 If the sufficiency claim, and with it the reciprocity thesis, is denied, we need an alternative account of how §17 functions in the overall argument of the B-Deduction. It may be that the role of this section is largely to provide a characterization of an object that has a key role in the ensuing challenge to Humean associationism, and thereby initiates an argument from below. Kant’s proposal is that an object is “that in the concept of which a manifold of a given intuition is united” (B137). The subsequent claim is that the unification of a manifold requires synthesis; immediately following the characterization of an object he states that “all unification of representations demands unity of consciousness in the synthesis of them” (B137). It seems consistent with these texts that Kant’s characterization of an object is designed just to present his anti-Humean theory of the mental processing required for representing objects, and that the subsequent claim for the need for synthesis does not express a view he expects us to accept without further argument, but rather one he aims to confirm in §§18–20. If this argument succeeds, it will turn out that the a priori synthesis required to account for the features of our representations of objects Kant singles out is the same process that yields my consciousness of the identity of myself as subject of different self-attributions.