The truth about things sleeps behind the veil of appearances, in a place that can only be accessed by the safe conduct of thought. Since time immemorial, human beings have aspired to know it, in order to unravel the mystery of life and reality.

The search for unknowns about the human and the mundane has been, since the dawn of time, a distinctive element between our species and other animals; as well as the most solid evidence as regards the existence of a reason, which lives between the sickles and the convolutions of such a refined central nervous system.

Therefore, thoughts are a phenomenon that depends on brain structures and that “connects” directly with the experience and experiential orientation of those who use them, so it is very difficult to dissociate the results of thinking from the process that ultimately allows them to be achieved.

At this juncture we find the philosophical current on which this article will deal: psychologism . Its ontological and epistemological implications are of enormous significance, and therefore they were a source of great conflict among 19th century thinkers.

What is psychology?

Psychology is a philosophical current that emerges from ontology and epistemology, which deals with our ability to grasp the truth of things and has been the subject of great controversy since its conception. This perspective was particularly defended by empiricist thinkers, and postulated that all knowledge could be explained by the postulates of the psychological sciences (or reduced to them). Such a way of approaching reality implies that philosophical knowledge depends on the emotional, motivational, mnestic, cognitive and creative substratum of the human beings who think about it; inhibiting the access to the ideal root of it (to the beginning of what they are).

In other words, all content that is thought about is subject to the limits of the mind that conceives it. Thus, all things would be understood through the filter of the informational analysis processes and the mechanisms of cognition , being the only way to trace such logic.

In fact, psychology poses an analogy with classical logicism, through which it was intended to reduce any theory to the universal laws of logic, but postulating psychology as the fundamental vertex of this hierarchy. In this sense, logic would become another part of Psychology, but not a reality independent from it, nor a method with which to draw conclusions beyond what is accessible through the senses and the processes of reflection itself.

Psychology is a theoretical prism that starts from anthropocentrism when understanding the things of reality , and that has been applied to many of the universal questions raised from Philosophy. Its influences have spread to many areas of knowledge, such as ethics and didactics, but also to mathematics, history and economics.

It supposes a modality of scientific positivism, but it recognizes that potential knowledge is not alien to the perceptive limitations of the one who contemplates it, from which a theoretical contradiction difficult to solve arises.

In short, psychologism emerges at the confluence of philosophy, scientific positivism and epistemology; and the connection with logic would be based on the German ideological debate (19th century) between Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl (of which we will offer some small brushstrokes later on).

Although there is some controversy about it, the concept of psychology is considered to have been coined by Johann E. Erdmann in 1870 , although its elementary rudiments predate that historical moment. It has also been proposed that it could have been championed by the philosopher Vincenzo Gioberti in his work on ontology (similar to Platonic idealism and in which he aspired to explain the very origin of ideas through an intuitive reflection on their essence), in which he used the concepts of psychologism and/or psychology to contrast the scope of his vision with a hypothetical opposite (Italian ontology versus psychologism).

In short, psychology reduces all the “intelligible” elements of reality (which are the object of study of all sciences and philosophy) to the sensitive, that is, to what can be perceived through the senses.

That is why knowledge could not be understood in the absence of a subject who observes it, nor of the mental processes that unfold in the situation of interaction between the observer and the observed. The subjective sense would impose insurmountable limits to the potential of knowing reality, even at the risk of confusing the product of thought with the tool through which philosophical knowledge is obtained (since they are not equivalent).

In the following lines we will go deeper into the work of some authors who defended or opposed psychology. Many of them clashed fiercely with those of the opposite side, representing one of the most remarkable dialectic polemics in the whole history of contemporary thought.

Defense of psychology

Perhaps one of the most relevant defenders of psychology is David Hume, a Scottish philosopher and historian who is among the most popular empiricists. From his very extensive work we can see the desire to reduce any possible form of knowledge to what he coined as “empirical psychology”, which implied the understanding of the sensitive through the different sensory organs . In his Treatise on Human Nature (a major work by the author) he reduced or simplified metaphysics, ethics and the theory of knowledge to certain psychological parameters, understanding that such domains were basic to determining direct experience with things in the tangible world.

In his writings Hume described two forms of expression for such psychologism: gnoseological and moral . The first of them stated that the problems of knowledge (its origin, limits and value) should be understood as forms of reaction of the mind to the action of the exterior, summarizing all the objectivity to an epiphenomenon of mental life. The second understood that the totality of the notions of ethics would be explained only as theoretical constructions, since in its beginnings they were no more than subjective responses to the evidence of more or less just social interactions.

Another thinker in favour of psychology was John Stuart Mill , an English philosopher (but of Scottish origin) who defended the idea that logic was not a discipline independent of the psychological branch of philosophy, but depended on it in a hierarchical sense. For this author, reasoning would be a discipline within Psychology through which to get to know the substratum of mental life, and logic only the tool with which to achieve this objective. In spite of all this, the author’s extensive work did not definitively clarify his position on the extreme, finding discrepancies at different times in his life.

Finally, the figure of Theodor Lipps (German philosopher focused on art and aesthetics) is also noteworthy, for whom psychology would be the essential foundation of all knowledge in the mathematical/plastic disciplines. Thus, this would be the supply of every logical precept that would sustain the capacity to know elements of reality.

Opposition to Psychology

The main opponent of the psychological current was, without a doubt, Edmund Husserl . This philosopher and mathematician of German origin, one of the most notorious phenomenologists of all times, was against this way of thinking (he considered it empty). His work analyzes in a deep way its advantages and disadvantages, although he seems to be more in favor (as it is explicitly evidenced in numerous passages of his texts) of its opposition. The author distinguishes two specific types of problems in psychology: those related to its consequences and those that are more linked to its prejudices.

Regarding the consequences, Husserl showed his concern for the equation of the empirical with the psychological , understanding that the two had very different objectives and results. He also considered that the facts of logic and psychology should not be placed on the same plane, since this would imply that the former would have to assume the same character as the latter (which are valuable generalizations, but not proven facts according to a logical terminology). In fact, he pointed out that no mental phenomenon could be explained with the conventional laws of a syllogism.

As for prejudices, Husserl stressed the need to differentiate “pure logic” from the fact of thinking (based on rules), since the purpose of the former would be to achieve evidence of objective facts and that of the latter to decipher the nature of subjective and personal constructions about oneself and the world.

The main implication of this would be to discern an objective epistemological structure alongside another of a subjective type, complementary on the level of internal experiences and sciences, but distinguishable at the end of the day. For the author, the evidence would be an experience of truth, which means that the internal would converge with the external in the framework of representations of the facts that would reach reality value.

Bibliographic references:

  • Gur, B. & Wiley, D. (2009). Psychologism and Instructional Technology. Educational Philosophy and Theory. 41, 307 – 331.
  • Lehan, V. (2012). Why Philosophy Needs Logical Psychologism. Dialogue, 51(4), 37-45.