In this way, Kant thought he was proposing a “Copernican Revolution.” The “Copernican Revolution” in Kant’s philosophy was this: all previous philosophy had assumed that knowledge comes to us when our external experiences impose themselves on our minds; Kant was now arguing that, on the contrary, we impose our mental categories on those experiences in order to know or understand them. Knowledge is not from the outside in; it is from the inside (mental categories) out (experiences).14
