The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Review: Stumpf - Psychologic und Erkenntnisstheorie
The question of this pamphlet is between the philosophy which seeks to free epistemology from all dependence on the results of psychology, and that which finds a necessity for carrying back all epistemological inquiry to a psychological foundation. After stating the more obvious arguments on each side, the author examines those claims in particular which the epistemologist draws from his study of Kant's K. d. r. V. Accordingly, the body of the paper is occupied with a criticism of three Kantian doctrines: the constitutive work of the understanding as related to the system of nature; the distinction between form and content in knowledge; the doctrine of necessity. Granted the synthetic function of the understanding in "making nature," there remains the crucial question: What may we think together, what not? The deduction of the categories shows at most that the mind has a tendency to unify its presentations, but not that the latter must conform themselves to the synthesis. That time and space are at once a priori and sensuous, gives them indeed an intermediate but not a mediatory character. In applying, e.g. the category of causality, the concept of cause having been completely separated from that of time-flow, the schematism leaves no logical obstacle against thinking the later as cause of the earlier, or depriving cause and effect of any fixed time-relations whatever. The extension of the antithesis between form and matter to time and space versus the sensuous qualities in perception, has proved psychologically untenable. It is only a half-truth which the Kritik ceaselessly inculcates — that the understanding thinks sensuous material into law and order, the complementary truth being that the logical criteria of the synthesis must be sought in the material itself. Neglect of psychology is the radical defect of the Kantian criticism, and the attempt to retain its results as an independent epistemology has been highly unfavorable to the progress of philosophy. Even Kant's conception of objective necessity is an abstraction from the matter of certain judgments, not added to it through "a priori forms." Having been thus won, it is hypothetically ascribed to an "outer world," in itself hypothetical, in order that the mind may regain both postulates justified by the progress of science. The meaning of an "independent without," as concerning both epistemology and psychology, is further discussed in the conclusion, where the related work of the two sciences is marked out and the evidences of their interdependence summarized. To psychology belongs inquiry into the origin of concepts, while the special field of epistemology is the discovery and classification of the most general immediate truths of knowledge. Any search after the "conditions of possibility" of such immediate truths is found to be without epistemological meaning. The final thought of the pamphlet is that the problems of epistemology and psychology should be kept sharply separate in order that the two sciences may the more effectively unite in their solution.