(Late 18th C.) Synthesis of the rationalist and empiricist points of view: See Gardner, MNS.
How can you have knowledge to be a priori and also dependent on experience i.e. a posteriori?
First, the subject contributes to the experience at the sensory level using frameworks like space and time (which are not learnt from experience).
Next these experiences (passing images) become meaningful to the person by a synthesis, a "binding together" through the active contribution of that person.
Eg. Person walking towards you - series of images, gradually increasing in size, first recognise gender, then other features, finally the identity of the person.
Concrete external world noumena; cannot be directly perceived, has to be experienced through phenomena, or appearances. On the phenomena we bring to bear ``categories of thought'' such as quantity, quality, relation and modality. Interposed between the raw sensory information and the abstract a priori categories are the schemata.
Schemata are patterns which determine how perceptual elements are brought together and organised.
Examples of schemata:
| Category (experience/ concept) | Schema |
| quantity | number |
| (eg. unity, plurality, totality) | |
| quality | degree of intensity |
| (eg. reality (attribution), negation, limitation) | |
| relation | permanence in time |
| (eg. substance and accident (attribute), cause-and-effect, reciprocity) | |
| modality | |
| (eg. actuality (existence), possibility, necessity-contingency) | |
| dog | schematic repr. of a dog |
| (or other concrete expces) |
Are Kant's schema innate?
Kant laid out conditions for the possibility of knowledge; delimited the domain within which knowledge is possible. Ultimately all knowledge, including mathematical knowledge, is dependent on experience.
He concluded that psychology can never become a science: the mind cannot study itself, experimentation in psychology is impossible, and there is no mathematical basis for such a science. For many years this warning deterred research in cognition.