JOHN AACH

PSYCHOLOGISM RECONSIDERED: A
RE-EVALUATION OF T H E A R G U M E N T S
OF F R E G E A N D H U S S E R L

Psychologism is the view that logic can be explicated by psychology,

and though it was widely accepted during the last century, today it is
considered dead. ~ That Frege and Husserl vanquished the reigning
psychologism of their day at the turn of the century through a series
of sharp arguments2 is an oft-told tale of twentieth-century philosophy.
In place of psychologism, Frege and Husserl defended what I call
the "Independence Assumption" that logic is entirely independent of
psychology, which has no relevance to the latter's foundations.
In this article I challenge this view by showing that psychologism
remains very much an open issue a n d that there are good reasons
for doubting the Independence Assumption. I will review Frege's and
Husserl's arguments and show that they divide into two classes, each
of which fails to prove its point. I will argue that logic and psychology
have a more reciprocal relation than the prevailing view allows, and
suggest that this view has had serious consequences for the philosophy
of our century.
A central theme of this article is that Frege and Husserl in a basic
way misidentified their target. It was not psychology per se which, when
applied to logic, led to the errors they attacked, but rather a specific
tradition of psychology derived from British empiricism that was com-
monly accepted in their day. Frege and Husserl, neither of whom
took great interest in psychology, accepted the definition of psychology
offered by their adversaries, but psychology as a whole was not bound
by it, and, indeed, started moving away from it on its own not long
after their attacks. This movement went unnoticed by Frege and Husserl
even though it began to take psychologism out of reach of their attacks,
and their philosophical descendants continued the error by simply ac-
cepting the issue as closed.
The psychology that took the biggest step out of Frege's and Husserl's
reach was, in my view, behaviorism, and a second theme of this article
will be to show that a behavioristic psychologism eludes their argu-
ments. But three things must be clear: First, the behaviorism I refer to

Synthese 85: 315-338, 1990.

© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
316 JOHN AACH

here is the scientific behaviorism founded by John B. Watson and

developed in our day by B. F. Skinner, not the "logical" behaviorism
often attributed to Wittgenstein, Hempel, and Ryle. Second, although
I will describe a psychologism based on suggestions made by Skinner,
it may not be the case that behaviorists, including Skinner, will acknowl-
edge the result as part of their science. Third, I do not claim to present
a fully adequate psychologism, although I see no reason why what I
present here cannot be further developed. Nor do I claim that behavior-
ism is the only foundation for a possibly adequate psychologism.3
In terms of plan, in Section 1 I will divide Frege's and Husserl's main
arguments against psychologism into two classes. In Section 2 I will
show that the first class of arguments fails by showing how my behavi-
oristic psychologism evades them. In Section 3 I will show that the
second class also fails on more general grounds. In Section 4 I will
criticize the Independence Assumption. In Section 5 I will lay out the
origins of the prevailing view and its deleterious consequences.

Both Frege and Husserl give numerous arguments against psycholog-

ism, but the main threads can be roughly divided into four groups. The
work of this section will be to describe and reduce those to two classes.
Each author gives arguments from all the groups, but Frege does not
distinguish the different threads and seems to favor the first three, while
Husserl is systematic, especially in his Prolegomena to Pure Logic (LI,
pp. 53-247), and tends to emphasize the fourth. Also, Husserl, but not
Frege, thought that the arguments objectively refuted psychologism,
and they disagreed about what constituted psychologism - issues that
have been closely studied but do not disturb the groupings I outline
here. But it is possibly Frege's skepticism about psychologism's refut-
ability that encouraged his polemic style of argument against it, in
contrast to Husserl's systematicity. And now to the groups themselves:

