Critically Assess the View that, Without a Predetermined Conceptual Scheme, Our Sense Experience Would Be Unintelligible

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Roshan Geevarghese          Dr Hemp        

“Critically Assess the View that, Without a Predetermined Conceptual Scheme, Our Sense Experience Would Be Unintelligible”

A conceptual scheme is the set of concepts that organise experience and allow us to interpret it. This theory of all people possessing a conceptual scheme was put forward by influential German philosopher Immanuel Kant. He claims that experience is only intelligible because the mind has a way of categorising and interpreting the raw data that it receives. This categorization tool is our conceptual scheme, and without it we wouldn’t be able to make sense of anything around us, everything would just be a massive blur of information or experience that we can’t comprehend. Kant claimed that ‘thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.’

An example that is given to illustrate this viewpoint is “Condillac’s Statue”. You can imagine a statue that is organised like a human on the inside; however it is devoid of any sensations.  If the statue begins to experience a series of sensations, and is brought from having no ideas whatsoever to forming various concept and developing beliefs about itself and the world, then is this believable? However some would say that, this idea wouldn’t work at all. They would claim that the statue would just receive a flow of uninterpreted sensations: noises, shapes, colours and tastes. They would argue this by saying that the statue must at least have the concept of similarity to compare and contrast experiences. Therefore, if the statue doesn’t have a pre-existing method of categorising and storing all this information then it can’t form concepts or even recall its ideas.

Furthermore, this problem can be shown through the analogy of the office and the filing system. The workers in the office (representing the senses) produce a lot of complicated letters, files and faxes. Your job would be to file these away (represents the process the mind undertakes when understanding what we experience and organise our experiences). However, if this office has no prior system for filing, and you were just told to put the documents into each draw, as you get them, then after about 2 months when you are asked to retrieve a certain document you will be unable to do so. This is because you will simply have no memory of where it might be, as there is no system to find it. In the same way, this can be applied to ‘Condillac’s Statue’.

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Kant stated a set of categories by which he believed the mind organises raw sense data. These categories include; the categories of quantity, quality, relation and modality. The modern scientific view of the human world is a huge bundle of energy, always changing and moving around. However, we do not see the world in this way, but rather we perceive an ordered world with objects composed of matter that cause events. Part of this order is due to our minds imposing the category of unity upon our perceptions. An example to show how this works is to think about how ...

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