From Pure Thought To 'Mere' Concepts

 

From Pure Thought to ‘Mere’ Concepts

------ Vaibhav Narula

 

[The following article is a part of the concluding summary of my PhD thesis ‘From Concepts to Reality: A Philosophical Analysis’. A more complete textual proof and philosophical analysis can be found in chapter 1 and 2 of my doctoral thesis. The following is a philosophical elucidation of a major transitional period in history of philosophy. This article is forthcoming in Philosophical Traditions of The World, University of Mumbai Press.]

 

It is often heard that philosophy is based on ‘mere concepts’, and that concepts are not enough to provide us into knowledge of reality and that they are merely subjective. The traditional role of philosophy is however to enlighten us about the nature of reality as such and this role of philosophy came from a belief in the underlying unity of thought and being, truth in ancient philosophy was valid thought. Below is a philosophical reflection on history of a period that marks the transition from this paradigm to critical philosophy that undermined this framework and consequently the possibility of a metaphysics which thereby opened the avenue for non-rational methods to inform us about the nature of reality. The period that we are concerned with here begins with Descartes and the article talks about the transition from his philosophy to Hume’s.

 

Plato had observed that sensory perception is unreliable and truth is accessible to pure thought or thinking that abstracts from sensory experience. Descartes like Plato believed that if human beings can revert to a disembodied existence, then they would be able to know the truth better than in their embodied conditions. To regard thought as innate is not to think that there is a storehouse of information that is drilled in the soul but to regard the capacity to know the truth as innate or natural to rational souls but which is hampered due to the violence done to the soul due to its association with the body, but most importantly that the content of knowledge is intellectual and the nature of the content distinguishes thought from sensibility as a source of knowledge. Further to retrieve this knowledge of truth requires in Platonic terms an ascent and for Descartes a meditation, a turn within to find out solely with the assistance of our consciousness and so without any presuppositions, whether or not we can know the truth. The difference between Plato and Descartes is for the latter the ascent means not just discovery of truth but a proof of objective validity. The meditator deploys the sceptical method to question every piece of knowledge he considers himself to have and to believe only when he has eliminated the possibility of deception and all grounds for doubt. This is possible only by setting up a reliable method that allows us to discriminate between truth and falsehood. The meditator discovers this criterion in the fact of self-consciousness, the indubitability of self-consciousness reveals that anything clearly and distinctly perceived to be true cannot be false. This still is insufficient to prove objective validity because it does not assure us that our thinking corresponds to something real outside us. What is being demanded is to prove the rationality of the content of thought, that what exists, is real is amenable to being understood by thought or of being an object of knowledge. Only this could assure us about thought that it can be a valid source of knowledge. The radicalness of Descartes’s project can be gleaned from the fact that this rationality of the content of thought or the identity of thought and existence was never questioned by philosophers before him because this identity was the basis of all proof and to try to prove it cannot but be a project that is inevitably vitiated by circularity which is destructive of the possibility of demonstration. Since the laws of logic are prior to all demonstrations, they themselves cannot be made the object of demonstration but since this is essentially what scepticism demanded either the demand needs to be fulfilled or else the demand is irrational or meaningless. The latter option was the norm in Descartes’s time who broke with it by adopting the former course of action. By choosing this option Descartes opened the Pandora’s Box without being able to close it. First, by distinguishing between subjective validity and objective validity or that thought can be valid without being true Descartes paved the way for a psychologism which gives a foundational role to subjectivity. To see this note again that rationality of the content of knowledge is a view that implies a deeper unity between the thinking subject and the external real object which is the content of knowledge. This deeper unity can be characterized as a structural unity and Reason is this structure that holds subjective thinking and objective content together thereby making it possible for the former to know the latter. Reason is something over and above the psychological thinking process found in the subject and the reality outside the subject. When the meditator grasps God as Reason, he acquires a second-order knowledge of the reliability or the justification of first-order knowledge and the indubitability of the former carries over to the latter so that the meditator can finally trust his faculties to be a valid source of knowledge about external reality. This validity is not a subjective validity – an account of how a subject comes to think or consider something as valid, rather it is objective validity which implies that the connection between the subject and the world is mediated by certain rational norms which account for the rationality of the human faculties of knowledge. However, when the subject is given a foundational role, a psychological account of considering something to be true or justified knowledge is an account of the validity of the thought. The object in order to be