A. Psychologism Destroys the Objectivity of Logic

According to Frege, a fundamental difference obtains between subjec-
tive ideas that exist in the minds of individuals and objective ideas that
"are the same for all", and, indeed, this distinction "stands or falls
with that between psychology and logic" (FA, p. 37). This distinction
 PSYCHOLOGISM RECONSIDERED 317

is not affected by the fact that subjective ideas often accompany our
grasping of objective ideas, which Frege characterized as non-actual
(i.e., non-sensory, see BLA, p. 16). Husserl also distinguished subjec-
tive and objective ideas but was more concerned than Frege to describe
their relationship. Subjective ideas are presentations that are "real"
(i.e., temporal, see LI, p. 351), but they bear acts that intend objective
Ideas or Species which subsume them. The Species that subsume these
individual moments are themselves neither temporal nor sensory. 4
Both Frege and Husserl argued their case by reference to arithmetic,
which they subsumed under logic, by noting that even though people
may have different subjective experiences when they think of a number,
they still have the same number in mind. Thus, Frege wrote that if
the number two were a subjective idea "it would have straight away to
be private to me only. Another man's idea is, ex vi terminii, another
idea. We should then have it might be many millions of twos on our
hands. We should have to speak of my two and your two, of one two
and all t w o s . . . " (FA, p. 37). Husserl made the same point (LI, pp.
179-80).
From this distinction, and from the definition of psychology as the
science of subjective ideas, 5 both Frege and Husserl argued that psycho-
logism is an error: Since psychology is "about" subjective ideas, then
logic would also be about subjective ideas if logic were grounded in
psychology. But logic is about objective ideas, as arithmetic makes
especially obvious. Frege summed it up by saying that under psycholog-
ism "everything is shunted off into the subjective" (Review, p. 9).

B. Psychologisrn is a Kind o f Relativism

Both Frege and Husserl held that psychologism is a kind of relativism,

which is an error. Frege conceived of the issue in terms of the distinction
between truth and taking to be true: while "psychological logicians"
confuse these, he insisted that "being true is different from being taken
to be true, whether by one or many or everybody, and in no case is to
be reduced to it" (BLA, p. 13). Husserl likewise insisted that truth is
distinct from truth for any individual or group. The key point is that
truth per se is, in Frege's words, "objective and independent of the
judging subject" (BLA, p. 15), and, in Husserl's, "absolutely, intrinsi-
cally true: truth is one and the same, whether men or non-men, angels
or gods apprehend and judge it" (LI, p. 140).
318 JOHN AACH

Lurking just beneath this agreement that psychologism confuses abso~

lute and relative conceptions of truth lies a disagreement about the
precise sense of this error. Husserl held that this confusion grounded
an objective refutation of psychologism, but Frege stopped short of this
claim. Central to their difference is the status of a claim that relativism
apparently entails: 'There is no absolute truth'. Such a claim, it can
be argued, is equivalent to, 'It is true that there is no absolute truth',
which is a contradiction. Reasoning in this way, Husserl argued in the
fourth of six criticisms of "specific" relativism (LI, p. 142) that it, and
therefore psychologism, is absurd: Since such relativism entails that
truth depends on the human constitution, it entails the conditional 'If
there were no such constitution, there would be no truth'; but the
conclusion of the conditional is absurd while the premise is not (it is
simply false), and this implies that the conditional as a whole, and thus
the relativism that entails it, is also absurd.
The problem is that the validity of this argument presumes the validity
of the usual logic of the conditional and the law of contradiction, which
a relativist is free to reject along with the existence of absolute truth.
At best, this argument can only show that the systematicity of logic is
such that its principles cannot be rejected piecemeal, but the possibility
of wholesale rejection or, what amounts to the same thing, wholesale
reinterpretation of the sort a psychologism might permit, is not ad-
dressed. Thus, Frege observed (BLA, p. 15): "The question why and
with what right we acknowledge a law of logic to be true, logic can
answer only by reducing it to another law of logic. Where that is not
possible, logic can give no answer". He apparently concluded, in con-
trast to Husserl, that psychologism could not be objectively refuted.
Frege's and Husserl's positions on these issues have been closely
studied by F¢llesdal 6 and Mohanty. 7 F¢llesdal shows that all of Hus-
serfs arguments against relativism uphold logic only by means of prior
adherence to logic, as Frege indicated, and ultimately concludes that
Husserl could only drive his arguments by recourse to his notion that
we have immediate evidence (Evidenz) of logical truths. But with this
notion, F¢llesdal finds that "Husserl saw catastrophically falsely exactly
at the point where he thought he had seen essentially farther than
Frege", 8 and concludes that psychologism remains unrefuted despite
Husserl's efforts. Against this, Mohanty notes that Husserl aimed not
to persuade relativists, but to refute them; though this may presuppose
the availability of objectively valid principles, it does not require
 PSYCHOLOGISM RECONSIDERED 319

