  6. It is then partly because of the apparently rather special nature of these transcendental claims, that the suspicion arises that there will then turn out to be something distinctively Kantian about such arguments; for Kant made it the focus of his critical project to account for metaphysical knowledge of this sort, where transcendental idealism is then supposed to provide the answer to how such knowledge is possible. The idea, roughly speaking, is that it is too much for us to be able to know how things must be beyond the limits of our experience, and so claim metaphysical knowledge of things-in-themselves. By contrast, once we confine ourselves to how things appear to us given our ways of seeing and thinking about the world, then we can understand how we could at least acquire knowledge of how things must behave as phenomena, by knowing about the forms of intuitions and concepts through which such phenomena must appear to us if we are to experience them at all (cf. Williams 1974, Pippin 1988, Stroud 1999, Stroud 2000a). However, as we saw in the case of Strawson, whether or not such full-blooded Kantian commitments are necessary to the transcendental argument strategy is a matter of dispute. Indeed, some have argued that there is a ‘neglected alternative’ here: namely, while Kant might be right to hold that we cannot plausibly claim insight into the constraints on the world itself but only on the nature of our sensibility and understanding, nonetheless we can argue from this that the world must itself be a certain way to fit these conditions, without thereby thinking that it is mind-dependent or that all we thereby know is how things appear to us. The analogy is thus drawn to a case such as the following: once we know how our lungs work, we can know what the air must be like in order to allow us to breath, where the latter is not in any way constituted by the former or an ‘appearance’ of anything more fundamental (cf. Harrison 1989, Westphal 2004: 68–126).