psychologism

is the wrongheaded idea that logic describes the laws of thinking, and that thinking is a psychological process.

How do we know that two contradictory judgments cannot be both true' Why do we believe that logical rules are valid or that our thinking ought to comply with them' The psychologism in its radical version consisted in the statements that logic described the laws of thinking, and that thinking was a psychological process. (kolakowski 'husserl' : 16).

is the (mistaken) notion that all mental life can be explained in terms of biological causal relations. The truth of 2 + 2 = 4 is neither biological nor causal, but rather, logical.

Psychologism, Husserl argues, fails to make the distinction between the meaning ofjudgment and the act of judging. My act of affirming thejudgment that 2 + 2 = 4 is causally determined, but it would be absurd to say that the truth of this judgment is causally determined. (kolakowski 'husserl' 19)

is the idea that logic is not obligatory commands, but simply state empirical facts. The consequences of thought, then, are not logical consequences of thought but causal relations be tween facts of our consciousness.

sentence 'all dogs are mammals' entails the sentence 'some mammals are dogs' does not really mean that anything logically follows any thing. It simply displays a causal relation between two acts of acceptance related to these two judgments. To followers of psychologism, he argued, the rules of logic, far from being obligatory commands, simply state empirical facts. The consequences of thought, then, are not logical consequences of thought but causal relations be tween facts of our consciousness. To say that the sentence 'all dogs are mammals' entails the sentence 'some mammals are dogs' does not really mean that anything logically follows any thing. It simply displays a causal relation between two acts of acceptance related to these two judgments. (kolakowski 'husserl' 17)

is the wrongheaded idea that thinking is a psychological process and that logic describes the laws of thinking.

How do we know that two contradictory judgments cannot be both true' Why do we believe that logical rules are valid or that our thinking ought to comply with them' The psychologism in its radical version consisted in the statements that logic described the laws of thinking, and that thinking was a psychological process. (kolakowski 'husserl' : 16)

is the theory that logical laws are really just psychological laws of the human mind.

The first volume of Logical Investigations is an attack on “psychologism”: the theory that logical laws are really just psychological laws of the human mind, a popular view at the time.

psychologism, n.Definitions

psychologism