Abstract

This article reevaluates Hermann Ebbinghaus’s famous criticisms of Wilhelm Dilthey’s 1894 essay “Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology,” to determine how Dilthey’s diverse approaches toward philosophy and the human sciences are related to experimental psychology and to hypothetico-deductive science. It turns out that Ebbinghaus falsely accuses Dilthey of rejecting experimental psychology overall, while, in fact, Dilthey rejects only a specific misuse of experimental psychology: as a way to provide a foundation for the humanities. At the same time, Dilthey recognizes several ways in which philosophy and the human sciences might benefit from experimental psychology. Although it clearly rules out experimental psychology, Dilthey’s descriptive psychology involves a hypothetico-deductive standpoint that intermediates, with some success, between modern social science and nineteenth-century hermeneutics.