My mind is like a filing system.

Hello,

Back to Kant...

Have you ever wondered how we can get a grip on the world? We seem to experience so much of it in just once one glance, how do our minds cope? For Kant this ability to process everything is helped out with a little innate knowledge, known as the conceptual schemes. Kant supposes that if we did not have this innate understanding of these schemes/catorgeries our mind would be an unintelligible "buzz of sense data" = major confusion. So for Kant these schemes are examples of synthetic a priori knowledge as these schemes are innate = a priori - meaning knowledge which does not need to be checked against experience YET is still helpful to further our understanding of the world, not trivial.

Now: The Schemes, there are a vast amount but the most helpful (in my opinion) are that of time, space and causation...For Kant these are innate we just know them, they are very helpful in sorting out all the sense experience's we are exposed to. For example if you were to drop a mug of tea, you are bombarded with the sense experience of the spilt tea, the shattered china and the sodden carpet. How do we cope? What do we really know is happening with the sense experience? Well if we implement Kant and his schemes we can know for sure that whilst the mug is falling, time is passing and space is being occupied and it is you who caused the mug to fall (butter fingers).

So Kant can be used on a daily basis for causation in general, so we don't need to go pointing out every that blog had a cause - ie someone to write it, we just know innately/synthetic a priori that EVERY EVENT HAS A CAUSE - conceptual schemes.

However, there are objections to Kant and his scheming ways. Firstly the concept of innate knowledge in general can be criticised as innate means that everybody has the same concepts - however this is not the case, via the development of anthropology we can see other societies which do not have comparable ideas of time e.g. the Hopi Indians have nothing like the time we have.

So it is not truly innate - how can rely on a flawed foundation?

But to be fair to Kant, he had never heard of the Hopi Indians

A second more considerable objection comes from the Empiricist Hume and his idea of causation - this idea essentially illustrates that we can never see the cause of an action (only it's effect) meaning that we can NEVER have EXPERIENCE cause = no experience = no knowledge. Hume states that just because it seems like common sense doesn't mean it's true - and as Hume denies all innate ideas it's a big slap in the face for Kant.