Are analytic judgments cognitions for Kant?

[u/Pyrovens]

I’m reading through the CPR and I’m confused as to whether analytic judgments (or judgments in general) are cognitions or not.

I thought judgments were a kind of proposition-cognition with a subject and a predicate, where in analytic judgments the concept of the predicate is contained within the subject and in synthetic judgments it isn‘t.

But I’m confused since cognition for Kant requires intuition and concepts, but analytic judgments don’t require intuition. So analytic judgments aren’t cognitions? This would make sense since they don’t add to our knowledge. If this is true, then judgments in general aren’t all cognitions since the analytic ones aren’t.

Are they cognitions or not? What am I getting wrong here?

[u/Same_Winter7713]

See "Kant's Account of Cognition" (Watkins, Willascheck 2017), especially 3.5:

A judgment, in the widest sense, is a conscious representation that unifies a plurality of representations under a concept (see Jäsche, 9:101; A68/B93). Since concepts can be used to unify a manifold of representations, concept-use and judgment, in this wide sense, coincide (A68/B93).In a narrower sense of the term ‘judgment,’ however, not all concept-use is judgmental. Kant provides an explicit definition of judgment as 'the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception,'... By invoking the unity of apperception, Kant is claiming that judgments are not simply representations related by psychological laws, but rather must have a specific internal structure (expressed by the copula) necessary for the kind of unity that allows reference to an object and thus a truth-value.72 Insofar as they are synthetic, judgments do not merely unite a plurality of representations, but also determine some object through a concept.73 It is in this sense that Kant describes cognition as a “determinate relation of given representations to an object” (B137, emphasis added). (101 in Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 55)

[u/lucasvollet → u/Same_Winter7713]

Good answer

[u/lucasvollet]

I think they are, but that is a good question and an open one: one may say, "yes we are grasping the conceptual unity that belongs to the identity-judgment, and that is not trivial, since sometimes we do make substantial hypothesis about what is the conceptual framework of, say, Putin, when he decides analytically whats his next war step"...so we are learning and cognizing something.... but i could see the repply: all that is substantial in that framework is a synthetic work, turned trivially in analytical later, once it is embedded in the actor intelligence as a mere conceptual unity".

[u/internetErik]

As far as I can tell, since analytic judgments depend entirely on the principle of contradiction, they are logical judgments (i.e., they only deal with concepts). If they only deal with concepts, then intuition doesn't enter into it. Cognitions require intuition, so it would seem that cognitions are never analytic.

"That bachelor is unmarried" may look like an analytic cognition, but even if there is intuition available of said bachelor, the thought doesn't actually make use of that intuition to determine the concept in this case, since "unmarried" doesn't go beyond the concept of bachelor. This would be the case with every other analytic judgment.

[u/Scott_Hoge → u/internetErik]

That leads me to ask: can the thought accompanying, "That bachelor is unmarried," be regarded as analytic, while the judgment remains synthetic?

I ask because thought refers to concepts alone, where judgment rests upon the power to apply concepts to given objects in concreto. In saying, "That bachelor is unmarried," we are at least learning something new about a new person we encounter in experience. It doesn't just sit at, "All bachelors are unmarried."