Psychologism

O presente artigo visa mostrar que um dos argumentos de Frege contra o psicologismo, o argumento da comunicabilidade, pressupoe duas teses que implicam a possibilidade de uma linguagem privada, no sentido de Wittgenstein (uma linguagem que apenas uma pessoa pode entender), a saber, (1) que as representacoes mentais (Vorstellungen) sao epistemicamente privadas e inalienaveis e (2) que para saber o que um termo geral significa, deve-se conhecer aquilo ao qual ele se refere.

According to (what I call) the Explanatory Problem with Frege's Platonism about Thoughts, the sharp separation between the psychological and the logical on which Frege famously insists is too sharp, leaving Frege no resources to show how it could be legitimate to invoke logical laws in an explanation of our activities of thinking. I argue that there is room in Frege's philosophy for such justificatory explanations. To see how, we need first to correctly understand the lesson of Frege's attack on psychologism as fundamentally marking a contrast between justification and explanation, and, second, we must take Frege to be committed to the idea that the laws of truth are normatively constitutive for the process of thinking.

Resumen El presente trabajo constituye una reflexión teórica sobre la vinculación transdisciplinaria entre la Lógica y la Psicología. Como punto de partida se explicitan los tipos de conexión entre disciplinas que caracterizan a las relaciones inter, multi y ...

The paper explores psychological experimentation in fiction with chronotope, point of view, a forgetful narrator to develop dual narration technique when the older character qualifies memories to synchronize with the present. Reconstruction provides polyphonic contexts.
Key words: chronotype, consciousness, memory, dialogism, polyphony


Психология и хронотоп сознания в романе Эммы Хили
«Элизабет пропала»

Автор статьи анализирует психологический эксперимент в романе, задействуя такие категории, как хронотоп, точка зрения, забывчивый рассказчик для создания дуальной повествовательной техники. Реконструируя события прошлой жизни, рассказчик, сопоставляя их с настоящим, обеспечивает полифоничность контекстов.
Ключевые слова: хронотоп, сознание, память, диалогизм, полифония.

For more than a hundred years now, the dominant view amongst scholars has been that Kant's philosophy has nothing to do with psychology, or, at the very least, that psychology is inessential to Kant's philosophical project. In the early reception of Kant's work, however, psychology played a central role. Philosophers such as Carl Christian Erhard Schmid, Jakob Friedrich Fries, and Friedrich Eduard Beneke all maintained that Kant's philosophy could only be justified on the basis of a psychological account of cognition. This doctoral thesis shows that this tradition should be interpreted as a reasonable response to the problems that these early Kantians encountered in Kant's philosophy and that, though it is now mostly forgotten, this tradition formed an important part of the philosophical landscape in Germany around 1800.

This article is focused on answering the question to what extent one can be a sceptic. Sextus Empiricus’s Outlines of Scepticism serves as a guide. In section 1, it is investigated whether three logical laws have a certain foundation or are subject to doubt. In section 2, Sextus’s way to deal with these laws is examined; the question arises how dogmatic his approach is. After that, a possible ‘reply’ by Sextus to the criticism receives attention. Section 3 is concentrated on a possible alternative to Sextus’s approach. Besides logical laws, some important methods are concerned.

Kelly suggested that it was useful to consider anyone as functioning as a scientist, in the business of applying theo-ries, making hypotheses and predictions and testing them out in the practice of everyday life. One of Charles Peirce’s major contributions was to develop the disciplines of logic and the philosophy of science. We can deepen and enrich our understanding of Kelly’s vision by looking at what Peirce has to say about the process of science. For Peirce, the essence of science was the application of the laws of inference. He developed a much broader concept of logic, elab-orating the processes of deduction and induction and adding to these the logic of hypothetical inference, or ‘abduc-tion’, even as Kelly broadened it further in his “departure from classical logic”. Examining the implications of these three forms of inference allows us to elaborate the dynamics involved in the process of construing, ordinacy and the cycles of experience, creativity and decision making. This is the second of a three part series examining the relation-ship between the work of Peirce and Kelly. The third will include a look at phenomenology, bipolarity, the self, dialogical process and sociological considerations.

