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Psychologism
 
 
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Psychologism is a generic type of position in philosophy
Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
 according to which psychology
Psychology

Psychology is an academic and applied science discipline involving the science study of human mental functions and behavior. Occasionally it also relies on symbolic hermeneutics and critical theory, although these traditions are less pronounced than in other social sciences such as sociology....
 plays a central role in grounding or explaining some other, non-psychological type of fact or law. The most common types of psychologism are logical psychologism and mathematical psychologism.

Logical psychologism is a position in logic
Logic

Logic is the study of the principles of valid demonstration and inference. Logic is a branch of philosophy, a part of the classical Trivium . The word derives from Greek language ?????? , fem....
 (or the philosophy of logic) according to which logical laws and mathematical laws
Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, structure, space, change, and related topics of pattern and form. Mathematicians seek out patterns whether found in numbers, space, natural science, computers, imaginary abstractions, or elsewhere....
 are grounded in, derived from or explained by psychological facts (or laws)
Psychology

Psychology is an academic and applied science discipline involving the science study of human mental functions and behavior. Occasionally it also relies on symbolic hermeneutics and critical theory, although these traditions are less pronounced than in other social sciences such as sociology....
.






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Psychologism is a generic type of position in philosophy
Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
 according to which psychology
Psychology

Psychology is an academic and applied science discipline involving the science study of human mental functions and behavior. Occasionally it also relies on symbolic hermeneutics and critical theory, although these traditions are less pronounced than in other social sciences such as sociology....
 plays a central role in grounding or explaining some other, non-psychological type of fact or law. The most common types of psychologism are logical psychologism and mathematical psychologism.

Logical psychologism is a position in logic
Logic

Logic is the study of the principles of valid demonstration and inference. Logic is a branch of philosophy, a part of the classical Trivium . The word derives from Greek language ?????? , fem....
 (or the philosophy of logic) according to which logical laws and mathematical laws
Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, structure, space, change, and related topics of pattern and form. Mathematicians seek out patterns whether found in numbers, space, natural science, computers, imaginary abstractions, or elsewhere....
 are grounded in, derived from or explained by psychological facts (or laws)
Psychology

Psychology is an academic and applied science discipline involving the science study of human mental functions and behavior. Occasionally it also relies on symbolic hermeneutics and critical theory, although these traditions are less pronounced than in other social sciences such as sociology....
. Psychologism in the philosophy of mathematics
Philosophy

Philosophy is the study of general problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, truth, beauty, justice, validity, mind, and language....
 is the position that mathematical
Mathematics

Mathematics is the study of quantity, structure, space, change, and related topics of pattern and form. Mathematicians seek out patterns whether found in numbers, space, natural science, computers, imaginary abstractions, or elsewhere....
 concepts and/or truths are grounded in, derived from or explained by psychological facts (or laws).

John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill , United Kingdom philosopher, political economy, civil servant and Parliament of the United Kingdom, was an influential liberalism thinker of the 19th century....
 seems to have been an advocate of a type of logical psychologism, as were many nineteenth-century German logicians such as Sigwart and Erdmann as were, and are, quite a few psychologists, for example, Gustave Le Bon
Gustave Le Bon

Gustave Le Bon was a France social psychologist, sociologist, and amateur physicist. He was the author of several works in which he expounded theories of national traits, racial superiority, herd behaviour and crowd psychology....
. Psychologism was famously criticized by Frege
Gottlob Frege

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a Germany mathematics who became a logician and philosophy. He helped found both modern mathematical logic and analytic philosophy....
 in his The Foundations of Arithmetic, and many of his works and essays, including his review of Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic
Philosophy of Arithmetic

The Philosophy of Arithmetic is the English language title of Edmund Husserl's first published book. It was first published, in the German language, under the full title, Philosophie der Arithmetik....
. Edmund Husserl, in the first volume of his Logical Investigations, called "The Prolegomena of Pure Logic", criticized psychologism thoroughly and sought to distance himself from it. The "Prolegomena" is considered a more concise, fair, and thorough refutation of psychologism than the criticisms made by Frege, and also it is considered today by many as being a memorable refutation for its decisive blow to psychologism.

There are other kinds of psychologism. For example, there is a psychologism pertaining to epistemology
Epistemology

Epistemology or theory of knowledge is the branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge. It addresses the questions:...
 which mixes up problems of epistemology (context of justification) with problems of psychology (context of discovery). The criticism of this kind of psychologism can be traced back to Kant
KANT

KANT is a computer algebra system for mathematicians interested in algebraic number theory, performing sophisticated computations in algebraic number fields, in Global field function fields, and in local fields....
. Karl Popper
Karl Popper

Knight Bachelor Karl Raimund Popper Order of the Companions of Honour, Fellow of the Royal Society, Fellow of the British Academy was an Austrian and British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics....
 criticized this kind of psychologism in his The Logic of Scientific Discovery
The Logic of Scientific Discovery

Logik der Forschung is a 1934 book by Karl Popper. It was originally written in German language, but reformulated in English language by Popper himself some years later, to be published as The Logic of Scientific Discovery in 1959....
, and some other works. According to Popper, one shouldn't confuse such questions as "How can a theory
Theory

For a more detailed account of theories as expressed in formal language as they are studied in mathematical logic see Theory A theory, in the general sense of the word, is an analytic structure designed to explain a set of observations....
 be tested
Experiment

In scientific inquiry, an experiment is a method of investigating causal relationships among variables. An experiment is a cornerstone of the empiricism approach to acquiring data about the world and is used in both natural sciences and social sciences....
?" (context of justification) with "How do we come up with a new theory?" (context of discovery). Psychologists, such as John Locke
John Locke

John Locke was an English philosopher. Locke is considered the first of the British Empiricism, but is equally important to social contract theory....
 or David Hume
David Hume

David Hume was a Scotland philosopher, economist, historian and a key figure in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment....
, do not distinguish between these two questions.

See also

  • Anti-psychologism
    Anti-psychologism

    Anti-psychologism is a thesis about the nature of validity, that it does not depend upon the contents of human ideas but exists independent of human ideas....


External links

  • Naturalized epistemology
    Naturalized epistemology

    Naturalized epistemology is a collection of philosophy views concerned with the theory of knowledge that emphasize the role of natural scientific methods....