Frank Kogan

Your account of a Kantian noumenon appears to be the direct opposite of Rorty's account of Kantian synthesis, but maybe that's because you and he are talking about two different things. I don't know. In your account there's an all-in-one-go at-every-stage front-back-and-insides whole that our time-and-space conceptual consciousness as we experience it slices up.

Here's Rorty's account of synthesis (not synthetic statements, I don't think, but the synthesis that concepts force on intuitions, and that intuitions undergo; or is that synthesis and the synthesis that subjects and predicates undergo in a non-analytic statement somehow the same thing?). In Rorty's account, the concepts are what unify what had been disparate. Rorty, pp 152-153:

[T]he Kantian "synthesis" required for a judgment differs from the Humean "association of ideas" in being a relation which can hold only between ideas of two different sorts - general ideas and particular ideas. The notions of "synthesis" and the concept-intuition distinction are thus tailor-made for one another, both being invented to make sense of the paradoxical but unquestioned assumption which runs through the first Critique - the assumption that manifoldness is "given" and that unity is made. That assumption is spelled out in the claim that inner space does contain something like what Hume found there, a collection of "singular presentations to sense," but that these "intuitions" cannot be "brought to consciousness" unless "synthesized" by a second set of representations (unnoticed by Hume) - the concepts - which enter into one-many relations with batches of intuitions.

Any idea why concepts are considered "representations"? I can see that intuitions represent what is "out there." But do concepts merely "represent" something else that's also "in here," rather than simply being in here?