, by ascertaining what there was to be known. These categories of the understanding, like the intuitions of the sensibility, are, according to Kant, purely subjective. They are modes of the mind's knowing, and are not in themselves objective realities. As space and time are purely ideal, so these, as space-and-time-qualities, are also ideal, and merely the forms of knowledge of which sensation furnishes the material. Now the office of the judgment is to subsume the empirical intuitions of the sensibility under these categories, within the forms of space and time. Under the first it cognizes simply quantity, as extensive, without knowing anything more about it than simply that it is a unity and a plurality completed in a totality. Under the second, it knows qualities, as real, distinguished and defined, having intensive quantity or degree of quality. Under the third, it knows qualities as necessarily connected in substances, events as connected with causes, and in the relation of action and reaction. And under the fourth, it also cognizes things as possible, actual and necessary. In the former two cases, the act of the judgment is called mathematical, in the latter two it is called dynamical.

That a conception and an intuition, thus brought together by an act of judgment, actually belong to each other, has its proof in this, that the act of the intellect by which an intuition is cognized or conjoined, is precisely the same when the sensation is withdrawn, as that by which the conception itself is cognized. The intuiting and the conceiving are identified in the same act, the former being a synthesis of the imagination, and the latter a synthesis of the understanding; and thus the application of the conception to the intuition is rendered certain. The identity consists in this, that the instants of time gone over in the process of intuiting, correspond to those gone over in the operation of conceiving; and these corresponding instants of time are called "the transcendental schema" being the medium through which intuitions and conceptions are shown to belong to each other. So, also, in regard to judgments in time. The intuiting of succession, when the notion of time is withdrawn, is the same as the conceiving of the process of causation; i. e. the mind in both acts passes over the same instants of time, and thus the relation of cause and effect is verified and proved to be the only ground of experience. The schema of cause is succession in an irreversible order.

Now this act by which intuitions are brought under the categories, and identified with them in one consciousness, is called "the original synthetical unity of apperception," and is the highest principle of all exercise of the understanding. It consists in subjecting all the operations of the mind to the unity of self-consciousness. And thus self-consciousness lies at the basis of all the processes of cognition, and holds them all in synthesis as my cognition.