Tobias Rosefeldt at the TI workshop

Tobias Rosefeldt, in his paper ‘Appearances, Secondary Qualities and Dispositions’, argued for a position he called the ‘Subject-related Ontological Double-aspect’ view or SODA. This is a model through which to understand Kant’s conception of appearances. It is ontological because it posits that the difference between appearances and things-in-themselves is locatable in the order of being as well as the order of knowing. It is double-aspect in that it holds that things-in-themselves are the same objects as appearances understood as characterised in different ways.

Tobias characterised appearance predicates as predicates whose application is relativised to a kind of subject, say, the kind of subject who has spatio-temporal intuitions. Such predicates are objective, in that their ‘extension is independent of all parameters to which they are not explicitly relativised’ (i.e. the extension of such predicates is objective in all aspects other than the explicit relativisation to subjects of a given kind). We can understand Kant’s talk of appearances being mere ‘representations’ in terms of the appearance being characterised as an object possessing the property of affecting a kind of subject, along (something like) functionalist lines: of having the second-order property of having the property of being an object that affects certain kinds of subjects. This allows us to think of appearances as coextensive with the empirical world of primary and secondary qualities, so that all empirical objects are relativised to kinds of subject in the relevant functionalist sense and are thus appearances.