BODY AND PRACTICE IN KANT

CAUSALITY AND COMMON SENSE PHYSICS 299
it is in its interest to move. If not, it remains at rest. However, interaction
still takes place. This point is perhaps best described by saying that the
child’s knowledge of causality is embedded in its general propensity to
move or to remain in rest relative to other objects so that desired
consequences are produced, and unwanted are avoided. As before,
‘knowledge’ means here sensorimotor knowledge, signifying that the
child at this age has no knowledge of causality independently of the
practice.
In a previous chapter I argued that if there is a level at which the
relational categories exist as embodied practices, then these have to be
practices entertained at every awake moment of our lives. I have now
identified what I have called a practice of causality that satisfies this
condition. I have also argued, following suggestions made by Piaget, that
this practice may be conceived of as an a priori condition of experience.
So this practice seems to have a function similar to the one ascribed to
the category of causality in Kant’s transcendental theory. If we accept
that there is a level at which the category of causality exists as an
embodied practice, the practice just defined may well be the practice we
are looking for. Note, as before, that I do not take this idea to be
explicitly promoted in the Critique. My claim is only that it is Kantian in
the weaker sense that is compatible with basic ideas underlying a number
of Kantian texts, including some parts of the Critique.
Note, finally, that just as the relational categories work together
according to Kant’s theory in the Critique, there is a sense in which the
two practices now identified, those of object-permanence and causality,
presuppose each other in a sense that makes them hard to distinguish in
an actual situation. To take into account the causality of the world means
to take into account that objects exist and that they have a permanence
beyond our perception of them. Therefore there is a level at which these
two practices converge into a general practice of interaction, i.e. they are
at play in every interaction we have with the objects of our world.
11.5 Sensorimotor intelligence in the adult
It may be that this argument is reasonable as long as we talk about
children in the sensorimotor period, but what about adults? The
cognitive capacities of the adult are dramatically more sophisticated than
those of the young child. Where the adult is concerned, would it not be
natural to see the categories as functions present within these more
sophisticated cognitive faculties? I think not, and my argument for this is
based in part on an aspect of Piaget’s cognitive theory that has so far not
been mentioned. It is the idea that sensorimotor intelligence is present