Brentano and Dilthey on descriptive Psychology

Guillaume Fréchette

Although Dilthey and Brentano were apparently pursuing roughly the same objective – to offer a description of our mental functions and of their relations to objects – and both called their respective research programmes 'descriptive psychology', they seem to have used the term to refer to two different methods of psychological research. In this paper, I discuss some analyses of these differences. Against (Orth 1984), but also against a possible application of recent relativist accounts of the epistemology of peer disagreement to this case, I argue that their apparent shared objective is not strong enough to support an understanding of their views as two alternatives within a given historical or scientific context or as a mutual peer disagreement. I show that the impression of a shared objective can in fact be explained away by some influences from the psychology of their teacher Trendelenburg, and I stress that the case of introspection strongly suggests that an account in terms of peer disagreement is not plausible. Finally, I conclude that the opposition between two traditions, Austrian philosophy and historicism, might be better suited to account for the dispute and its apparent common historical context.