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In discussing the Apple Tree example, I said that my various representations of the apple tree could neither agree nor disagree with one another if they contained no general knowledge of what to expect of an apple tree under these kinds of circumstances. With this addendum, I was hinting at a point that it is now time to make explicit, namely that the significance accorded to universal validity in Kant’s argument lends no support to the claim that the rules that we rely on in synthesising the manifold of sense in intuition must be robust across variations in circumstances insofar as these affect how things stand with the object. We can add some detail to the Apple Tree case to illustrate the point.

Imagine, once again, that, contrary to my expectations, the tree trunk gives in when I touch it. I could come up with various different explanations. Some of these explanations will disqualify (a subset of) my perceptions as grounds for perceptual judgment: perhaps there is actually no apple tree, so that my haptic perception of penetrability is veridical, whereas my visual perception of the tree is hallucinatory; or perhaps there is a tree, so that my visual perception of the tree is veridical, but my haptic perception of its trunk as penetrable is illusory; or perhaps it is dark and the object that I mistook for an apple tree is in fact a piece of clothing on a clothes line. However, there might be other explanations, explanations that do not disqualify any of my perceptions as grounds for perceptual judgment. After all, there are certain circumstances in which trunks of apple trees do have penetrable parts – for example, when woodpeckers have bored holes in them. In this case, all my representations of the object, taken individually, would be correct.

Given what we have said so far, this is a somewhat puzzling possibility. On the one hand, my perceptual expectations seem to have been generated on the basis of the rule “If x is an apple tree, x has a completely impenetrable trunk”, so the fact that my actual sensations fail to agree with the sensations that this rule makes necessary suggests that some of my representations of the object are incorrect or subjectively distorted. On the other hand, all my representations of the apple tree seem correct or objectively valid. If we want to make sense of the veridicality of my representations, while staying within the Kantian framework that we sketched above, we have three options. Either we argue 1) that the rule that I purportedly relied on, the one cited above, is not truly universal and therefore flawed, or 2) that my expectations were

actually generated by a different rule, or 3) that a rule can be universal, in the sense that matters to Kant, despite allowing for certain exceptions. For reasons that are similar to those that led us to reject Korsgaard’s appeal to provisional universality (ch. 2, sect. 2.2) and those that we cited in support of the Asymmetry desideratum (ch. 2, sect. 1), I favour the third account.

Regarding the first account, it is worth noting that the mere fact that my actual sensations fly in the face of my initial expectations does not show that I did not know that this sort of thing can happen. Initially, I may not have been fully aware of the circumstances, not aware that the tree had become the nesting site of a wood- pecker, but upon noticing the hole, I might say to myself: “Oh, wow, a woodpecker nest!”. If that was my reaction, it would seem inappropriate to say that my perceptual experience was guided by a flawed concept of an apple tree, that it relied on a rule that fell short of the universality needed to establish unity among my representations, or that it was based on a misconception of the laws of nature that govern apple trees in their interaction with other things and beings. The reason why I had the wrong expectations is not that my perception of the tree was guided by a flawed concept, but that I was not aware of all the relevant facts, that I was not aware of the applicability of additional concepts.150 In order to appreciate the difference between these two

explanations, compare this version of the Apple Tree example to an example where the experiencing subject really is relying on a rule that is not properly universal: someone who has never seen or heard of black swans, for instance, and, therefore, assuming that all swans are white, misperceives a black swan as an odd-looking black cormorant. Here the perceptual experience is subjectively distorted. The lesson to be learned from this comparison is that it is one thing to think of the goings-on of a certain kind of object as sensitive to the presence of other objects and states of af- fairs, and another thing to be wrong about what those goings-on are in the first

150 _{This example illustrates that Kant commentators are wrong when they say either that concepts-qua-}

universal-rules are to be understood as criteria for classifying experiences as veridical or non-veridical and that Kant was confused when he thought that, for objective knowledge, these rules had to play a role in synthesising the manifold (Bennett 1966: 61-2; Strawson 1966: 88-9); or when they maintain that these rules are imperatives that we ought to follow in synthesising the manifold, and that our experiences are veridical to the extent that we do (Beck 1998: 103; for this distinction see, i.a., Van Cleve 1999: 94). The truth lies in the middle: the veridicality of our experiences depends on whether we synthesise the manifold of sense such that our experiences can be unified in accordance with con- cepts-qua-universal-rules, no matter whether we manage to thus unify them on any given occasion, e.g. whether or not we realize that we have found a woodpecker nest.

