Let psychologism be the doctrine that whether behavior is intelligent behavior depends on the character of the internal information processing that produces it. More specifically, I mean psychologism to involve the doctrine that two systems could have actual and potential behavior _typical_ of familiar intelligent beings, that the two systems could be exactly alike in their actual and potential behavior, and in their behavioral dispositions and capacities and counterfactual behavioral properties (i.e., what behaviors, behavioral dispositions, and behavioral capacities (...) they would have exhibited had their stimuli differed)--the two systems could be alike in all these ways, yet there could be a difference in the information processing that mediates their stimuli and responses that determines that one is not at all intelligent while the other is fully intelligent. (shrink)

This paper considers the question of whether Mill's account of the nature and justificatory foundations of deductive logic is psychologistic. Logical psychologism asserts the dependency of logic on psychology. Frequently, this dependency arises as a result of a metaphysical thesis asserting the psychological nature of the subject matter of logic. A study of Mill's System of Logic and his Examination reveals that Mill held an equivocal view of the subject matter of logic, sometimes treating it as a set of (...) psychological processes and at other times as the objects of those processes. The consequences of each of these views upon the justificatory foundations of logic are explored. The paper concludes that, despite his providing logic with a prescriptive function, and despite his avoidance of conceptualism, Mill's theory fails to provide deductive logic with a justificatory foundation that is independent of psychology. (shrink)

This chapter introduces psychologism as the thesis that social facts can explained in terms of more basic facts about individuals, their psychological states, their actions, their relations, and their environments. It argues psychologism should be our default stance toward social reality. It reviews psychologistic approaches to shared intention and how shared intentions can help explain conventions, status functions, and organizations. It provides a deflationary account of corporate attitudes. It argues that neither physical nor social externalism about thought content (...) are incompatible with psychologism. It argues that social construction views of the self that conflict with psychologism are implausible. Finally, it points out that it is no objection to psychologism that social facts can change without changes in psychological facts because this is compatible with psychologism as explained here. (shrink)

In the past few years, a number of philosophers ; Horgan and Tienson 2002; Pitt 2004) have maintained the following three theses: there is a distinctive sort of phenomenology characteristic of conscious thought, as opposed to other sorts of conscious mental states; different conscious thoughts have different phenomenologies; and thoughts with the same phenomenology have the same intentional content. The last of these three claims is open to at least two different interpretations. It might mean that the phenomenology of a (...) thought expresses its intentional content, where intentional content is understood as propositional, and propositions are understood as mind-and language-independent abstract entities. And it might mean that the phenomenology of a thought is its intentional content—that is, that the phenomenology of a thought, like the phenomenology of a sensation, constitutes its content. The second sort of view is a kind of psychologism. Psychologistic views hold that one or another sort of thing—numbers, sentences, propositions, etc.—that we can think or know about is in fact a kind of mental thing. Since Frege, psychologism has been in bad repute among analytic philosophers. It is widely held that Frege showed that such views are untenable, since, among other things, they subjectivize what is in fact objective, and, hence, relativize such things as consistency and truth to the peculiarities of human psychology. The purpose of this paper is to explore the consequences of the thesis that intentional mental content is phenomenological and to try to reach a conclusion about whether it yields a tenable view of mind, thought and meaning. I believe the thesis is not so obviously wrong as it will strike many philosophers of mind and language. In fact, it can be defended against the standard objections to psychologism, and it can provide the basis for a novel and interesting account of mentality. (shrink)

This paper argues that a class of popular views of collective intention, which I call “quasi-psychologism”, faces a problem explaining common intuitions about collective action. Views in this class hold that collective intentions are realized in or constituted by individual, mental, participatory intentions. I argue that this metaphysical commitment entails persistence conditions that are in tension with a purported obligation to notify co-actors before leaving a collective action attested to by participants in experimental research about the interpersonal normativity of (...) collective action. I then explore the possibilities open to quasi-psychologists for responding to this research. (shrink)

