ABSTRACT
In his article, ‘On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme’, Donald Davidson identifies the ‘dualism of scheme and content, of organizing system and something waiting to be organized’ as the third dogma of empiricism. 1 I hope it has become clear that acceptance of this dogma, which forms a central part of Kant's transcendental idealism, is in fact inseparable from a fourth: that an individual object is just a bundle of sensible properties, which needs to be organized by the subject if the object is to come into being. I have argued that only by accepting this reduction of the object to a plurality of properties can the Kantian doctrine of synthesis get a grip on us, and that the bundle theory of the object leads immediately to the idealist position, that objects as they appear to us are in fact products of some unifying conceptual scheme imposed by the subject on an intrinsically unstructured manifold.
