  Vaihinger’s reading of the KrV, and especially of the Deduction, has become known as the “patchwork thesis.” The patchwork reading has been influential in Anglophone scholarship, due largely to its adoption by Norman Kemp Smith (1918), but it remains controversial. Since the reading apparently requires us to assume that Kant failed to understand that combining views he knew were inconsistent with one another would produce a view that is itself inconsistent, it may be objected that, “if such a conclusion is true, we must say that Immanuel Kant was either abnormally stupid, or else that he took his thinking in a frivolous spirit” (Paton 1930, 157). However, the thesis that the Deduction, regardless of its precise method of composition, at least contains multiple inconsistent lines of argument, rather than a single unified argument, has found able defenders since Vaihinger (see e.g., Wolff 1963; Guyer 1987). For a recent challenge to this revised patchwork reading see (Allison 2015).