an object of knowledge must fulfil the psychological conditions under which the subject can know, subjectivity determines the conditions of the possibility of knowledge and so there is no mind-independent normative space of reasons (to use Sellars’s phrase). There is no objective validity because truth is inaccessible, what is accessible is validity explained in terms of psychological laws that invariably compels thought to think in a certain way. Objective validity can be explained away on the presumption of a psychological deception that compels one to consider as objectively valid what can be taken to have only subjective validity. A psychological account that can explain this illicit transition from subjective to objective validity would undermine the presumption of the objective validity of the laws of logic and so also the rationality of the content of knowledge. Descartes never entertained the possibility of this kind of sceptical response and hence his project failed. Second, in order to prove the rationality of the content of knowledge which through the evil demon scenario he had subjected to doubt, he had to prove the existence of God which meant there was one special Idea found within the human soul that can be accorded objective validity in accordance with the criterion of truth he discovered in the cogito argument. But the criterion of truth he found - clarity and distinctness is ambiguous in so far it can be predicated of the manner of knowing or the perception of the subject and in so far as it pertained to the object of knowledge. In the former sense Descartes could never prove the existence of God because nothing but subjective validity can be accorded to these perceptions. Evidently Descartes employs the second sense of clarity and distinctness thereby presupposing what is the subject of proof – the rationality of the content of thought. This can be seen in the illicit equation of clarity and distinctness with perfection and the assumption that what has maximum perfection must be real. Here the unity of perfection and reality is assumed which however is the very thing to be proved. Third, the manner in which God has been grasped as Reason (nous) undermines the validity of the system of knowledge. When Descartes says that mathematical knowledge of say 2+2=4 is subjectively valid and that there might be possible worlds where this knowledge is false, he has compromised the rationality of the content of knowledge. There is no intrinsic or structural connection between the truths of understanding and human understanding. The connection is an external one mandated by God and he could have constituted human understanding in a different way because of which we would not have attached the kind of self-evidence to arithmetical knowledge we are used to doing but would on the contrary have seen it as false. The entire structure of human understanding becomes arbitrary and truths of understanding become species relative truths. This again is a point where Descartes deviates from and so undermines the ancient model of rationality. To see God as Nous or Reason in Descartes implies seeing God as transcending the system or structure of knowledge where rationality was supposed to be what holds the system together. God like a king mandate what the system will look like and the rationality of the system is not a logic internal to the system but instead subject to the arbitrary will of God. Leibniz took great issue with this aspect of Descartes’s thought and charged him with confounding truths of fact with truths of reason. The difference between God’s understanding and human understanding is a difference of degree rather than of kind and so there is a greater continuity between the two. If we find certain mathematical truths to be valid, God must find them to be valid too and so there is an internal structural connection between human and divine understanding, in Leibniz’s philosophy. God does not mandate truths of understanding but discovers them and human beings despite their inherent limitations are God-like in this manner. Descartes’s views had great potential for undermining the rationality of content of knowledge, it meant that arithmetical truths need not be seen as analytic and so 2+2=4 is a piece of knowledge on par with the inference from smoke to fire because there is no logical (internal/structural) connection between 2 and 2 other than what God had mandated and so it may as well have been connected with 5, if God had willed so. Did Descartes really hold such a view? It seems not, he merely entertained the possibility but was led to it by a logic internal to the system. We can notice the ambiguity in the epistemic status of Divine Guarantee. On the one hand it means that God would not mislead us about the truth because truthfulness is a perfection and God being the most perfect being cannot lack this quality. But while this proves that God will not mislead us, it does not prove that God cannot be deceived about the truths of understanding. So divine guarantee can be an assurance only if there is a necessary connection between divinity and truths of understanding. But what is this connection? As we have seen the answer to this question cannot lie in Divine Mandate because that would inevitably compromise the rationality of the content of knowledge. But if we see this necessary connection in terms of all truths of understanding being necessarily the object of God’s knowledge as Leibniz believes then there is a necessary connection between truths of understanding and human understanding and the possibility of the severance between the two cannot be a genuine possibility and the thought can be entertained only as a heuristic exercise to reassure the meditator of the reliability of his faculties. But then such an exercise will not have the potential to answer the sceptical demand to justify the laws of logic and Descartes’s epistemological project would not be so radical after all.    

