Conceptual Schemes

At the end of the eighteenth century (c 1770) the German philosopher Immanuel Kant attempted to combine rationalism with empiricism in what is known as Kant's Synthesis. He was dissatisfied with the attempt by both rationalism and empiricism to make our knowledge of the world conform to how objects in the world really are, with one arguing that we have knowledge of them through sense experience, the other through reason.

The problem is that in both cases we don't have direct experience of them. Kant's solution was to ditch that attempt and to see if he could connect objects to our minds by looking at the problem the other way round - by explaining how objects conform to our understanding. In other words, it's not the objects that cause the way we experience them; it is our minds that "create" the object as we experience it. The concepts he called "the categories of experience" impose a particular conceptual scheme on the raw data of sense experience. Without that conceptual scheme, we would not have self-conscious experience at all. There would be no "I" to know it was experiencing the world. The categories include space, time, causation. They do not derive from experience; they are a priori in that they come before experience, but they are not mental processes that we control, as maths and inferential reasoning are. We can only experience objects in space and time, but we don't actually experience space and time themselves: they are part of the structure of our experience. Without experience, there could be no awareness of them.

So Kant is neither an empiricist nor a rationalist. He argues against both sides. Hume had argued that knowledge was either synthetic a posteriori (factual knowledge from experience) or analytic a priori (true by definition, not factual), but Kant argued that knowledge can be synthetic a priori - that is, knowledge that is known independently of experience but which is not analytic, not trivial. "Every event has a cause" is an example. It is factual but it depends on the a priori categories organising experience in such a way that we experience events chronologically and as causally connected.You couldn't even form the concept of an event without the categories: it depends on us perceiving things in space and time.

Today we would more naturally think of the categories as brain mechanisms (as Chomsky does in relation to the Language Acquisition Device) but Kant thought of them as a priori rules of the understanding which somehow unify our experience, imposing an order and coherence on it. Otherwise, our raw sense experience would be chaotic, confused, incoherent. We wouldn't even be able to say it was our experience because we wouldn't have a sense of an enduring self without the concepts of time, space and causation. This order comes from our minds, so it is in this sense that objects "conform to our knowledge". [Look at the quotation from Kant on page 25 of the textbook.]

Notice two important points. Firstly, Kant is accounting for our experience being as it is (phenomenon). He does not claim to explain how things in the world really are in themselves (noumenon). So you might well think that he still leaves us cut off from reality. Secondly, some philosophers (including Bertrand Russell) have argued that if the categories are a contingent fact about how we happen to filter raw sense data in our minds, then there is no logical necessity in our knowledge of the world. It could have been different. In which case, do we have the kind of certainty that is usually considered necessary for science, maths and inferential reasoning?

Kant certainly did consider that his conceptual scheme, his categories, were essential for human experience. Without them to filter raw sense data, we would not have experience because there would be no selves to experience. My sense of self depends on my ability to differentiate myself from other people, and that depends on my knowledge of objects in the expternal world, outside of my own experience, which in turn depends on the categories filtering sense experience and imposing a particular order or schema on it. The conceptual scheme makes the concept of self possible.

So even if they are not logically necessary, the categories are supposed to be essential, fundamental to what it is to be a human or a person. But we can think about conceptual schemes in a very different way. Perhaps we all need to experience the world through concepts that organise our perceptions in particular ways, but could the conceptual scheme vary from person to person, or at least from culture to culture? Perhaps the way people in one time and place organise experience (the way they see things) can be different from the way people in a different time and place do. If so, we might still consider that Kant's categories are essential, operating at a deeper layer in our minds, perhaps, but the particular way our culture conceptualises the world could be overlaid on top of them.

Think, for example, of different ways in which different cultures might categorise animals or plants. We see certain four legged animals as dogs, despite their different sizes, shapes, habits, etc. But do we have to? Could a different culture organise their concepts differently and therefore see things differently? Surely, the answer is yes. We interpret the world, we don't just see it, and our culture imposes an interpretation on us to a large extent, through language and concepts. So our world - our way of seeing how things are in the world - is not universal. It is specific to our culture, or to our culture's conceptual scheme.

This means that on top of the Kantian conceptual scheme that is considered to be essential to our human nature, to our human experience, there are culture-specific conceptual schemes that affect the way we perceive things. Both kinds affect our view of reality and of truth.

But the idea of variable conceptual schemes opens up the possibility of truth and knowledge being relative to particular cultures. Unless...we can decide that one conceptual scheme is better than others, that one presents the world to us as it is, and the others are false. In that case, we can dismiss relativism and say truth is not relative, it is absolute, fixed, and Culture X has it.

Problem is, which culture is Culture X, the one with The Truth? Is it, for example, the culture of the Sioux Indians, of Kalahari hunter-gatherers, of the Taliban or of fundamentalist Christians from the American mid-west? No, I don't think so either. I think my culture, my way of seeing the world is more right than theirs is. On the whole, I trust science and rationality. I am biased in favour of what I know and understand.

It was just this kind of problem that Foundationalism wanted to avoid. If we could trace all our knowledge and ideas back to absolutely secure basic beliefs, we could then build up truths from there with confidence, as Descartes and Locke both intended. But neither rationalism nor empiricism has convinced us that they can provide firm foundations. A priori reasons and sense experience lead to problematic theories. Kant's categories look promising, but they are contingent on human nature and don't give us logical necessity or certainty. In any case, the cultural concepts can be considered to be in addition to Kant's conceptual scheme.

The main alternative to Foundationalism is Coherence Theory. This says that all we can aim for is that our beliefs are coherent, that they fit together and help us to interpret the world in a particular way and to make predictions. They are useful rather than absolutely true. As long as conceptual schemes work, do the job, we cannot choose between them. Our scientific web of beliefs is no better and no worse than any other. Some schemes could be criticised, perhaps, for being contradictory or over-complicated, but most long-established cultures will have traditional beliefs that are coherent and with their own kind of elegance or beauty. (One twentieth century philosopher who has argued for this is W V Quine.)

Personally, I am not convinced. I do not believe that all conceptual schemes that are coherent are as good as each other, for I don't think they really can all do what, on the whole, our broadly scientific and rational conceptual scheme can do. Ours has more predictive and explanatory power. It has allowed us to bring the world to the brink of disaster by developing technology...but (with necessary adjustments) it may allow us to go beyond existing technology and save the world from disaster. It is very open to change; it revises itself as new evidence and techniques become available. It does not get quite so bogged down in traditional belief as some cultures do. It allows us to change not only the minor beliefs at the edge of the web of beliefs but even occasionally important beliefs towards the centre. Also, as the world shrinks due to globalisation and electronic media, it the scientifc culture of the West (USA and Europe) that is spreading. It is hard not to conclude that this is simply because it is more likely to bring progress through knowledge and truth. (Although, of course, many would disagree, including fundamentalists of all kinds - but they still use the technology that Western thinking invented.)

Of course, that is not a reason for disregarding other conceptual schemes or cultures. We can respect them without accepting that they have an equal claim to truth as ours. Also, of course, there may be some aspects of them from which we can learn, ways in which we can recognise that they are wiser or clearer.

So I want to avoid relativism about conceptual schemes. Some beliefs simply are more true than others. But you must decide for yourself, and when you do you will inevitably be using ideas and concepts (reasons, truth, knowledge, justification, fairness, freedom, etc) which are concepts from our culture, with which we organise our understanding or interpretation of the world. It is hard to escape the conceptual scheme - the web of beliefs, the language, the concepts - our culture has given us.