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In Caygill's Kant Dictionary entry of 'I Think' there is this part:

Kant further claims that 'I think' is the necessary vehicle/form/accom­paniment of experience: to have a representation it is necessary to accom­pany it with 'I think' or else the representation 'would not belong to the subject' (CPR B 132). With this claim he draws back from some of the extremely radical implications of his dissolution of the substantive char­acter of the ultimate subject of experience, and implicitly commits the very paralogism of the subject which he himself exposed.

I understand the paralogism of pure reason to be assigning a status of substance to the I of 'I think' or the transcendental/logical I. What does the part in bold have anything to do with it being a substance?

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    Since having any representation it is necessary to accom­pany it with 'I think', there's a status of substance of the I in the 'I think', thus the author wants to point out Kant's (inconsistent) paralogism here since his famous CPR was supposed to critique the pure rationalism held by Decartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, et al... May 23, 2022 at 6:51
  • "Since having any representation it is necessary to accom­pany it with 'I think', there's a status of substance of the I in the 'I think'" Could you give a bit more of detail in that inference? How do you go from A = "having any representation it is necessary to accom­pany it with 'I think'" to B = "there's a status of substance of the I in the 'I think"?
    – gsmafra
    May 24, 2022 at 4:32
  • The key word here (for rationalism especially) is substance, see a recent relevant post about this important concept. Hope this clarifies... May 24, 2022 at 6:27
  • Kant said that?! Awesome! The dog! He's, like everyone else, offering you candy coated with chocolate. Talk about overkill! Case closed ... it's in yer mouth isn't it?! May 23, 2023 at 11:09

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The part in bold, "to have a representation it is necessary to accompany it with 'I think' or else the representation 'would not belong to the subject'," suggests that the "I think" is necessary for the representation to be associated with the subject, and without it, the representation would not be connected to the subject. This implies that the "I think" is being treated as a substance, or a self-contained entity that has a separate existence and can exist independently, which is the paralogism of pure reason that Kant is trying to avoid.

In Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, he argues that the "I think" is not a substance, but rather a mere concept or category that is used to unify and organize the various representations that we have. He claims that the "I think" is not a thing in itself, but rather a way of thinking about the representations that we have. By saying that we need to accompany representations with "I think" in order for them to belong to the subject, Kant is seemingly attributing a substantive existence to the "I think," which goes against his own arguments.

Therefore, the part in bold can be seen as implicitly committing the paralogism of pure reason by treating the "I think" as a substance, which is exactly what Kant is trying to avoid.

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A key thing to keep in mind is that Kant differentiated logical from metaphysical, or analytical from synthetical, necessity. The principle of the transcendental unity of apperception is, he says, analytical, despite having an important role in synthesis (not quite the same thing as syntheticality, I should note).

Had he claimed that the principle was synthetical, he would have had to say that we have an intuition of permanence also, here, which we do not (as he goes on to explain with respect to the paralogism). For that permanence would be the synthetical necessity which would render the "I think" a true substance.

To (try to) clarify matters further: Kant distinguished the logico-functional form of categorical judgments from the category of substance proper, even though the latter has its formal grounding in the former(!). Aristotle had defined a substance as that which must always be a subject and never a predicate only (you should see here where Kant got the second formulation of the categorical imperative from, mind you). Kant agrees far enough to find the structural grounds for his definition of substance in Aristotle's definition, but doesn't hesitate to add that intuition must be superadded to this definition to make it metaphysically, and not just logically, viable. And so again, this intuition is lacking, here (the "I think" is too general to be an intuition; the word "I" here is not intuitively grounded in me (or you, or anyone else) in particular, but is a general accompaniment of any thinking being's apperception).

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