place. The woodpecker version of the Apple Tree case falls into the former category, so the rule relied on is universal.151

Having ruled out the first account, we can now compare the second and third. Proponents of both accounts accept that the rule used to generate my perceptual expectations is universal, both trace the lack of agreement between expected and actual sensations to my initial ignorance of the nesting activity, and both agree that my appreciation of the causal impact of the woodpecker on the apple tree restores the agreement between my representations, thus rendering them fully intelligible. The point of disagreement between them is only whether the fact that the rule is universal entails that the knowledge required to grasp the goings-on as a causal interaction between woodpecker and apple tree is encoded in the very rule relied on in combining the manifold of sense in the intuition of an apple tree, or whether it doesn’t, whether that knowledge could instead be knowledge of how this rule operates in different circumstances, e.g. knowledge of when it is valid and when it is not. According to the second account, it does. On this account, if my expectations were generated on the basis of a universal rule, the rule would have to read: “If x is an apple tree and x has not become the nesting site of a woodpecker, then x has a completely impenetrable trunk”.152 According to the third account, it does not. On this account, a rule can be

universal, in the sense relevant to Kant, even if its validity is circumstance-dependent. The question that we have now arrived at is the question from which we began, namely: can a rule be universal, in the relevant sense, if it does not hold in all cases or in all circumstances, if it is a defeasible rule that admits of exceptions? (This, recall, is what we need in order to reconcile our three desiderata. If we were to build all poten- tial defeaters into the rule itself, as the second account has it, we would violate Asymmetry. So if both accounts are viable, the third is to be preferred).153

151 _{This is the lesson that we accused Korsgaard of ignoring. The reductio argument against her Two}

Standpoint View (ch. 2, sect. 2.2) brought out that we should not treat the acknowledgment that there

are defeaters as mistakes.

152 _{Of course, since the whole point of this move is to be able to insist that I relied on an appropriate}

concept or fully universal rule, the list of exceptional cases that would have to be ruled out would be much longer.

153 _{My aim here is limited. It is merely to show that, given the role that universality plays in Kant’s}

account, he can say that a rule is universal despite admitting of exceptions, not that he should say this. If I wanted to argue that he should favour this view over the second account, I would adduce the kinds of considerations that I presented in ch. 2, sect. 1 to motivate the Asymmetry desideratum. I would note, for example, that proponents of the theoretical counterpart of the Fine Print Reading would have us believe that it is part of mastering the rule that first enables us to perceive trees that we know about the nesting practices of a certain bird species, and that, if we did not possess this understanding,

Now that we know why universality matters to Kant, we can reformulate the question as follows: could we rely on the rules that constitute our concepts of objects to distinguish, from within experience, between objectively valid and subjectively dis- torted ways of synthesising the manifold of sense, if these rules did not hold in all circumstances? The answer to this question, I would argue, is yes. For the possibility of agreement and disagreement between my different representations of an object is secured by the standards set by all the rules that make up my understanding of the objective world together, not by any one rule on its own. So as long as an exception to a given rule can be justified from within the relevant system of rules as a whole, it is not the kind of exception that, if deemed legitimate, would erode the distinction be- tween objectively valid and subjectively distorted ways of combining the manifold of sense and, as such, undermine the very possibility of agreement and disagreement.154

(Of course, this claim raises questions about the logical form of these defeasible rules and about how they restrict each other; we will address these questions in a moment).

