ON THE STATUS OF EMPIRICAL PSYCHOLOGY IN KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON AND METAPHYSICAL FOUNDATIONS OF NATURAL SCIENCE

According to Kant, empirical psychology is a discipline that studies inner sense. In this inner sense we perceive the states of our own mind. In his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant states that this empirical psychology, in contrast to physics and chemistry, cannot reach the status of a natural science. The aim of this article is to show that the limitations in the cognitive potential of empirical psychology presented in the aforementioned work are consequence of the fact that this discipline deals with inner sense, as it is expounded, mainly, in the Critique of Pure Reason. Unlike all scholarly work on the subject, this article combines, in a single study, a detailed analysis of the implications of the nature of inner sense and a thorough examination of the cognitive limitations of empirical psychology carried out taking into account our analysis of such nature of the inner sense.