1. Judgements of Cognition, Judgements of Beauty and the Threefold Synthesis

A virtue of Ginsborg’s account is that it establishes consilience between different aspects of Kant’s critical philosophy. She argues that judgements of cognition (hereafter JoC) and judgements of beauty (hereafter JoB) are both products of the mental functions involved in the threefold synthesis of cognition that Kant explains in the CPR (A95–110). The three syntheses are: the apprehension of the manifold, the reproduction of the apprehension and finally the recognition of this reproduction in a concept. First, the apprehension of the manifold involves whatever level of discriminative attention to the spatio-temporal character of intuitions is minimally requisite for the possibility of any experience whatsoever. Second, the reproduction of the apprehension refers to our capacity to replicate an image of the spatio-temporal intuitions in our imagination. Finally, the recognition of the reproduction in a concept refers to our ability to develop an appropriate concept for the image.

JoC and JoB involve the apprehension of the manifold and the reproduction of this apprehension in the imagination (the first and the second syntheses). Both are justified normatively – yet for different reasons – and require that the judgements relate to how the object ought to be regarded by anyone else in the same circumstance. Thus Ginsborg explains that, in a number of contexts, when exercising judgements of beauty, ‘the “ought” is not supposed to be different in kind from that implicit in any empirical cognitive judgement’ (p.114). It is not clear why Ginsborg does not consider the ‘ought’ to be the same in all cases. Later in the same passage she states that Kant asserted only one difference between JoC and JoB. Specifically, for the latter ‘it is a feeling of pleasure, rather than the application of a concept, which we take to be required of those who perceive the object’ (p. 114). Hence only JoC require the third synthesis, where an appropriate concept is applied to the image of the object.

To understand the distinction between JoC and JoB consider Kant’s example of judging a rose as beautiful. To judge a rose as beautiful is to refer to the feeling that the object brings about. This is regarded as universally valid because the feeling is generated by the free play of the faculties of the understanding and imagination. In contrast, the JoC – to call this object of experience a rose – is regarded as appropriate in virtue of its general logical form, i.e. the object is appropriate to be placed in the class pertaining to the empirical concept ‘rose’. The normative justification for subsuming the rose under an empirical concept is distinct from that for judgement of the rose as beautiful as the latter is grounded in a feeling, not a concept. However, both these types of judgement are normative with respect to the objects in question, even if for JoB we cannot establish a law or rule by appealing to empirical concepts. According to Ginsborg ‘we feel pleasure in the music, or judge it to be beautiful, not in virtue of anything specific about our response … but rather in virtue of the normative fit we experience – in that very response, and without the mediation of concepts – between the response and the object’ (p. 126).

Ginsborg interestingly explains JoC by considering the differences between humans and other animals. As is to be expected, the key is precisely normativity. Non-human animals lack judgement because they employ their imaginative and sensory capacities ‘without any awareness of the normative dimension of what they are doing, and, more specifically, without the awareness of what they are doing as appropriate’ (p. 218). Hence they do not lack concepts, rather they merely lack the reflective capacity required for understanding that their concepts are normatively appropriate. Ginsborg develops a related point when she explains concept acquisition in children. She argues that we ought to look at how children develop the capacity to sort their own experiences.

The concept is generated by the appropriateness of its use. This does not require that we distinguish concepts from their application. In fact Ginsborg is able to show how neither JoC nor JoB require us to separate the relevant ‘predicates’ from their use.

In relation to JoB, this is criticism directed at Guyer’s two-act account of beauty. Guyer distinguishes between the non-conscious ‘simple reflection’ that gives rise to a feeling of the harmony of understanding and imagination on the one side, and the deliberate act of judging an object as beautiful on the other. In contrast Ginsborg argues that there are not two acts but only one: the subjective, non-conceptual, disinterested feeling which is a JoB. To this effect she asserts ‘There is a single act of judgement involved in the exercise of taste: namely, the act of self-referentially judging that one’s mental state in that very act of judging is universally communicable or universally valid with respect to an object’ (p. 42).

2. The Relation between Teleological Judgements and Normativity

One way Ginsborg develops her account of judgements of natural teleology is by contrasting them to JoB. They differ insofar as a JoB ‘does not ascribe normative lawfulness to the object in and of itself’ (p. 248). In order to elaborate the relevant difference between these two kinds of normative lawfulness, consider two examples: judging a painting as beautiful, and judging a horseshoe crab as something which ought to have eight legs. In the former case, if I do not perceive the painting as beautiful, then the fault must reside in the free play of my faculties of imagination and understanding. In the latter case the justification for my judgement relates to experience with the object in question: I judge that ‘a horseshoe crab ought to have eight legs only because previous examination of healthy and unmutilated horseshoe crabs has shown that they in fact have eight legs’ (p. 244). In other words, if a horseshoe crab does not have eight legs, then it is defective. And of course this is where a judgement of natural teleology comes in. It is not our judgement which is the source of perceiving the object as defective, but rather the object itself is the source of our judgement. Ginsborg emphasizes that this does not imply that entities which are judged teleologically are products of design. She states ‘The purposiveness we ascribe is “without a purpose”, in that we refrain from claiming that there is any actual concept of design that is responsible for the object’s production’ (p. 232).