 

So, we see why Spinoza and Leibniz and scholastics of Descartes’s time were unimpressed by his epistemological innovation. It meant that we accede to the legitimacy of the sceptical demand that the laws of logic must be justified but we cannot justify what itself is the very basis of justification. So, these philosophers thought that instead of refuting scepticism Descartes had instead acceded too much to them and made them still more powerful. Their fears were not unwarranted for this sceptical demand would become the basis of critical philosophy and undermine metaphysics which can be a study of being qua being only if there is a unity of thought and being. But for Spinoza and Leibniz the sceptical demand was unfounded – one cannot make a rational demand while at the same time failing to be rational i.e., one cannot demand a proof while refusing to adhere to the rational norms governing proof. But once we separate subjective validity from objective validity, we also give a certain independence to the subject to determine the truth independently of the norms which are considered to be rationally binding on the subject, depending on the clarity and distinctness of the perception found within the subject. In critical philosophy we find subjective consciousness has a priority in determining the meaning of a concept, a concept cannot have a meaning (sense) which does not mean something to the subject and so the rationality of the concept is determined by what meaning it has for a particular kind of subject. We find this also in Bayle’s scepticism when he denies the inference from self-evidence to truth. A subject may find self-evidently true that 2+2=4 but nevertheless it may still be false. So, the sceptic may agree that he finds the laws of logic to be true and cannot think otherwise nevertheless he need not grant that they are objectively true for reality may turn out to be radically different from what we hold to be true. Why hold reality hostage to our ways of thinking? So, the sceptical demand is justified, while the laws of logic may govern my thinking what proof of their objective validity can be given? Why believe that the laws of logic can be anything more than psychological? With this way of framing the question there seems to be no contradiction in the sceptical demand to justify logic or the norms governing justification. But with the subjective resources at hand, it seems impossible to prove objective validity. Empiricists like Hume would embark on a reductive project to give a psychological account of why subjective validity is mistaken for objective validity. Kant on the other hand would attempt a proof of objective validity by elucidating the epistemic role of apperception and how subjectivity implies rather than excludes objectivity. The likes of Jacobi would appeal to non-sensible intuition or irrational means to justify reason. To understand these trends of philosophy it is necessary to understand how subjectivity became a special problem in philosophy.  

 