Given the cognitive role that Kant attributes to universal rules, it is thus unprob- lematic to say that the rule “If x is an apple tree, x has a completely impenetrable trunk” is universal, even though the woodpecker version of the Apple Tree example constitutes an exception to that rule; or that the concept of an apple tree, on its own, makes necessary the representation of a completely impenetrable trunk but that, in combination with the concept of a nesting woodpecker, it does not; or, again, that the operation of the laws that govern apple trees depends on circumstantial features insofar as these are deemed relevant by the system of laws that govern nature as a whole.155 What the operation of these laws cannot and does not depend on are cir-

cumstantial features which appear to be relevant to the subject because of a distorting factor that bears on how they combine the manifold of sense, but which, according to the system in which these laws are embedded, are not. Think of someone who has taken a hallucinatory drug that makes them feel as if they can walk through walls. If it this knowledge gap would prove that none of our perceptions of trees are ever veridical – which is a rather implausible thing to say.

154 _{In this respect, it differs from the kinds of exceptions that would be deemed legitimate within a}

framework like Hume’s, in which the combination of the manifold of sense is thought to be based on mere habits of association. See fn. 147.

155 _{This point is worth stressing: the above rule is strictly universal despite being defeasible and, unlike a}

Humean generalization (see fn. 147), it qualifies as a proper law, although it is a ceteris paribus law (see ch. 2, sect. 2.3.2). It is strictly universal or a proper law in the sense that, whichever conditions must obtain for the relevant link to obtain, whenever they do obtain, the link obtains as well.

was the drug intake that explained why they found themselves having the kinds of sensations that would otherwise indicate that the object that they are touching is penetrable, then their perception of penetrability would be non-veridical. And any attempt on their part to restore agreement between their representations by appeal to circumstantial features that are taken to bear on the object, e.g. the “fact” that it is witching hour, would result in a false judgment.156 We can capture the sense in which

conceptual rules have to be universal more precisely by distinguishing between two kinds of counterfactual robustness. A universal rule, such as “If x is an apple tree, x has a completely impenetrable trunk”, needn’t be robust across variations in objectively relevant circumstances (i.e. circumstances that bear on how things go with the object that is represented). But it must be robust across both actual and possible variations in merely subjectively relevant circumstances (i.e. circumstances that merely appear to bear on how things go with the object because of some distorting factor that bears on the subject that is doing the representing).157 This means that universal rules can be defea-

sible in the sense that there can be objectively relevant features of the circumstances that function as defeaters.158 In the next section, I will elaborate on this conception of

defeasibility and examine whether rules that are, in this sense, defeasible can do the kind of work that motivates proponents of the subsumptive conception of rationality to posit Case-Scope universal rules. This is important if we want to make sense of Kant’s claim that we derive actions from laws.

156 _{What they could do, however, is restore agreement between their representations by appeal to the}

distorting factor and its impact on their capacities: they could realize that they are intoxicated and on this basis discount the perception of penetrability as not indicative of the character of the tree.

157 _{In bad cases the third-personal explanation of why a subject judged the way they did differs from}

the explanation or justification that the subject themselves would offer if challenged. The third- personal explanation would appeal to the relevant distorting factor, e.g. the drug intake, whereas the first-personal explanation or justification would appeal to the purportedly objective but in fact merely subjective circumstantial feature, e.g. the “fact” that it is witching hour. In good cases, by contrast, the two explanations coincide.

158 _{It seems to me that Stephen Engstrom is expressing the same idea when he says: “A judgment has}

objective universal validity just if ... the act of predication ... is valid for all objects falling under its concept ... Such objective universality does not, however, imply that the cognition of each object falling under the judgment’s concept would actually agree with the cognition of every other in assert- ing the judgment’s predicate of its object. Such actual agreement cannot be assumed in the case of contingent judgments, such as those of experience ... In the case of such judgments, objective univer- sal validity implies only that all the objects that can be brought under the judgment’s concept would have its predicate asserted of them in the cognition of them provided that they were in such conditions as is

the object of the judgment. The judgment that the water in the pond is frozen, for example, in relying on

the concept water, implicitly involves the universal judgment that any bit of water, when in the conditions

of the water in the pond, must be frozen – a judgment in which such conditions, though unspecified in

the judgment itself, are implicitly regarded as sufficient to determine the water to be frozen” (2009: 116, my emphasis). He does not explore the implications of this idea any further, however.