Psychologism in logic holds that logic is a branch of psychology. This view has been vigorously defended by John Stuart Mill and by a number of German philosophers of logic, notably Erdmann. Its chief critics have been Husserl and Frege and, to a lesser extent, Russell. Husserl set forth a profound and detailed critique of psychologism in Logical Investigations. This paper examines this critique. First, I explain why the psychologistic theory is attractive. Then I show that Husserl's critique (...) is not convincing, partly because he does not take the theory in its most plausible form and partly because he ignores certain important distinctions (for example, between what a statement is about and what it is true in virtue of). Then I raise two new objections to the psychologistic theory. The purpose of this paper is to suggest that the psychologistic theory remains an important and serious position from which we can learn much about the status of logic. (shrink)

People do things for various reasons. Are these motivating reasons psychological? I argue here that such reasons are typically not purely psychological. Yet there is an important psychological element or aspect of these reasons. I proceed by first reviewing some arguments for and against psychologism about (motivating) reasons. Next, I do the same for the view that reasons are typically non-psychological facts. I then explore some additional alternatives: a) disjunctivist views, b) the appositional account, and finally c) naïve action (...) theory, which I favour. Naïve action theory transcends and preserves the best features of both standard psychologism and standard anti-psychologism. (shrink)

Psychologism is a philosophical ideology that seeks to explain the principles of logic, metaphysics, and epistemology as psychological phenomena. Psychologism has been the storm center of concerted criticisms since the nineteenth century, and is thought by many to have been refuted once and for all by Kant, Frege, Husserl, and others. The project of accounting for objective philosophical or mathematical truths in terms of subjective psychological states has been largely discredited in mainstream analytic thought. Ironically, psychologism has (...) resurfaced in unexpected guises in the form of intuitionistic logic and mathematics, cognitivism, and naturalized epistemology. I examine some of the principal objections to psychologism – distinguishing roughly between good and bad or philosophically acceptable versus unacceptable psychologism – and consider the extent to which a new wave of psychologism may be gaining prominence in contemporary philosophy, and the light its successes and failures may shed on the original concept and underlying perspective of classical psychologism. (shrink)

The end of the nineteenth century is remembered as a time when psychology freed itself from philosophy and carved out an autonomous subject matter for itself. In fact, this time of emancipation was also a time of exile: while the psychologists were leaving, philosophers were slamming the door behind them. Frege is celebrated for having demonstrated the irrelevance of psychological considerations to philosophy. Some of Frege’s reasons for distinguishing psychological questions from philosophical ones were sound, but one of Frege’s most (...) influential arguments, which was elaborated upon and advocated by the positivists, vastly overestimated the gap separating the two disciplines. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on one of the common fallacies in Western philosophy called 'psychologist's fallacy'. William James, in his Principles of Psychology, coined “the psychologist's fallacy”. It is a fallacy of relativism. James articulated the psychologist's fallacy as if it were a confusion between first‐person and third‐person points of view. Importantly, an experience and its description are different, and from the first‐person point of view, whatever a person experiences is identical with what that experience is. Therefore, the first‐person point of (...) view of an experience, because it is the view of actually having the experience itself, is itself the truth of the experience. To avoid this fallacy, one needs to ground arguments with claims that hold necessarily and universally. Neither descriptions of experience based on subjective judgments nor the occurrence of specific accidental‐psychological events hold necessarily or universally regarding human psychology. (shrink)

When is an artwork complete? Most hold that the correct answer to this question is psychological in nature. A work is said to be complete just in case the artist regards it as complete or is appropriately disposed to act as if he or she did. Even though this view seems strongly supported by metaphysical, epistemological, and normative considerations, this article argues that such psychologism about completeness is mistaken, fundamentally, because it cannot make sense of the artist's own perspective (...) on his or her work. For the artist, the question is not about his or her own psychology, but about the character of the work and the context in which he or she works. A nonpsychological account of completeness, on which completeness is a question of whether the work satisfies the conditions implicit in the artist's plan, avoids this problem and is equally or better able to explain the metaphysical, epistemic, and normative phenomena which appeared to support psychologism. (shrink)

