The real interest of the Kantian doctrine of categories lies in the thesis that only by being submitted to the pure concepts of understanding can objects be presented as objects. (B 164-5). Recently, the most authoritative research on infant cognition and infant object representations (Elizabeth Spelke, Susan Carey, Fei-Xu, Nancy N. Soja, Renée Baillargeon, amongst many others) has pointed out the infant’s possession of a concept of object largely antecedent to the acquisition of kind concepts. The main objective of this paper is to try to throw some new light on Kant ́s doctrine of the categories by means of a comparison with the most general results of this recent psychological research on the subject. In spite of the fact that we could be tempted to consider Kant’s concepts of the object in general as having a function similar to the sortal role attributed by psychologists to the concept of object, we had better resist this temptation as long as Kantian semantics of the categories - so claims the paper – must be likened to the semantics of indexicals rather than to those of sortal terms.