This is my MA thesis for University of Tartu devoted to psychologism and neopsychologism in philosophy of logic. Psychologism is a conception according to which foundation for logic is our mental states. Psychologism was extremely popular in the 19th century but later slowly lost its positions. Psychologism as a philosophy was critcized by Frege and Husserl. However, philosopher Quine already in the 20th century predicted the return of the doctrine in future. Thesis proposes a survey of early psychological ideas such as that of Mill, Wundt, Beneke. It also studies the later neopsychological ideas connected to cognitivsim and philosophy of mind.

There are passages in Wittgenstein where he compares his method to psychotherapy and one or two where he seems to suggest that the ‘patient’ has the last word on his ‘illness’ and ‘cure’.  This paper tries to take these seriously, especially in connexion with the idea that victims of philosophical confusion talk nonsense.

Philosophical accusations of talking nonsense made in a polemical spirit are bound to fail, since the only way one can effectively criticise another’s utterance is by attaching some meaning to it.  But if the other acknowledges the possibility that his puzzlement arises from his having been taken in by nonsense, then perhaps a co-operative investigation of this suggestion might be fruitful.  Indeed self-diagnosis ought in principle to be possible.  Ought it not to have happened at least once in the history of philosophy if philosophical nonsense has ever been exposed? 

But there are difficulties.  For example:
a) We must ask whether or not philosophical nonsense, when exposed as such, is supposed to lose all appearance of meaningfulness.  Either answer is problematic.
b) The acknowledged similarity of the methodology under investigation to that of psychoanalysis exposes it to many of the familiar objections to the methodology of psychoanalysis, especially those that draw attention to the misleading influence of suggestion by an authority-figure.
c) The proposal that relentless cross-questioning of a suspected nonsense-talker will eventually lead her to ‘dry up’ (if she really is talking nonsense) seems to involve a version of the so-called Socratic Fallacy.

From his early writings onward , Charles S. Peirce defended an unpsychological approach to logic. Logicians, he argued in his Harvard lectures of 1865, should not be interested in how and what we in fact think: logic deals only with the necessary and objective relations among symbols, whether they are actually thought or not, so that any intromission of psychological facts into logic would confound rather than elucidate what logic is about. As an authority for this opinion, he quoted Johann Friedrich Herbart (1776–1841), especially the passage from the Lehrbuch zur Einleitung in die Philosophie in which ‘‘the great German metaphysician’’ had claimed that ‘‘in logic it is necessary to ignore everything that is psychological.’’1 This was destined to become a standard reference for Peirce’s subsequent philosophy of logic. Herbart’s influence on Pierce was not limited to logic, however. What he especially learned from Herbart was the doctrine of the association of ideas. Pierce knew, of course, the British empiricist- associationist tradition—of Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Mill, Bain—quite well. But for him the only adequate description of how ideas are connected one another was Herbart’s. There is evidence that it was from Herbart’s conception of apperception that Peirce inherited the ‘‘synechistic’’ doctrine of the association of ideas that he first presented in his celebrated ‘‘The Law of Mind’’ of 1892.

The Twin Earth scenario assumes reference to natural kinds is unique and never changes (rigid designation), and that we can give justice to the intuition of reference-permanence and things having a deep structure only by pushing meaning outside the brain or mind (semantic externalism). This, I'll show, doesn't follow. Besides, the intuition itself is misconstrued here. To say the term “water” expressed a thought or concept or belief denoting H2O before its actual discovery around 1750, is to make a claim without real content and be guilty of after-the-fact rationalizing. If anything, Twin Earth undercuts the theory of semantic externalism and its core-notion of rigid designation. A pluralized, descriptivist model of reference, I claim, is a better fit for our scientific data and ordinary intuitions either way.

Intentionality is a key-concept in Husserlian phenomenology, in which the proverbial tension between Modern tradition and the "thing-in-itself" comes to the fore. Conscious of the risk of revisiting an issue that has already been object of countless interpretations, we use it as a guideline to retrace the steps of the genesis of the Logical Investigations and phenomenology's alleged "breakthrough". Two of its elements will be examined: the "transcendence" of ideality and the "universal problem of correlation".