Psychologism is the view that practical reasons are psychological states. It is widely thought that psychologism is supported by the following principle governing explanation: TF. The difference between false and true beliefs on A's part cannot alter the form of the explanation which will be appropriate to A's actions. (TF) seems to imply that we always need to cite agents' beliefs when explaining their actions, no matter whether those beliefs are true or false. And this seems to vindicate (...) psychologism. I argue, however, that the standard argument for psychologism which includes (TF) as a premise in fact fails to establish its intended conclusion. As a result, the overall case for psychologism is not as strong as it may initially seem. (shrink)

What sorts of things can be evidence for belief? Five answers have been defended in the recent literature on the ontology of evidence: propositions, facts, psychological states, factive psychological states, all of the above. Each of the first three views privileges a single role that the evidence plays in our doxastic lives, at the cost of occluding other important roles. The fifth view, pluralism, is a natural response to such dubious favouritism. If we want to be monists about evidence and (...) accommodate all roles for the concept, we need to think of evidence as propositional, psychological and factive. Our only present option along these lines is the fourth view, which holds that evidence consists of all and only known propositions. But the view comes with some fairly radical commitments. This paper proposes a more modest view—‘truthy psychologism’. According to this view, evidence is also propositional, psychological and factive; but we don’t need the stronger claim that only knowledge can fill this role; true beliefs are enough. I first argue for truthy psychologism by appeal to some standard metaethical considerations. I then show that the view can accommodate all of the roles epistemologists have envisaged for the concept of evidence. Truthy psychologism thus gives us everything we want from the evidence, without forcing us to go either pluralist or radical. (shrink)

Little of the work in critical and hermeneutical psychology has been linked to instructional technology. This article provides a discussion in order to fill the gap in this direction. The article presents a brief genealogy of American IT in relation to the influence of psychology. It also provides a critical and hermeneutical framework for psychology. It then discusses some problems of psychologism focusing on positivism, metaphysics, cultural ecology, and power. The narrow psychologism in IT produces a kind of (...) systematic blindness regarding cultural, political, and other issues. IT professionals are encouraged to engage reflectively with the power‐relations and ethical issues in which they are involved. The article points out a need for looking at psychology more comprehensively. (shrink)

This paper is about the topic of psychologism in the work of Kazimierz Twardowski and my aim is to revisit this important issue in light of recent publications from, and on Twardowski’s works. I will first examine the genesis of psychologism in the young Twardowski’s work; secondly, I will examine Twardowski’s picture theory of meaning and Husserl’s criticism in Logical Investigations; the third part is about Twardowski’s recognition and criticism of his psychologism in his lectures on the (...) psychology of thinking; the fourth and fifth parts provide an overview of Twardowski’s paper “Actions and Products” while the sixth part addresses the psychologism issue in the last part of this paper through the delineation of psychology and the humanities. I shall conclude this study with a brief assessment of Twardowski’s solution to psychologism. (shrink)

The most plausible of Yarkoni's paths to recovery for psychology is the least radical one: psychologists need truly quantitative methods that exploit the informational power of variance and heterogeneity in multiple variables. If they drop ambitions to explain entire behaviors, they could find a box full of design and econometric tools in the parts of experimental economics that don't ape psychology.

Guided by the APA Ethics Code and social justice, this book helps psychologists solve ethical dilemmas while empowering those impacted by their work.

First published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Husserl and Frege did not criticize psychologism on the ground that it deduced the norms of logic from non-normative premises (naturalistic fallacy), as is often supposed. Rather, their refutation of psychologism assumes that such a deduction is possible. Husserl compared the rules of logic to those of technology, on the supposition that they have a purely theoretical basis. This conception of logic is critically examined, and it is argued (contra Follesdal) that Frege held a similar view.

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.

