Aspects of Psychologism

Tim Crane

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780674728110
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Mind & Body in Philosophy

Aspects of Psychologism is a penetrating look into fundamental philosophical questions of consciousness, perception, and the experience we have of our mental lives. Psychologism, in Tim Crane's formulation, presents the mind as a single subject-matter to be investigated not only empirically and conceptually but also phenomenologically: through the systematic examination of consciousness and thought from the subject's point of view.How should we think about the mind? Analytical philosophy tends to address this question by examining the language we use to talk about our minds, and thus translates our knowledge of mind and consciousness into knowledge of the concepts which this language embodies. Psychologism rejects this approach. The philosophy of mind, Crane believes, has become too narrow in its purely conceptual focus on the logical and linguistic formulas that structure thought. We cannot assume that the categories needed to understand the mind correspond absolutely with such semantic categories. A central claim of Crane's psychologism is that intentionality--the "aboutness" or "directedness" of the mind--is essential to all mental phenomena. In addition, Crane responds to proponents of materialist doctrines about consciousness and defends the claim that perception can represent the world in a non-conceptual, non-propositional way.Philosophers must take more seriously the findings of psychology and phenomenology, Crane contends. An investigation of mental phenomena from this broader viewpoint opens up philosophy to a more realistic and plausible account of the mind's nature.

ESSAY ONE

Introduction: In Defence of Psychologism (2012)

We know of the efforts of such philosophers as Frege and Husserl to undo the ‘psychologizing’ of logic (like Kant’s undoing Hume’s psychologizing of knowledge): now, the shortest way I might describe such a book as the Philosophical Investigations is to say that it attempts to undo the psychologizing of psychology.

—Stanley Cavell (2002: 91)

1. INTRODUCTION

The term ‘psychologism’ is normally used for the doctrine that logical and mathematical truths must be explained in terms of psychological truths (see Kusch 1995 and 2011). As such, the term is typically pejorative: the widespread consensus is that psychologism in this sense is a paradigm of philosophical error, a gross mistake that was identified and conclusively refuted by Frege and Husserl.

The consensus is surely correct: there is no future in defending psychologism about logic and mathematics. But as the above remark by Stanley Cavell indicates, ‘psychologism’ and ‘psychologizing’ have been used in a broader way too, to describe attitudes to knowledge, meaning, and mind more generally. Michael Dummett, for example, treats Frege’s critique of psychologism as applying to doctrines about meaning as well as doctrines about logic and mathematics:

When Frege engages in polemic against psychologism, what he is concerned to repudiate is the invasion of the theory of meaning by notions concerned with mental processes, mental images, and the like, and the confusion between the process by which we come to acquire a grasp of sense and what constitutes such a grasp. (Dummett 1981: 240)

The term ‘theory of meaning’ here should be taken to include more than logic, since logic is silent on what constitutes the meanings of any terms other than the logical constants. Dummett is claiming, then, that Frege’s attack on psychologism can be extended to views outside logic. Psychologism in Dummett’s discussion is a view about understanding the meanings of words (‘grasp of sense’). Psychologism holds that what ‘constitutes’ our grasp of sense is connected in some way with the ‘processes by which we come to acquire’ such a grasp. Dummett thinks this is a confusion, and that it is one of the targets of Frege’s arguments.

What exactly this view about sense is, and whether it is really a confusion, is something I will return to below. At the moment I only want to illustrate the way in which ‘psychologism’ has been used as a name for doctrines other than the disreputable idea that logic and mathematics should be explained psychologically. Another example of this kind of use can be found in the work of John McDowell, who once described psychologism as the view according to which ‘the significance of others’ utterances is a subject for guesswork or speculation as to how things are in a private sphere concealed behind their behaviour’ (McDowell 1981: 225). Where Dummett sees psychologism as involving a confusion between constitutive questions about understanding and questions about mechanisms, McDowell sees it as a positive (and surely incredible) proposal about how understanding works. These views are not, of course, incompatible.

