Psychologism and the Problem of Error (1899–1907)

Abstract

The beginning of analytic philosophy is marked by a certain tension. On the one hand, it is true that ’twentieth-century analytic philosophy is distinguished in its origin by its non-psychological orientation’, as Peter Hacker puts it.¹ On the other hand, psychological theories of wholes and parts, and of judgement and intentionality have played an important role precisely in its origin, as we have seen in the former chapter. In the nineteenth century, psychology was the new successful science, whose methods were considered to be as exact as those of the natural sciences, or even to be identical with those methods. One hoped to develop for philosophy exact laws by taking psychology as its foundation.² Insofar as philosophy is concerned with perception, judgement, concepts, inferences and acts and states of knowledge, a science of the human mind seems to be relevant. Right from the beginning of the nineteenth century, though, philosophers also criticised the use of psychology as far as the theoretical and normative parts of philosophy are concerned. In order to account for the objectivity or universal validity of truth and logic, psychology cannot be foundational to philosophy. Kant had shown, for example, that a normative, applied logic, in which psychology may play a role, presupposes a pure logic, that is, a logic that is independent of psychological concepts (KdrV A 52 ff). In Britain, opposition to the use of psychological methods in philosophy started with the British idealists. Especially the atomistic method in association-psychology was severely criticised by Bradley, and he distinguished between the psychological and the logical idea as we have seen in the first chapter.