This article examines the development of Russell's treatment of propositions, in relation to the topic of psychologism. In the first section, we outline the concept of psychologism, and show how it can arise in relation to theories of the nature of propositions. Following this, we note the anti-psychologistic elements of Russell's thought dating back to his idealist roots. From there, we sketch the development of Russell's theory of the proposition through a number of its key transitions. We show (...) that Russell, in responding to a variety of different problems relating to the proposition, chose to resolve these problems in ways that continually made concessions to psychologism. (shrink)

Psychologism is the target of vehement disapproval in much of mainstream philosophy from Kant to the present day. Yet although antipsychologistic rhetoric is adamant, there is little substantive argument against psychologism to be discovered in contemporary discussions of the problem. Many recent influential philosophical projects, moreover, including intuitionistic logic, conceptualism in the ontology of mathematics and the program to naturalize epistemology, are in different ways efforts to apply modern psychology in the service of philosophical theory. In this essay, (...) I critically survey the history of attacks on psychologism and conclude with a refutation of eight of the most important objections of the theory. My purpose is both to try to clarify the concept of psychologism and to encourage a renewed dialectical interaction between proponents and opponents of the philosophical merits of psychologism. (shrink)

The last in a series of examinations, this paper articulates Husserl's mature position on the nature of a phenomenologically informed human science. Falling between the naïve positivity of a naturalistic approach to psychology and the transcendental view of consciousness at the base of phenomenological philosophy, we argue that a human scientific psychology—while not itself transcendental in nature needs to re-arise upon the transcendental ground as an empirical—but no longer transcendentally naïve—discipline through Husserl's notion of the "return to positivity." This notion (...) of the return allows us to avoid "transcendental psychologism," differentiating psychological from transcendental subjectivity but from a transcendental, rather than naïve perspective. In this way, the return to positivity reclaims psychology as a worldly, but no longer naïve, discipline. To facilitate an understanding of the different perspectives in question, and the process of leaving the naturalistic perspective in order to return to it once armed with a transcendental understanding and its associated tools, we continue to develop the illustrative example of anorexia provided in the first part of this series. In conclusion, we discuss the implications of this framework for transcendental reforms both of clinical practice and of psychological research. (shrink)

Both the phenomenology of Husserl and the pragmatist phenomenology of James can be categorized by the formula “radical empiricism,” which is explicit in James and implicit, but no less pervasive, in Husserl. For both of them, radical empiricism is additionally conjoined with an equally radical anti-psychologism. The problem is that the two terms “radical empiricism” and “anti-psychologism” take on a radically different meaning in the two authors. This essay aims to investigate the structural differences between two perspectives that, (...) while following completely different courses, seem to share the same objective: to elaborate a philosophy which at no point moves away from the experiential plane. (shrink)

Corcoran, J. 2007. Psychologism. American Philosophy: an Encyclopedia. Eds. John Lachs and Robert Talisse. New York: Routledge. Pages 628-9. -/- Psychologism with respect to a given branch of knowledge, in the broadest neutral sense, is the view that the branch is ultimately reducible to, or at least is essentially dependent on, psychology. The parallel with logicism is incomplete. Logicism with respect to a given branch of knowledge is the view that the branch is ultimately reducible to logic. Every (...) branch of knowledge depends on logic. Psychologism is found in several fields including history, political science, economics, ethics, epistemology, linguistics, aesthetics, mathematics, and logic. Logicism is found mainly in branches of mathematics: number theory, analysis, and, more rarely, geometry. Although the ambiguous term ‘psychologism’ has senses with entirely descriptive connotations, it is widely used in senses that are derogatory. No writers with any appreciation of this point will label their own views as psychologistic. It is usually used pejoratively by people who disapprove of psychologism. The term ‘scientism’ is similar in that it too has both pejorative and descriptive senses but its descriptive senses are rarely used any more. It is almost a law of linguistics that the negative connotations tend to drive out the neutral and the positive. Dictionaries sometimes mark both words with a usage label such as “Usually disparaging”. In this article, the word is used descriptively mainly because there are many psychologistic views that are perfectly respectable and even endorsed by people who would be offended to have their views labeled psychologism. A person who subscribes to logicism is called a logicist, but there is no standard word for a person who subscribes to psychologism. ‘Psychologist’, which is not suitable, occurs in this sense. ‘Psychologician’, with stress on the second syllable as in ‘psychologist’, has been proposed. In the last century, some of the most prominent forms of psychologism pertained to logic; the rest of this article treats only such forms. Psychologism in logic is very “natural”. After all, logic studies reasoning, which is done by the mind, whose nature and functioning is studied in psychology—using the word ‘psychology’ in its broadest etymological sense. (shrink)

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.

