Psychologism conflates a genetic account of the acquisition of concepts with the truth of those concepts. In other words, it regards how we come to consider something as true as an explanation of the truth of the belief. This reduction of epistemology to psychology depends on an ontological reduction of the object of thought to the underlying psychological process of thinking. The account is irremediably circular, as can be seen in Hume’s psychologistic reduction of the relation of cause and effect. According to Hume, the philosophical relation of cause and effect is reducible to a natural relation consisting of the feelings of facility in moving from one idea to another and vivacity that compels the mind to believe that something is present to consciousness. Consider a person who regularly sees smoke wherever there is fire without any counterexamples. This leads him to associate the two together and regard one as the cause and the other as the effect. The source of the idea does not ...
Jiddu Krishnamurti (henceforth JK in short) uses the term ‘conditioning’ in three inter-related senses: a) Mediation: in this sense mind is conditioned because a mental state is part of a chain of cause and effect. The existence of any mental state is dependent on a previous one which is to say that the present mental state is conditioned by its predecessor. Whatever is mediated is also limited because it has an opposite and whatever is limited is finite, b) Habituation: in this sense mind is a cluster of habits of thinking and acting which are formed due to memories, past experiences, culture and tradition. To every new challenge that the world throws upon us the mind responds in accordance with its limited array of acquired responses, so while the challenge is always new, the response is always dependent on the past. Acting according to a pattern makes the mind dull and insensitive, c) Teleological: human beings act for a reason and they have a purpose or a goal for the sake of...