Kant: conceptual schemes

Evaluate the claim that experience is only intelligible because it presents sensation through a pre-determined conceptual scheme.

Kant's work on conceptual schemes began as an objection to empiricist theories of how we gain knowledge. Hume said that 'at first, senses let in particular ideas', but Kant criticised this as a simplification that misses the vital step of exactly how sensory impressions are interpreted into ideas or concepts. Kant said that if our purse sensory input wasn't sorted or 'categorised' in any way then our experience would be nothing more than an unintelligible buzz.

In order to explain how we sort our sensory input into an intelligible experience of a physical world, Kant presented his theory of conceptual schemes, consisting of 12 innate categories which are necessary for intelligible experience. Some examples of these categories are Causation, Substance, Unity and Necessity. Kant said that causality is a necessary category as it allows us to differentiate between the order of our experience changing, and changes in the object itself. For instance, if I walk around a house, I know that I can experience a window and then a door, but I also know that if I were to see the door before the window then this would be a change in my order of experience, rather than a change in the position of the objects themselves. In contrast, I can see a ship sailing upriver towards me. My order of experience cannot be changing in this instance, as if the ship was sailing away from me it would a different event. Therefore, I know that the ship is actually changing as my order of experiences cannot be.

Causality is a somewhat difficult concept to comprehend, as we have no way of imagining experience without causality. This is a good explanation of why our conceptual schemes are necessary for intelligible experience, as we have no way of separating our experience from the categories themselves. Kant expanded on this by saying that there are two worlds: one of pure sensory stimuli, and the other the physical world that we experience. He said that we are unable to even come close to comprehending the world of pure stimuli as our experience is so dependent on the categorisation of our conceptual schemes.

A criticism of this is that all 12 categories might not be necessary for intelligible experience. For example, our experience is of a world of physical objects interacting with each other. Maybe the only categories that we need interpret sense experience are causation and substance, as substance covers physical objects while causality explains the interactions between these objects. In essence, this objection states that Kant's conceptual schemes may be too complex.

A second objection is that if Kant's theory rests on their being a 'real' world of pure sensory stimuli which is completely beyond our comprehension then we could say that this is too much of a leap, as it seems implausible that our experience is separate from the 'real' world of pure sensory stimuli. However, modern scientific theories about the brain have identified a process called sensory gating, in which our brain filters out unnecessary stimuli. While this does not explicitly support Kant's conceptual schemes, it does suggest that our experience is different from pure sensory stimuli. Therefore, Kant's argument that our intelligible experience is completely separate from the world of purse sensory stimuli seems convincing.