Comment by davesims | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davesims | Hacker News Reader

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That's one way of looking at it, and certainly the scientific community would like to think so -- as if Kant and James did a bit of theoretical work that the scientists fleshed out in practice.

But this is really quite naive, and when you look at the particulars, really one discipline has very little to do with the other. James certainly did lay the foundation for modern psychology, but to the extent that he did he was acting as a scientist, not a philosopher, and very little of James' actual philosophy survives self-consciously in the discipline today. How many psychologists do you know claim that the epistemological bedrock of their practice is rooted in a Jamesean (or Dewey-ian) pragmatism? How many psychological curriculums require a study of James' theory of belief? How much practical application do Kant's categories have in modern psychology, and if they did, would they hold up under serious philosophical scrutiny? The answers to these questions are: few if any, not many/none, not much, and no.

One might make a case about James being a scientist, however that's the sort of after the fact revision which Kuhn describes in Structure of Scientific Revolution.

But there is no way to make that claim about Kant and Critique of Pure Reason. The logic underpinning such an argument - that Kant's view of the mind does not match popular current scientific theories and therefor does not constitute science - would also place Newton's Principia outside the realm of Physics.

To suppose that the thrust of Kant's categories do not underpin modern psychology one would have to be the most radical of behaviorists. Modern psychology readily accepts that a person's experience of the world is largely shaped by the features of their mind - e.g. reframing.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reframing]

As for what psychologists claim as their epistemological basis, I suspect that the rate at which psychologists would claim James as a predecessor is significantly greater than the rate at which planetary astronomers who would claim Giordano Bruno's work as their epistemological base.

Perhaps a better example here is the work of the empirical psychologists Fechner, Weber, Helmholtz, Wundt &c., respectively influenced by and reacting to Mach and Kant.

"The logic underpinning such an argument - that Kant's view of the mind does not match popular current scientific theories and therefor does not constitute science - would also place Newton's Principia outside the realm of Physics."

That's an interesting parallel, but I think Newton/Kant is really apples/oranges (as it were). Kant's 'Copernican Revolution' notwithstanding, his <i>a priori</i> categories were highly speculative -- by definition -- and not really meant as a theoretical underpinning for a science of mind as much as an attempt to establish a reasonably defensible epistemology in the face of Hume's skepticism. Kant may have had hopes in a scientific direction, but in practice no scientist uses concrete, specific Kantian principles as a basis for research. Gestalt theory would be the closest attempt, but that's a pretty high-level appropriation. It had its day and retains some residual influence but certainly nothing on the order of Newton's fundamental laws in the world of physics.

But even if you consider Gestalt or some of the contemporary influence of phenomenology in certain psychological circles (and they are limited), the philosophical problems with Kant or James remain: Neither James' nor Kant's answers to Hume fully protect one from skepticism or solipsism. Husserl and his inheritors in the Phenomenological/Continental tradition fared better there, and certainly Husserl's entire endeavor was focused on Science and its epistemological problems -- but very little of the scientific community has done the difficult work of understanding Husserl. Kuhn/Popper/Lakatos it seems are much easier to digest.

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