So in addition to psychologism about logic and mathematics, there are views about meaning and understanding that have also been called ‘psychologism’. My interest here, however, is in the mental or the psychological. According to Cavell, then, Wittgenstein’s target in the Philosophical Investigations is ‘psychologism about psychology’—or about the psychological, since we are not interested here in a discipline but in its subject-matter. What might this be? What does it mean to undo the psychologizing of the psychological? For that matter, what does it mean to ‘psychologize’ the psychological in the first place? How could one take any other approach to the psychological?

The answer is complicated by the fact that ‘psychologism’ has been used for a number of different views about the psychological. Ned Block uses the term for ‘the doctrine that whether behavior is intelligent behavior depends on the character of the internal information processing that produces it’ (Block 1981: 5). And Adrian Cussins has defined psychologism as ‘the doctrine that psychology provides at least part of the explanatory basis for the constitutive understanding of the mental’ (Cussins 1987: 126–7). The term is a sensible one for both of these views, and both of them (unlike the view described by McDowell, say) are very plausible. So if Wittgenstein’s aim was to attack these views, then he had his work cut out. But what was his aim?

On Cavell’s view, Wittgenstein’s point is that the connections between psychological phenomena and (say) their behavioural manifestations are in a certain way not contingent. The assumption seems to be that a psychologistic approach will only identify causal or contingent connections between phenomena, and that misses something central about the psychological. Wittgenstein wanted to articulate a conception of these connections in terms of notions like ‘criteria’ and ‘grammar’, which play the role of something like necessary or analytic connections in other philosophers; or as Cavell puts it, he wanted to ‘show the necessity controlling our application of psychological and behavioural categories’ (2002: 91).

To the extent that an investigation to these necessary connections is a conceptual investigation, then we can describe anti-psychologism about the psychological as the view that the psychological should be investigated in purely conceptual terms. But where does this leave the science of psychology itself? At the end of the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein famously said that scientific psychology involves ‘experimental methods and conceptual confusion’ (1953: 232). This was written over sixty years ago, but it is unlikely that he would have had a different view if he were alive today.

However, not all followers of Wittgenstein take this invidious attitude to psychology. Some of them think that the conceptual investigation of the mind is one thing, and psychology another. These philosophers might rely, for example, on a distinction between the normativity that orders the mind and the underlying causal structure in the brain; or on a distinction between the personal and sub-personal levels of explanation. But whichever they choose, they distinguish between the conceptual investigation undertaken by philosophy and the empirical, causal, or nomological investigation undertaken by psychology.

Treating anti-psychologism as the idea that the study of the mind is a purely conceptual investigation fits well with Block’s and Cussins’s definitions of psychologism. Although I agree with the substantive views defended by Block and Cussins, my focus in this essay will be on something more specific in the debate between psychologism and anti-psychologism: their contrasting approaches to intentionality or mental representation. The specific version of anti-psychologism about intentionality I will consider here is the view that intentionality should be understood primarily in semantic terms: that is, in terms which relate only to the conditions for the truth and falsehood of representations. I claim that this is a purely conceptual investigation in the sense that it treats the subject-matter of a theory of intentionality as consisting in the attributions articulated in our folk psychological discourse.

Psychologism about intentionality, then, is the denial of this view: intentionality should not be understood primarily in semantic terms. This version of psychologism can be directly linked to Frege’s discussion of psychologism about logic, via the views of his followers, Dummett and others; as we shall see. I will start with Frege.

2. MEANING, COMMUNICATION, AND INTENTIONAL CONTENT

Frege’s anti-psychologism about logic was based on the maxim that we should ‘always separate sharply the logical from the psychological, the objective from the subjective’ (Frege 1884). His target was Mill:

So far as it is a science at all, [Logic] is a part, or branch, of Psychology; differing from it, on the one hand as the part differs from the whole, and on the other, as an Art differs from a Science. Its theoretical grounds are wholly borrowed from Psychology, and include as much of that science as is required to justify its rules of art. (Mill 1865: 359)

Frege’s objection to psychologism was based on two features of logic: its objectivity and its normativity. The objectivity of logic consists in the fact that logical truths are true independently of whether anyone judges them to be so, or whether anyone thinks about (‘grasps’) them. So they cannot be truths about psychological facts, since psychological facts cannot obtain regardless of whether they are instantiated in any particular psychological structure.

The normativity of logic consists in the fact that the laws of logic are not like the laws of physics: they are not generalizations about what actually happens, but prescriptions about what ought to happen. As Michael Potter puts it:

In Frege’s hands anti-psychologism was a thesis about logic with normative content: logic is the study not of the laws by which we in fact think but of those by which we ought to think; and the normativity of the ‘ought’ here was not, Frege thought, simply to be resolved into an account of the benefits that accrue if we reason according to these rules rather than others. (Potter 2008: 18)

A system of laws or generalizations could be objective without being normative (the laws of physics are an example) and could be normative without being objective (moral laws are like this, on some conceptions). But for Frege, logical laws were both normative and objective.

If this is the essence of Frege’s anti-psychologism, it is easy to see how it might be extended to apply to the phenomena of meaning and understanding, as Dummett suggests. For it is plausible that that facts about meanings of words have a certain objectivity in relation to any particular linguistic acts of thinkers. Of course, this does not mean that facts about meaning are entirely independent of what speakers do; how could they be? But we can deny this consistently with holding that they are independent of any particular linguistic act or intention.

Similarly, meaning does seem to have a normative dimension in the sense that the rules governing the public meanings of words are something to which competent speakers see themselves as answerable. Individual speakers can use words correctly or incorrectly; that is, either in accordance with the norms governing the usage in their language, or in accordance with their own idiolect.

Neither of these claims is exactly parallel to what Frege says about logic and mathematics. A ‘platonistic’ view of view of meaning—according to which the facts about meaning are somehow timelessly there independently of the acts of language-users—is deeply problematic, as Crispin Wright and others have argued (Wright 2001). And the normativity of meaning is notoriously hard to articulate, since it clearly is not quite the same thing as whatever normativity attaches to logic.

Nonetheless, it is hard to deny that there is something to the idea of the objectivity or publicity of meaning. Similarly, we should not deny that there is something to the idea that one can go right or wrong in one’s use of words, and that meaning is to this extent normative. Frege’s own distinction between sense and reference made room for both of these features. The objectivity of reference is an aspect of Frege’s realism, and the objectivity of sense he thought was required for the possibility of communication. Communication, he claimed, involves thinkers associating the same or similar thoughts (propositions, the sense of a sentence) with the words expressed. In a letter to Peano, Frege wrote: “The task of our vernacular languages is essentially fulfilled if people engaged in communication with one another connect the same thought, or approximately the same thought, with the same proposition” (Frege 1980: 115). Communication obviously involves understanding, which Frege described in terms of the metaphor of ‘grasping’ thoughts.

What grasping actually involves is a question Frege himself—by his own admission—did not answer. Grasping must presumably involve some psychological processes; but according to Dummett at least, an account of these processes is not part of a ‘constitutive’ account of grasp of sense. What matters for the ‘constitutive’ account is rather that communication must involve a relation to thoughts. As articulated in his classic essay, ‘The Thought’ (Frege 1918–1919), thoughts are inhabitants of the ‘third realm’; they exist independently of what anyone thinks, independently of whether anyone grasps them. Thoughts are objective, and to treat them otherwise would be to lapse into psychologism about meaning.

In his much earlier essay, ‘On Sense and Reference’ (1892), Frege encapsulated this idea in a famous analogy between the sense and reference of a word and the act of looking at the moon through a telescope. The reference of a word is analogous to the moon itself—it is out there, no matter what. The sense is analogous to the image in the telescope—it is partial, from a (literal) point of view, but can be seen by different perceivers. As Frege says, it is ‘property of many people’ (1892: 29). The third element in the picture is the image on the retina of the person viewing the moon. Frege says this is analogous to the idea (Vorstellung) in their mind, and the idea plays no part in what constitutes the thought (Gedanke) or proposition; nor, if Dummett is right, does it play any part in what constitutes the ‘grasp’ of the thought. (More on ‘ideas’ in §3 below.)

Anti-psychologism about meaning can now be loosely expressed in terms of Frege’s three-fold distinction. It is the view that meaning, communication, and understanding involve only sense and reference, and not ‘ideas’ in Frege’s use of that word. In order to understand meaning and communication, all that we need to appeal to are the objective referents of our words in the world and the objective thoughts they express. The error of psychologism about meaning, on this conception, is to think that meaning (and communication, understanding, etc.) has anything to do with ideas. This is why Dummett attributes to psychologism the ‘confusion’ between what constitutes a grasp of sense—our relation to thoughts—and the processes by means of which we come to acquire this grasp. These processes might involve ‘mental imagery’ and such things (‘ideas’), but these things should not be allowed to ‘invade’ the theory of meaning.

The theory of meaning is sometimes called semantics, and at the heart of semantics is the notion of truth. A compositional semantics for a language demonstrates how the semantic properties of whole sentences (in particular, truth and falsehood) are determined by the semantic properties of their parts (either truth and falsehood in the case of sentences, or other referents in the case of other types of term). What is semantically relevant is only what determines truth-value. Anything else—‘tone’, ‘colouring’, or ‘ideas’—is not relevant to semantics.

Compositional principles tell us how the parts of sentences join together to form something assessable as true or false. Predication is fundamental in these constructions. As Quine put it: “Predication joins a general term and singular terms to form a sentence that is true accordingly as the general term is true of the object to which the singular terms refer” (Quine 1960: 96). Other theories offer explanations of how this comes about. Frege’s theory of predicates (and their referents) as unsaturated is one attempt at an explanation. Montague and his followers (e.g., Lewis 1970) offer another. (See Davidson [2005] for a penetrating discussion.) My interest here, however, is not in the details of these approaches but to draw attention to this conception of the semantic as the realm of the determination of truth-value.

Frege himself made this explicit. On his view, the bearers of truth-value are thoughts: and a thought is ‘that for which the question of truth arises’ (Frege 1918–1919). Thoughts, like sentences, have a structure: they are made up of senses. But thoughts are also the ‘contents’ of sentences, and of the judgements that assertions of sentences express. Judgements, of course, are judgements that something is the case, or is true, so the content of a judgement—what is judged—is something for which the question of truth arises.

As well as its use in the theory of meaning (or semantics), the notion of ‘content’ is also used in the philosophy of mind, in the theory of intentionality or mental representation. ‘Content’ is a technical term and there is no agreed characterization of the notion of the content of an intentional state. My own definition (Crane 2009a), which I think is as good as any at capturing all the various things that the term is used for, is that the content of a state is the way it represents its object. Many theories of intentionality take intentional content to be propositional: that is, they take intentional states to be those with propositional content. Propositional content is truth-evaluable content.

If anti-psychologism about meaning is the view that questions about meaning should only be answered by using notions like Frege’s notions of sense and reference (or notions akin to these), then a parallel anti-psychologism about intentionality holds that that questions about intentional content should only be answered by appealing to these notions. To echo Dummett: anti-psychologism about intentionality is the opposition of the infection of the theory of intentionality with notions like mental imagery. Intentionality should be understood in terms of sense and reference, not in terms of ‘ideas’.

We can put the issue more precisely. If the content of intentional representation is propositional, then anti-psychologism about intentionality is the view that a theory of content is theory of what determines the truth or falsehood (or the conditions for the truth and falsehood) of these propositional representations. In other words, a theory of intentional content is a semantic theory, in the sense just introduced. Such a theory should explain how the truth-values of intentional states are determined by the semantic properties and relations (e.g., reference) of the significant parts of intentional states: in other words, it should give a compositional semantics for the contents of intentional states. Given this, and the assumption that all intentional content is propositional, anti-psychologism about intentionality is the view that an account of intentionality only needs to appeal to semantic facts about the mind.

Of course, the term ‘semantic’ is sometimes used as a synonym for ‘intentional’—t...