taste). That argument runs as follows.^59 (Each premise is supposedly knowna
priori, via reflection alone, not through specific empirical investigation.)(1) Cognitions (knowledge-claims) are communicable. (Nothing purely
internal to and idiosyncratic to oneself could count as knowledge.)
(2) Like effects have like causes.
Therefore (3) The subjective conditions [Stimmungen] of cognition–i.e. those
states of the subject out of which cognitions are generated – are
communicable.
(4) The subjective conditions of cognition¼a harmony, accord, or propor-
tion of the cognitive faculties [imagination and understanding cooper-
ating to construct intuitions and to subsume intuitions under concepts in
a judgment].
Therefore (5) This harmony, accord, or proportion of the cognitive faculties
that underlies cognition is communicable.
(6) The harmony, accord, or proportion of the cognitive faculties that under-
lies cognition¼the harmony, accord, or proportion of the cognitive
faculties in free play (when we are estimating freely).
Therefore (7) The harmony, accord, or proportion of the cognitive faculties in
free play is communicable.
(8) Judgments of taste are intersubjectively valid if and only if the harmony
of the cognitive faculties in free play is communicable, that is, if and only
if subjects feel pleasure in the harmonious free play of the cognitive
faculties with regard to the same objects (when they are genuinely esti-
mating them or paying free and disinterested attention to them).
Therefore (9) Judgments of taste are intersubjectively valid.
Against this argument it is possible to make a number of reasonable objec-
tions.^60 First, premise (1) seems like an empirical claim, not one that isa
prioriknowable. Though the transcendental deduction of theCritique of Pure
Reasonargues that any subject with an apperceptively unified and judgmen-
tally structured consciousnesses is entitled to claim knowledge of causal(^59) The most worked out and plausible version of the argument appears in sections 38 and
39 of theCritique of the Power of Judgment, especially in the footnote to §38. I base my
presentation closely on Paul Guyer’s reconstruction of it in hisKant and the Claims of Taste
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), chapter 9, pp. 308–19.
(^60) Here too I follow Guyer,Kant and Claims of Taste, chapter 9, pp. 318–24.
190 An Introduction to the Philosophy of Art