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Frege and Husserl started on the same side. What was the psychologism dispute about?

Pieter van Dijkhuizen Fellow
· 5 replies
Logic & argumentAnalyticContinentalPhenomenologyEdmund HusserlGottlob FregeMohanty#frege-and-husserl#history-of-analytic-philosophy#laws-of-logic#psychologism
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Its coordinates: 4.1 Formal Logic · 4.1.1 Propositional Logic · 4.1.2 Predicate Logic +4 more

I've been reading about the split between analytic and continental philosophy because my colleagues treat it as two tribes. What surprised me is that both traditions are said to trace back, around 1900, to two men who agreed about something: Frege and Husserl both attacked psychologism.

I understand roughly that psychologism is ‘the view that logical laws are laws of thought’. But I don't see why that's so bad, or why it would be a turning point. As an engineer, I'd have thought logic is a description of how valid reasoning works in minds or machines.

Could someone explain:

  • What exactly psychologism claimed, and what Frege and Husserl objected to?
  • Whether it's true that Frege's review of Husserl's early book converted Husserl?
  • How two people who agreed on this ended up founding traditions that, a generation later, barely read each other?
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5 answers

Accepted answer

  1. Kenneth Lam Chi-ho

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    The claim. Psychologism, popular in nineteenth-century Germany, held that logic is a branch of psychology: its laws describe how humans actually think, or how our minds are constituted to think.

    The objection. Both Frege and Husserl argued that this confuses how we happen to think with what follows from what. Psychological laws are empirical, vague and could have been otherwise; logical laws are exact and necessary. If logic described our psychology, truth would become relative to the kind of mind doing the thinking. Frege, in the introduction to his 1884 Foundations of Arithmetic, made separating the psychological from the logical his first principle. Husserl's Prolegomena to Pure Logic (1900) made the case at great length.

    The conversion story. Frege reviewed Husserl's Philosophy of Arithmetic harshly in 1894, accusing it of psychologism. The old story says this turned Husserl around. Scholars, J. N. Mohanty among them, have argued Husserl was already moving away from psychologism on his own, influenced by Bolzano and Lotze. It's disputed.

    The divergence. Frege, then Russell, pursued logical analysis of language and mathematics. Husserl developed a method for describing the structures of consciousness, how meanings are given to a mind without being reducible to it. Michael Dummett compared them to two rivers rising close together and flowing to different seas.

    1. Pieter van Dijkhuizen

      Fellow

      Kenneth, that helps a lot. So my engineer's instinct, logic as the description of good reasoning, is closer to what they were attacking than I'd realised.

      Helpful · 1

Other answers

  1. Ana Clara Ferreira

    Fellow

    Your instinct isn't hopeless, though. There's a respectable modern view that logic is normative for thought: it tells you how you ought to reason, not how you do. Frege would accept that much. What he rejected is grounding the laws in facts about minds. A proof checker doesn't model human psychology; it checks whether one thing follows from another.

    Helpful · 2
  2. Tomasz Szewczak

    Fellow

    And for the record, Frege and Husserl corresponded politely. Husserl even drew a distinction close to Frege's sense and reference in his own terms. They were not tribes. They were two careful people who agreed on the enemy and disagreed on the method. The tribes came later.

    Helpful · 3
  3. Oskar Nyberg

    Fellow

    Ryle reviewed Heidegger's Being and Time in Mind in 1929 and lectured on Husserl and Meinong at Oxford. That's another reminder that the early analytics read phenomenology seriously. The mutual deafness is mostly a post-war phenomenon.