Kant's Conceptual Scheme

His question: "How is intelligible experience made possible at all?"

In reality, our minds are taking on millions of pieces of information which should result in an 'incomprehensible buzz' where nothing makes sense. Yet somehow, our minds seem to have a structured perception where we make sense of the world around us. So, how do millions of pieces of sense data get transformed into an intelligible experience?

We are born with a conceptual scheme! Our mind has 12 categories which makes up a conceptual scheme (CS) and it structures sense data into experiences. There is no such thing as 'pure experience' because our experiences are a result from our mind structuring this data so we never really see things in themselves, just how they appear to us.

Innate or from experience?
Neither. We need a conceptual scheme to experience things so it cannot have come from experience. However, it isn't innate idea either because an idea isn't a structure of the mind, yet a conceptual scheme is. It is simply an 'innate ability'. (Synthetic a priori). Knowledge about the world without needing experience. (R).

He goes against R and E
"Thoughts without content are empty: intuitions without concepts are blind".
We need experience to know things and we haven't got innate ideas but if all we had was sense data, it would just be a 'buzz'. We're not a tabula rasa because we have a CS.

Causation
One of the categories is 'causation'. A person with this ability will understand that something is caused by something else. (A door changing shape because they are walking past it). We need this ability and the other 11 to have intelligible experiences.

Implications:

1. Our mind imposes structure on the world, this structure may not exist in reality.
2. We don't know what reality is/looks like, only the experiences of it.

Criticisms..

Empiricists - We observe causation, we didn't create it. If it didn't exist before humans, how was the earth created and dinosaurs created? We wouldn't have been created - nothing to cause us to be.

Rationalists - Mathematics gives knowledge of reality and this isn't part of a CS. Before humans, 2 dinosaurs plus 2 dinosaurs would make 4 dinosaurs. This is necessary truth (will always be true).

Kant's reply: Maybe these concepts are real and existed before humans but they happen to be part of our CS.