‘Perception’ in §26 of the Transcendental Deduction

As we have seen, the Second Analogy invokes the principle according to which the ‘conditions of the possibility of experience in general are at the same time conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience’ (A 158/B 197). Let us first reflect on what this could mean. In the Second Analogy, the antecedent appeals to the way in which we must think, or conceive, of the experience of objects, and the consequent invokes conditions of the possibility of those objects themselves. On the face of it, this does not look crucially different from saying something as untenable as ‘If I believe that p, then p’. But apart from the not entirely determinate sense of expressions like ‘can be thought’ or ‘conceived as’, it is clearly not in this way that we judge a statement like: ‘What is conceivable is possible’, though ‘conceive’ refers just as much to a subject as ‘believe’ does. There are cases, I take it, in which one would say that something that initially seemed conceivable turns out to be impossible. This, however, will likely have an effect on the way we think it ought to be conceived. We would say that the initial belief that it can be conceived was due to an unclarity about the way in which this is most reasonably done. In cases where there is no such unclarity, we are quite sure that what we can imagine is also possible.