Anti-Psychologism

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 lie in an objective relation between the objects, but its ground is within human nature. The similarity is the similitude of feelings that the regular ideas of smoke and fire provoke within us, and the vivacity associated with smoke, which is immediately present to us, gets transferred to the unseen object, fire. Through a projective illusion mind shifts the ground of the relation from itself onto the object.

The reduction is successful only if the relation of cause and effect is not invoked to explain the agreement and disagreement of feelings. The human affects are supposed to be constitutive of the relation of cause and effect. The senses do not grasp the causal relation, or a child will understand that fire is the cause of smoke and heat. It is only when thinking (=imagination) compares several perceptions that a concept arises, but the truth of the concept does not lie in the object but in the mind considering it. Imagination only takes into account the agreeableness and disagreeableness of feelings in the transition from one idea to another, in forming the concept of cause and effect. Here, Hume is subtly equivocating between feelings and felt content. In the former, feelings are essential to the content because they are the content itself, whereas in the latter, the object of cognition explains the presence of feelings within us, which are contingently related to its object. What Hume does is switch back and forth between what he calls a ‘system of reality’ and ‘system of judgment’, to convince us that the former has been reduced to the latter. If we concentrate on feelings alone, we cannot explain what sudden break disrupts a continuum of agreeable feelings or a disagreeable one. We have to appeal to the felt content to explain this agreeableness and disagreeableness, and this leads to circularity because it is the object of feeling that explains why something feels a certain way rather than vice versa. Feelings do not sustain themselves in the absence of an object; when the object is taken away, the feelings also run their course.

Hume could argue that we do not notice any objective relation between fire and smoke; all we have to work with is our underlying affections. The rationale for this is that we can conceive the existence of smoke without conceiving the existence of fire without contradiction. This, however, does not prove that we can consider smoke to be the effect while also considering it to be brought about independently of a cause. But this is the heart of the matter, the mind is a bundle of perceptions and each exists independently of the other, while relations are external to these perceptions and forged upon them by thinking. What exists are only structureless facts. In immediate sense-perceptions, we are confronted with an object as it is, while thinking begins to relate these distinct existents, creating the fiction of the mind and a mind-independent external world. What has being-in-itself cannot have being-for-another. What has being-for-another cannot have being-in-itself. What, however, underlies the relational activity of thought is human affects and not any objective relation between objects.

To use Hume’s example, we cannot notice the difference between a white marble and a black globe in the first moment of sense perception. It is when the mind compares different perceptions and learns to differentiate between shape and color, and different colors and shapes that it can discriminate between marble and globe, white and black. However, the cognition of the difference between x and y depends on cognition of identity because we need to know what x is and what y is before we can grasp their difference. Similarly, in the case of smoke and fire, we implicitly know that smoke must not be found in the absence of fire, and it is the temporally posterior entity that is the effect and not the cause. Smoke and fire are absent everywhere except in smoke and fire. It is not any absence that is relevant to their subsumption within the concept of causality but the absence of causal relation between the two has to be ruled out to take their co-presence as indicating the relation of cause and effect. This is a Platonic argument that a non-propositional awareness of the Form underlies and explains our ability to apply concepts and form representations. One must implicitly know how to apply the concept of cause and effect, fallibly though, before sorting out objects accordingly.

The Kantian rebuttal of psychologism was based on the impossibility of converting an autobiographical assertion - the fire is warm in my experience to a uniform attribution - the fire is warm, without the intervention of pure concepts of understanding. But the relation is still to be limited to subjective representations because only the latter can conform to the laws of the mind. Hence, Kant’s philosophy is a subjective idealism.

Hegel gives another option: when we consider the existence of something without relation to another, the cognition is immediate; when we consider it in relation to another, it is mediated. The concrete identity of an object is, however, a mediated immediacy - it is itself through another. There is no contradiction between being-for-oneself and being-for-another.

People often commit what is called the gambler’s fallacy in probabilistic reasoning. That this is a fallacy cannot be discovered by examining what is inside our skull, but through probability calculus. A similar point can be made about rational agency and moral responsibility. When psychology attempts to explain what is truly explanatory prior to it, by abstracting from the content of thought, it falls into the psychologistic fallacy because it considers an account of the acquisition of truth as the explanation of truth.