UNDERSTANDING

in the first Critique, the faculty concerned with actively producing knowledge by means of concepts. This is quite similar to what is normally called the mind. It gives rise to the logical perspective, which enables us to compare concepts with each other, and to the empirical perspective (where it is also called judgment), which enables us to combine concepts with intuitions in order to produce empirical knowledge. The first Critique examines the form of our cognitions in order to construct a system based on the faculty of understanding (= the theoretical standpoint). (Cf. sensibility.)

[A230/B283] The source of concepts; opposed to sensibility, the source of intuitions. The human understanding limits our possible experience (and thus thought and knowledge) to discursive experience; as the source of concepts, our understanding is such that we can only think through concepts (i.e., discursively), although beings with different forms of understanding may well think differently. "The understanding, in accordance with the subjective and formal conditions of sensibility as well as of apperception, prescribes a priori to experience in general the rules which alone make experience possible. Other forms of intuition than space and time, other forms of understanding that the discursive forms of thought, or of knowledge through concepts, even if they should be possible, we cannot render in any way conceivable and comprehensible to ourselves; and even assuming that we could do so, they still would not belong to [our] experience." (Concepts as rules for combining intuitions; their "representational content" is specified in terms of their being a rule.)