Comparing Kant and post-modern science

“However, all such attempts to arrive at such a science with thoroughness encounter considerable difficulties that are inherent to human nature itself.”

In “Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View” from 1785 Kant lays out his view on the inquiry into human nature. Could this be scientifically described? Apart from certain qualities of human beings proving to be in themselves difficult to research, it is also Kant’s conception of science that has high demands for what may be counted as scientific knowledge. I will compare these to a post-modern conception of science and from there examine if the original problems for Kant are still relevant.

The high demands that Kant puts on scientific knowledge are:

1. use a systematic method of ordening
2. it must be based on rational principles
3. it must be a priori knowable with certainty

For something to be a priori knowledge with absolute certainty is an extremely high demand for knowledge, and is definitely not applicable to human behaviour. Cultural and habit-based behaviour gets in the way of “actually natural” behaviour, and the study of emotions becomes impossible from an objective or rational viewpoint as anobserver cannot be objective when feeling the emotions they want to analyse. It appears that Kant strives for purely rational and objective knowledge, and this is difficult to acquire concerning human nature, as he has made a distinction between fysiological and pragmatic anthropology, and is studying the latter. This leads us to the prediction that anthropology cannot be classified as a strict science.

In a post-modernist sense however, the qualities of human behaviour might not pose as a problem for the categorization as science. In the science wars of the nineties a post-modernist movement critized realist scientists in a Kuhnian tradition. They claimed that science cannot be as objective as it aims to be, as the social and cultural influences are greater than they might seem. Relativists claim that there is no objective measurement for rationality, and post-modernists claim that scientific theories are social constructs.

These perspectives for one accept cultural and habit-based behaviour as natural to human beings, and as such might not dismiss this as non-scientific. Also accepting that scientists never have an objective viewpoint on what they are observing makes that research into emotions will be possible. Subjective data will still be data. Lastly Kant mentions “the Hawthorne effect” when trying to observe people: they will start acting differently when they know they are observed. This might still pose a theoretical problem for science in theory, if we in modern times did not possess many unseen ways of observing other unkowning people.