The quite famous "lone hand argument" contained in Kant’s pre-critical essay Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space (1768), was criticised in many ways. After several observations, based on the concepts of contemporary geometry, about Kant’s errors in his accounting for incongruent counterparts, a very different criticism has now been advanced. It maintains that Kant’s argument involves a paralogism, due to a confusion in the terminology of the geometry of his age. The present paper deals first with a problem that follows from such a claim, namely that in Kant’s essay there are clues which suggest he is intentionally employing a different terminology. It then proposes an alternative reading, which would have allowed Kant to avoid the paralogism by thinking of orientation as strictly analogous with magnitude.
Keywords: Kant, space, geometry, paralogism, orientation, magnitude