Abstract

Kant claims that “empirical psychology must always remain outside the rank of a natural science properly so called.” What led him to this conclusion? Kant first points out that if we take nature to be the totality of things insofar as they can be objects of our senses, then the doctrine of nature will contain two parts corresponding to the two forms of our sensibility: a doctrine of body and a doctrine of mind. But an “historical doctrine of nature comprising nothing but systematically ordered facts” must be distinguished from natural science properly so called. For “only that can properly be called science whose certainty is apodictic; cognitions which can only have empirical certainty are only improperly called science”. Since the chemistry of his day consisted of “mere laws of experience,” Kant held that it was not really a science; the explanations it gives in terms of such laws leave us “unsatisfied because no a priori grounds can be given for these accidental laws which mere experience has taught”. There can be no proper natural science, so Kant argues, without “a pure part on which the apodictic certainty, which reason seeks in it, can be based”. This metaphysical foundation of science is transcendental insofar as it is concerned with the concept of nature in general. If we specify it further by introducing the empirical concept of body, or of mind, the a priori cognitions which can then be established will constitute a pure part of physics, or of psychology, “in which transcendental principles are applied to the two types of objects of our senses”.