In Defense of Metaphysics: A Kantian Approach to the Philosophy of Chiropractic

At the extremes of interpretation within chiropractic's philosophical landscape, one group of members adheres to historical doctrines of Innate Intelligence, whereas the other group borders on scientism. This article examines the metaphysical problems faced by each extreme and offers the methodology of Immanuel Kant as a means toward progress in understanding by offering a unifying application of philosophy.

The philosophical and ideological extremes within chiropractic represent divergent epistemologies, with one group arguing for the necessity of deductive rationalism based on axiomatic principles and the other for the primacy of empirical or scientific knowledge. This division emerges from a basic misunderstanding of the aim of metaphysics and recapitulates fierce disagreements published throughout the Enlightenment in continental philosophy, culminating with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Kant's was an attempt to reconcile these disparate views by elevating metaphysics to the level of science. This article works backward chronologically from Daniel David Palmer to Kant and then from Kant to contemporary applications of metaphysics. By investigating Kant's arguments and those that followed, it is observed that positivism, grounded in empirical science, as well as rationalism in and beyond chiropractic research, depends upon certain metaphysical ideas that cannot be dismissed.

This article proposes that empirical scientific research in the clinical setting is contingent upon basic assumptions that are inherently metaphysical. In order to further philosophical progress in chiropractic, metaphysics in chiropractic, as in Kant's time, must embrace an academically rigorous form.