What did Kant mean by "objects" and how do they relate to intutions and concepts?

Question

I am trying to understand Kant's taxonomy of ideas (or "representations") and I am stuck on his meaning of "intuition", in particular, whether or not the object of an intuition always refers to something that is empirically real. My working interpretation of "object" is something like "the thing that the thought is about", and hence could refer to something that can be given in experience or not (like the things studied in math). That he does mean that the objects of intuitions always refer to material things in the world is suggested to me in how he says that these objects must be "given to us" through our sensibility and that these intuitions are acquired through the way objects "affect" us.

If I restrict to thinking only about external objects in the world affecting my senses, then I think I can understand what he means well enough, but once I start contemplating other forms of thought I get confused as to the difference between objects and ideas. For example, if I dream up some object in my mind that doesn't exist in the world, like a chair or a triangle, but nonetheless think it singularly and picture it in my mind, is this an intuition? If so, what is the object and how do you distinguish it from the idea itself?

Answer 1

In general, from a philosophical perspective (debatable), the object is the counterpart of the subject in the interactive process of knowledge. That is, Schroedinger's cat is the object, and Schrodinger is the subject, or also, the observer. If the object, or concept is something that exists in the mind, the thing is what corresponds to the physical world. That is, the cat, as it exists in Schroedinger's mind, is the object, and the cat, the one inside the box, is the thing.

For Kant, the object seems to raise in the Transcendental Logic, specifically in the first part, the Transcendental Analytic.

Sensible experience (odor, flavor, color, form) are a disparate set of intuitions (which can be understood as representations) that don't have any sense as they are perceived. That is basically what the Transcendental Aesthetic is about.

Those intuitions are manifolded (grouped in spite of their disparity) and integrated to become concepts of the understanding, in the Transcendental Analytic. The object "cat" raises at such point, and is granted of a status among the categories. That is, it is the object of categorization. So, the object seems to raise here: the subject classifies the object, which is now an integrated entity, by means of the categories, in order to become a concept. At this point, the object is already part of the interaction process with the subject: judgements.

In the Transcendental Dialectic, the object becomes integrated with other sets of judgements, in what Kant calls the unity of the self. The former object is at this point not only the target of perception, but a concept, or even transcendental idea, which is radically different. There is no sense in referring to the concept as an object here, because it would imply a psychological target, which is not anymore Kant's goal.

Answer 2

For mathematical objects, the formal reality is the objective reality. By formal i mean the logical definition of the thing and by object i mean the thing referenced by its idea. Kant believed in the correspondence theory of truth so the idea or proposition has to agree with its object. So he does think about "thinghood" as an object of our mental ideas.

Intuition is the receptivity of the mind while the understanding is the spontaneity. For Kant intuition is only empirical and rejects humans having a intellectual or rational intuition. So objects are given to us empirically through the intuitions of inner sense and outer sense. Mental phenomena like desires are objects of inner sense (inner intuition). Intuitions have a form and matter. The form of sensible intuition are space and time. Space for outer and time for inner (and thus for other as well). The matter is the content, the feeling of that sensation.

Kant is not a materialist necessarily, but a transcendental idealist. This means that the world is structured by rationality of the mind (phenomena are dependent on the categories of the mind of their reality). Kant the objective deduction says objects are a "transcendental X" which just means non-sense to me. What he means, as informed by Paul Woff in his youtube series on the Critique of Pure Reason, an object for Kant is a structure or schemata of the phenomenal data according to the categories in the mind. So the table is all the sense data of it in accordance with the category of substance. This is when it has its "thing-hood" and is an empirical object in the everyday sense.

Noumena or things-in-themselves are not given to us with the categories of the mind. An object does not give its unity, number, substance, etc. to us. There are merely a manifold (or multi-told) of representations that are given to us between the interaction of us as subjects and the object-in-itself. Objects-in-themselves need not be things or units, the unity as well as every other category is introduced by the unitary time consciousness. So reality could be a plurality like most of us think or even monism could be true as well...we just don't know. We can't know anything about things-in-themselves even that they are unitary objects. Things-in-themselves is an ontological term, and noumena is an epistemological term. Things-in-themselves is "being" and its ability to be thought but not sensed is where it gets its noumenal designation. Since speculative reason relies on something of possible experience to give it meaning, we cannot know what is noumena or things-in-themselves. It is different in practical reason, but that's a whole 'nother book.

Answer 3

I'm thinking that objects, like the subject-object example, refers to a coordinate pair that must exist in cognitive processes, so that when Kant says something like, ". . . reason really has as object only the understanding. . . " (A644/B672), he is saying that Reason needs something to reason about so its object is understanding, and Intuition needs something to intuit, so its objects are the senses, and the Understanding needs something to understand, so its objects are the particular objects and the empirical concepts they constitute, etc.