Subjectivity becomes a special problem when subjective and objective validity are separated. In the course of the cogito argument Descartes extracts his criterion of truth, clarity and distinctness which becomes the basis for justifying a rational psychology but insufficient to meet the demand to prove objective validity of thought. The point has also been made above that this separation compromises the ancient model of Rationality which saw Reason as the internal structural connection between the subject and the object of knowledge and so saw Reason as independent of the individual psychological thoughts of the human subject implying that logic cannot be reduced to anthropology because no descriptive psychology can deliver the normative science of logic. This means that individual psychological thoughts can be valid only due to considerations outside the human psyche and because of being in accord with the laws of logic. But when we separate subjective from objective validity, we countenance the possibility that thinking may be valid without being true – despite being in accord with the laws of logic it cannot make a legitimate demand on reality as such, atleast not without further proof. We can now give a psychological explanation of the validity of logic because this validity itself is something peculiar to the nature of subjectivity rather than something that conforms to a reality outside the subject. The content or object of knowledge should in order to be an object of knowledge must conform to the demands of subjectivity rather than vice-versa. This paves the way to a subjective or psychological conception of thought because the objective conception of thought implies that a valid thought cannot fail to be true or in accord with reality and so validity of knowledge is governed by norms not reducible to the psychology of the subject. So, laws of logic cannot be species relative, they cannot fail to hold for different kind of rational being because they define rationality itself. Different rational beings cannot have different logical laws and still be counted as rational. This objective conception of thought the author has explicated through a structural unity of thought and being, underlying both the subjective thinking process and the subject-independent reality as such, it makes the connection between the two an internal mode of justification such that valid thought necessarily conforms to reality but the psychological conception of thought makes the relation a contingent and external one or in other words it implies that merely because something is thinkable it cannot be real because thinkability is something purely internal to the subject. The severance of thought and reality is the essence of the psychological conception of thought and the objective conception of thought can be regarded as its exact opposite. Descartes’s epistemological project was undermined due to this emergence of subjectivity as a special problem because as we saw, a) it leads to a psychological conception of thought, b) makes it impossible to give a non-circular justification of rational norms, c) makes God external to the system of knowledge and undermines the epistemic status of Divine Guarantee.

 

But there is a further aspect of the problem that led to undermining of the rational psychology itself. Descartes’s criterion of truth – clarity and distinctness is the epistemological basis of the science of rational psychology, pertains to perceptions rather than objects of knowledge pending the proof of objective validity. In the Meditations they suffice for a provisional proof of real distinction between mind and body. In the Second Meditation Descartes sought to prove that it is not only the case that the mind thinks but rather it is a thinking thing i.e., thought pertains to the very essence of the soul which together with the consideration of the difference between thought and extension leads to the inference of the real distinction between mind and body. The very possibility of a rational psychology as a science depends on the essence of the soul which is the object of the study and the essence of the thinking subject can be fathomed only if in this instance atleast there is coincidence of thought and being – which we find to be the case in the case of cogito argument and also which in turn is the basis of the extraction of the criterion of truth. It is only in self-consciousness that thought and being coincide and on the basis of this fact Descartes deploys the method of exclusion to argue that the thinking is the being of the soul. This method of exclusion however is based on the assumption of the transparency of the soul or the assumption that there is nothing in the soul which in principle cannot be made an object of thought, but this is the very thing to be proved – that the soul in essence is a thinking thing which cannot have more than what thought can inform us about because thinking and being coincide in this case. But even in this limited sphere objective validity cannot be proved because Descartes cannot exclude the possibility that the mind can be both a thinking and extended being. Mind can legitimately think its separation from body without its actually being so. This undermines the prospects of the science of rational psychology because a science is the study of an essence and if the essence is unknowable then mind cannot be made the object of study of a rational psychology. Further the Rationalist paradigm of knowledge depends on Real Definitions, according to which to know something is to conceive it as following as a consequence from its cause (=substance/essence), the ontological relation of essence-mode is conceived in epistemological terms of analytic containment. If I cannot conceive an X without also conceiving Y but the conception of Y does not involve X, then X can be said to be analytically contained in Y. But if the essence is unknowable then the epistemological relation of analytic containment is seriously undermined because even if the concept X involves the concept Y that does not imply that the former is analytically contained in the latter. This calls for a new way to think the topic of individuation of the content of Ideas and their relation with one another. Broadly there are two prospects, one we could give up on analytic containment and regard two Ideas any contingently related and second, to conceive a synthetic but necessary relation between Ideas. The former option was adopted by Malebranche and the latter by Kant and Leibniz’s position comes midway between the two. Malebranche acknowledged the impossibility of a rational psychology because the soul’s essence is indeed hidden to the soul itself, however he still believed we can know the essence of matter is extension. In the case of matter, he could retain the notion of analytic containment and salvage the rationalist paradigm of knowledge but where he couldn’t, he appealed to God as a Deus ex machina. In the case of knowledge of the external world he regarded this knowledge had in its favour only probabilistic evidence because he could not find any logical connection between sensation and the existence of the external world. For Descartes this was not a problem because the inference was made on the basis of perfection of Ideas and the minimal representational content that sensations have intrinsically guarantees the existence of the external world even though this proof lacks objective validity without Divine Guarantee. This is an internal mode of justification because there is a reason (degree of perfection) why sensation is linked to the existence of the external world and the two are not arbitrarily combined by God. However, we see in Descartes at play on the one hand a Platonic framework which saw perfection as the connecting link between thought and reality which leads to internal justification and on the other hand, we can also find in his philosophy an undermining of this basis and an external mode of justification. In Malebranche it is the latter tendency that is predominant. He finds no logical connection between thought and reality, between the existence of effect and the cause, sensation and the external world and so has to appeal to God to save the situation which is an external mode of justification. Not a logical but only a moral certainty belongs to the knowledge of the existence of the external world. We are only a step away from the empirical theory of Ideas which gives an appearance=reality principle for individuation of content according to which if we can form two ideas and if the content of the idea is what we conceive within it and nothing more then the very distinctness of the conception proves that one cannot be said to contain the other.