In a recent article (Inquiry, Vol. 19 [1976]), J. W. Meiland addresses the issue of psychologism in logic, which holds that logic is a branch of psychology and that logical laws (such as the Principle of Non?Contradiction) are contingent upon the nature of the mind. Meiland examines Husserl's critique of psychologism, argues that Husserl is not convincing, and offers two new objections to the psychologistic thesis. In this paper I attempt to rebut those objections. In question are the (...) acceptable criteria for determining the possibility or impossibility of systems of logic significantly different from our own. I argue that a criteriological application of our accepted laws of logic to this question commits a circular fallacy. I then argue that, even if we accept logical consistency as a criterion for possibility, a plausible argument for the possibility of valid alternative logics can be constructed by using the functionalist analogy between minds and automata. Finally, I attempt to rebut the claim that in logic the only changes possible are conceptual changes that would not permit a proposition to be both true and false. (shrink)

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to talk to all those famous names you've read about in psychology? How and why did they get interested in psychology, and what makes them tick? Why was Eysenck so hostile to Freud? What was Skinner's problem with feelings? Psychologists on Psychology presents a fascinating snapshot of psychology's leading protagonists. The last century has seen radical changes in thinking and practice, and the arguments that drive this change are surprisingly deep. These (...) interviews give an insight into the conflicts and controversies at the heart of contemporary psychology, revealing a clash of visions of what human nature is all about. From Skinner to Chomsky, Eysenck to Damasio, Psychologists on Psychology is a unique collection of in-depth conversations with world-famous psychologists. (shrink)

Bertrand Russel asked in a newspaper column (1932) of astrologers: “Do they believe themselves in the sciences that they profess?” This paper asks whether academic psychologists believed the science that they professed. The replication crisis—researchers do not obtain results comparable to the original when repeating that study—has, in the past decade, seriously challenged psychology's status as a science. Most of the social and behavioral sciences have been invalidated by the replication crisis, but I focus on psychology because of my personal (...) involvement in this field. I draw on the work of Žižek and Zupančič on denial and disavowal to approach the question of what we believed. I will argue, contra Zupančič, that disavowal is not necessarily a phenomenon of mass individualism. As doctoral students, we learned to transgress scientific norms, and then to act as if this transgression had never happened. To enter the community of scientists, we had to disavow that psychology is not a science. After running enough studies—falling on our knees and praying—some of us came to believe that psychology is a science, whilst others held on to a more cynical position. Subjectively some of us believed, some did not, objectively we all believed. I also pursue the related questions of why we did what we did—why was it, for psychology as a field, necessary to break scientific norms and what enjoyment did we, as subjects, derive from what we were doing? (shrink)

In the United States, prohibitionist policies are used as the primary approach to combat the negative effect of substance use on society. An extensive academic literature spanning the disciplines of economics, political science, and multiculturalism documents the great social costs of the United States’ “War on Drugs” both nationally and internationally. These costs come with at best marginal effect on substance abuse and other crimes linked to the drug trade. In many cases, there is a reason to believe that these (...) policies exacerbate the problems they aim to address. This article explores psychologists’ ethical commitments to social change concerning such drug policy, given the field of psychology’s expanding commitment to social justice. We examine arguments regarding the boundaries between psychologists’ personal and professional ethics with regard to political participation. Using drug prohibition as an exemplar, we suggest that many psychologists’ political actions and professional ethics may be misaligned. Ultimately, we conclude that the endorsement of prohibitionist drug policies is in direct conflict with the guiding ethical principles put forth by the American Psychological Association’s Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. (shrink)