Humor and things related (such as the category of the merry [veselost’]), played an unusually prominent role in what is often considered the first school of contemporary literary theory, Russian Formalism, or, to be specific, its Petrograd wing, mainly represented by Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, and Boris Eikhenbaum. Humor helped these Formalists in their battle against approaching literature from the standpoint of “psychologism”. The comic let them emphasize literature’s own agenda (centered round the interplay of its constructive elements, not only within a single work but also across history), at the cost of the “serious” authorial purpose, previously identified with the meaning of the work. In fact, an artistic breakthrough, the Formalists maintained, tends to be (taken as) humorous at the beginning, its “serious” explanations being a later development;
accordingly, the Formalists considered as the prototype of all novels the parodic works of Cervantes
and Sterne. Humor advanced Formalist theory, helping it take its eyes off the tenor of the work and see
the vehicle, off content and see the medium, which now was considered the true message. However,
when it came to their special theory of the comic, this approach threatened to deconstruct the literary
significance of humor in literature, humorous works no longer distinguishable from non-humorous
ones. Why this was so is analyzed in the forthcoming second part of this article, titled “Literature as a
Joke”.

Attention to the conversational role of alethic terms seems to dominate, and even sometimes exhaust, many contemporary analyses of the nature of truth. Yet, because truth plays a role in judgment and assertion regardless of whether alethic terms are expressly used, such analyses cannot be comprehensive or fully adequate. A more general analysis of the nature of truth is therefore required---one which continues to explain the significance of truth independently of the role alethic terms play in discourse. We undertake such an analysis in this paper; in particular, we start with certain elements from Kant and Frege, and develop a construct of truth as a normative modality of cognitive acts (e.g., thought, judgment, assertion). Using the various biconditional T-schemas to sanction the general passage from assertions to (equivalent) assertions of truth, we then suggest that an illocutionary analysis of truth can contribute to its locutionary analysis as well, including the analysis of diverse constructions involving alethic terms that have been largely overlooked in the philosophical literature. Finally, we briefly indicate the importance of distinguishing between alethic and epistemic modalities.

What is the logical form of judgments, if they have one? This question remains an enigma for any transcendental approach to logical thought. The paper addresses the matter by following the debate between Edmund Husserl and Christoph Sigwart from 1890 to 1904. It shows the pivotal role that the problem of judgment played in this discussion. Since judgments were thought to be both refined mental acts and fundamental logical elements, the related issue was a thumbnail version of the broader conflict between psychology and logic. The paper argues that Husserl, far from overcoming Sigwart's "Kantian-psychologistic" approach, ends up integrating it into the later stages of his phenomenological work; and that this approach does in fact pose an unavoidable transcendental-genetic problem for Husserl's phenomenology of logic. The argument intends to contribute to a possible integration of the study of the factual "nature" of men within the horizon of the philosophical logic of knowledge.

I suggest that, although the nonsensicalist challenge (obviously) matters, it has, at least in its Wittgensteinian form, been widely ignored.  On the other hand, those who still adhere to nonsensicalism (mainly Wittgensteinians) have been equally remiss in their failure to examine its presuppositions.

I am planning a history of the notion of philosophical nonsense and naturally difficult historical and exegetical questions have come up.  Charles Pigden has argued that the notion goes back at least as far as Hobbes and that Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant (on some interpretations) and pragmatists such as William James, as well as numerous Twentieth-Century philosophers make use of it.  In this ‘paper’ I put forward for general discussion such questions as whether Hobbes was the first 'nonsensicalist', whether Kant was a 'nonsensicalist' at all, which philosophers if any have considered contradictions to be meaningless and whether Wittgenstein thought that his concept of criterion could legitimately be used verificationistically.  I shall continue to add further questions as they occur to me.

