In Which a Problem remains for McDowell, but I satisfy Myself that McDowell's older Position can Avoid the Difficulty

Looking at my blog now, there is way too much text. My last two McDowell posts are pretty much just two dense walls of obscure prose. To try to improve matters, I'm sticking this post behind an animated gif of Yuyuko eating rice. It's a follow-up post for my follow-up post on my earlier post on "Avoiding The Myth of the Given". Yuyuko is a video game character, and the rice is from Hidamari Sketch. Hitting the "Escape" key will stop gifs from looping in Firefox. (It's actually the same as hitting "Stop"; it's just that Firefox defaults to graying out the stop icon on pages that are fully loaded.)



Oh, and incidentally, "The Dark Knight" is still fantastic on a second viewing, and on a third. It's also worth seeing in IMAX if you can manage it; the city-shots are gorgeous.

In my last McDowell post, I encountered a dilemma: Even if one does not follow McDowell in limiting the conceptual capacities which can be involved in the content of an intuition to "common and proper sensibles", but allows that any conceptual capacities a thinker has might be involved in the content of an intuition given to that thinker, there seemed to be a problem about noninferential judgements based on recollected intuitional content. "I might see a pink ice cube on Tuesday, learn to recognize what ice cubes look like on Wednesday, and then, on Thursday, noninferentially gain knowledge that the thing I saw on Tuesday was made of ice (because I remember what it looked like, and I now have the ability to recognize cubes made of ice as being made of ice when I see them)."

I think that my problem was that I was working with a false picture of how "intuitional content" can be "recollected". Memory is not like a strip of film; remembering how something looked is not a matter of re-inspecting an image which was gained when the object was initially seen. Memory has more of a constructive element to it than that sort of picture allows. When I recollect something, I do not simply "re-present" how things were given to me; I re-construct them. Remembering how something looked involves the imagination. (This is why "false memories" can be such a problem -- the imagination cannot simply be excluded from the faculty of memory, so having accurate memories is a matter of having a disciplined imagination, and not simply "not imagining things".)

(It is worth noting that the sort of memory I am concerned with here is only one way in which we use memory-talk. If I remember my PIN number, this is just to say that I know what my PIN number is. I do not have to imagine the numbers to remember my PIN number; here, "remembering" is just knowing at various moments in a stretch of time. And the same holds for determinate (propositional) bits of memory, such as "I remember that the Washington Monument is white." This analysis won't do as a way of describing what it is to remember how something looked, in the sense that concerns me; that sort of memory is not just knowledge mentioned idiomatically. For if I remember how the cube looked, then this memory can provide a noninferential grounding for my judgement that the cube was made of ice. But if remembering how the cube looked was just a matter of knowing various things about the cube, then the grounding it provided would have to be an inferential one. But the knowledge that the cube was made of ice is not gained through inference: I simply am able to recognize ice cubes as being made of ice when I have them in clear view. It is not that I am able to gain knowledge of a thing's being made of ice when I have certain other bits of knowledge about it, such as might be made explicit as premises in an argument whose conclusion is that the thing is made of ice. If pressed for why I think the cube was made of ice, I might only be able to say that it looked like it was made of ice. But looks-talk can't provide inferential grounds for is-talk, as Sellars showed. This is all by way of preliminary throat-clearing.)

So, on the picture I was puzzled by, the dilemma was that the content of an intuition given to me can't involve the activity of conceptual capacities which I don't possess, and yet it seemed that this same intuition's content had to involve concepts which I gained later. For I might be unable to recognize things as made of ice when I have an ice cube in view, yet my having had a clear view of the ice cube might allow me to know that it was made of ice when I "look back on it" later, once I have gained the capacity to recognize things as made of ice. I think my problem was that I thought that memory must involve the re-presentation of the same intuitions which were my original having-in-view of the ice cube, such that limits on my conceptual capacities at the time of the original viewing would limit what concepts could be in play in the content of the recollection of the cube. But if the image which I call to mind when I remember what the cube looked like is a product of my imagination, then whatever conceptual capacities I have presently might be drawn upon in the construction of the image presented to me in recollection. (I'm worried about tripping up on my language here, since recalling how something looked has to be something I do, and not merely something that happens to me (as is the case with vision), yet I still want to draw on McDowell's language of conceptual capacities being passively drawn on in the content of what is "seen" (here, metaphorically, in a "mental image", rather than an actual one). My conceptual capacities are passively drawn on in my active attempt to recall how something looked, as opposed to being actively drawn on in an active attempt to produce an image (which is what is generally called "imagining something").)

