Studies In Logical Psychologism

From the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20 th century,a debate over the relationship between logic and psychology was launched between psychologism and anti-psychologism in the western philosophy and logic circles.This debate ended up with a phased victory by anti-psychologism and it was once thought to be the end of psychologism.In the middle and late20 th century,influenced by the development of disciplines,some new relationship types between logic and psychology emerged.Some psychologists and logicians began to study the disciplinary intersection and fusion and explore the interplay between these two disciplines.Some new development directions emerge in modern logic research.For example,after studying some factors,such as information,beliefs,and subjects,which influence people's reasoning practices,certain modern epistemic logicians indicate that there is a correlation between logic theory,psychological factors,and empirical practices.Therefore,today,by carefully and thoroughly combing and studying the entire development context of the idea of logical psychologism,especially studying the cross-fusion between the two disciplines in the new period,from its being proposed to its being criticized and to the emergence of new research ideas,the author rethinks the status and role of psychological factors in logic.And this study is considered to be of great theoretical significance to explore and analyze the development process of logic and interdisciplinary research and to investigate the relationship between them.This article is devoted to the study of the transition process from psychologism,to anti-psychologism,to communication and integration,and to the so-called "new psychologism" from the beginning of the ideological trend of logical psychologism to the present,which about the discussion of the relationship between logic and psychology in logic circles.Based on these changes in thought,the dissertation consists of three aspects,the 19 th century logical psychologism,anti-psychologism represented by Frege and Husserl,and contemporary reflection on logical psychologism.And the paper is divided into the following five parts.The first part is an introduction,including the domestic and foreign research review,the significance and purpose of this research,as well as the structure of the thesis.The chapter one is a review of the 19th-century European trend in logical psychologism.Firstly,it outlines the background of the generation of psychologism,and then discusses and analyzes Mill's logical psychologism in detail and the logical psychologism in German philosophy in the same period.Logical psychologism holds the following claims on the relationship between logic and psychology,logic is only describing natural process of human thinking,and its research objects have the characteristics of human thinking or psychology.Logical truth is based on human experience and beliefs,and its test standard is the empirical facts that people believe.The laws of logic belong to the laws of thinking and are based on the laws of psychology,so they are the result of mental activity.The logic method is essentially psychoanalysis or psychological methods,and the study of logic presupposes psychoanalysis or psychological research.In short,logic is based on psychology and is a part of psychology.On the basis of clarification of the logical psychologism,it demonstrates that the similar philosophical thoughts among Mill and German philosophers was rooted in the fact that they both accepted the British empiricist philosophy,and believed that experience is the basis and source of knowledge.Through comparison,it is also found that the biggest difference between Mill's logical psychologism and German psychologism is whether the experience on which logic depends is individual experience or the experience of the entire human being.It is criticized that Logical psychologism exaggerates the role of experience,violates the basic characteristics of logic,and therefore,led to relativism.However,while criticizing the disadvantages of logical psychologism,its positive significance should also be acknowledged due to the fact that it attaches importance to the practice of human reasoning,and enriches the scope of logic research by including the inductive reasoning methods in daily reasoning and the experimental methods of natural science in the scope of logic research.Therefore,a new branch of logic,the study of inductive logic,has been developed and promoted.The chapter two systematically expounds the anti-psychologism ideas represented by Frege and Husserl.It discusses in detail the critiques of logical psychologism by Frege,Husserl,et al,and the logical view of anti-psychologism established on the basis of criticism.Based on this discussion,the basic points of anti-psychologism have been summarized.First,due to the characteristics of the discipline,it is least likely that the precise and strict logic,which have necessity,cannot be built on the basis of psychology,which is probably,fuzzy and imprecise.Second,Psychologism confuses the prescriptive laws and natural(descriptive)laws of thinking,and "true" and "being-taken-to-be-true",and therefore,confuses the logical concept with the concept of psychology.Thirdly,Psychologism must lead to relativism.Ever since the anti-psychologism by Frege and Husserl was put forward,it has become the mainstream view to answer the question of the relationship between logic and psychology,which was advocated by many philosophers and logicians.But their criticism also has some shortcomings.On the question of how to grasp the thought,Frege fails to provide a feasible theory of understanding to explain how the abstract thinker can pass his grasped thoughts to people,which can highly likely lead to mysticism.By comparing the differences between logic and psychology in terms of concepts and disciplinary characteristics,Husserl constantly argued that psychologism was proved to be wrong,but he failed to demonstrate that the research objects of logic has no correlation with psychological factors from the research objects and the subject matter of logic.Hence,although he tried to set a clear boundary between logic and psychology,he could not cut off the connection among truth,logical laws,logical reasoning,and psychological factors.The chapter three analyzes the new research and reflection on logical psychologism from several perspectives of contemporary logic.Firstly,it discusses the challenge faced by contemporary discipline development