BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

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CAUSALITY AND COMMON SENSE PHYSICS
work that reveal a Kantian orientation is the idea that experience
involves more than the senses of the child being passively affected. For
the child to experience itself as living in an ordered world of causally
interacting spatio-temporal objects, it needs to actively relate to this
world.
The reason why I use Piaget in this chapter is, however, not just this
general Kantian orientation. Equally important is the fact that according
to Piaget, the activity just referred to, the activity making possible the
experience of an ordered world, is a behavioral activity. Also, Piaget
attempts to identify in detail how different behavioral patterns make
possible various aspects of the child’s experience of the world, such as
object-permanence and causality. I shall argue that these behavioral
patterns may be conceived of as practices, and that they may be those we
are looking for.
Critics have argued that Piaget’s empirical findings cannot always
support the more general conclusions that he himself draws from them
and that his theory is therefore in need of revision. 4 The outcome of this
chapter, however, does not stand or fall by the empirical truth of each
and every detail of Piaget’s theory. I think that even if we allow this
theory to be revised, there are aspects of it that remain tenable, and
moreover, that have a relevance beyond the specific context in which
they are introduced. Of specific interest is the Piagetian notion of a
sensorimotor intelligence, an intelligence working through perception
and action alone. I shall argue that this notion of a sensorimotor
intelligence may also be of relevance in understanding Kant’s
transcendental epistemology in general, and his theory of the relational
categories in particular.
Finally, it may be worth noting that the project of this chapter will
take us beyond what I take to be Kant’s main concern in his theory of the
relational categories. As I read the Critique, his interest lies not in
presenting a comprehensive theory of what these categories are, or what
we do when we employ them. His basic aim is to prove the validity of the
relational categories. This validity, moreover, is proved by means of a
transcendental argument, starting out from what is taken to be evident,
i.e. that we experience the world as a series of events taking place in an
are part of the a priori cognitive framework with which the child is born. From
what I have argued above, however, there are good reasons for questioning this
conclusion.
4 For a discussion of this criticism, cf. e.g. Goswami (1998) and Butterworth
(1987).