acknowledgement within the view being refuted. Thus, the relativist

may be refuted by observing that he intends to formulate logic as a
Theory in its usual objective sense, but in a psychological way which
simultaneously denies that sense; that he can avoid acknowledging the
error by exploiting ambiguities in our concepts of 'idea' vs. 'Idea' or
'true' vs. 'true for me' does not evade it. 9
This is a complex dispute which, fortunately, it is unnecessary to
pursue here. For my purposes, all that we need observe is that, regard-
less of the outcome of Husserl's "refutation" of relativism, the final
judgment against psychologism still depends on the point argued in the
first group of arguments that psychology can only account for subjective,
but never objective, ideas. 1° In this sense, this group of arguments
arises from the first simply by focusing on particular objective ideas of
logic - here Truth, but also Concept, Proposition, Theory, Thought,
etc.

C. Psychologism Confuses Origin with Justification

Both Frege and Husserl held that psychology, in addition to studying
subjective ideas, is committed to studying their origin according to
causal laws. Psychologism thus depicts logical laws as causal laws, but
the two types of laws are distinct since logical laws do not describe how
ideas are caused, only how they are justified. Thus, Frege's often quoted
motto:
N e v e r let us t a k e a d e s c r i p t i o n o f t h e o r i g i n o f a n i d e a f o r a d e f i n i t i o n , o r a n a c c o u n t o f
the mental and physical conditions on which we become conscious of a proposition for
a proof of it. A proposition may be thought, and again it may be true; let us never
confuse these two things. (FA, p. vi.)

Husserl agrees when he warns that we must "not confuse psychological

dependence (e.g., dependence of origin) with logical demonstration
and justification"(LI, pp. 108-109).

D. Psychological Laws are Neither Universal nor Exact

The first two groups of arguments locate psychologism's flaw in the
circumstance that psychology deals with the wrong subject matter to
explicate logic, but a different line begins to appear in the third: psycho-
logism fails because psychology formulates the wrong kind of law.
320 JOHN AACH

There, the problem is that psychology's causal laws are distinct from
logic's laws of justification, but a more general issue is raised in the
fourth: Psychology, as an empirical science, yields inexact, impure, and
non-universal laws, but logical laws are exact, pure, and universal. Both
Frege and Husserl raised this objection, but it seems more central to
Husserl:
The basic error of Psychologismconsists, according to my view, in its obliteration of this
fundamental distinction between pure and empirical generality, and in its misinter-
pretation of the pure laws of logic as empirical laws of psychology.~L

It underwrites his leading arguments against psychologism - his three

refutations of the "empiricistic consequences" of psychologism in Chap-
ter 4 of the Prolegomena (LI, pp. 98-110), and was also central to his
attacks on naturalism in general. But, though Frege strongly opposed
empiricism in logic and arithmetic, the issue arises only incidentally in
his attacks against psychologism per se, and we saw above that, for
him, it is with distinctions of subject matter that psychology's separation
from logic "stands or falls".
In these three refutations, Husserl points to two basic problems with
the notion that an empirical psychology can explain logic, the first with
the content of empirical laws and the second with their knowability.
Concerning content, he notes that empirical laws are always vague and
inexact, and that they always presuppose the existence of matters of
fact; indeed, strictly speaking, such impurities mean that they are not
'laws' at all. Thus, in psychology, 'laws' like the laws of association of
ideas are only statements of approximate regularities that have been
observed to obtain between ideas under some conditions, but logical
laws such as the syllogism are of "absolute exactness" (LI, p. 99) and
do not refer to any existing state of affairs. Such a distinction between
logical and empirical laws would suffice to show that the former were
not products of an empirical science were it not for the fact that some
empirical laws, e.g., the Newtonian law of gravitation, seem also to be
pure laws. But here is where knowability comes in. True, such laws as
conceived may be pure, but they differ from the laws as known. ~2 For
Husserl, empirical laws apparently always retain as part of their content
some of the particularity of the experiences that instantiate them. Des-
pite its exact statement, the law of gravitation is only known to obtain
approximately under certain conditions, so it is not really a pure law
after all, only "a probability" (LI, p. 106).
 PSYCHOLOGISM RECONSIDERED 321

Frege makes essentially the same points but less systematically. Any
psychological law, as an empirical law of actual events, must include
determinations of place, time, and (especially for psychology as the
study of subjective ideas) person, and so cannot be a law of logic. Thus,
he notes (BLA, 14-5):

How, then, is the Principle of Identity really to be read? Like this, for instance: "It is
impossible for people in the year 1893 to acknowledge an object as being different from
itself"? Or like this: "Every object is identical with itself"? The former law concerns
h u m a n beings and contains a temporal reference; in the latter there is no talk either of
h u m a n beings or of time.

