| The primary text of this study is the "Transcendental Doctrine of Method" in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. My aim is to set out Kant's understanding of the methodologies of the various sciences. In the "Transcendental Doctrine of Elements," the first half of the Critique, Kant analyzes the "materials" for developing speculative knowledge. In the second half, the focus of our study, Kant provides the "plan" for assembling from these materials a system of speculative knowledge. Curiously, major comprehensive commentaries on Kant's first Critique have tended to ignore the second half dealing with methodologies.;The central chapters of the dissertation show that, for Kant, mathematics and natural science each have distinct methods and that there are objectively valid metaphysical assumptions of natural science. The second chapter examines the role of a priori imaginative construction in the generation and justification of definitions, postulates, and demonstrations in any axiomatized mathematical system. Here we see Kant's rejection of the methodological monism of the Cartesian who treats Euclid's geometry as the paradigm of all scientific knowledge. In the third chapter, we take up Kant's account of the method of the natural sciences. The natural scientist must proceed from imaginatively invented hypotheses to the empirical testing of their observational implications. The acceptance of any hypotheses as an empirical law of nature requires an act of commitment in which we make them into empirical laws of nature, which are never justified completely on deductive or inductive grounds. In the fourth chapter, we look at Kant's claim to have established the objective validity of the a priori (immanent metaphysical) framework assumptions of natural science, showing them to be the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience--"experience" understood as empirical judgments that are intersubjectively communicable and testable in the apperceptive community. |