In this paper I take the opportunity of the recent publication of Pieranna Garavaso's and Nicla Vassallo's Frege on Thinking and Its Epistemic Significance (with whose main tenets this paper is in constant dialogue) to provide an overview of some components of Frege's conception of logic, in relation to epistemic notions such as thinking, judgement, and inference. In section 1 I discuss Frege's view that the task of logic is to provide justification for what we think, and in section 2 I show that this idea plays a central role in his view that logic is normative for judgements and inferences. In section 3 I offer a survey of Frege's manifold conception of thinking. Finally, in section 4, I analyse the relations between thinking and language in Frege's philosophy.

Данная статья - первое из серии исследований автора, анализирующих трансформации феноменологической философии начала ХХ в. Отправной точкой анализа служит проблема релятивизма в «Логических исследованиях» Э. Гуссерля. В статье показывается, как начальное согласие в отношении предложенного Гуссерлем решения этой проблемы постепенно ведёт к формированию альтернативных взглядов на проблему психологизма (Хайдеггер, Шелер). При всех различиях этих позиций, объединяющей является общность по вопросам основ научного знания, стремление создать мета-теорию науки (на примере Гуссерля и раннего Хайдеггера). В заключительной части статьи подробно анализируются внутренние и внешние причины, по которым психологические и антропологические идеи начинают восприниматься как «естественное продолжение» феноменологической философии.

This is the first article out of the author's series of publications, presenting his analysis of the transformations that phenomenology underwent in the first decades of the 20. Century. The problem of relativism builds a natural starting point for the discussion. The initial general agreement on the solution to the problems of relativism (as given in «Logical investigations») leads to an important differentiation of views within the phenomenological community. However, the general unity concerning the meta-theory of knowledge (as shown on the example of Husserl and Heidegger) is maintained. The final part of the article investigates different motives that led some German philosophers to the conviction that anthropology could be a way of continuing phenomenological research.

Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s objections against the possibility of a science of aesthetics were influential on different sides of the analytic/continental divide. Heidegger’s anti-scientism leads him to an alētheic view of artworks which precedes and exceeds any possible aesthetic reduction. Wittgenstein also rejects the relevance of causal explanations, psychological or physiological, to aesthetic questions. The main aim of this paper is to compare Heidegger with Wittgenstein, showing that: (a) there are significant parallels to be drawn between Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s anti-scientism about aesthetics, and that (b) their anti-scientism leads both towards partly divergent criticisms of what I will call ‘aestheticism’. The divergence is mainly due to a broader metaphilosophical disagreement concerning appeals to ordinary language. Thus situating the two philosophers’ positions facilitates a possible critical dialogue between analytic and continental approaches in aesthetics.

Gestalt psychology emerged in Germany in the opening decades of the twentieth century and grew to become one of the major psychological schools alongside functionalism, structuralism, behaviourism and psychoanalysis. As a case study in the sociology of scientific knowledge (SSK), it provides a rich source of insights as to how scientific theories develop in particular socio-historical contexts. In the early twentieth century the fate of psychology still hung in the balance: it could become an independent empirical science modelled on the natural sciences or remain housed in philosophy departments as the foundation of a scientific philosophy. The rapid development of experimental psychology in the late nineteenth century had raised the prospect that traditional philosophical problems in logic, epistemology and metaphysics might prove susceptible to experimental solution. Such claims, known collectively as 'psychologism', came under intense attack from a wide range of philosophers wishing to defend the traditional philosophical enterprise from the encroachment of science. The highly charged 'psychologism debate' (Psychologismus-Streit) extended from the 1880s to the 1920s, when it was finally resolved in favour of a separation between experimental psychology and 'pure' philosophy. It was in this fraught institutional context that the founders of Gestalt psychology -Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka -sought to establish their new theoretical framework. The purpose of the present essay is to trace the influence of the psychologism debate on the development and reception of Gestalt psychology in the period 1910-1930. The main source of information on this topic is Mitchell Ash's seminal study Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890-1967 (1995), which provides a detailed sociological analysis of the intellectual, institutional and wider cultural context in which Gestalt 1 Gestalt Psychology & the Psychologism Debate | Campbell Edgar psychology emerged. Another important source is Martin Kusch's Psychologism (also published in 1995), an in-depth analysis of the psychologism debate involving a novel application of the principles of SSK to philosophical rather than scientific knowledge. Kusch argues that the First World War and the antiscientific mentality of the Weimar Republic caused the abandonment of the psychologism debate and the victory of phenomenology.

