Hobbes and Kant

Abstract

Let us consider that we are witnesses to a man falling overboard from a ship. Excepting skeptical quibbles about errors in sense perception, we have no difficulty in stating this sort of observation as a fact. It is an observational fact but it is not a fact generated within the ambit of science. Hobbes begins with acknowledging the fundamentality of sense observations, however, he continues to a notion of science. Science takes empirical or sense observations in terms of a systematic framework of concepts defined in words or symbols. Thus, the science of physics treats the man falling overboard by a body falling a certain distance in a certain time, under certain qualifying constraints like wind resistance; physiology treats say the action of the lungs when a person – of a certain age and condition – falls a distance; psychology may treat this matter as a suicide. Each science or conceptual frame is warranted by rigorous definitions of its concepts in a particular convenient language. Consequently, the rigor of physics compared to psychology has a greater warrant to be a science.