Sunday, January 27, 2013

Communication and Reflective Judgment

According to Kant's system, the Understanding cognizes a phenomenon as a mechanistic effect, while the Reflective Judgment interprets the effect as a deliberate product.  Thus, the sounds coming from someone's mouth, even when taken in combination, e. g. with the direction of their eyes, is, in the absence of Reflective Judgment, not characterizable as an 'act of communication'.  So, to merely represent some phenomenon as a 'message' is a judgment that precedes any other judgment involved in the cognitive processing of the content of the message.  Hence, is it distinct from the judgment that the content of a message is 'universalizable'.  Now, to judge a message as 'universally communicable' entails that anybody else who hears it will, likewise, judge it as 'universally communicable', which entails that they, in turn, etc.  In other words, Kant's Aesthetic theory, which  is based on the 'universal communicability' of the judgment 'I like X', presupposes a theory of Communication, which, upon examination, seems to dissolve that presumed basis into an infinite regress.

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