In a highly influential essay, Dieter Henrich has argued that Kant’s deductions were modeled on the so-called Deduktionschriften, which were still widely used in the eighteenth century to justify various legal claims within the Holy Roman Empire. According to Henrich, these writings addressed the two questions to which Kant himself refers in the beginning of the Transcendental Deduction in the first Critique: the quid facti and the quid juris, and the resolution of each turned on a question of origin, albeit in different ways. For example, if one were to claim to be the rightful owner of a piece of property, one would have both to document the acquisition (quid facti) and show that it stemmed from a legally valid contract (quid juris). Moreover, though he places special emphasis on the deduction of the second Critique, with its notorious appeal to the “fact of reason,” Henrich also suggests that this legal model provides the essential basis for understanding all of Kant’s deductions.

My present concern is to explore this hypothesis in connection with a deduction that Henrich himself largely ignores, namely that of pure judgments of taste in the third Critique. As Kant emphasizes, a deduction is here required because a claim of taste involves a demand for universal agreement that is analogous to the demand built into a cognitive judgment. Thus, in asserting that a particular object (whether of nature or art) is beautiful, one is claiming to speak with a “universal voice,” even though one’s judgment is based on a feeling. Accordingly, the quid juris in the domain of taste concerns this presumed right. And since it is only the pure judgment of taste that lays claim to such a right, the quid facti must be whether a given judgment of taste is pure, which is straightforwardly a matter of origin.

These questions are addressed in the Deduction and the Analytic of the Beautiful respectively. At least in broad outline, then, the Deduktionsschrift model corresponds to the division of labor in Kant’s treatment of the normativity of taste. Beyond that, however, I shall also try to show that this model underscores a feature of Kant’s account that is often either glossed over or misconstrued; viz., the undeterminability of the quid facti.