Many philosophers of science follow Hempel in embracing both substantive and methodological anti-psychologism regarding the study of explanation. The former thesis denies that explanations are constituted by psychological events, and the latter denies that psychological research can contribute much to the philosophical investigation of the nature of explanation. Substantive anti-psychologism is commonly defended by citing cases, such as hyper-complex descriptions or vast computer simulations, which are reputedly generally agreed to constitute explanations but which defy human comprehension and, as (...) a result, fail to engender any relevant psychological events. It is commonly held that the truth of the substantive thesis would lend support to the methodological thesis. However, the standard argument for the substantive thesis presumes that philosophers’ own judgments about the aforementioned cases issues from mastery of the lay or scientific norms regarding the use of ‘explanation.’ Here we challenge this presumption with a series of experiments indicating that both lay and scientific populations require of explanations that they actually render their targets intelligible. This research not only undermines a standard line of argument for substantive anti-psychologism, it demonstrates the utility of psychological research methods for answering meta-questions about the norms regarding the use of ‘explanation.’. (shrink)

The understanding of and adherence to professional ethics is fundamental in navigating the moral encounters and dilemmas that all psychologists face in their daily work, whether in research or professional practice. Core values and principles remain stable. However as more complex and conflicting societal contexts come into play, the individual psychologist and the professional community need support in upholding a solid moral integrity. The volume is a welcome resource for any psychologist or student wanting to foresee, prevent, and professionally manage, (...) in an ethically responsible way, the moral challenges that arise. The framework for this timely, second edition remains the Meta-code of Ethics of the European Federation of Psychologists Associations (EFPA), which is an important asset in addressing the challenges faced by the profession now and in the coming years. The discussions of the principles on the meta-code are further developed and the authors have extended the number and types of practical examples to vividly illustrate ethical challenges and dilemmas faced. Read, discuss, and evaluate your practice. (shrink)

Outline: 1. Why Judgment? 2. Inverse Psychologism: General Issues 3. Inverse Psychologism in the Phenomeno-Logic of Judgment 4. Judgment and Language 5. [De-]stabilizing Kant ’s Inverse Psychologism.

Psychologism is the attempt to account for the necessary truths of mathematics in terms of contingent psychological facts. It is widely regarded as a fallacy. Jackendoff's view of reference and truth entails psychologism. Therefore, he needs to either provide a defense of the doctrine, or show that the charge doesn't apply.

The intuition that we can think about non-existent objects seems to be in tension with philosophical concerns about the relationality of intentionality. Tim Crane’s psychologism removes this tension by proposing a psychologistic account of intentionality according to which intentionality is a purely non-relational notion. I argue that his account has counterintuitive consequences regarding our thoughts about existing objects, and as such is insufficiently plausible to convince us to reject the relationality of intentionality.

Clinical psychologists' and nonpsychiatric physicians' attitudes and behaviors in sexual and confidentiality boundary violations were examined. The 171 participants' responses were analyzed by profession, sex, and status (student, resident, professional) on semantic differential, boundary violation vignettes, and a version of Pope, Tabachnick, and Keith-Spiegel's (1987) ethical scale. Psychologists rated sexual boundary violation as more unethical than did physicians (p<.001). Rationale (p<.01) and timing (p<.001) influenced ratings. Psychologists reported fewer sexualized behaviors than physicians (p<05). Professional experience (p<.01) and sex (p<.05) were (...) associated with confidence-violating behavior. Overall, 78% of the sample reported attitudes or behaviors associated with boundary violations. The behavior violations were correlated (r=.49). Actual violators rated vignette violators more leniently than did nonviolators (p<.01). (shrink)

The ‘psychologist’s green thumb’ refers to the argument that an experimenter needs an indeterminate set of skills to successfully replicate an effect. This argument is sometimes invoked by psychological researchers to explain away failures of independent replication attempts of their work. In this paper, I assess the psychologist’s green thumb as a candidate explanation for individual replication failure and argue that it is potentially costly for psychology as a field. I also present other, more likely reasons for these replication failures. (...) I conclude that appealing to a psychologist’s green thumb is not a convincing explanation for replication failure. (shrink)

This book presents a remarkable diversity of contemporary opinions on the prospects of addressing philosophical topics from a psychological perspective. It considers the history and philosophical merits of psychologism, and looks systematically at psychologism in phenomenology, cognitive science, epistemology, logic, philosophy of language, philosophical semantics, and artificial intelligence.