Ginsborg also concedes in a footnote that there is a connection between the moral sense of ‘ought’ and this sort of normativity, yet she maintains it is too indirect to warrant identification with the moral ought. Thus ‘a horseshoe crab missing a pair of legs is not morally deficient’ (p. 249). As for comparison with the JoC, the reason that we can judge organisms as purposive – and therefore as possibly deficient – is because the object presents its own normative standards or constraints. Thus the normative constraints revealed by the object in teleological judgements are a different sort of normativity than JoC requires. Ginsborg explains that teleological judgements are about how an object ought to be, whereas JoC determine how an object ought to be perceived. She states

That a stone might be round and black refers only to the way it ought to be perceived rather than the way it ought to be. The stone cannot reveal the way it ought to be because ‘its features – unlike those of a healthy eye – do not represent normative standards governing its kind’ (p. 245). The very possibility of being able to conceive of an object as the source of its own normative constraints is justification for the conception of teleological judgements as involving a distinct sort of normativity from JoC. We can say that an eye is defective but the same cannot be said of a rock, hence there is a difference between organic and ‘inorganic products of nature, which are not subjective to normative evaluation at all’ (p. 245).

3. Natural Teleology and Philosophy of Biology

Finally, this review will consider how Ginborg regards her account of natural teleological judgements as offering help to philosophy of biology. In the final essay Ginsborg argues that her account can ‘remove a conceptual obstacle in the way of normative ascriptions in biology – namely, the thought that we cannot ascribe oughts without intentions’ (p. 342). Her argument is that teleological judgements in biology should not be justified by any appeal to a causal argument. Instead teleological judgements depend on a primitive normativity. As she explains, ‘the primitively normative “ought” applies not to the intentional actions or beliefs about a rational agent or epistemic subject, but rather the natural reactions of a human being responding to her environment’ (p. 341). Thus it is not always necessary to justify teleological judgements in relation to the intentions or plans of a designer; rather we can appeal to the normative constraints of the object which reveal to us how an object ought to be. Normative constraint cannot be reduced to design because design is a particular example of normative constraint, one which appeals to a designer to justify how the object ought to be. It is possible to have oughts without intentions because we can simply appeal to the organic ‘structure and behaviour as governed by normative constraints, but without taking those constraints to be represented in the mind of a designer’ (p. 326).

Ginsborg considers one potential difficulty with the comparison between her account and the biological approach to teleology: her account implies that nature generally – both biological and non-biological – could be understood as teleological. She argues that this criticism misunderstands the basis of her account, which merely argues that we can legitimately appeal to oughts without the need to presuppose intentions. She acknowledges that her account allows ‘that the notion of function could conceivably be applied to natural phenomena that are not biological’ (p. 344). She argues that this is not a fault of her theory, rather it exposes a problematic assumption about function on the part of the biologist. She asserts ‘I do not think that a philosophical analysis of the notion of function in biology … should rule out in advance that we might encounter non-biological phenomena for which functional characterizations turn out to be scientifically indispensable’ (p. 344).

Ginsborg’s acceptance of functional teleological characterizations of non-biological phenomena is compelling. However, I am concerned that her invitation to biology could also be used as grounds for critique. The problem of oughts without intentions is solved at the cost of portraying the organism as something mysterious. Consider the example of the Great Red Spot, a storm system on Jupiter. Ginsborg discusses weather systems as a contrast to the Kantian account of organisms. The difference is that weather systems can organize and preserve themselves simply because of ‘the more basic physical forces that were responsible for their formation in the first place’ (p. 320). The problem is not that regarding the weather system as an organism is incompatible with contemporary philosophy of science. Stuart Kauffman discusses this very possibility: ‘One can have a remarkably complex discussion about whether the Great Red Spot might be considered to be living – and if not, why not. After all, the Great Red Spot in some sense persists and adapts to its environment, shedding baby vortices as it does so’ (Kauffman 1995: 21). Rather, the problem is how it is possible to preserve the distinction between biological and non-biological entities if the justification for biological entities also applies to non-biological entities. Ginsborg’s response is that it is not necessary to conceive of the weather system in normative terms: ‘while we might have to recognise that clouds have a tendency to produce rain under certain circumstances, we do not suppose, further, that this is one of their functions’ (p. 344). However, we could argue that the weather system does require a functional explanation because it possesses its own normative constraints which enable us to state how the object ought to be. Ginsborg argues that the natural normative constraints of organisms reveal how they are meant to be, but that the same cannot be said for weather systems. Both organic and non-organic entities can be explained by appealing to the arrangement of molecules and physical forces, but Ginsborg only considers the former case as missing something when it is explained this way. This explanation leaves the organism shrouded in mystery as it is not clear how we can demarcate between functional explanations that reveal how an object ought to be (in the case of biological entities) and functional explanations that reveal how an object can be (in the case of non-biological entities). It is not clear that there is any justification – apart from appealing to a primitive normativity that we supposedly are already aware of – for the argument that only organisms require teleological judgements supported by their own normative constraints.