BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

KANT’S TRANSCENDENTAL EPISTEMOLOGY
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normativity, is also transferred to the practice within which they occur. 22
Discussing an example similar to the one given above (i.e. measuring an
object with a measuring rod), he maintains that this practice is not
disconfirmed when someone fails to live up to its standards. 23
The idea that practices are normative in the sense here specified, is, I
think, also integral to the Kantian definition of a practice. When Kant
defines a practice as ‘acts performed according to a rule to attain an end’,
he clearly ascribes to it a normative aspect, signaled by the fact that he
claims the practice to be governed by a rule, i.e. a norm. So confronting
the world with a practice involves more than just passively registering one
of its properties. In confronting the world with a practice, we set up a
standard, a standard represented by the practice. Borrowing a
metaphor from the old master himself, we may say that in confronting
the world with a practice, we approach the world not as students waiting
to be told its secrets, but like judges, demanding that the world answers
our questions. Or as Kant expresses the point in the preface to the Bedition:
Reason, in order to be taught by nature, must approach nature with
its principles in one hand, according to which alone the agreement
among appearances can count as laws, and, in the other hand, the
experiments thought out in accordance with these principles - yet in
order to be instructed by nature not like a pupil, who has recited to
him whatever the teacher wants to say, but like an appointed judge
who compels witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them. (B
XIII)
In Kant’s Transcendental Idealism Allison discusses what might count as
a priori conditions of experience in a Kantian or transcendental sense. 24
There are several conditions that have to be met in order for a person to
have experience of the world, such as the physiological processes going
on in the brain but Allison rightly denies that such processes may be
called a priori conditions of experience in a Kantian or transcendental
sense. Allison’s criticism, however, does not apply to a practice in my
view. One essential difference is that the physiological processes in the
brain are not something we actively control in the same way that we
22 Ibid., 176.
23 Ibid., 180. Interestingly, Railton here also introduces the notion of a priori.
The rule, he claims, is a priori regulative to the practice.
24 Allison (1983), 10.