No Other Use than in Judgment?: Kant on Concepts and Sensible Synthesis

According to the Judgmentalist Reading of Kant (JR), he holds that every act of using a concept is an act of judging. Against this it has been argued that, on the contrary, Kant thinks that concepts are also employed in the perceptual apprehension of objects. However, advocates of this Non-Judgmentalist Reading face the problem that the evidence for JR (primarily in the Metaphysical Deduction) appears to be very strong. The aim of this paper is to address this problem and thus to strengthen the case for the Non-Judgmentalist Reading. I provide an interpretation of the Metaphysical Deduction that shows that in fact the evidence does not support JR over its competitor. According to this interpretation, Kant holds that the capacity to use concepts depends on the capacity to employ them in judgment. But this does not entail that every exercise of the first capacity is an act of judgment. So Kant can consistently hold that concepts are employed outside judgment.