 

Leibniz made an attempt to salvage the situation by distinguishing between truths of facts and truths of reason. The internalist mode of justification is saved in the case of truths of reason but in the case of truths of facts one could not apply the epistemological notion of analytic containment. But the tendency of Leibniz’s thought is to retain an internalist mode of justification even in the case of truths of facts. He accomplishes this by regarding these synthetic truths as reducible to analytic truths but only in principle. All synthetic truths are based on the principle of harmony or God’s tendency to maximize Good which depends on God’s Will and since there is a necessary connection between will and the object of will (God cannot fail to know what he Wills) the synthetic truths are reducible to analytic truths but only for God. To reduce synthetic truths to analytic truths is the regulative ideal of Reason. Leibniz distinguishes his pre-established harmony from occasionalism on grounds that the principle of harmony depends on the individual nature of monads which he conceives in terms of their compossibility with other monads and so God considers their individual natures to bring them together in harmony. But this is where Leibniz’s problems begin. Considered as a simple essence, the soul of Alexander the great for instance does not contain truths of facts like his victory over the Persians, considered as simple essence no soul has any connection to such contingent truths. So, these predicates must have been instituted by God’s Will in the Soul without considering their simple essence because these contain no predilection towards one contingent truth as opposed to another. So, when Leibniz regards synthetic truths to be reducible to analytic truths, he could only mean analytic-in-will because God’s Will and the object of his Will have a necessary connection but the Will is arbitrary and contains no consideration of simple essences which makes his philosophy indistinguishable from occasionalism. To overcome this predicament Leibniz has to give a unified theory of knowledge but no logical connection is found between truths of facts and truths of reason and there is no way to unify these two kinds of knowledge.  The drive of reason lies in converting all contingent knowledge to analytic knowledge supports an internal mode of justification of thought as an ideal of reason, not realizable in actuality but a regulative ideal nevertheless that Reason sets before itself – to reach greater clarity and distinctness or greater completion as far as it can. The principle of harmony provided an aid to this process but was a source of moral certainty of truths, not logical certainty. But the principles of harmony and PNC are two distinct principles of thought that are illegitimately combined to set up a single regulative ideal for thought as such. The two principles are set up side by side and are never reconciled within Leibniz’s philosophy.

