KANT'S CRITIQUE OF TELEOLOGY IN BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION

Tertium datur 75
judgment. Let us now turn to the question of how such judgments
can lead to particular "dialectical" difficulties.
In a digression on Zeno (B530-35), Kant uses a purportedly
simple example to display the logical relations of the propositions in
an antinomy. He points out (B531) that there is a contradiction
between the affirmative proposition :
5) Every body is good-smelling (every body smells good)
and the negative proposition:
6) Some bodies are not good-smelling (some bodies don't
smell good).
But we could replace (6) with an infinite judgment such as: 34
7) Some bodies are non-good-smelling (some bodies smell
non-good)
Propositions (5) and (7) are incompatible, but they are not contradictories
in the strict sense. The Law of the Excluded Middle, which
applies to the conjunction of (5) and (6) on the basis of their logical
form, does not apply to the conjunction of (5) and (7). Only on the
presupposition that all bodies have some smell are (5) and (7) contradictories.
Without this assumption both could be false, e.g. if all
bodies are odorless or some bodies are odorless but none are bad
smelling (having an odor is obviously a synthetic predicate). The
apparent contradiction between (5) and (7) thus proves to be, in
Kant's sense, a merely contrary opposition. Both propositions could
be false, but both could not be true; the dialectical illusion of a
contradiction disappears as soon as this is recognized. Here we are
dealing only with a logical illusion. As Kant himself says:
If someone were to say, that every body smells either good or it smells not
good, a third case occurs, namely that it does not smell (diffuse) at all, and
34 The reformulation of the opposition as good-smelling/bad-smelling proposed
by Wolff (Der Begriff, pp. 48-56) and occasionally simply carried out in English
and French translations (e.g. Meikeljohn, Barni and Archambault) disposes of
the "logical word non" in the formulation and transforms the infinite judgment
into a straightforward affirmative judgment which is incompatible with another
affirmative judgment for reasons of content. However, Kant's problem is not that
"contrary" predicates such as good-smelling and bad-smelling, or black and
white could be confused with "contradictory" predicates; the problem is rather that
judgments ascribing "contradictory" predicates (good-smelling, not-goodsmelling;
mortal, non-mortal) to the same subject at the same time may not themselves
be contradictories but merely contraries.