Frank Kogan

By the way, to not make a mystery out of this, Rorty ends up at the end of the subsection saying:

What we want to know is whether concepts are synthesizers, and it is no help to be told that they couldn't be unless there were a lot of intuitions awaiting synthesis. At this point, I think, we must confess that "intuition" and "concept," in their Kantian senses, are susceptible only of contextual definitions; like "electron" and "proton," they have sense only as elements in a theory which hopes to explain something. But with that admission, of course, we snap the last links to Locke's and Descartes's appeals to that special certainty with which we are aware of "what is closest to our minds" and "easiest for us to know." The assumption that diversity is found and unity made turns out to have its sole justification in the claim that only such a "Copernican" theory will explain our ability to have synthetic a priori knowledge.

But if we view the whole Kantian story about synthesis as only postulated to explain the possibility of synthetic a priori knowledge, if we accept the claim that the quasi-psychological goings-on described in the "Deduction" have no introspective ground, we shall no longer be tempted by the "Copernican" strategy. For the claim that knowledge of necessary truths about made ("constituted") objects is more intelligible than about found objects depends upon the Cartesian assumption that we have privileged access to our activity of making. But on the interpretation of Kant just given, there is no such access to our constituting activities. Any mystery which attaches to our knowledge of necessary truths will remain. For postulated theoretical entities in inner space are not, by being inner, any more useful than such entities in outer space for explaining how such knowledge can occur.

And now Rorty is using "synthesis" in the way I used it up in #7, which I subsequently said seemed not to be Kantian, so now I'm more confused about my term, though I think I get Rorty's argument. Either we're conscious of synthesis [as Rorty is using the term], or we're not. If we are, the whole phenomena-noumena distinction collapses and we are aware of what we're doing and can critique it and come up with alternatives etc.; if we're not, then there's no reason to care about "synthesis," 'cause it doesn't tell us anything; it's a spinning wheel that doesn't find ground.