 

So we review here the primary characteristics of Platonic model of thought that Descartes inherited: a) pure thought is objectively valid and requires no proof of objective validity, being and thought are identical and truth is valid thought, b) this validity is internal to the nature of thought, c) pure thought is normative, it sets the standards for judging the truth i.e. it decides which norms allow us to determine the truth, d) the content of pure thought is not a psychological entity tied to the existence of the thinker, e) the source of validity of pure thought is rooted in metaphysics of God, truth and validity of pure thought are values that have their source in God but in an internal structural manner, these epistemological notions are inextricably and due to an internal necessity are linked with metaphysical notion of God, f) truth and being are co-extensive terms which is seen in the notion of perfection which implies that the nature of reality itself involves thought and hence pure thought simply through reflection can acquire objectively valid knowledge and the concept of perfection marks the connecting link between thinking and being, g) pure thought is a distinct source of knowledge than sense perception and the difference is in terms of content of knowledge, h) pure thought is innate or characterizes the nature of the soul i.e. the soul due to its very nature has the capacity to acquire knowledge and in disembodied condition it shall be able to acquire clear and distinct metaphysical knowledge, it may be reiterated that Descartes identified thought with consciousness and regarded it as the essence of the soul, i) pure thought is both discursive and intuitive i.e. it can be regarded as a clear and distinct perception or a conceptual intuition. This Platonic Model of Rationality was compromised by Descartes’s separating subjective and objective validity and eventually led to the psychological conception of thought which we consider next and the difference was not obliterated once the gap opened despite the efforts of Malebranche and Leibniz. 

 

Empiricism beginning with Locke who was the first philosopher to separate epistemological concerns from metaphysical even though he might not have understood his philosophy in this way, he does give priority to the question of what can we know over what is thereby inaugurating the era of critical philosophy. But this tendency of his thought becomes manifest more completely in Berkeley and Hume’s psychologism. Psychologism is a view that reduces epistemological notions of truth, validity or proof to psychological laws governing thought. This reduction seems unstable because psychological laws are empirical laws and are known empirically and hence our manner of reduction will change as the discovery of empirical laws of the mind force the change.  But the mainstay of psychologism is that the content or the meaning of the concept is essentially tied to the consciousness of the individual thinker. Psychologism in the empirical school of thought has four features, first sensibilism (the author has here adopted Waxman’s terminology) according to which Ideas are objects immediately present to consciousness and do not exist independently of being perceived, second the individuation of the content of ideas is based on an appearance=reality principle according to which the Idea contains nothing more than what I think within it. In the Rationalist fold a distinction was made between the content of thought and thought, the latter was a psychological entity peculiar to the thinking subject but in psychologism the existence of the content of thought is not anything over and above the existence of thinking. Thought is similar to sensation wherein for example pain is both the content and mode of apprehension, the act-object model of consciousness is inapplicable to thought as it is in the case of sensation, third, Ideas bear resemblance (or represent) only to Ideas and so extra-mental reality cannot be inferred from Ideas. The scope of reference of Ideas is restricted to the consciousness of the subject and so the subject is treated as foundational. The subject cannot refer to any reality beyond himself because anything he thinks must meet the conditions of apprehension which is restricted to consciousness itself and so the subject is entrapped within its own world. The distinction between thing-in-itself or reality and subjectivity is essential to this view. Fourth every Idea is different from another and it is the function of imagination to connect Ideas and bind them together. Locke is a sensibilist without committing to psychologism, this is reflected in the way he conceives the debate between Rationalism and empiricism in terms of concept acquisition instead of the way Hume conceives it in terms of whether the content of thought is intellectual or sensible. The latter debate demands a psychologistic reduction of intellectual content (categories of thought) to sensible content which contains sensible ideas together with laws of association – in effect a reduction of understanding to imagination. Locke’s project is undermined because his historical method to explain concept acquisition allows rationalists like Leibniz to answer Locke by acknowledging the role of experience as a stimulus in the process of concept acquisition while at the same time contending that the content of thought should be regarded as independent of sensory content. Sensory experience is foundational then only in the sense that it is a necessary trigger for the mind to retrieve innate concepts to be found within itself. However, for his empiricism to undermine rationalism Locke needed to prove that the content of understanding is not independent of sensory content. Also, Locke regarded Ideas as having a representational content that resembles extra-mental objects which cause certain Ideas and sensations within the human subject. That the content of Ideas requires an explanation in terms of intellectual cause-effect relations shows that Locke did not subscribe to psychologism which depends on an essential connection between thought and the content of thought precluding extra-mental explanation of the latter.