to anti-psychologism and psychologism,among which Piaget's psycho-logic is the application of logical methods in psychology while epistemic logic examines the role of psychological factors in the study of logic.Then it elaborates on David Godden's pragmatic approach,by which he avoided psychologism.His research method is as following,setting five criteria that reject psychologism as evaluation standards,taking pragmatic interpretation,and treating logic as a methodology which researched necessary consequence to avoid psychologism.After that it discusses the classification doctrine of psychologism of Pelletier and of others.They divided psychologism into four categories,psychological individualism(the classic logical psychologistic position represented by Mill),psychological descriptivism,cognitive architecture and ideal cognizers.Thereby they drew a conclusion that no matter what kind of modification of the classic logical psychologiam was,as long as its views were still psychologistic,those objections cannot be completely avoided.In fact,this theory implies the modification of psychologism in the view of anti-psychologism.Finally,it examines a "new psychologism" of Johan van Benthem,which was not the same as the classic logical psychologism in the 19 th century,but expressed a view on the basis of summarizing modern research methods of dynamic epistemic logic.That is,the connection between empirical experiences and logic was long-standing and inseparable.Logic should focus on the actual reasoning of human beings,and on the impacts of various factors such as situation or environment,experiences,memory,interaction between cognitive agents,information update and belief revision and so on.It should deal with the dynamic issues of information update and belief revision in the representation + transformation schema,which not only breaks the boundary between logic,cognitive science and psychology,but also promotes the integration of logic with other disciplines.In this chapter,the author has elaborated on the pragmatic approach of David Godden,the classification doctrine of psychologism of Peltier et al.,and a "new psychologism" of van Benthem.What's more,she summarizes the main points of their theories,analyzes the theoretical significances,advantages and disadvantages.The last part which serves as a summary of the dissertation is the end of the thesis.The innovations in the thesis are as follows.First of all,the thesis carefully analyzes and compares the logical psychologism of Mill and German philosophers,revealing the commonalities and points out the following differences.On the one hand,Mill emphasized the dependence of logic on personal experience and facts,which moved towards individual relativism,while German psychologism focuses on the basic status of human consciousness,and went to human relativism.On the other hand,Mill started from logic itself and searched for a universal methodology based on psychological association,namely inductive methods and inductive logic,and he then extended psychologism in the field of logic to other sciences,while German psychologism was based on the philosophy as a whole;that is,philosophy was based on human psychology and empirical facts,and it then clarified that logic is based on psychology.Second,the thesis conducted a thorough analysis of the logical views of logical psychologism and anti-psychologism,suggesting that the definitions of logic were different between them;logical psychologism believed that logical concepts and laws were new knowledge which generated from experiences and facts.Only inductive logic was true logic which could acquire new knowledge from experiences.However,in the point of anti-psychologism,logic is one of a priori and normative science because the laws of logic have some characteristics,such as necessity and prior validity.Thus,only classical logic is the true logic.In other words,logical psychologism is from the standpoint of inductive logic,emphasizes that logical reasoning based on special experiences,and requires from the known to the unknown.On the contrary,anti-psychologism stands on classic logic,adheres to normativity and necessity,and treats logic as the science of studying the norms of thinking.The third innovation is that the thesis analyzes Godden's pragmatic approach,and points out that this scheme actually understands logic as a methodology or a science of art.This science does not study where the theories,laws,truth,and knowledge come from but their uses,which turns logic into a set of laws,criteria and methods for evaluating and guiding necessary consequence.Admittedly,it is true that it could avoid falling into psychologism but it also limits the research scope of logic as a complete science.Finally,the thesis gives some insights by exploring van Benthem's “new psychologism”.First,although “new psychologism” is named as “psychologism”,it is different from the classic logical psychologism.Though it reincorporates the experiences and human reasoning practices into the field of logic research,but,instead of using psychology as the basis of logical research,it emphasizes the role of empirical facts,information,beliefs,agents and other factors in logical reasoning on the basis of endorsing the prior validity of logical laws.It not only breaks the boundary between logic and psychology,but also to a certain extent answers the issue of the relationship between logical thinking and psychological factors.In addition,the empirical facts that “New psychologism” concerns about relate not to the specific experiences of individuals but to people's common intuitions so as to avoid dividual relativism.Meanwhile,its significant difference from anti-psychologism cannot be ignored.Unlike anti-psychologism that thoroughly separates logic from psychology;“new psychologism” emphasizes the importance of empirical facts of human reasoning rather than the dependence on psychological experiences.On the contrary,logic,psychology,cognitive science and other disciplines are interdisciplinary,which implies that logic can be applied to multiple areas of disciplines,and the actual reasonings in different fields is described in detail.Finally,by analyzing the research background and perspective of the “new psychologism”,the thesis points out that the representation + transformation schema,adopted in modern non-classical logic,is highly likely to not only reflect the normativity of logic but also generalize in specific fields,which can give the direction of the practical application of modern logic to different fields.