Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy

by Simon Blackburn

Kant sees that when it comes to space and time, size, shape, and the objective order, to have a concept is not to have a mental picture. It is to have an organizing principle or rule; a way of handling the flux of data. Having the same organizing principles or rules could give us the same understanding of the world in spite of differences of subjective experience. The implication then is that we got into the problems of the last two sections because we were looking for ‘things’ to play certain roles: the role of objects standing behind and apart from powers and forces, or the role of something responsible for causal and physical laws. But if we can wean our understandings from this dependency on things, perhaps we can do better. Suppose instead we see thoughts of causation and law, things in space and time, and space and time themselves as necessary categories of thought. They provide us with a framework of principles with which to organize or systematize our experience. They do not provide a set of things we ‘infer’ from our experience.