Despite this agreement, Frege's and Husserl's positions differ in one

important way: While both claim that pure laws are fundamentally
unavailable to empirical science, Husserl adds an account of the non-
empirical availability of logical laws - immediate evidence. Indeed,
beyond the four kinds of argument against psychologism just discussed,
Husserl may be said to use a fifth not employed by Frege - namely,
that logical, but not empirical, laws can be validated by immediate
evidence. But the notion of immediate evidence mainly derives its
force precisely from its characterization as that which makes pure laws
available to consciousness in their purity in contrast to empirical gener-
alization, and so this fifth argument does not seem to be independent
from the fourth. True, Husserl would surely deny this and claim that
it is immediate evidence that allows the difference between empirical
and pure laws to be comprehended in the first place, but if I can show
that it requires his notion of immediate evidence to reject psychologism,
I will, like F¢llesdal, consider my aim accomplished.
Meanwhile, I will divide the four groups of arguments into two
classes - first, the class of those arguments which depend on the notion
that psychology cannot account for logic because of its subjective subject
matter, and, second, the class of those which depend on the notion
that logical laws cannot be products of an empirical science. Groups A
and B are clearly in the first class, and group D is clearly in the
second, but group C falls on the border between them, since it refers to
psychology both as a science of only empirical causal laws, and as
one whose subject matter cannot accommodate the objective idea of
justification. It will prove convenient, however, to put group C into the
first class, to which I now turn.
322 JOHN AACH

As just seen, the first class of Frege's and Husserl's arguments against
psychologism depend on a concept of psychology as the science of
subjective ideas. This concept embodies two assumptions - first, that
psychology's proper subject matter is conscious experience, and second,
that this psychological subject matter cannot be objective. While there
is no sign that Frege or Husserl ever questioned the first assumption,
they emphatically maintained the second. Husserl even warned that to
study objectivities psychologically would be as damaging to psychology
as to logic or phenomenology.13
But the first assumption was falsified by the inception of behaviorism
in 1913 by John B. Watson, who claimed that "psychology must discard
all reference to consciousness... [and] no longer delude itself into
thinking that it is making mental states the object of observation". 14
Watson banished the entire vocabulary of consciousness from psycho-
logy, which would be formulated as a natural science of behavior in its
relation to its environment. But this does little to overturn Frege's and
Husserl's arguments unless it is seen that behaviorism, by discarding
the apparatus of consciousness, can overcome the second assumption
above by formulating some notion of objective behavior. That it can
do so can be seen by following out a set of suggestions by B. F. Skinner.
Skinner starts with a notion of "operant" behavior whose basic unit
is a response with a certain physical description and which occurs with
a certain probability (or "strength").~s Operant behavior is essentially
probabilistic, but its strength changes in lawlike manners depending on
the consequences it occasions in its environment. One such conse-
quence is "reinforcement", in which behavior occasions presentation
of a reinforcer - a stimulus which has the effect that it regularly in-
creases the strength of any response it follows upon. A response which
has achieved high strength due to reinforcement is "conditioned". Obvi-
ous examples of reinforcers are food and water, which, when presented
to an organism sufficiently deprived of them, will condition any be-
havior that immediately precedes their appearance; these are, indeed,
"primary" reinforcers, ones whose behavioral effects are genetically
determined.
Reinforcers are not the only stimuli important to behavior. Also
important are "discriminative" stimuli, which, as stimuli regularly pre-
sent on occasions when a response is reinforced, are essentially predic-
tors of when behavior will be reinforced. According to a general law
 PSYCHOLOGISM RECONSIDERED 323