 

Psychologism demands the reduction of epistemological or logical concepts to psychological concepts so the logical laws of justification are reduced to psychological laws and hence possess only subjective and no objective validity. We saw that in the ancient model of rationality the metaphysical concept attributed to being was identical and internally or structurally related to pure thought. So, there is a harmony between thought and being, the latter is intelligible to the former. But when subjective and objective validity are separated, thinking and being are separated, the objective or metaphysical conception of pure thought now becomes subjective or psychological. Pure thought provides no insight into the nature of reality. Truth and validity have been separated because truth is no longer valid thought, truth is outside the sphere of subjective consciousness and valid thought is inextricably linked to the thinking consciousness. This conclusion is evident from Hume’s critique of the law of causality. What Hume questions is the nature of the transition from ‘everything that begins’ to ‘must have a cause’. Is this principle due to any insight into the nature of reality or is the transition purely psychological or due to the psychological laws of association? What is the import of the ‘must’ in this case? Is it a logical necessity or a non-logical one? It cannot be a logical necessity because the principle is not analytic, we can think the one without thinking the other and so the concept of the effect is not logically contained in the concept of the cause. What warrants this conclusion is that he can think of the existence of one thing without thinking about the existence of the other. To think about the existence of something is to conceive its idea and the idea is copied from the impression. In Berkeley the immediacy which is the actual presence of a content to consciousness is what determines the content of the concept of existence, in Hume in contrast the actual presence is not required, what is required instead is the feeling of vivacity which determines the content of the concept of existence and due to this feeling impressions are distinguished from ideas. If the law of causality is regarded as the content of immediate consciousness, then even a child would be able to glean causal associations and would not have required experience to learn about which objects are associated in accordance with the laws of causality. So, what is present in the idea of the object is what is copied from its impression and the impression-original contains no information about causality but only about the singular existence of an object. This gets carried over into its concept which contains an accretion of semantic content but no addition of ontological import and when we concentrate on the latter, we find that the idea of one object contains no logical connection to the existence of any other object. The law of causality is only subjectively valid but not objectively valid but human beings in ignorance of the psychological genesis of the law mistakenly attribute objective validity to the concept, regarding the concept as applicable to a reality outside their consciousness and the object is given a priority over the subjective consciousness. All laws of understanding are reduced to psychological laws of association in a non-circular manner to non-cognitive features of the mind and so as a consequence whatever is thought is severed from what exists but is nevertheless taken to be real, due to a psychological deception born out of the feeling of vivacity. The necessity of the transition from one individual existent to another is due to a psychological and not a logical necessity. To put Hume’s critique of causality in historical perspective we find nothing new in the criticism that the existence of one does not have a logical relation to the existence of another. Not just Malebranche and Leibniz but even the Medieval Theologians were aware of this mode of criticism. What however is different in Hume is the manner in which he can block the inference to a God as a Deus ex machina to save the causal relation. This is possible because critical philosophy gives a priority to consciousness to determine the meaning or content of consciousness. To transfer this meaning from the subjective consciousness to the existence of the object outside the subject renders the ascription nonsensical. The object of consciousness has to conform to consciousness rather than visa-versa. For instance, attributing pain to a stone is meaningless because consciousness is an essential constituent of the sensible content of pain and so pain cannot be attributed to anything that lacks consciousness. The psychological conditions that determine the possibility of the object of consciousness determine also the boundaries of sense and so are the criterion that distinguish sense from nonsense. This criterion is one that determines the ontological meaning of the concept not its semantic reference, we can continue to speak as if the object is independent of the subject but from an ontological point of view this is not a genuine possibility.