Now, I can easily see a worry here: If the first time a conceptual capacity is drawn on is in imagining how things are (as an element of attempting to remember how things are), then why should the result be capable of providing a justification for a judgement as to how things are? For the product of the imagination might seem a mere subjective fancy. I think that there is a valid worry in this: trying to gain noninferential knowledge from how I recollect things to have been is not as reliable as trying to gain noninferential knowledge from how things appear to me in experience. In memory, it is more common to dream things up that never happened than it is in waking life.

But, this sort of being mislead by a faulty memory is intelligibly erring. For the problem is that what I took to be part of the content of what I had seen was not actually part of the way things were. That which was supposed to justify my noninferential judgement turned out to not be adequate for the task demanded of it. But this shows that adding the imagination to the picture is sufficient to dissolve the dilemma I faced earlier: If I can be misled by the contributions of my imagination, then I can also be lead to licit conclusions by them, as with my ice cube example. They are the sort of thing that is a candidate for being a reason for judging that things are thus-and-such. Having bad reasons for a belief is not simply having exculpatory excuses for having the belief; it is a case of reasoning badly rather than appealing to something outside of the space of reasons.

And so I am able to again hold the opinion that if one does not limit the conceptual capacities which can be involved in experience, as McDowell didn't used to, then one can avoid a problem which McDowell's most recent position has to face.

"The Dark Knight" is awesome

I saw it at midnight last night. I'm considering going to see it again tomorrow (tickets are cheap before noon on weekends, here, otherwise I'd be considering seeing it again tonight). There was pretty much no moment in the movie at which I was not totally enjoying myself.

All of the praise you've heard for Heath Ledger as the Joker is totally justified. Absolutely phenomenal performance.

About the only criticism that comes to mind is that the movie is too exciting; I found myself exhausted at the end of it. Take a powerbar or something to prevent fatigue, I guess; I had to down a soda due to lightheadedness after the fourth or fifth Totally Awesome Event.

Go see it!

A More Serious Problem for McDowell

On McDowell's new view, any particular bit of intuitional content can be brought to consciousness -- can be recognized, made explicit, articulated -- by merely the addition of the "I think" -- so to speak, by willing it into consciousness.

This would not be the case if intuitional content were rich enough to include whatever a recognitive capacity might allow one to gain knowledge of via a particular experience, as I had suggested in my previous post. For then the articulation of the content of an intuition might require the exercise of recognitional capacities which were not already in play in having an intuition with a particular content (since intuitions with the same content can be had by thinkers with different recognitive capacities).

I suspect that McDowell holds that the concepts of "common and proper sensibles" are in some sense necessary for one to be able to have experiences at all. In the first appendix to Mind and World McDowell suggests that "interesting" analytic judgements can be maintained through reference to "necessary" aspects of any possible view of the world (he apparently takes this view over from Jonathan Lear). So there's reason to think McDowell finds this sort of talk plausible (whereas I do not). If he does think that the concepts of "common and proper sensibles" are a priori (in the sense of being necessarily had by any thinker, by anyone with a "view of the world"), then the exercise of such conceptual capacities as would be needed to articulate an intuitional content can plausibly be said to not involve any special recognitive capacities, since all of the concepts involved are "in the mind a priori" and don't need special education to acquire. I still think that the conceptual capacities involved in articulating an intuitional content have to be recognitive capacities, since being able to articulate a particular content requires being able to recognize it as the same content as might occur elsewhere (in things with the same shape, size, etc.). Being able to articulate an intuitional content is being able to recognize that content, even if the particular content articulated is one that the thinker has not encountered before. If I only recognize an octagon on one occasion, and do not recognize it as being the same shape as other octagonal things I encounter on other occasions, then I can't be said to have recognized the shape of the octagon.

I don't think is how McDowell uses "recognition"-talk; he seems to reserve it for what I called above "special recognitive capacities". I don't see how they can really be so opposed, though. All of my recognitive capacities are capacities to recognize something when it is sensibly present to me in experience (as with McDowell's cardinal); that is what makes them "recognitive". So all recognitive capacities involve (in some sense) recognizing what I am given in experience, and so knowledge gained by such capacities can't be simply opposed to knowledge gained by articulating intuitional content, on the grounds that the latter is knowledge gained by bringing to consciousness what is given in experience. For both sorts of knowledge are the bringing to consciousness of something presented to me in experience. (The one as part of an intuitional content, the other as... I don't know what McDowell says here. My complaint about "exculpation" in the previous post stands.)