of behavior, when such stimuli exist a response comes to be conditioned

only in their presence; in this case they are called controlling stimuli,
since their presence effectively controls the response's probability of
occurrence.
Now, organisms that follow laws of operant behavior, in which class
Skinner places humans, live in environments that are also lawful, and
among their laws are regularities that govern the circumstances under
which operant behaviors will be reinforced. These "contingencies of
reinforcement" are properties of the world at large, including the social
and biological world. But from this arises a conception of objective
behavior as behavior that optimally meets prevailing contingencies of
reinforcement, i.e., behavior that, within the capacities of an organism,
is conditioned to occur only in circumstances where it will be reinforced,
and not otherwise. Such behavior is objective in that it is adjusted to
the world as it really is; it is not completely random or evoked under
inappropriate circumstances. Behavior controlled by available
discriminative stimuli is objective in this sense, but objectivity does not
always turn on discrimination: Since water is common, dowsers are
commonly reinforced for dowsing, which may then become con-
ditioned, but it fails to be objective not because it is not under control
of available discriminative stimuli, but because, by occurring when it
does not have to, it is not optimal.*6
To be sure, this is a different sort of objectivity than Frege and
Husserl considered, for while it deals with the adequate adjustment of
organisms to enduring properties of the world, they regarded objectivity
as eternal, ideal, and conceptual. ~7 But two further suggestions by
Skinner partly address the last difference: First, operant behaviors may
be "chained" in such a way that some come to be conditioned only
through the mediation of others. Chaining is principally governed by a
law that controlling stimuli are themselves reinforcing ("secondary" or
"conditioned" reinforcers), so that organisms can develop sequences
of responses, each one of which produces discriminative stimuli that
control the next. Second, Skinner holds that language is a network of
operant behavior that people acquire through contingencies of re-
inforcement in the social world.~8 Language is first effective because it
puts the behavior of others at one's disposal as a way of securing
reinforcers, both when one speaks (e.g., when one requests water) and
when one listens (e.g., when one follows verbal instructions to water).
But, once established, it is also effective as verbal thought within indi-
324 JOHN AACH

viduals (e.g., having learned to give directions to water, one can repeat
them to one's self and then follow them when needed).
Thus, Skinner views language as a vast network of conditioned be-
haviors and reinforcers that is ultimately held down at its periphery by
its ability to procure primary or non-linguistic secondary reinforcers.
Verbal behaviors away from the periphery are held in place by their
mediate position in chains of behavior that ultimately connect with it.
Within this arena are the subnetworks of behavior called theories. The
chains of reasoning we follow in a theory are, on this view, chains of
behavior we actually execute - sequences of verbal responses each of
which present verbal stimuli for subsequent responses, and which take
us from statements of the laws or rules t9 of the theory to statements
of its consequences. But the concept of behavioral objectivity can now
be extended to encompass theories, so long as we can accept the notion
that some contingencies of reinforcement are such that the only way
for people to effectively meet them is through the establishment, not
of individual behaviors, but of whole networks of behavior. An objec-
tive theory is, in the large, a complex, articulated, verbal response to
some enduring property of the world, which optimizes our interactions
with it. The objectivity of logic can then be countenanced by following
Husserl in accepting it as an objective theory of theories, a subnetwork
of rules which mediate the formation and use of other objective theor-
ies, and, in doing so effectively, takes advantage of another and even
more subtle enduring property of the world - that it can be regularly
exploited by logically organized theories. This path leads in the end to
a kind of behavioristic phenomenology, where the intentionality of
consciousness is replaced by the direction of behavior via reinforcement
to properties of the world. Even the notion of 'object' can be introduced
by identifying it with such properties, and "ideal" objects are properties
that require a theory to "access" them - i.e., to optimally exploit them.
Thus, arithmetic is an 'object' in the sense that there is an enduring
property of the world that we can regularly exploit only by means of
arithmetical theories, and the number three is an object because the
arithmetic rules for it, as part of arithmetic in general, regularly exploit
the same property. But an irreducible difference between behavioristic
and Husserlian phenomenology is that access to objects is ultimately
conscious and intuitive for the latter, but radically unintuitive for the
former. 2°
Given this notion of behavioral objectivity, the second of Frege's and
 PSYCHOLOGISM RECONSIDERED 325

Husserl's assumptions about psychology is falsified, and the first class

of their arguments against psychologism collapses completely. But it is
worth seeing that this behavioristic theory also evades their claim that
psychology inevitably confuses origins with justifications: One need only
observe that the laws of operant behavior are evolutionary laws which,
like those of natural selection, describe only how randomly occurring
characteristics become predominant by virtue of their consequences
(reinforcement in the case of operant behavior and increased fitness in
natural selection), but do not deal with their original causes, and that
"justification" of operant behavior is to be referred to these conse-
quences. 2~ True, if a random behavioral innovation is justified by meet-
ing prevailing contingencies, it will be reinforced when it occurs and
come to be conditioned. But rather than confuse origins with justifi-
cations, this makes the important observation that the justification of
behavior can be a contributory cause of its regular occurrence.

