 For Kant, a defining feature of our representations of objects is their objective validity. For a representation to be objectively valid it must be a representation of an objective feature of reality, that is, a feature whose existence and nature is independent of how it is perceived (Guyer 1987:11–24). In this argument, it appears that Kant just assumes that the representations that make up experience are objectively valid. He then aims to establish that association is inadequate because it can yield only representations that are not objectively valid. In the above passage, Kant contends that our objectively valid representations must in a sense be necessary and universal. However, the empirical unity of consciousness, which involves an ordering of representations achieved by association, can only be non-universal, contingent, and hence merely subjectively valid, by contrast with the transcendental unity of apperception, which involves an ordering that is universal and necessary, and is therefore objectively valid. In Kant’s conception, it is the fact that the transcendental unity of apperception is generated by a priori synthesis that allows it to yield an ordering that is universal, necessary, and objectively valid. (Ameriks 1978, Pereboom 1995, Patricia Kitcher 2011: 115–60; Allais 2011, 2015; Vinci 2014). On Lucy Allais’s proposal, empirically we are acquainted with objects, but absent a priori synthesis, empirical representations would be of objects that are indeterminate with respect to multiple possible ways of conceptualizing and individuating them. Only with a priori synthesis is the representation of determinate objects possible. The concept of cause has a key role here, since determinacy is paradigmatically a function of represented causal unity of objects (Allais 2015: 275–85; cf. Beck 1978; Vinci 2014: 134–44). This determinacy, by virtue of a shared scheme of a priori concepts, yields the universality and necessity Kant has in mind.