ARNOLD BRECHT'S POLITICAL THEORY REVISITED Political ...

178 THE POLITICAL SCIENCE REVIEWER
or "things-in-themselves" presumed to have real existence, while at
the same time categorically denying our capacity to perceive it
either in general or particular. And his later discussion 35 of Kant's
" categorical imperative " treats it out of context and rejects its
authority or imperativeness without offering any substantial reasons
for doing so . He offers only the evidently specious implied argument
that Kant's negative a-prioris are valid because they constitute
"logically necesssary" assumptions; but the categorical imperative is
not a logically necessary assumption. It therefore raises a question of
fact-whether the moral law is a built-in feature of human think-
ing-which, he insists, should be subjected to empirical inquiry
rather than simply assumed (377) .38
This would seem to suggest that
Kant would have done a better job if he had only discovered Scientific
Method in its current form and had then established his
necessary regulative principles of the human mind on an
"empirical" basis.
Brecht concludes his general discussion of a prioris by briefly
reiterating the dependence of Scientific Method on the assumed "immanent
methodological a prioris": "consubjectivity; the ability of
observation to disclose `facts'; causality or, at least, regularity; and
some human freedom of will." The precise nature of their relationship
to Scientific Method is, however, rendered ambiguous by his
previous insistence that, "[s]trictly speaking, Scientific Method does
not as such accept or incorporate these assumptions, but it permits
the scientist to accept them without being on that ground guilty of
violating the rules of procedure" (99). His subsequent discussion of
the role of " assumptions, " " working hypotheses, " " types, " and
"models" in scientific inquiry stresses that their usefulness depends
upon their correspondence with reality (not qualified by quotation
marks) and that their fruitful genesis is a highly creative act of
human genius (107-112).
It is evident, then, that many of the claims made on behalf of
Scientific Method by Brecht in his more general characterizations
are not borne out in his discussion of the particulars of that mode of
inquiry. Most particularly, the level or degree of certitude of its products
appears markedly lower among the particulars than it is made
35. Pp. 368-9, 375-7.
36. The argument is, however, so vaguely and implicitly rendered as to resist a very
precise and confident interpretation. This is due in part to the fact that it is disjoined
from his earlier discussion of the other a prioris.