So, this is why McDowell doesn't think that intuitional content involves more than a scant number of concepts: it is able to be articulated by the mere addition of the 'I think". No recognitive capacities are required, apart from those already "passively actualized" in having an intuition with a particular content.

In a footnote, McDowell notes that intuitional content can be remembered without having been made discursive (though it's easier to remember if it has been so articulated, as a fact about our psychology). I suppose the idea is that if I've seen an object with a particular shape, I can call up the shape in memory and make explicit just how it looked. "It had... eight corners, and three of them were bent like this, and the rest were right angles." This seems plausible enough. And for thinkers who lack such numerical concepts as "eight" and "right angle", it seems plausible that they might still be able to draw a picture of the object, or sculpt it, or at least recognize it as the same shape if they saw it again. But then I'd think it would also apply to aspects of objects which do not involve common and proper sensibles: "The thing I saw was made of... oh, I have it, it was made of ice, and was sort of a pinkish-red." So however the mass of our noninferential judgements get their justification, they can be related to memory in the same way as judgements justified by their articulating intuitional content. If I don't consciously note that something is made of ice when it's in view, I can recognize it as made of ice by examining it in memory, later on.

Given this latter capacity, exemplified in my ability to recognize that the object I saw the other day was made of ice (though I hadn't articulated this fact at the time the object was present to me), it seems that my recognitive capacities cannot be limited by the concepts which were "passively actualized" in having an intuition with a particular content. For I might see a pink ice cube on Tuesday, learn to recognize what ice cubes look like on Wednesday, and then, on Thursday, noninferentially gain knowledge that the thing I saw on Tuesday was made of ice (because I remember what it looked like, and I now have the ability to recognize cubes made of ice as being made of ice when I see them).

So, I am able to gain noninferential knowledge from being given an intuition with a particular content without the having of that intuition having involved the actualization of all the concepts involved in the noninferential knowledge which it entitles me to. For I can noninferentially know that what I saw on Tuesday was ice, yet it was not possible for my having been given that intuition to have been an actualization of my conceptual capacity to recognize ice, for I had no such capacity at the time I saw the ice cube. (To sharpen the picture, suppose the ice cube I saw on Tuesday was the first time I had ever encountered ice of any sort, and then Wednesday was spent (by coincidence, since I don't think of Tuesday's cube again until Thursday) encountering a great deal of ice, learning about it, practicing distinguishing it from glass and transparent plastic, etc. So on Tuesday I had no concept of "ice", and by the end of Wednesday I had become proficient in handling encounters with ice knowingly, and on Thursday I gain a bit of noninferential knowledge about what I saw on Tuesday.)

So, if all knowledge gained noninferentially on the basis of experience involves recognitive capacities similar to the capacity involved in my recognizing ice, then it might seem that intuition does not involve an actualization of conceptual capacities at all. For an intuition might entitle me to noninferential knowledge despite such knowledge involving concepts which were not possessed by me at the time of my having the intuition. But if intuition did not involve the actualization of any conceptual capacities, then it's hard to see how such entitlement could be anything but the Mythical Given. For nothing outside the "space of reasons" has import within that space, and the space of reasons is thoroughgoingly conceptual; justifying and being able to justify is a linguistic affair. But it's not clear to me how McDowell's current position on noninferential knowledge gained apart from the articulation of intuitional content isn't similar Mythically Given. For if the articulated content of an intuition is something like "There is a cube at rest in front of me", then how can this justify my noninferential knowledge that "There is a pinkish-red cube made of ice at rest in front of me"? It doesn't help if the cube is (in fact) pinkish-red and made of ice, since these aspects of the ice cube are not things which were made visible to me in the content of the intuition I was given, which is the only means by which I have a view of the ice cube. (It also doesn't help that the intuitional content is infinitely richer than "There is a cube in front of me", since, for all its richness, it involves only concepts of proper and common sensibles.)

So: We must make it clear how noninferential knowledge can be gained on the basis of an intuition the having of which did not involve the actualization of conceptual capacities the possession of which is a necessary condition for being able to gain said noninferential knowledge. This puzzle seems to stand regardless of whether or not we follow McDowell in his recent limitation of the concepts which are involved in intuitional content.