The first class of arguments fails because Frege and Husserl construed
psychology too narrowly as the study of subjective ideas. But this
criticism does not apply to the second class. Here, they correctly con-
strue psychology as an empirical science, and argue that logic cannot
be included in this wider category. Behaviorism cannot escape these
arguments simply by its redefinition of psychology's subject matter, as
it did the first, because it remains an empirical science. But I will show
here that this argument also fails because their characterization of
empirical science is also too narrow. I focus on Husserl, who stressed
this argument, but most of my analysis will also apply to Frege.
The heart of Husserl's mischaracterization of empirical science is that
he thought it could only be inductive, never theoretical, a notion he
reserved for a priori sciences such as he took logic to be. Now, "induc-
tive" and "theoretical" empirical sciences differ most basically in the
criteria by which universal propositions are accepted as basic laws. An
inductive science frames as basic laws generalizations based on directly
observed particular instances, and eschews attempts to formulate these
as products of a deductive theory, while it is precisely axioms of the
latter which are accepted as basic laws in theoretical empirical sci-
ences. 22 Since both sorts of sciences ultimately refer the truth of their
laws to observation, the best that can be said of them is that they have
326 JOHN a a C H

a high degree of probability. But Husserl seems to conclude from this

that all empirical laws are conceptually inexact, and this is a mistake.
There seems nothing wrong with the notion of a conceptually exact
proposition being known only with probability; such would have clear
necessary and sufficient conditions but simply be known to obtain in
the world only under some circumstances. Yet Husserl's discussion of
Newton's law of gravitation shows how strongly he resists this con-
clusion: Rather than accept it as both conceptually exact and uncertainly
known, he in effect splits the law in two: a conceptually exact part
which is absorbed into a non-empirical science, and an empirical part
which is not, he claims, really a law at all.
Husserl's position is partly due to his commitment, shared by Frege,
to the notion that all reference to objects is mediated by senses, for
this led him to see the use of terms with imprecise extensions as due
to inexact senses. Thus, he says concepts like "notched, indented, lens-
shaped, umbelliform, and the l i k e . . , are essentially and not accidentally
inexact" (Ideas, p. 190), and once armed with this notion he argues
that all concepts of empirical science are inexact. This notion that
sensory ("intuitible") data comes involved with its own set of non-
theoretical concepts is useful because it explains why the question of
whether data accords with a theory is always significant and always
informative. But the nature of this involvement is a key problem. By
bringing it under his general logic of sense-fulfillment, Husserl depicts
it as a form of entailment, sees intuitible data as having essential
characters, and views empirical science as a process of eliciting these
characters from it (see LI, p. 450) and bringing them to conceptual
expression (p. 450). But this is too strong, and applies at best to low
level inductive taxonomies which seek features by which organisms or
artifacts seem to sort themselves. Yet even here it can be seriously
asked if the relevant data even have unique conceptual expression, and
more theoretical empirical sciences may be better described as giving
their data conceptual expression rather than eliciting it from them. And
such data would be given exact conceptual expression through the clear,
necessary and sufficient conditions provided by the science's theoretical
structure, even though the theory remains only probable.
If this is so, Husserl has given no reason why logic itself cannot be
a theoretical empirical science, and, indeed, such a conception has
recently received serious consideration in "quantum logic". 23 True, the
theoretical aspect of such sciences presupposes a notion of logic, but
 PSYCHOLOGISM RECONSIDERED 327

