According to Kant’s lectures on logic, the formation of empirical concepts consists in the logical acts of comparison, reflection, and abstraction. This paper defends the tenability of Kant’s account by solving two prominent difficulties identified by commentators. Firstly, I justify Kant’s chronological presentation of the three acts by clarifying two meanings of ‘comparison’ in his writings: while comparison-1 refers to apprehension in relation to apperception and precedes reflection, comparison-2 refers to a twofold operation comprising both comparison-1 and reflection, such that its completion presupposes reflection. Secondly, to unravel an alleged ‘circularity’ in Kant’s account, I propose multiple interactions between comparison-1, which can be entirely arbitrary, and reflection, which examines the compared representations according to the imagination’s free agreement with the understanding, namely, a lawfulness without law. By means of such interactions, we experiment back and forth and lawfully generate an empirical concept without relying on conceptual guidance.

中文翻译：

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康德论经验概念的形成

根据康德关于逻辑的讲座，经验概念的形成在于比较、反思和抽象的逻辑行为。本文通过解决评论家指出的两个突出困难来捍卫康德解释的有效性。首先，我通过澄清康德著作中“比较”的两种含义来证明康德对三幕的时间顺序表述的合理性：比较 1 指的是与统觉相关的理解并在反思之前，比较 2 指的是包含比较的双重操作—— 1 和反思，这样它的完成就以反思为前提。其次，为了解开康德描述中所谓的“循环性”，我提议在完全任意的比较 1 和反思之间存在多重相互作用，它根据想象与理解的自由一致来检查比较的表示，即没有法律的合法性。通过这种互动，我们来回试验，不依赖概念指导，合法地产生一个经验概念。