1.
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: universal
Wilhelm Dilthey forms of sensibility and categories of
understanding -> answer to Hume’s
(1833-1911): skepticism
The critique of 2. Dilthey’s critique of historical reason:
historical reason categories of life historically mediated
and the and variably enacted and embodied in
philosophy of threefold structure:
worldviews i. Lived-experience
ii. Expression
iii. Interpretive understanding
Compare Max Weber – “interpretive
sociology”
All human life/thought as historical (social,
cultural) formation.
First-person perspective (I, we) of human
lifeworld and human sciences.
Feeling of life, lifeviews and worldviews,
are fundamental to feeling and knowing.
All sciences are historically mediated yet Key Points
aspire to universal verifiable truths.
Historical-cultural structures are distinct
from natural structures and demand their
own sciences.
Critique of historical reason – embodied
and enacted variable categories of life.
Mill or Dilthey?
1. Mill, The Logic of the Moral
Sciences (1843) – priority of
natural science (positivism)
2. Dilthey, Introduction to the
Human Sciences (1883) –
differentiation of the human
sciences
Mill or Dilthey?
John Stuart Mill’s Strategy:
• “extend and adopt” the deductive-hypothetical causal model of the natural
sciences to the moral and social sciences.
Dilthey’s Rejoinder:
• Agrees that human sciences require epistemology, logic, and psychology.
1. “extend” maintains an inadequate positivistic paradigm.
2. “adopt” makes Mill a pioneer of the autonomy and reformer of the human
sciences; yet does not go far enough to address their specific objects,
methods, and aims.
• Mill lacks sense of historicity as way specific phenomena are given and
specificity of the history of the individual sciences.
• Epistemic theory of the sciences interconnected with history of the sciences.
Dilthey: From positivist to historicist theory of science
1. First positivist thesis: liberation of science from metaphysics
• Implication: science should be understood from its own history and practices
and not an external abstract hypothesis.
• Dilthey’s anti-positivist conclusion – liberation of the individual sciences from
the metaphysical ideal of the unity and conformity of science.
2. Second positivist thesis: history and moral sciences lack recognition of the
role of theory, epistemology, logic, psychology, and anthropology.
• Implication: this cannot be done externally but in only in relation to the
practices of history and the human sciences.
• Dilthey’s anti-positivist conclusion: the theory of science emerges through
critical self-reflection on the sciences and their histories -> history and theory
of science
Mill’s Organization of the Moral Sciences
1. Psychology (science of individuals) as fundamental human
science.
2. Ethology (anthropology) as character in formation and self-
culture. This includes sense of freedom and adaptive change
through technology and reform (as compatible with causal
explanation).
3. Practical interests (reform, progress) of moral sciences as
useful for art of individual and political life.
1. Psychology as fundamental
descriptive/analytic human science of
relational individuals.
2. Anthropology as study of relational types
and formation of peoples and character /
need for fuller conception of self-culture
Dilthey’s model (Bildung) with its reflexive, auto-
biographical, and reflective senses.
3. All sciences born of practical interests
(technical or practical) and human
sciences motivated by their own practical
interests (orientation in history toward
reform and progress rather than historical
necessity).
Controversies over psychology in the human sciences
What are individuals?
• Mill and Dilthey: Individuals as basic elements of human sciences.
• Mill’s political economy as model: pleasure and pain, self-interest and
generalized interest, utility.
• Dilthey’s Humboldtian Criticism: British political economy prioritizes
property instead of active free self-formation and a reduced abstract
individual instead of effective interactive nexus of personal life.
• Individuals pursue concretely embedded goods, values, meanings
(happiness, pleasure, are their abstract reification).
• Two forms of experientialism: “external” and “impersonal” empiricism vs.
immanent, intersubjective, perspectival hermeneutics.
Individuals as bundles and as ethical realities
• Shared Thesis of Hume, Mill, and Dilthey: individuals are bundles and
intersections of natural and social drives, forces, instincts.
• Dilthey’s Critique: psychology of impressions and associations does not lead
back to the complex biographical life-courses of individuals with their sense of
self, perspective, and the “thereness-for-me” of my world.
• Weak Holism (holism = whole): individuals and social systems as relational
intersections and changing structural wholes.
• Self-Interpretive Break: From this immanent perspective, individual
experiences itself both as the world conditioning it (truth of naturalism and
positivism) and as an active participant in the world (truth of idealism).
• Analysis: individual as formative (Bildung) and as acquired psychological nexus;
and as reflexive (self-related) and self-reflective (adoptable and reformable) ->
individuals as ethical realities with autonomy and worth.
Mill’s Model Dilthey’s Alternative
I. Liberalism: naturalistic account of I. Liberalism: formative (Bildung) model
individuality and freedom of individuality and freedom
II. Deductive-hypothetical models II. Description and analysis of lived-
verified by experience & induction experience and structural nexus
III. Psychological context and emergence
III. Psychological reduction
IV. interpretive break of self-reflexivity
IV. Human as causal explanatory
and being-there-for-me (1st person)
(natural) object (3rd-person) V. Human sciences: emergent
V. Moral sciences: extended and interpretive historically situated self-
adoptive application of scientific reflexivity and self-interpretation
method (positivism) VI. Ethical Life: content- and context-
VI. Ethics: abstract principle of utility related purposiveness
VII. Science, fallibilism, and progress VII. Science, finitude, and progress as
historically situated orientation
Dilthey’s Immanent Critique of Positivism
• Fact of Science: Dilthey begins by recognizing the “fact of science,” the scope
of the scientific project, and its naturalistic and positivistic self-understanding.
• External Critique: idealist, romantic, etc., criticisms of science fail to address
science and its historical and contemporary situation.
• Immanent Critique: positivism overextends scientific and naturalistic claims;
does not adequately address its own social-historical and philosophical
positionality; and its totalizing aspirations fall into self-contradiction.
• New Theory of Science: sciences need both appropriate self-reflection
(epistemology, validity) as well as histories of their formation within the social-
historical world.
• Human sciences: presuppose and employ self-reflexive participant (first-
person) perspective of agency, norms, purposes, values, life- and worldviews.
A 1923 Chinese Debate
1. Zhang Junmai 張君勱 (1887-1969): the
New Culture movement promoted
scientific-technological modernization
without moral-political Enlightenment.
• Priority of life-view and value: science
does not address normative and
practical issues of life (人生觀).
2. Hu Shi 胡適 (1891-1962): Zhang
resurrected the ghost of metaphysics and
anti-modern traditionalism.
• Priority of experimental truth: science
is the exemplar and form for
experimentally addressing ethical and
political issues.
Mill or Dilthey?
1. Is natural science the only paradigm for
understanding nature and knowledge (=
positivism / scientism)?
2. Are the human and social sciences only
Discussion and extensions of natural science (Mill) or do they
have their own logic, structure, and problems
Study (Dilthey)?
Questions 3. What is fundamental: science and/or
worldview or lifeview (人生觀)?
4. How does Dilthey’s critique of historical reason
continue and differ from Kant’s critique of pure
reason?
5. Do you agree more with Mill or Dilthey?