For, if the concepts involved in the having of an intuition are not limited to those of "common and proper sensibles", they still must be limited by the conceptual capacities of the thinker who has a particular intuition. For capacities that are not present can't be actualized, passively or no. And yet, since intuitional content may be recollected, an intuition may entitle a thinker to noninferential knowledge which he could not have gained at the time of the intuition. The content of an intuition thus seems to be both limited by the conceptual capacities a thinker has and not limited by the conceptual capacities a thinker has. McDowell's current position is available to avoid this, by narrowing the concepts involved in the content of an intuition, but this still leaves the justificatory problem. Where I previously thought I saw a way out of this difficulty, I now see that my "solution" was a chimera.

a puzzle about McDowell's most recent position

In "Avoiding the Myth of the Given", McDowell revises the position he'd laid out in Mind and World. Here is how he puts it in "Avoiding":

Suppose I have a bird in plain view, and that puts me in a position to know noninferentially that it is a cardinal. It is not that I infer that what I see is a cardinal from the way it looks, as when I identify a bird’s species by comparing what I see with a photograph in a field guide. I can immediately recognize cardinals if the viewing conditions are good enough.
...On my old assumption, since my experience puts me in a position to know noninferentially that what I see is a cardinal, its content would have to include a proposition in which the concept of a cardinal figures: perhaps one expressible, on the occasion, by saying “That’s a cardinal”. But what seems right is this: my experience makes the bird visually present to me, and my recognitional capacity enables me to know noninferentially that what I see is a cardinal. Even if we go on assuming my experience has content, there is no need to suppose that the concept under which my recognitional capacity enables me to bring what I see figures in that content.

Does this not remove the possibility of "grounding" many of my noninferential judgements in how experience reveals things to me to be? If having an experience with a particular content in no way involves my concept "cardinal" being drawn on, then how can that experience justify the noninferential judgement "That's a cardinal"? It seems that with regard to such judgements, experience functions merely as an exculpation, not a justification. Which is just the sort of predicament Mind and World is supposed to help us avoid.

Note how McDowell expresses himself here:

Consider an experience had, in matching circumstances, by someone who cannot immediately identify what she sees as a cardinal. Perhaps she has never heard of cardinals. Her experience might be just like mine in how it makes the bird visually present to her. It is true that in an obvious sense things look different to me and to her. To me what I see looks like (looks to be) a cardinal, and to her it does not. But that is just to say that my experience inclines me, and her similar experience does not incline her, to say it is a cardinal.

How McDowell's experience makes the bird present to him is identical to the way it makes the bird present to him to someone who is not able to recognize cardinals. But it inclines him to judge "That's a cardinal" of the bird, whereas it does not cause her to want to judge thusly.

This looks an awful lot like McDowell is saying that experience functions as a cause, but not a reason, for most of the noninferential judgements I am inclined to make. This seems like A Bad Thing -- an awful lot of what I regard as "perceptive" in my cognitive life show up as my mind "spinning frictionlessly". The bird I am given in experience is a cardinal, and I am inclined to judge that it is a cardinal, but the former is not the reason for the latter: I am inclined to judge that it is a cardinal merely because that is how I react on this occasion. McDowell speaks here of "recognitional" capacities, but that seems like a smokescreen: what I cognize by the exercise of such a capacity does not "capture" part of the content of what I am given in experience, but functions autonomously, without the world having a rational grip on the capacity. Experience cannot even be providing criteria for my judgement that what I see is a cardinal, for when I judge noninferentially I do not judge "from the way it looks, as when I identify a bird’s species by comparing what I see with a photograph in a field guide". It thus seems that, on McDowell's most recent view, experience simply drops out of the picture as a justificatory element (in many cases, not all).

Now, McDowell does allow that the content of an experience involves concepts of "proper sensibles" and "common sensibles" (he says "of sight", but presumably there are "proper" and "common" sensibles for each modality of sensation).

As a first problem, I don't know how these concepts are supposed to be distinguished from the rest of our concepts. Perhaps he means concepts such as color-words, which he doesn't think can be made intelligible without reference to how things look to a subject. I can see how these might be "proper" sensibles, since they can't be made intelligible without reference to how things can appear to a subject. But, this doesn't seem to be the case. Sayeth McDowell: "The common sensibles accessible to sight are modes of space occupancy: shape, size, position, movement or its absence." All of these strike me as being unlike color-words; if memory serves, they're also the properties that ancient Atomism took to be exhaustive of What Things Are Really Like. I suspect there might be a Kant-inspired* argument for the priority of these concepts in experience; I doubt that there's a sound argument for such a priority.

