Psychologism

The Sociology of Philosophical Knowledge

Martin Kusch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134801114
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 1995. When did psychology become a distinct discipline? What links the continental and analytic traditions in philosophy? Answers to both questions are found in this extraordinary account of the debate surrounding psychologism in Germany at the turn of the century. The trajectory of twentieth century philosophy has been largely determined by this anti-naturalist view which holds that empirical research is in principle different from philosophical inquiry, and can never make significant contributions to the latter's central issues.

Martin Kusch explores the origins of psychologism through the work of two major figures in the history of twentieth century philosophy, Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl. His sociological and historical reconstruction shows how the power struggle between the experimental psychologists and pure philosophers influenced the thought of these two philosophers, shaping their agendas and determining the success of their arguments for a sharp separation of logic from psychology. A move that was crucial in the creation of the distinct discipline of psychology and was responsible for the anti-naturalism found in both the analytic and the phenomenological traditions in philosophy.

Students and lecturers in philosophy, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science and history will find this study invaluable for understanding a key moment in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.

1
PSYCHOLOGISM: AN INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION

For most of this century, Western philosophy has been hostile to the idea that central epistemological, logical or metaphysical questions could be answered by the natural or social sciences. Even the most diverse philosophical schools can be found to agree at least on this issue. Ordinary-language philosophers, logicians, phenomenologists and deconstructionists may well be worlds apart when judged by their various methods, concepts and aspirations, but they all share the belief that naturalism is an unacceptable position.

Perhaps we owe it to the fact that some directions in philosophy (cognitive science, evolutionary epistemology, neurophilosophy) have recently opted out of the long-standing consensus on the irrelevance of science for philosophy that we are now beginning to realise that antinaturalism is not forced upon the philosopher by the order of things or the dictate of reason. As the century draws to a close, naturalism seems again the viable option it was one hundred years ago, and thus it does not seem too pretentious to suggest that our century will perhaps one day be called ‘the century of the rise and fall of antinaturalism’. Although the time is not yet ripe for writing the history of the decline of antinaturalism, the moment where it is well worth studying its triumphant rise from the 1880s onwards has certainly arrived.

In this book I shall present a sociological reconstruction of one key aspect of this history. This central episode is the debate over psychologism in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century German academic philosophy. It was in this controversy—stretching from the 1880s to the 1920s—that many antinaturalistic arguments and sentiments were first systematically developed.

I shall study the psychologism dispute from perspectives suggested by the sociology of scientific knowledge. I am interested in understanding the dynamics of philosophical controversies and the causes of their emergence and termination. No one who is insensitive to the sociological variables of philosophical knowledge has any chance of coming to grips with these fascinating issues. In Chapter 2 I shall explain why this is so. But before that I need to say more on why the psychologism debate is a central episode in the more recent history of philosophy.

‘THE SAME OLD STORY’

The most natural starting point for justifying a book-length study of the German controversy over psychologism is a reminder of the standard narrative of the key events in German philosophy between Hegel’s death and the turn of the century.¹

After Hegel’s death in 1831, idealistic philosophy in Germany quickly fell into disrepute, and philosophy lost its dominant position in the intellectual field to the natural sciences. Philosophy had to adjust to the changed conditions by remodelling itself. This meant that many philosophers adopted a ‘naturalistic’ or ‘positivistic’ attitude, i.e. the viewpoint that the ideal of knowledge and the justification of the empirical sciences holds for philosophy as well. (Others, from Feuerbach to Marx and Engels, went further, and developed materialistic philosophies.) This naturalistic stance implied that philosophers sought to solve philosophical problems, e.g. epistemological, logical and ethical questions, by means of empirical research. Kant’s transcendental philosophy was reinterpreted along the way: the study of the Kantian a priori sources of human cognition was now taken to be an enquiry into what is psychologically or physiologically prior to whatever humans obtain as material knowledge, and thus a topic for the physiologists (like von Helmholtz) or the psychologists (like Wundt). This philosophical naturalism reached its peak in the attempt to treat logic in a psychological way. The way for such a treatment was paved by British empiricism (Locke, Hume and Mill). Mill wrote of logic that it is

not a Science distinct from, and co-ordinate with Psychology. So far as it is a science at all, it 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 1979:359)

German logicians, like Erdmann, Lipps and Sigwart, followed Mill’s lead. For them logic was but ‘the physics of thought’ (Lipps 1880: 530),² and they conceived of logical laws as empirical generalisations of the way humans reason. What is more, Mill and his followers gave a psychological interpretation of mathematics as well. Numbers were ideas or presentations of sorts (Vorstellungen), and the existence of ideal, abstract Platonic entities was denied.

