Inner Experience and Articulation: Wilhelm Dilthey’s Foundational Project and the Charge of Psychologism

Abstract

This article reassesses Wilhelm Dilthey’s descriptive psychology in light of the charge of “psychologism.” The essay has two goals. First, I provide a fine-grained reconstruction of Dilthey’s foundational epistemology of the human sciences. I give a systematic account of how Dilthey sought to ground the knowledge claims of the human sciences in “inner experience.” I place special emphasis on Dilthey’s concept of “articulation,” which mediates between inner experience and psychological knowledge, as well as between individual psychology and knowledge about the sociohistorical world. Second, I argue that Dilthey’s foundational project is “psychologistic” insofar as it grounds epistemology in psychology. However, I also show that the antipsychologistic arguments of his contemporaries Edmund Husserl, Wilhelm Windelband, and Heinrich Rickert did not force Dilthey to abandon his project. The article concludes with some reflections on the transition from Dilthey’s descriptive psychology to his mature hermeneutic theory.