Le inferenze del Giudizio riflettente nella logica di Kant: l'induzione e l'analogia

In the first part of the paper I reconstruct the long and rather obscure genesis of Kant’s doctrine that induction and analogy are inferences of the power of judgment. Kant was dissatisfied with the way induction was treated by G. F. Meier. Meier maintained that induction, as well as the inference by example, are enthymemes, i.e. syllogisms with an implicit premise. Kant objected that 1. example is not an inference, 2. induction should be considered together with analogy, meant as an induction on predicates (on the model of the age-old analoga attributionis), 3. induction and analogy are not enthymemes. However, up to the time of the Critique of pure reason, though acknowledging induction and analogy as inferences indispensable for our cognitive practice, Kant wondered whether they really belonged to the science of logic. Only at a later stage of his philosophical development he matured the conviction that induction and analogy do belong to logic because he came to considers them inferences mediated by a principle and made by the reflective power of judgment. In the rest of the paper, I move from an analysis of the activity of reflection in the light of Meier’s metaphor of ‘spelling and reading’, and examine the debt of the reflective power of judgment towards reason as concerns the principle underlying induction and analogy, but also point out the unique capacity of the power of judgment to make empirical inferences. Then I stress the following points. A) Kant imposes a condition of correctness on induction and analogy, namely, that they work with things that are homogeneous with respect to a certain genus. As concerns analogy, this condition is expressed by the rule of the par ratio (about which there is serious misunderstanding in the Jäsche Logic). B) For Kant a judgment resulting from an inductive or analogical inference remains a provisional one sub specie aeternitatis, but can be empirically certain for the time being (provided that it satisfies the condition of correctness). C) The study of Kant’s inferences of the reflecting power of judgment makes us better understand the difference between inferring by analogy and thinking by analogy. Finally, in an appendix, I reconstruct the history of the first propagation of the term ‘inferences of the power of judgment’ in the logical ‘Kantian’ literature prior to the Jäsche Logic, as well as the history the hostile reception of these inferences on the part of the logical establishment.