But all this was a ‘confusion’ (Brockhaus 1991:495), a ‘colossal blunder’ (McCarthy 1990:34). Fortunately, along came Husserl and Frege who eventually straightened things out. Thus the era of naturalism in philosophy ended around 1900 when Husserl launched his attack on this naturalism in philosophy. Husserl showed that ‘psychologism’ (i.e. the attempt to make psychology the foundation of philosophy and the sciences) is a self-refuting doctrine. Husserl himself had been turned against naturalism by the criticism that Frege had levelled against his earlier ‘psychologistic’ views; and therefore Frege’s refutation of ‘psychologism’ is entitled to historical priority. While Frege was initially ignored by his fellow ‘Continental’ mathematicians and logicians, his critique of psychologism was later taken up by Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein and the whole line of analytical philosophers from Carnap and Popper right up to Sellars. These thinkers exorcised psychologism from an increasing number of subdomains of philosophy, and thus finalised philosophy’s escape from the traps of psychology.

Whatever the superficialities and distortions of this narrative, it should be clear enough that ‘The same old story’ supports the claim that a study of the controversy over psychologism should be required reading for any student of modern philosophy. After all, if the story is true, then the refutation of psychologism is not only ‘one major breaking-point in the history of philosophy’ (Brockhaus 1991:506) and the defining event of all of twentieth-century philosophy (McCarthy 1990), but also ‘a salutary tale for those who believe that there is no progress in philosophy’: ‘Nowadays only a few cranks officially subscribe to that view… There is progress in philosophy after all!’ (Musgrave 1972:593, 606).

PSYCHOLOGISM: DEFINITIONS AND ACCUSATIONS

Most philosophers accept ‘The same old story’ as presenting the true account of our recent philosophical past. In other words, they hold that psychologism has been decisively refuted by Frege and Husserl. Given this widespread view, it comes as something of a surprise—at least to the ‘stranger’ to philosophy—that for many philosophers the cancer of psychologism is still alive, and that there is not even agreement on its symptoms or its nature. Indeed, several authors have complained that psychologism is ‘a far from clear notion’ (Skorupski 1989:164), ‘an exceedingly hazy doctrine’ (Scarre 1989:111), ‘systematically obscure’ (Notturno 1985:9), or ‘more an epithet than a philosophical position’ (Richards 1980:19). They suggest that it is often far from clear just what the accusation of psychologism amounts to, or that it seems almost impossible to avoid the charge: ‘although you believe you have taken every precaution, your worst enemy inevitably points it out’ (Richards 1980:19). One writer has even gone so far as to submit that a study of this strange phenomenon ‘would provide an interesting chapter in the sociology of philosophy’ (Notturno 1985:10)!

Although I cannot here write a history of the definitions of psychologism, nor a history of the accusations of psychologism from Frege’s and Husserl’s days to the present, it is perhaps worth our while briefly to vindicate these disillusioned comments by listing a number of definitions of psychologism from the last fifty years, and by providing a table of accusers and accused:

Reason, wherever it happens to be realised, is purely and simply reason. To deny this is to commit psychologism.

(Wild 1940:20–1)

To be guilty of [psychologism] is to suppose that the term ‘means’ in such sentences as ‘“A” means B’ stands for a psychological fact involving the symbol ‘A’ and the item B, whether the psychological fact be analysed in terms of Schau, acquaintance or just plain experience.

(Sellars 1949:430)

The [logical] relations are objective, not subjective, in this sense: whether one of these relations does or does not hold in a concrete case is not dependent upon whether or what any person may happen to imagine, think, believe, or know about these sentences… A discrepancy of this kind, where the problems themselves are of an objective nature but the descriptions by which the author intends to give a general characterisation of the problems are framed in subjectivist, psychological terms (like ‘thinking’), is often called psychologism.

(Carnap 1950:39–40)

[Psychologism is] the doctrine that the empirical sciences are reducible to sense-perceptions.

(Popper 1968:93)

While psychology may be defined as the theory of mind, psychologism is the theory of a ‘healthy’, ‘normal’, ‘clear’, ‘ideal’, ‘empty’, ‘purged’, ‘unbiased’, ‘objective’, ‘rational’, or ‘scientific’ mind.

(Lakatos 1978:208)

[Psychologism is] the thesis that an account of the meaning of words must be given in terms of the mental processes which they arouse in speaker or hearer or which are involved in acquiring a grasp of their sense (or the stronger thesis that these mental processes are what we are referring to when we use the words).

(Dummett 1978:88)

Let psychologism be the doctrine that whether behaviour is intelligent behaviour depends on the character of the internal information processing that produces it.

(Block 1981:5)

[Psychologism is] the attempt to analyse characteristically social phenomena in psychological terms.

