“[Kant] thinks that this metaconceptual transformation has profound consequences for what it is to be semantically in touch with—to be able to represent—objects so conceived. Those considerations are interwoven with a line of thought about sensibility and receptivity and neither are in any obvious way necessarily connected to the story about representational purport that I have told here. That there is nonetheless a deep connection, indeed a necessary harmony, between them is what the transcendental deduction aims to explain and to show.

But the fact that one of Kant’s central preoccupations is synthesizing these two thoughts about content—one, as Kant seems to have thought of it, having to do with the form of the metaconcept conceptual content, and the other having to do with its content—does not at all mean that it is not possible to dissect from the results of his synthesis one of the constellations of commitments he is concerned to integrate into a larger whole. There is an internal coherence to the line of thought about concepts (judging, hence apperception and understanding) that I have been laying out.”