Kant on Touch, Embodied Activity, and the Perception of Causal Force

In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science , Kant claims that perception of force through touch is fundamental to our knowledge of substance in space. However, he also holds that perception cannot have modal content. Causation is a modal notion, so how can Kant allow perception of causal force? In response to this puzzle, I provide a new reading of Kant’s theory of touch. Touch does not involve perception of the necessity of a cause, but it does involve awareness of the activity of our body in relation to other bodies. Human embodied activity has a hitherto unrecognized central role in Kant’s accounts of empirical cognition of substance in space, the science of such a substance, and the irreducibility of its causal forces

Causation · Cognitive psychology · Cognitive science · Embodied cognition · Epistemology · Irreducibility · Linguistics · Metaphysics · Perception · Philosophy of mind · Reading (process) · Relation (database) · Space (punctuation) · Computer Science · Historical Philosophy and Science · Philosophy · Psychology