(Bloor 1983:6)

Psychologism is the doctrine that psychology provides at least part of the explanatory basis for the constitutive understanding of the mental.

(Cussins 1987:126–7)

Epistemological Psychologism: The best way for the knowledge process to produce Truth requires that all producers share the same attitude toward the process, namely, they should all intend to produce Truth.

(Fuller 1988:23)

My purpose in listing these definitions is not to evaluate them or to improve upon them. Rather, this list of definitions—which could easily be continued for some time—is meant to convince the reader that there is indeed no consensus among philosophers as to what psychologism amounts to. We must also note the obvious point that the wide variety of characteristics suggested, as well as their vagueness, makes it an easy feat to identify psychologism or psychologistic tendencies in each and every philosophical system. Indeed, almost all major philosophers have at some point or other been accused of psychologism, often after having laid the very same charge at others; Dummett, McDowell, Popper and Sellars are cases in point.³ However, to write the history of these charges and countercharges for more recent times is not my purpose here. Nevertheless, in order to document the claim that almost all major modern philosophers have been charged with psychologism, at least a table of the main heretics and inquisitors is called for (Figure 1).

It hardly needs a separate argument to make plausible the idea that the strange phenomenon of a whole philosophical community being on the constant lookout for psychologistic tendencies is worthy of some closer sociological attention. The phenomenon at least calls for a closer look at ‘The same old story’.

THE CURSE OF FREGE’S AND HUSSERL’S ANTIPSYCHOLOGISM

Unfortunately, things are even more complicated than I have just suggested. ‘The same old story’ is no longer the only account of the impact of Frege’s and Husserl’s antipsychologism. During the 1980s a rival story has emerged that sees Frege’s antipsychologistic programme in particular as a ‘curse’ rather than a blessing. Indeed, much of the recent work in analytical philosophy can be understood as a ‘revolt against Frege’.⁴ If this story is true, then a study of ‘psychologism is called for in order to understand just what went wrong in turn-of-the-century German philosophy; i.e. the controversy over psychologism merits attention not so much as a marvel of philosophical reasoning but rather as an episode which could be said to have taken philosophy (and psychology) down the wrong track.

To provide a rough outline of the recently emerging rival of ‘The same old story’ is no easy task: the new story is still being written and developed by many different authors. Thus the novel narrative cannot yet be presented coherently, and assembling its various ingredients calls for some extensive quoting and name dropping.

What then is this new rival to ‘The same old story’?

To begin with, Frege has been taken to task for marshalling arguments against his psychologistic opponents that are simply invalid. For instance, a recent detailed study of Frege’s anti-psychologistic argument evaluates it as full of ‘blunders’, and as ‘a galaxy of conceptual confusions’ (Baker and Hacker 1989:81, 101). Other authors question Frege’s view on the proper relation between philosophy and psychology. To quote Michael Dummett’s still fairly sympathetic assessment:

Figure 1

Where both [Frege and Husserl] failed was in demarcating logical notions too strictly from psychological ones… These failings have left philosophy open to a renewed incursion from psychology, under the banner of ‘cognitive science’. The strategies of defence employed by Husserl and Frege will no longer serve: the invaders can be repelled only by correcting the failings of the positive theories of those two pioneers.

(Dummett 1991:287)

Frege’s and Husserl’s antipsychologism is also often seen to have led to a rather unhealthy division in institutional terms. Essentially it is due to these two thinkers that psychology at its very time of emancipation from philosophy was in fact sent into ‘exile’: ‘while the psychologists were leaving, philosophers were slamming the door behind them’ (Sober 1978:165). Philosophers and psychologists today ‘behave like the men and women in an orthodox synagogue. Each group knows about the other, but it is proper form that each should ignore the other’ (Macnamara (1986:1). Students of both psychology and philosophy have ‘the frustrating experience of being discouraged from being psychological in their philosophy tutorials and philosophical in...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• NOTE ON APPENDICES
• 1. PSYCHOLOGISM: AN INTRODUCTION
• 2. TOWARDS A SOCIOLOGY OF PHILOSOPHICAL KNOWLEDGE
• 3. PSYCHOLOGISM REFUTED?
• 4. THE CRITICISM OF HUSSERL’S ARGUMENTS AGAINST PSYCHOLOGISM IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY 1901–20
• 5. VARIETIES OF ‘PSYCHOLOGISM’ 1866–1930
• 6. ROLE HYBRIDISATION: THE RISE OF THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
• 7. ROLE PURIFICATION: THE REACTION OF ‘PURE PHILOSOPHY’ AGAINST THE NEW PSYCHOLOGY
• 8. WINNER TAKES ALL: LEBENSPHILOSOPHIE AND THE TRIUMPH OF PHENOMENOLOGY
• SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY