 Perhaps the best reason to reject the identity phenomenalist interpretation is that it is incompatible with many of the very texts that are used to motivate it (there is also the lingering problem of whether it is compatible with the “Refutation of Idealism”; see  section 2.4.  and part IV of Guyer 1987). In many of the texts in which Kant identifies appearances with (a species of) representations, he also claims that representations are representations of appearances, i.e., that representations are representations of objects, appearances. For instance,