Any interpretation of Kant's regulative ideas is beset with the problem of the apparently ambivalent views that Kant seemed to hold concerning those ideas. On the one hand, they are said to have a positive and objective function in the determinate knowledge of possible objects.¹ Nevertheless, Kant maintains a rigid dichotomy between the constitutive concepts of understanding and the regulative ideas of reason. He tells us that the ideas direct understanding toward imaginary focal points (B 672) and that they are "heuristic fictions".² Due to the necessary time limitations, I shall offer here only a schematic summary of a two-part argument, both of which parts converge to show why Kant's two views are not contradictory. Expressing this thesis in its strongest possible terms, we could say that the ideas are indeed subjective fictions and yet are manifestations of a regulative function of reason that enters into and conditions all our knowledge of objects, though not in the same way as do the categories of understanding.