I investigate the role of the subject in judgment in Kant, Frege, and Husserl, situating it in the broader and less-often-considered context of their accounts of presentation as well as judgment. Contemporary philosophical usage of “representation” tends to elide the question of what Kant called the constitution of content, because of a reluctance, traced to Frege’s anti-psychologism, to attend to subjectivity. But for Kant and Husserl, anti-psychologism allows for synthesis as the subjective act necessary for both “mere presentation” and judgment. In Begriffshrift, Frege alludes to a significant logical role for the subjective act of judgment, and in later work, traces of this logical role remain in the intensional notions of grasping a thought and judging as acknowledging its truth. But Frege’s anti-psychologism blocks interpreting these subjective notions in term of synthesis. Although similar in certain ways to Frege and equally anti-psychologistic, Husserl’s theory of judgment in the Logical Investigations maintains a role for subjective syntheses for presentations and judgments, and goes beyond Kant in allowing for a kind of objectivity at the level of non-judgment presentations. These two great anti-psychologists at the dawn of the parallel heydays of linguistic and phenomenological analysis are thus differentiated by the fates they assign to the act of synthesis.

The paper considers the question of whether Mill’s account of the nature and justificatory foundations of deductive logic is psychologistic.  Logical psychologism asserts the dependency of logic on psychology.  Frequently, this dependency arises as a result of a metaphysical thesis asserting the psychological nature of the subject matter of logic.  A study of  Mill’s System of Logic and his Examination  reveals that Mill held an equivocal view of the subject matter of logic sometimes treating it as a set of psychological processes, and at other times as the objects of those processes.  The consequences of each of these views upon the justificatory foundations or logic are explored.  The paper concludes that, despite his providing logic with a prescriptive function, and despite his avoidance of conceptualism, Mill’s theory fails to provide deductive logic with a justificatory foundation that is independent of psychology.

When not ignored by scholars, Lotze's logic is understood as an example of either psychologism or Pla-tonism. As a matter of fact, despite his allowance for the topic of the origin of concepts, Lotze manages to avoid logical psychologism. At the same time, concepts cannot be said to have validity (Geltung) in the same way as propositions in themselves do: were this the case, one could actually ascribe Lotze a form of Platonism. Avoiding the crass dichotomy between realism and nominalism, Lotze works out a meticulous analysis of the relation between general concepts and our knowledge of reality, which is perfectly compliant with his teleological worldview.

The present contribution elucidates Husserl’s relationship to Lotze in the light of Winthrop Bell’s notes on Husserl’s 1912 seminar on Lotze’s theory of knowledge. Once again, these notes make it clear that Husserl highly appreciated the chapter on Plato’s theory of ideas from Lotze’s 1874 'Logic' and his anti-psychologistic view of logic, as far as it goes. However, it also becomes clear that Husserl rejected both Lotze’s account of the origins of objectivity in terms of the doctrine of “achievements of thinking (Denkleistungen)” and the discussion of skepticism in the 1874 'Logic' against the background of his own (Bolzano-inspired) conception of intentionality and his treatment of the epistemological “problem of transcendence” in the framework of the “phenomenological reduction”.

The article develops the concept of "political judgement" - a new, affirmative understanding of the phenomena which are criticized as "political correctness" by both right-wing and liberal commentators. To that end, it takes the right's claims, that "political correctness" is slave morality in Nietzsche's sense seriously and proposes a systematic reading of a right-nietzschean position. Connecting current "political-correctness"-critique and Nietzsche in this way allows for a deeper understanding of the right-wing rationality and the affective energy underlying the critique. Through contrasting this right-nietzschean reading with its systematic opposite, a left-nietzschean position, the article shows that the essence of politics is to redesign norms which distribute privilege. What is critically labelled "political correctness" is, thus, better captured by the notion of "political judgment", because - given an interest in emancipation - such politics should not be demonized when they limit the freedom provided by undeserved privileges .