"We might think of common sensibles [in an intuition unified by the intuitional form "animal"] as including, for instance, postures such as perching and modes of locomotion such as hopping or flying." I am skeptical of the notion that I can identify something as "perching" apart from recognizing it as an animal of a fairly specific type: to say that a creature is "perched" is to distinguish its posture from others it might have, and to be able to do this I have to know a fair bit about how the animal gets around in its environment. The same holds for "hopping" and "flying", as distinguished from "bouncing" and "falling" and "being carried along by the wind" So I'm not sure what makes these "common sensibles" as opposed to being things I can know of an animal noninferentially, such as that the thing perched above the door is a raven, not a crow -- or that it's an ominous bird.

But as a more serious problem: At best, McDowell's most recent position can make it clear how judgements of a certain narrow type (those involving only concepts of common and proper sensibles) can be justified by experience. Many noninferential judgements which one is inclined to make "on the basis of" experience are not able to be justified by experience, on McDowell's current position. If he didn't limit the concepts which can be involved in the content of an intuition, then this problem would not come up. I cannot see why he doesn't do this, especially since his position in Mind and World did precisely this. In my earlier attempt to understand McDowell's revised position, I thought he'd done precisely this; looking at the article again, I simply had McDowell wrong. But I can't see why he doesn't hold the view I attributed to him in that earlier attempt.

About the only thing I can think of is that McDowell wants to be able to delineate what is possible and impossible to intuit, in some absolute sense. This doesn't seem like the sort of thing quietist philosophers, especially those who have a fondness for Rorty, are known for. It also doesn't strike me as either possible or desirable. If this isn't what McDowell is trying to do, then maybe he's trying to find a way to cash out saying that two people can have a bird "visually present to them" in "the same way" despite "seeing different things" (in the sense that one sees a cardinal, and one doesn't recognize the bird as a cardinal). I don't see why he couldn't just say that two people can recognize the same things in an experience with a particular content, and so can see "the same thing", while they can also vary in what they recognize, so they can see "differently". An experience can have a content which is richer than a single proposition can express; I take this to be part of what McDowell is trying to do justice to by speaking of "intuitional content" as opposed to "propositional content" now. There is more present to me in experience than I recognize as present; some of the reasons for altering my beliefs which experience provides me with are not reasons I take notice of. So when two people have experiences with the same content, some descriptions of what they recognize will be the same, and some will be different, depending on what each of them notices. I don't see why he needs to distinguish between intuitional form and intuitional content, or between common and proper sensibles and the rest of our concepts, to do justice to this aspect of experience.

All in all, I am puzzled. I should probably read some of Travis's stuff and see if I can make sense of why McDowell has revised his views in such an odd way. The way McDowell presents Travis's position in the article, I can see how it could motivate the move to talk of "intuitional" as opposed to "propositional" content, but I can't see how the other revisions McDowell makes in this article could be motivated.

If McDowell is making the errors I think he's making, that quite surprises me, since his work is what's lead me to see them as errors. If he's not making such errors, then I can't see how his current position allows for our noninferential judgements to be justified by how things appear to us, for most such judgements.

A concise version of what I take to be puzzling: How can intuitions noninferentially entitle us to judgements which go beyond anything discursively articulable in those intuitions, without this entitlement being a Mythical Given?

*Here is the sort of passage that makes me think Black-Hatted Kant might be behind this: "In a visual intuition, an object is visually present to a subject with those of its features that are visible to the subject from her vantage point. It is through the presence of those features that the object is present. How else could an object be visually present to one? [So far, so good.]
The concept of an object here is formal. In Kant’s terms, a category, a pure concept of the understanding, is a concept of an object in general. A formal concept of, as we can naturally say, a kind of object is explained by specifying a form of categorial unity. Perhaps, as I suggested, partly following Thompson, “animal” expresses such a concept." If McDowell thinks that the concepts involved in the content (or form) of an intuition have to be "pure concepts", then I suspect this may be the problem I'm seeing: I don't see how the "pure" concepts are to be distinguished from the "impure" concepts. I suspect that splitting concepts up in this way, if possible, would give you the analytic/synthetic distinction (since judgements only involving pure concepts might be true come-what-may in a way that judgements involving impure concepts need not be).

I am inclined to say that every concept is "the concept of an object in general", of "a kind of object", since it can be applied in multiple instances. "Animal" is a kind of object; "cat" is a kind of object; "kitten" is a kind of object; "my sister's kitten, Milo" is a kind of object. For even this last concept (or bundle of concepts, as it please you) can be used to pick out the cat at various times and in various places. It is always the same cat so picked out (if I don't misidentify cats), but likewise "cat" always picks out the same kind of animal (if I don't misidentify kinds of animals). In good Hegelian fashion, I want to say that singular reference involves general concepts (which are the only kind of concept), and not general concepts plus something else beyond that; general concepts are not "merely" general, but are how we recognize particulars as the particular things they are. I'm sure that category-talk, where categories are a special class of concepts, can still be put to good use, but I don't think we need it here, in giving an account of perception.

