CPR: Intuitions and Concepts

[I'll be taking notes here as I attempt to work through the Critique of Pure Reason. This is obviously me groping for understanding, not pontificating. If you can help me learn, please speak up.]

To start off the Aesthetic, Kant introduces a number of technical terms. Here's my list of them:
* intuition
* thought
* sensibility
* understanding
* given
* concept
* sensation
* empirical
* appearance
* matter [of an appearance]
* form [of an appearance]
* pure representations

As an exercise, I'm attempting to synthesize these terms into a coherent story, using a concrete example.

The Story: A man stands outside and sees a raven.

The Story, again: A man stands outside and a raven imposes itself on his senses -- in other words, he experiences an empirical sensation of the raven. This is the sort of thing that happens to human beings all the times, and to rocks none of the time. That's because humans have a sensibility, but rocks don't. Rocks suck.

This empirical sensation results in the man having an intuition of the raven. This is his experience of something that has certain sensible properties. His hands can feel the texture of the raven, his eyes can see its outline and colors, and he can hear sounds coming from the raven. All of the particular features of this experience are part of his intuition given by sensibility.

Right now this intuition has provided the fellow with the appearance of a particular object in his mind. There are limitations on what he knows about this appearance so far. He could tell you that it was black, that the raven was warm when he touched it, that it was firm and that it had a splash of orange, but he couldn't tell you that this was something called a raven, or even a bird. That's because "raven" and "bird" are concepts, and the sensibility does not provide concepts. Anything that is particular to this guy's sensation has to do with sensibility, but anything that tries to classify or categorize what it was that he experienced (e.g. "It was a bird," "It was really fast!") requires the understanding, a different human capacity than the sensibility.

Kant further distinguishes between the matter and the form of the appearance. The matter is all the stuff provided by the particular sensation. The form is the lens (thanks Jason!) through which sensibility always has to occur. What the form of the appearance is hasn't really been made clear yet, though it will be taken head on quite soon in the sections on Space and Time.

Just to summarize: this fellow has had an empirical sensation that results in an intuition. There's an object in this intuition, and that object is the appearance of some object, given by sensibility. This appearance has a matter and a form, and sensation provides the matter. So if we're just talking about intuitions and sensibility, all that appearances have is matter, not form.

Now, the experience of seeing a raven isn't of just seeing some thing. Rather, the experience is of seeing something familiar -- a raven. That which allows us to categorize this appearance as not just something particular, but as the experience of a raven -- something we've seen before, and will see again -- outstrips sensibility. Here ends sensibility's role in the story.

If the guy thinks, "Hey, that's a raven!" then he's having a thought, and the capacity for this sort of thing is called the understanding. People have understanding; I have no idea if canines do, but I can imagine that they don't. Concepts are ways of categorizing things, and they arise from thought. Not everybody has a concept of ravens -- others might just have a concept of black birds. But both folks are having a thought about ravens, an attempt to classify this appearance as a thing of some sort or another.

This guy has judgments (i.e. cognition) about ravens. He knows that ravens have distinct things, such as a head, wings and feet, that what it does is called "flying," that it is part of a family of things called "birds" are all provided by thought, by understanding. This is all general knowledge about ravens. This is all provided by the understanding.

There is cognition provided by the sensibility too, but it's all particular. "This thing is black," or "This thing pushes back on my hands." The truth is that both of these sentences are cheats, because, at the end of the day, every time we use a concept in speech we are leaning on the understanding. We really can't have much to say about that which is provided by sensibility, and that's why "thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind."

Questions:
* What does "all thought as a means is directed as an end" mean?
* Could a person have a sensation without having an intuition? The sensibility is a capacity for getting representations of objects, and every representation is either an intuition or a thought (I think?). So I think that every sensation does result in an intuition, though Kant's distinction does allow for other species having some other way of acquiring intuitions.
* Kant says that appearance is the undetermined object of an empirical intuition. But who says that there's an object at all? What capacity of the mind splits intuitions up into objects? This should be part of pure intuition, right?
* Is it wrong to separate sensibility and understanding as discrete steps? Is there a cost to this? How much work is really being done by this distinction, and is it warranted.

[This post was revised on 12/16/2011. I had made some really bad errors mixing up the role of the form of intuition and concepts, and JS was good enough to point that out to me.]