Krueger & Funder (K&F) see social psychologists as driven to demonstrate that people's behavior falls below relevant moral and intellectual standards. We suggest that social psychologists search for demonstrations of when it is that people's actual behaviors and decisions deviate from expected or ideal behaviors and decisions, and what these “deviations” tell us about general decision processes, including those that do not produce unexpected actions. Often the discoveries are of positive rather than negative behaviors.

The confusion between cognitive states and the content of cognitive states that gives rise to psychologism also gives rise to reverse psychologism. Weak reverse psychologism says that we can study cognitive states by studying content – for instance, that we can study the mind by studying linguistics or logic. This attitude is endemic in cognitive science and linguistic theory. Strong reverse psychologism says that we can generate cognitive states by giving computers representations that express the content (...) of cognitive states and that play a role in causing appropriate behaviour. This gives us strong representational, classical AI (REPSCAI), and I argue that it cannot succeed. This is not, as Searle claims in his Chinese Room Argument, because syntactic manipulation cannot generate content. Syntactic manipulation can generate content, and this is abundantly clear in the Chinese Room scenano. REPSCAI cannot succeed because inner content is not sufficient for cognition, even when the representations that carry the content play a role in generating appropriate behaviour. (shrink)

Psychological research and theory has been in the past, and is at present, vitiated by three groups of presuppositions and tendencies. Firstly, by a rigid ideal of preciseness, which produces in the mind of psychologists a biased predilection for selecting and emphasizing those facts which lend themselves best to a precise investigation, and for neglecting those facts with which this is not the case. Secondly, by certain psychological presuppositions rooted in the ideological background of the society to which the psychologist (...) himself belongs; these presuppositions induce him often to state, unwittingly, certain of his problems along the lines suggested by the predominant ideology. And thirdly, by the tendency to overlook, or to neglect, certain very important facts because these facts appear to be quite “obvious”. (shrink)

Deep neural networks (DNNs) are powerful computational models, which generate complex, high-level representations that were missing in previous models of human cognition. By studying these high-level representations, psychologists can now gain new insights into the nature and origin of human high-level vision, which was not possible with traditional handcrafted models. Abandoning DNNs would be a huge oversight for psychological sciences.

William James, one of the major founders of modern scientific psychology, spoke often about "the psychologist's fallacy." This fallacy resulted from the tendency of psychologists to confuse their analyses of subjective experience with the nature of so-called objective reality. A related, though less attended problem revolved around what I shall call "the psychologist's dilemma." Although this latter problem was shared by other psychologists at the turn of this century, I will discuss it with special reference to the thought and work (...) of William James. I have chosen to do so partially because James's own psychological and philosophical works reflect the import and centrality of this dilemma in the history of the human sciences, and partially in recognition and honor of the one hundredth anniversary of James's two-volume masterpiece, The Principles of Psychology, which will be celebrated in 1990. As I hope will be clear, this dilemma continues to be relevant to the concerns of contemporary psychologists. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), Kant sought to explain the objectivity of cognition by describing the operation of certain human cognitive activities. That is, in some sense Kant explained cognition's objectivity by appealing to features of the mind. A century later, the Marburg School Neo-Kantians Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp would insist that philosophers must explain cognition's objectivity without appeal to the subject's mind. Once at the center of the Kantian account of objectivity, the mind had been expunged (...) from it. This shift was the emergence of anti-psychologism, the view that the mind has no place in philosophical accounts of cognition's objectivity. This dissertation offers an account of how that shift happened. Chapter 1 argues that a central section of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, the Transcendental Deduction, is a description of a cognitive operation—namely, the apperception's synthesis of the manifold of sensible intuition. Because this operation is necessary, it determines the structures that a subject's cognition must conform to, and thus explains cognition's objectivity for Kant. But Kant's view that the mind is characterized by necessary cognitive operations was abandoned in the nineteenth century in favour of purely empirical conceptions of the mind. Chapter 2 argues that, in response to this change and in particular to the psychologism of the Back to Kant movement, Cohen developed an anti-psychologistic account of cognition's objectivity: for him, objectivity must be explained by appeal to the principles and laws of mathematics and pure natural science. But his account fails, since he does rot explain why those laws explain cognition's intersubjectivity. Chapter 3 examines Wilhelm Wundt's and Ernst Mach's attempts to articulate purely empirical conceptions of the mind, and to explain cognition's objectivity by appeal to the mind so conceived, as well as Hermann Lotze's anti-psychologism. Chapter 4 argues that, for Natorp, fundamental physical laws constitute the intersubjective content of cognition because they are invariant across space and time, and so different subjects can share representations of them despite having different points of view on the world. Natorp thus finally articulates a successful anti-psychologistic alternative to Kant's account of objectivity. (shrink)

