Dear Jeff K, lists - You're right: learning from psychology is not the same thing as psychologism. As the human mind is the empirical locus of logic which we know best, it is obvious that we may learn much about logic about how human minds express logical structure - as long as we do not make the mistake of taking the human mind of being the author, origin, creator, etc. of such structures. Best F
Den 16/09/2014 kl. 23.41 skrev "Kasser,Jeff" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> : I think that this is a really valuable point, Ben, and I think that an application of it bears very directly on discussions of psychologism and anti-psychologism in Peirce. Despite having opposed psychologism from the outset, Peirce was happy to pursue psychological solutions to some problems in logic. What's crucial here is to keep clear about the status of such solutions. When Peirce criticized his argument for the pragmatic maxim in 1877-78 for resting on a psychological principle, he was not, in my estimation, accusing his past self of psychologism. There are many reasons for this, starting with the fact that we'd have to come up with an explanation of how someone who railed against psychologism in the 1860's slipped into it in the 1870's. There are also clear anti-psychologistic claims in the stage-setting sections of "Fixation" and "How To" themselves. In the passage from the Minute Logic that Frederik quotes on p. 28 and in the later self-criticism I've already alluded to, it's pretty clear that by "psychological" treatments of logical matters, Peirce has in mind thinking about reasoning in terms of belief and action. There's nothing wrong about starting from claims about belief and action in order to establish certain logical norms, provided that one doesn't reduce the norms to that way of embodying reasoning. As you suggest below, Ben, it's a matter of a consilience of arguments. Peirce doesn't want his 1877-78 argument to be treated as the deepest or the only way of establishing such norms as the pragmatic maxim, but he's not accusing himself of circularity or relativism or the other vices of psychologism. If one doesn't attend carefully to the details of Peirce's self-assessments, he can seem inconsistent or confused about his position with respect to psychologism. Best, Jeff
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