As a note, Tom (Grundlegung) has posted on this material recently; this was the efficient cause of my looking at "Avoiding" again. It's a good post. I'd also not yet been aware of In The Space of Reasons, which is a blog which is about several things I like blogs to be about.

this looks promising

Thom Brooks links to this new blog, "Apperception and Spirit", which only has one post so far. But I definitely like the topic -- the role that Kant's "transcendental unity of apperception" plays in Hegel's thought, in particular the relationship between Kant's apperception and Hegel's Geist. I suspect that much e-ink will be shed over "the 'I'" in the future.

Hopefully, McDowell's "Hegel's Idealism as a Radicalization of Kant" will get discussed at some point, since McDowell's article largely centers on his interpretation of the Science of Logic quote which Chitty points out at the end of his post:

It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason that the unity which constitutes the essence of the concept is recognized as the original-synthetic unity of apperception, as the unity of the I think, or of self-consciousness.

As far as Chitty's post goes, I only have one short comment. Chitty writes that "it seems doubtful whether when Hegel says 'I is the pure concept itself' he means the same thing as Kant might have meant if he had used the same phrase." I think it's more than doubtful: Kant definitely would not have meant what Hegel means by this phrase. For Kant's distinction between intuitions and concepts is not Hegel's; for Hegel, intuitions are already "conceptual" -- they are the sort of thing that can be taken up in thinking, which is just the use of (determinate) concepts in judgements and inferences ("syllogisms"); the moments of "The Subjective Concept" in the Logic are also the moments of "Thinking" in Philosophy of Spirit.

Hegel explicitly links the "I" of apperception to thinking in a broad sense (though he decries Kant's phrasing it in terms of the 'I' "accompanying" my representations as "awkward", presumably because it makes it seem as if the 'I' and its thoughts could be placed alongside one another; Hegel has a general dislike for "spatial imagery" when it comes to discussing thinking). The "Preliminary Conception" in the Encyclopedia Logic features a fairly length discussion of Hegel's use of "the 'I'" and its relation to Kant's "I think", as an overview of where the Logic is headed. "[S]ince I am at the same time present in all my sensations, notions, states, etc., thought is present everywhere and pervades all these determinations as [their] category." "All other humans have this in common with me, to be 'I'... but taken abstractly as such, 'I' is pure relation to itself, in which abstraction is made from representation and sensation, from every state as well as from every peculiarity of nature, of talent of experience, and so on." (Encyclopedia Logic, ss20) What is taken to be valid for 'I', then, is not valid merely for myself as some determinately existing individual, but for thinking generally: if I judge, then I judge not merely how things are for me, but how things are; though my judgement is always my judgement, it also "does not stop short of the fact, but says: This. Is. So." (PI 95)

Hegel is thus clearly committed to "the unboundedness of the conceptual", in McDowell's phrase. Kant, on the other hand, uses "concept" in a more limited way, as something opposed to "intuition", and he thinks that there are "noumena" which are unable to be brought under our determinate concepts, yet which we can still know to exist (as the ground of the material of sensation). Thus if Kant spoke of the 'I' as "the pure concept itself", he would have to mean this in a sense still shot-through with dualisms -- what is concept is diverse from what is intuition, and what is conceptual is diverse from what exists. But all of these -- intuition, concept, and existence -- are something for the 'I'. Hence the 'I' for Kant cannot be simply der reine Begriff selbst, but must be something which includes also these other powers, of intuiting and relating to reality, as separate faculties. Whereas for Hegel, intuiting and relating to reality (and feeling and sensing and etc.) are all moments of the concept, are all unboundedly conceptual; the 'I' can thus be identified with the conceptual generally, without the worry that something is thereby being left out. Hegel is able to reach this position, though, through his radicalization of Kant: once the "transcendental ideality" of space and time is abandoned, the notion that our forms of intuition are merely our forms of intuition drops out, and they become simply the forms of intuited objects generally; thus Hegel can drop the idea that our intuitions might somehow be at variance with "things in themselves" or with conceptuality as such (as with Kant's unschematized categories). Conceptuality is then able to assert the universality which is its rightful possession.