A FORMALIZATION OF KANT’S TRANSCENDENTAL LOGIC

Although Kant (1998) envisaged a prominent role for logic in the argumentative structure of his Critique of Pure Reason , logicians and philosophers have generally judged Kant’s logic negatively. What Kant called ‘general’ or ‘formal’ logic has been dismissed as a fairly arbitrary subsystem of first-order logic, and what he called ‘transcendental logic’ is considered to be not a logic at all: no syntax, no semantics, no definition of validity. Against this, we argue that Kant’s ‘transcendental logic’ is a logic in the strict formal sense, albeit with a semantics and a definition of validity that are vastly more complex than that of first-order logic. The main technical application of the formalism developed here is a formal proof that Kant’s Table of Judgements in Section 9 of the Critique of Pure Reason , is indeed, as Kant claimed, complete for the kind of semantics he had in mind. This result implies that Kant’s ‘general’ logic is after all a distinguished subsystem of first-order logic, namely what is known as geometric logic.