Wanderings in Syllogistic Figures: On Kant’s Possible Cognitive Syllogistics

Kant’s treatise “The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures” has logical, epistemological, and cognitive-psychological implications. These three perspectives on his conclusions are practically undifferentiated. The first part of this article discusses the logical and ontological-gnoseological content of the treatise in order to reveal the prerequisites for the cognitive interpretation of syllogisms. The second part is an attempt to explicate the treatise’s cognitive content, i.e. a systemic representation of the cognitive properties of syllogisms, as understood by Kant. Kant’s syllogism is characterised as an intellectual act aimed at eliminating opaqueness in cognition and consists of several mental procedures. The cognitive properties of syllogisms are discoverable in Kant’s general characterisation of syllogisms, as well as in the characteristic marks of individual figures. The third part is an attempt to reconstruct Kant’s cognitive syllogistics from angles which can be discerned, but are not explicitly discussed, in the treatise. This reconstruction is based on the distinction Kant draws between two modes of formulating conclusions, one of which is “in the form of judgements”. Here, formal and “ontological” syllogisms are distinguished by the type of relation that obtains between parts of the premises. An ontological syllogism, unlike the formal kind, conforms to the most stringent rules in terms of content. The procedure of making an inference, even according to a perfect figure, is described as ‘composite’, involving, as it does, the transformation of a formal syllogism into an ontological one, or the supplementing of the formal syllogism with an intermediate inference which brings the parts of the syllogism under the categories contained in the highest rules. Errors in inferences in individual cognition are attributed to the use of the “form of judgements”, which obscures the connections that must be clearly understood according to the highest rules. In conclusion, the author systematically presents the cognitive content of the treatise and outlines cognitive pathways that are generated by the ideas of “The False Subtlety” and connected with the study of the unfolding of syllogisms in cognitive reality.