Schema (Kant) - Elaborations of Kant's Notion of Schema in Cognitive Science

Elaborations of Kant's Notion of Schema in Cognitive Science

The philosopher Mark Johnson discusses Kant's conception of a schema with respect to developing a theory of the imagination within cognitive science. Johnson's theory makes use of Kant's insights that analogy is the cognitive mechanism which links sensible percepts to their conceptual categories, and that creative analogy—or what Johnson calls conceptual metaphor—is the cognitive mechanism by which we come to have our understanding of those abstract concepts and categories of which we have less direct sensible experience. He proposes that we use imaginative schemata to structure abstract concepts largely in terms a set of spatial analogies he calls image schemata. In Johnson's view, we acquire image schemata primarily from recurrent patterns of experiences in infancy and early childhood, and then reuse these image schemata in a metaphoric fashion both to reason abstractly and as we speak our language.

In an increase of ambiguity and confusion, some cognitive scientists today have appropriated the often–misused technical term "schema" to mean Kantian Category. In his book Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy: Basic Principles and Applications (Jason Aronson Publishers,1996), Robert L. Leahy of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy in New York City and the Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University exemplifies this misuse. In Chapter 2, "Historical Context of Cognitive Therapy," he wrote of how, for Kant, "reality is never directly knowable, but rather is 'known' through 'categories of thinking.'" Leahy then stated, "According to Kant, all knowledge was based on the 'categories' (which today we would call schemas). Consequently, reality was never directly knowable--we only knew the schemas." In this way, Kant's concept of "category," or "pure concept of the understanding," is no longer defined as being a predicate, property, quality, or characteristic of any and all objects in general. A Kantian Category is now vaguely considered by cognitive scientists to be a "schema," which was a term that Kant had already used to designate the subsumption of an empirical intuition, through time, under a category or pure concept.