Franz Brentano, it has been argued 2 , is far too often neglected among contemporary philosophers and does not receive the attention he deserves, given the importance of his contributions to philosophy. In fact, Brentano is nowadays mentioned mainly for his thesis that intentionality is a characteristic mark of the mental, and when someone wants to stress his eminent role in the history of philosophy, she usually does so by adding the quite long and impressive list of his students who became important philosophers (as well as psychologists, politicians, etc.) such as Edmund Husserl, Alexius Meinong, Anton Marty, Christian von Ehrenfels, Sigmund Freud, Tomas Masaryk, and others. Brentano was described a charismatic teacher: students frequented his courses even when they were not part of the required program. His goal was to train them to approach philosophy -and psychology -in a scientific manner and to become independent thinkers for whom facts are more important than philosophical traditions. At the same time, however, especially after his giving up teaching in Vienna and moving to Florence in 1896, he often reacted quite disappointedly when he saw that his former students deviated from his philosophical position and developed their own views. Husserl describes this ambivalence of Brentano's personality in his Recollections of Franz Brentano:

Lacan helps me apply Holzkamp’s critique of psychology to Holzkamp’s psychology itself. To be more precise, I try to draw on some of Holzkamp’s critical ideas in order to enrich and expand a Lacanian critique of Holzkamp’s alternative psychology as it is presented in the text “Psychology: Social Self-Understanding on the Reasons for Action in the Conduct of Everyday Life”. This reveals some promising junctions and irreducible contradictions between the Lacanian and Holzkampian critical psychological traditions. Unfortunately, as a Lacanian, I am only able to consider these junctions and contradictions from my Lacanian perspective. It is from this perspective that Holzkampian psychology is shown to be partly unsatisfactory because it cannot entirely rid itself of some of the problems that Lacan and Holzkamp himself perceived in psychology, namely, psychologism, dyadic mirroring, individual-social dualism, individualism, structure blindness, abstraction, mechanistic rationality, and worldlessness. These problems can only be overcome, from my Lacanian perspective, by going beyond psychology, beyond Holzkamp’s Psychology of the Subject’s Conduct of Everyday Life, towards a kind of Metapsychology of the Big Other’s Conduct of Life.

Der Platz des Subjekts in der Bachelardschen Epistemologie ist keineswegs klar. Einerseits scheint diese Epistemologie jegliche subjektive Grundlegung abzulehnen, sei es in Form einer ontologischen Theorie der Vernunft oder einer transzendentalen Theorie der Kategorien: weit davon entfernt, die Grundlegung der Erkenntnis darzustellen, "muss sich der Geist den Bedingungen des Wissens beugen" 2 . So scheint die dialektische Bewegung der Produktion der wissenschaftlichen Begriffe, d.h. die Dynamik des Prozesses der diskursiven Korrektur der Begriffe und der Produktion der neuen epistemologischen Werte, in der der Fortschritt der wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnis sich wie eine ständige Erschütterung der Grundlagen der Erkenntnis ereignet, nicht das Schaffen eines Subjektes zu sein, sondern ein bloß objektiver Prozess. Andererseits jedoch hebt Bachelard besonders die Notwendigkeit hervor, durch eine Kritik eines zu steifen Formalismus oder eines Normativismus, die Begriffe der Wissenschaft zu "deformalisieren" oder zu "psychologisieren": "es muss in den Formeln ein wenig Psychologie geben, damit sich ein Nichtpsychologismus im Akt entwickelt, indem er den Psychologismus beseitigt" 3 . So verstehen wir aufgrund dieses Zögerns zwischen Begriffs-und Subjektphilosophie, dass einige in dieser Epistemologie eine radikale Kritik des Idealismus gesehen haben, andere hingegen einen neuen Idealismus, und dass noch andere ihre Ratlosigkeit geäußert haben, angesichts einer Epistemologie, die, wie Canguilhem schreibt, "das Vokabular der Psychologie und der Interpsychologie weiterhin verwendet, um einen axiologischen Rationalismus darzustellen" 4 .

