 One strategy would be to claim that Kant does not mean the “is” of identity, but the “is” of grounding. Sometimes, apparent claims of identity are really claims about grounding relations. For instance, if I say “pain is C-fiber firing” I might mean the type-identity thesis that the state of being in pain is the state of C-fiber firing. But I might also mean that all there is to pain is C-fiber firing, that if one is in pain it is in virtue of C-fiber firing, or that C-fiber firing non-causally grounds the state of being in pain. On this view, in claiming that appearances are representations, Kant is claiming that the contents of representations ground the existence and empirical properties of appearances.