Kant concluded that for some reason the categories of space and time which are usable in the scientific project and which assist us in understanding the physical world and cause and effect must still exist and since they must still exist, there must also be some other basis for reliable knowledge rather than empirical observation and logic.
This was a key shift in philosophical thought.
But the question emerged as to “What else was there.”
This realization on the part of Kant led him to what has been termed “the most radical reconstruction of the theory of knowledge that anyone has carried out.” He concluded that the whole nature of the world “as we experience it” is dependent on the nature of our apparatus for experiencing and the inevitable consequence of this is that:”things as they appear” are not the same as “things as they are in themselves.”
In short, most of what we perceive about the world is contingent on our perception.
Kant recognized that there are preconditions which must be met before anything can be experienced at all and therein lay the solution to Hume’s problem. Things such as physical identity, location in space, location in time, propensity for causal interaction, are not derived from experience or logic. There is a third component in human knowledge.
One philosopher has used the metaphor of catching things in a network of experience and these categories so to speak are the net through which things must pass. Only what can be caught in them is available to us. Anything that passes through them untouched will not be picked up by us, as well as that which falls outside the net altogether. Only what these nets catch will be outs and only what they can catch can be ours.