Because of the importance of Puritanism in its history, one of the forms taken by religious Angst at the end of the 19th century in New England was uneasiness about the psychological nature and validity of the conversion experience. Apart from William James and G. Stanley Hall, the leading psychologists who investigated this phenomenon were Edwin Starbuck and James Leuba. Each had a different personal stance with regard to the plausibility of religious belief. In practice their differences of opinion over (...) the psychology of conversion pivoted round the role of sexuality. In the first part of the 20th century their conflicting views brought to the fore themes that were eventually given full expression 40 years later in Paul Ricoeur’s account of the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’. (shrink)

Although it is not documentarily proven, it is not unlikely that the young Wittgenstein read at least part of William James’s psychological work. In this paper we have compared their respective points of view about psychologism and the conception of the self. The result is a complex pattern of similarities and differences. If James and the early Wittgenstein coincide in their opposition to psychologism and the Cartesian conception of the subject, they do so from very different philosophical positions: (...) that of a naturalist focus in the case of the American thinker; that of a transcendental focus in the Austrian thinker. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The authors argue that individual psychologists have an obligation to understand, review, and comment on upcoming revisions of the Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct. Psychologists may want to consider several factors as they review and prepare comments on these revisions. Among other things, commenting psychologists should consider the purposes of ethics codes and how the writing of a code can meet or balance these often-conflicting purposes; the overarching ethical theory or theories that should form the basis (...) of the APA Ethics Code; and the extent to which individual standards are useful and comprehensive, and avoid unnecessary harm to both the public and psychologists. The authors provide examples from the current and recent APA Ethics Codes to illustrate the types of decisions that psychologists must make when evaluating revisions to the APA Ethics Code. (shrink)

This article develops Frege's conception of answerability, and his correlative views on psychologism of the first sort. Compared to prior philosophers, such as British empiricists, Frege is a minimalist in the demands he sets on answerability. If he is ever less than minimalist, that is something that flows out of his particular conception of logic. The article then turns to Wittgenstein's conception of answerability, by which Frege is not quite minimalist enough. That allows us to see how the pursuit (...) of answerability might lead to psychologism of the second kind. (shrink)

Jonathan Dancy’s Practical Reality is, I think, best understood as an attempt to undermine our allegiance to these two purported constitutive claims about action. If we must think that psychological states figure in the explanation of action then, according to Dancy, we should suppose that those psychological states are beliefs rather than desire-belief pairs. Dancy thus prefers pure cognitivism to Humeanism. But in fact he thinks that we have no business accepting any form of psychologism in the first place; (...) no business accepting a theory that explains an agent’s actions by reference to that agent’s psychological states. For though it is indeed a truism that actions are explained by reasons, Dancy argues that psychological states are only rarely, if ever, reasons. He thus prefers the unadorned normative story, a story which contents itself with explaining actions by laying out the considerations in the light of which the agent acted as he did, to any form of psychologism. I will consider Dancy’s arguments for these claims in turn. (shrink)