Sostengo l'opportunità di esplorare con attenzione i pro e i contro di un drastico riorientamento della teoria del diritto, e della teoria delle norme in generale, nella direzione di ciò che chiamo " psicodeontica " : l'adozione di un approccio psicologistico. Argomento in difesa di un approccio psicodeontico non in termini generali, ma con riferimento a due ambiti particolari: la teoria del ragionamento giuridico (in particolare, il ragionamento giustificativo giudiziale) e l'elaborazione di una teoria del diritto a due livelli (il livello delle regole e quello dei principi) ispirata a una concezione particolarista del ragionamento pratico. I due temi sono strettamente connessi. Alcuni aspetti della concezione particolarista del ragionamento pratico, di cruciale importanza, si prestano in modo naturale a essere intesi e sviluppati in chiave psicologica. Parole chiave ragionamento giuridico, norma, psicologismo, particolarismo, psicologia del ragionamento.

In the following text I reexamine the connotations of the term habit from the perspective of Peirce’s pragmatism. I start by tracing back the roots of the term in the Metaphysical Club’s discussions of Alexander Bain’s theory of belief. By stressing the relative overlap between belief and habit I am also proposing that the latter term transcends the boundaries of empirical psychology. Peirce’s well-known antipathy to psychologism in logic raised the status of habit to a universal concept that participates in the unlimited process of interpretation. Habit, therefore, falls into a new lineage of meaning that can be traced back to antiquity and turns into a generative notion with extensive connotations. As a result it becomes an inseparable part of Peirce architectonic philosophy, capable to shed new light on his evolutionary cosmology and metaphysics. Conceiving of habit as an operative element in the evolution of all phenomena in the universe is the main objective of this article.

Peirce’s anti-psychologism hinges on two main assumptions. First, logic and psychology belong to two separate disciplines – respectively, the normative sciences and the experimental sciences. Second, externalism must be understood as a crucial and inescapable epistemological criterion. The introspectionist illusion, according to which individuals have direct and epistemologically flawless access to their own internal states, should be dismissed. As Colapietro (2003) and Calcaterra (2006) observe, Peirce’s standpoint is far different from the Kantian classical account of anti-psychologism. This original take on anti-psychologism leaves room for a functional distinction between logic and psychology, emerging from a semiotic and communicative continuity. This means that psychology, unlike logic as a formal doctrine of signs, will be epistemologically appropriate for dealing with internal psychological states, on the condition that this inquiry be focused on the communicative processes through which these internal states are expressed and conveyed.
Such a Peircean account of anti-psychologism forms the epistemological background of this paper. My goal is to show how Peirce’s approach to communication and semiosis can be applied in order to discuss a specific psychological theory, in this case, attachment theory. Specifically, I propose employing Giovanni Maddalena’s Peircean distinction between complete and incomplete gestures (Maddalena 2015) to account for the distinction between secure, dismissing and preoccupied attachment patterns. To this end, I will be discussing three different measurements of attachment: the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI, George, Kaplan & Main 1985), the Adult Attachment Projection (AAP, George & West 2006), and the Patient Attachment Coding System (PACS, Talia, Miller-Bottome & Daniel 2015). Throughout this discussion, I will examine the connection between the semiotic and phenomenological category of completeness, and the psychological category of security. This connection involves an interesting normative import, which I briefly discuss in the conclusions.

Horizont ist der Gesichtskreis, der all das umfaßt und umschließt, was von einem Punkt aus sichtbar ist. In der Anwendung auf das denkende Bewußtsein reden wir dann von Enge des Horizontes, von möglicher Erweiterung des Horizontes, von Erschließung neuer Horizonte usw. Insbesondere hat der philosophische Sprachgebrauch seit . . . Husserl das Wort verwendet, um die Gebundenheit des Denkens an seine endliche Bestimmtheit und das Schrittgesetz der Erweiterung des Gesichtskreises dadurch zu charakterisieren. Wer keinen Horizont hat, ist ein Mensch, der nicht weit genug sieht und deshalb das ihm Naheliegende überschätzt. Umgekehrt heißt Horizont haben: Nicht-auf-das-Nächste Eingeschränktsein, sondern über es Hinaussehenkönnen. Wer Horizont hat, weiß die Bedeutung aller Dinge innerhalb dieses Horizontes richtig einzuschätzen nach Nähe und Ferne, Größe und Kleinheit. Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, pp. 307-308

