Conceptual Content after the Copernican Turn

Kant announces a ‘Copernican turn’ in philosophy, but the model of cognition from which he claims to be ‘turning’ resurfaces in his own constructive account of empirical conceptual content. For Kant, no less than for his ‘pre-Copernican’ predecessors, empirical concepts are a species of representation that ‘conform to’ their objects. But if Kant does not excise the pre-Copernican model of cognition from his positive picture, in what does his turn from it consist? I argue that Kant’s target is not the legitimacy but the explanatory sufficiency of the pre-Copernican model. Kant’s critical gesture towards that model consists in showing that cognition can only exhibit the structure envisaged by the pre-Copernican system if it is underwritten by a kind of content - viz. transcendental content - which cannot be modeled in pre-Copernican terms. A full appreciation of Kant’s Copernicanism thus requires an account of transcendental conceptual content, and its relation to empirical conceptual content. Drawing on Kant’s account of the transcendental object and other neglected textual resources, I develop such an account.