Is Kant committing the reflection fallacy? ( Kant's epistemology)

Question

(1) I see a tree.

(2) Therefore the tree is the object of my perception.

(3) So I see the object of my perception.

(4) Hence, without grasping the concept of object in general and subsuming the diversity of sense impressions under this concept, I could not perceive the tree.

(5) Hence, the concept of an object in general in an a priori condition of my knowledge of the external world.

2 questions:

(1) Is this reasoning a reasonable reconstruction of Kant's argument in the Transcendantal Logic part of the Critique of Pure Reason?

(2) In case it is, isn't there a fallacy in the inference from (1) to (3) , a fallacy consisting in a confusion between direct knowledge and the reflective description of knowledge?

My argument to assert Kant is committing this fallacy is that one need not identify a tree as an " object" to actually see a tree.

Children do not grasp the concept of " object" ( which is a higher-order concept); notwithstanding, a child is perfectly able to see a tree.

Answer 1

You're correct that this would constitute a fallacy. We can perceive an object without awareness of all of its features - Kant says this is the case quite explicitly in the Amphiboly of the Concepts of Reflection in the first Critique where he challenges Leibniz's metaphysics which is based on the principle of identity of the indiscernibles which, Kant thinks, is due to confusion of appearances with things as they are in themselves. A cognition of things as they are in themselves, as objects of pure thought (which Kant says is empty, so constitutes no knowledge whatsoever) would be according only to a description of an object given a general concept. However, in the case of experience we are given objects in intuition, either pure or empirical, and indeed we classify them under concepts in judgements to have knowledge of them, but we don't refer to them via a description, mediately, but rather directly (compare that with the contemporary debate in analytic philosophy regarding direct reference theories).

Kant doesn't commit the fallacy you accuse him of. Your reconstruction is incorrect - indeed, Kant argues in the first part of the so-called B-Deduction that all objects of empirical knowledge must be able to figure as subjects of possible judgements (with concepts as possible predicates) but that a) doesn't exhaust his argument, b) isn't equivalent to saying that we can be given an object in an intuition only as far as we can exhaustively describe it.

Conifold writes in a comment that this would commit Kant to the Myth of the Given. However, that is not true. John McDowell reccommends exactly this Kantian view of perception as a way of avoiding the Myth of the Given without assuming that we can exhaustively describe the objects of our empirical awareness in his essay Avoiding the Myth of the Given.

Answer 2

The thing is you don't see a tree. What you see is shades of brown, usually also a lot of shades of green, depending on the season maybe yellow and/or red, often some blue or white or depending on the time of the day maybe just black or grey.

When you "see" a "tree" you've already done a considerable amount of preprocessing.
You've made the decision that the green and brown things are connected to themselves and each other despite being differently shaded and colored. You made the decision that they are distinct from the green (grass) at the bottom of the tree despite being similar in color to the green atop (leaves), you made the decision that the blue and white parts are not part of the tree despite being in very close proximity.

So you already made a considerable effort in categorizing which parts of your perception are "part-of-tree" and "not-part-of-tree". Hence by "seeing a tree", you've already created an "object", that is you encapsulated parts of your perception in a sort of entity that is distinct from other entities and the rest of your perception.

So the point might not be about perception in the sense of being able to see but about recognition of elements of perception. So in that regard the child actually could not see a tree because they haven't yet categorized their perception in that way. Like take this "experiment" where you have a card with certain color, on it is written a word in a different color and the word is the name of yet a different color. It's almost impossible as an adult to be faster and more accurate at naming the color of the word than a child. Because while the child just sees the color and tells it, adults are so used to reading that they intuitively decipher the meaning of the word and apparently struggle to name the color that the word is written in rather than the color name that the word spells out, which either leads to error or takes considerably more time.

Though maybe a child already learned about foreground and background so that instead of "tree" they are able to see "a thingy", which you could argue is a rudimentary understanding of what an object is, so what they see is an encapsulated something that is somewhat distinct from the rest. Like you can make the talk about objects a lot more complicated but on it's most basic level it's just fragmenting reality into meaningful units.

Like if I pick up my bottle of water, I feel that it's edges are continuous that parts that look uniform, feel uniform, that if I touch it somewhere and press it, it's not just that point that reacts to the pressure but also a variety of other points. So I get the impression that all these points are connected, they form one entity, that I can speak of the entire thing as "it" as one thing rather than a serious of unrelated points.

So when I see a tree, I see one "thing", so I perceive in "things", so the concept of thingyfying perception must have come before the perception of things, because if I couldn't think of these things as things, I wouldn't see a thing, I would just perceive a whole mess of stimuli.

Though I'm not sure the last bit with the concept of thingyfying perception being a priori necessary is actually necessary because that could already be a subconscious process where several inputs are coupled together before you even make a conscious thought.

The thing is the most intuitive way to sketch the perimeter of an object with regards to the rest of the world is to touch it and look at what you're touching and when you feel touch, so it's already a combination of inputs that usually makes the basis of calling something a thing.