La psychologie de la forme cherche à penser les émotions comme des relations causales, psychologiquement « manifestes », c'est-à-dire ressenties, entre les corrélats physiologiques des objets perçus et le corrélat physiologique de notre corps propre. Les émotions ne sont alors pas, comme dans la théorie James-Lange, des effets de la causalité des objets perçus sur notre organisme et sur le sentiment que nous en avons, mais cette causalité elle-même, qui conduit éventuellement à ces effets. Cette théorie a l’avantage de rendre compte très simplement de plusieurs caractéristiques des émotions : d’abord, elles nous renseignent immédiatement sur leurs causes (j’ai peur du serpent) ; ensuite, et surtout, elles sont indivisiblement une propriété de l’Ego qui les éprouve (j’ai peur) et une propriété de l’objet qui les provoque (le serpent est effrayant). On rend facilement compte de cette dernière caractéristique dès lors qu’on fait des « émotions » égologiques (la peur) et des « caractères expressifs » des objets (le caractère « effrayant » du serpent) de simples prédicats relationnels, réductibles ontologiquement à la relation dynamique dont ils ne sont, pour parler comme Russell, que des « expressions embarrassées » : « j’ai peur du serpent » signifierait seulement qu’il y a une relation dynamique sensible (et qualitativement caractérisée) entre le serpent et moi.
Mais les psychologues de la forme semblent prêter un avantage supplémentaire et décisif à cette théorie : elle permettrait de rendre compte de la « compréhension » que nous avons souvent de nos émotions, au sens où nous saurions en les éprouvant qu’elles découlent nécessairement de la nature de l’objet qui les provoque. C’est cette thèse de l’intelligibilité intrinsèque des émotions que nous voudrions discuter, en les distinguant d’autres relations entre l’Ego et les objets, par lesquelles les objets reçoivent, non plus des « caractères expressifs », mais des « caractères de demande », et qui ne sont plus dynamiques ou causales, mais logiques : la condition pour que nous puissions « comprendre » nos émotions est qu’elles soient sous-tendues par des relations de motivation entre l’objet et un projet de l’Ego. Mais alors on pourra se demander si elles méritent encore le nom d’émotions.

Resumo: Em todas as críticas feitas por Franz Brentano contra a filosofia do século XIX, seja na Psicologia a partir de um ponto de vista empírico, seja em seus últimos escritos, indubitavelmente Kant ocupa o lugar de honra. Na visão de Brentano, Kant não apenas postulou os juízos sintéticos a priori sem qualquer justificação, mas também instigou a fase de decadência que caracterizou a filosofia alemã na primeira metade do século XIX. Além dessas afirmações polêmicas, que frequentemente atraem a atenção, é importante colocar as coisas em perspectiva e investigar como essas críticas são interpretadas e quais são as suas origens. No presente artigo, eu vou me concentrar mais especificamente na recepção da psicologia kantiana por Brentano e seus alunos. Certamente, a rejeição brentaniana da psicologia de Kant acompanha sua total rejeição dos juízos sintéticos a priori. O que eu quero sugerir aqui é que, no caso específico da psicologia, a hostil recepção da filosofia kantiana na escola de Brentano se deve, principalmente, a uma combinação de dois fatores. O primeiro é a rejeição kantiana da psicologia na teoria do conhecimento. O segundo, que é correlativo ao primeiro fator, é a rejeição brentaniana da tese de Kant acerca da impossibilidade da psicologia se tornar uma ciência. No que se segue, eu investigo detalhadamente esses dois fatores, utilizando como estudo de caso a posição defendida por Carl Stumpf na Psicologia e Teoria do Conhecimento. Este trabalho merece ser discutido em sua totalidade: Stumpf (1848-1936) não foi apenas um dos alunos mais brilhantes e influentes de Brentano, mas seu ensaio também desempenhou um importante papel na escola de Brentano, oferecendo uma das raras confrontações impressas com as posições kantianas e neokantianas sobre a psicologia.