Kant: Is Psychology a Science?

1781

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804)

Although he spent his entire life in the small city of Königsberg, Germany, Immanuel Kant is often considered the greatest philosopher in the Western intellectual tradition. For the discipline of psychology, Kant presented a formidable challenge when he insisted that the mind could not be studied in the same way that the natural sciences approached their subject matter.

Kant’s argument challenged scientists who were interested in the mind and sought to explore it experimentally. To meet the challenge they had to deal with Kant’s theory of how we know the world. In his 1781 book Critique of Pure Reason, Kant proposed that there are two separate domains of reality: the noumenal world and the phenomenal world. The former is external and consists of objects in a pure state, or things-in-themselves, which exist independent of human experience. When our minds perceive these, they are transformed into phenomena that our minds categorize for us.

Herein lies the essence of Kant’s challenge: Kant’s position implies an active, rather than passive, mind. His theory indicates that the role of the mind in structuring our experience uses certain rules—twelve a priori categories—to organize the phenomena, not because the world is actually so organized but because the mind is set up to structure its experience of the world in that way.

Why would this contention not open the door to a psychological science? Because, Kant argued, mental processes exist in time but have no spatial dimension. This, he reasoned, means that the way the human mind works cannot be expressed mathematically. And since mathematics is the mark of true natural science, then psychology could not be a science; thus psychology can only be a historical and descriptive discipline. Before the end of the nineteenth century, Kant’s challenge was met by scientists who believed that they had found a way to experimentally measure the mind in action.

SEE ALSO Just-Noticeable Difference (1834), Sensory Physiology (1867), Mental Chronometry (1879)

Statue of Immanuel Kant, located in Kaliningrad, Russia.