 

For the psychologistic program to succeed it needs to reduce the categories of thought to psychological laws in a non-circular manner. Only Hume could meet this challenge because his laws of association based on felicity of transition and vivacity did not appeal to any intellectual category and are purely based on non-rational imagination. But this reductive program is not successful. Consider first the consideration made earlier that reduction is unstable because its fortune is dependent on advances in empirical psychology. This objection could be alleviated on the basis that psychologism is based on the priority of subjective consciousness – the question what does it mean to the individual is prior to the question - what is and so any future discovery in the field of psychology would improve our prospects of reduction of human experience to underlying psychological laws like the discovery of neurological correlates in the field of neuroscience today. This however does not answer the objection because the reductive project depends on delineating the essential or necessary structure of consciousness. If we found a subject with radically different psychological faculties then the reductive project would fail in this case or else one could salvage the situation by asserting that we should not consider this new species to be a subject at all. But this response is possible only if we have found the essential conditions for being a subject of consciousness, so the reductive project cannot be left to the fortunes of future discoveries and has an a-priori aspect to repudiate which is the motivation of psychologism. Similarly, the psychological reduction of intellectual concepts like cause-effect will not be successful if there is a contingent relation between the psychological base and the intellectual concepts. Psychologism takes the conditions under which we consider knowledge to be valid, to be an explanation of validity of knowledge itself. The latter question however is best left to logic to answer.

 

 

So the main features of the psychologistic conception of thought can be summed up as follows: a) psychologism reduces the epistemological or logical concepts of justification to psychological laws, the subjective account of what is regarded as true becomes an account of the truth, b) the operations of the mind on the sensory data make an essential contribution to the content of thought thereby delimiting the scope of application of these concepts because of which they cannot be applied to mind-independent reality, c) there is no mind-language-world isomorphism, d) ideas contain nothing more than what the perceiving consciousness apprehends within them, e) the source or origin of ideas lies within the mind, hence their content is necessarily constituted by mental activity rather than to mind-independent reality, this implies that simply in virtue of being thought the object of thought has no existence outside the field of the thinking consciousness, f) empirical rationality is a form of probabilistic reasoning, the inference from smoke to fire for instance is based on repeated experience and absence of counter-examples and it is not based on any a-priori insight into the constitution of smoke, it is simply a habit of the human mind to associate the two together giving way to a custom where the thought of one invariably triggers the thought of another, g) understanding does not have a distinct content over and above the sensory content and in that sense is not a distinct source of knowledge, h) psychologism takes experience to have a non-cognitive origin and attribution of objective validity to concepts of understanding is due to a psychological deception. There is truth in the traditional view that Locke’s empiricism leads to Humean scepticism. This scepticism is nothing but finding the absence of categories of pure thought within experience. Experience determines what should or should not be considered as rational and is not answerable to logic because the two have different structures and the demands that logic or pure thought makes on experience, the demand to find the ‘why’ or the reason two things are linked in nature are unfounded demands that experience cannot and need not satisfy because experience does not possess a logical structure, i) thinking or understanding is purely discursive and involves an abstraction that indifferently considers multitude of perceptions together ignoring their individual differences in order to form a single concept, j) critical philosophy demands a justification of metaphysical principles and even the principle of identity of thought and reality on which all justification is based, to be validated within experience or within the subject’s consciousness and this demand implies the priority of consciousness over considerations of mind-independent reality. The subject must accept only what he finds validated within his consciousness, so Descartes for instance cannot assume the correlation between degrees of perfection and levels of reality uncritically if this principle has no basis in human consciousness. The epistemic norms that are not validated within subjective consciousness cannot have any binding force on the subject and to meet the demands of the subject they have to be measured in accordance with measuring rod of subjectivity. It should be noted that the distinction between appearance and the thing-in-itself is endemic to psychologism because it is based on emphasizing the radical difference between concepts and reality, which turn out to be incommensurable. Overcoming this dualism between subjectivity and objectivity has been the primary focus of German Idealism since Kant.

 

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