Abstract

: It is often overlooked that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is not just an enterprise to understand the transcendental function of synthetic a priori truths, but to give an analysis of propositions with empirical content, too. This means, that Kant’s enterprise is a semantical one in a much more challenging sense than the pure formal semantics after Tarski, Carnap, and Davidson, where the whole issue was a formal concept of truth as we use it already inside pure mathematics. Therefore, and only therefore, writers in this tradition can withdraw into different forms of deflationism and merely pro-sentential theories of truth. The task of a full fledged semantics is, however, the clarification of the relation between language and the world. Kant’s semantical analysis of this relation starts with a reflection on Anschauung. I propose to reconstruct the object of such an Anschauung as the present field of observable things and movements. Kant then turns to the forms of judgements , and develops semantical categories and basic principles of pure understanding. They explicate, so to speak, how the categories are applied to the specific domain of the objective empirical world, mediated by possible Anschauung. As I have shown in my Sinnkriterien , Kant’s logic does not focus on recursive definitions of truth-conditions for the sentential operators, quantifiers, and logically complex predicates. He only uses the traditional disambiguations of the different quantificational readings of the noun phrase , the different negations of the verb phrase , different relations in a sentence or between propositions and different modalities . Kant seems to realize the importance of the contrast of tense or grammatical time attributed to the different copulae that connect noun-phrases with verb-phrases . That is, the different copulae or tenses as ‘is’ and ‘was’ or ‘is doing’ and ‘will be done’ make the time-relation between the speech act and the situation of reference explicit including the time-structure of processes referred to, especially in view of their results. In fact, Sebastian Rödl shows in his important book Kategorien des Zeitlichen , that Frege’s logic is purely formal because it lacks any such contrast and can serve, therefore only in an analysis of mathematical, as such time-independent or ‘eternal’ sentences. As such, it is totally inapt to articulate empirical statements properly. The result is a too narrow notion of semantics altogether, as we find it throughout Analytic Philosophy in the 20th century