this only means that, unlike other empirical laws, logical laws mediate
their own interconnections and the connections they have with the data
which ultimately validate them. But Husserl explicitly attacked the
notion that logical laws are "empirical, but not inductive" in his third
refutation of psychologism (LI, pp. 108-109), and his argument suggests
the source of his mischaracterization of empirical science. Claiming that
a non "empirico-inductive" origin of logical laws must mean that they
are "abstracted" from individual psychological experiences, he says this
merely describes an origin of our ideas of the laws, not a justification
that comes from "insight". By this contrast, Husserl shows that he
thought abstraction a basic flaw in psychological theories of logic that
could only be overcome by his notion of immediate evidence. His
Second Investigation makes it clear that Husserl had the "abstraction"
of the British empiricists in mind. Their basic idea was that universals
accrue to thought through repeated exposure to singular ideas that bear
inherent affinities to one another (though they disagreed about what
the affinities were and how the universals accrued). Moreover, while
abstraction was basically a psychological force or power, it was also the
origin of all knowledge of the world, which thus had to be inductive.
But this is the same link Husserl makes between psychology and empiri-
cal science as a whole.
In short, though Husserl framed his attack as against empirical sci-
ence in general, it finds its proper target against a specific conception
of empirical science - that of the British empiricists. Indeed, against
this target, all of Frege's and Husserl's arguments against psychologism
make perfect sense: This view does hold psychology to be about
subjective ideas, confuse origins with justifications, and, in its theory
of the accrual of universals by abstraction, allows no way for general
claims to ever be pure claims. If anything they erred by conceding it
too much. Rather than destroy it, they canonized it - asking in return
only that their new sciences of logic, arithmetic, and phenomenology
be taken as independent both of psychology and empirical methods.
But empirical science was never any more wedded to the empiricists'
concepts of abstraction and induction than psychology was to their
definition of it as the study of subjective ideas, so their attack on it in
general rests on a misidentification.
Finally, it is worth noting that my behavioristic psychologism denies
the empiricist view that the only justified general claims about the world
arise from a psychological induction. True, behaviorism does have an
328 JOHN AACH

inductive side in its laws of response generalization and stimulus induc-

tion, which describe how the strength of behavior that is similar to
other strong behavior depends on the degree of similarity. But as an
evolutionary theory, it also describes how innovative behavior can arise
that violates such similarity gradients, and yet be 'valid' in that it
satisfies prevailing contingencies.

The failure of Frege's and Husserl's arguments against psychologism

does not necessarily invalidate their conclusion, the Independence As-
sumption, but I will now show that this also has a serious problem: It
makes the effectiveness of logic on human behavior - which nobody
seriously doubts - into a glaring anomaly. This problem arises for both
Frege and Husserl, but comes up most clearly when Husserl argues
against the view that logical laws are natural laws of human thought
that operate when "alien mental influences (such as custom, inclination,
tradition)" are excluded. (LI, p. 101.) This view arises because:
The empirical fact that persons performing normally in a given sphere, e.g. scientists in
their fields, usually judge in a logically correct manner, seems to demand, as a natural
explanation, that the logical laws by means of which the correctness of thinking is
assessed, also determine the course of thinking, in the manner of causal laws, while
isolated deviations from the norm may readily be put to the account of the troubling
influences stemming from other psychological sources. (LI, p. 103)

Husserl rejects this as a confusion of psychological acts of judgment

with their objective contents, noting that it confuses "a law as a term
in causation with a law as the rule o f causation. In other fields, too, we
familiarly employ mythic talk of natural laws as presiding powers in
natural e v e n t s . . . " (LI, p. 102). Between logical laws and psychological
accounts of how we think in accordance with them there is no relation
at all - j u s t a "fundamental, essential, never-to-be-bridged gulf" (LI,
p. 104).
But something is wrong here. If logic and psychology had no connec-
tion at all, it would seem an immense anomaly that people usually
judge in a logically correct manner, as Husserl freely grants. With no
connection, why would people not usually think logically inconsistent
thoughts, or think logical thoughts completely randomly? It was for
 PSYCHOLOGISM RECONSIDERED 329

reasons like this that Natorp, in an early review of Husserl's Prolego-

mena, thought that the issue of psychologism was not "fully settled".
Noting that Husserl acknowledged that logical laws are pre-conditions
to subjective "feelings" of inward evidence, he argued against him that
"the logical law would appear to enter into the chain of causation, for
what else can the pre-condition of a 'feeling' be other than a condition
in the causal sense? ''24
This problem cannot be evaded by positing a one-sided dependence
of psychology on logic, which is still taken as strictly independent of
psychology. In fact, this is Husserl's view. He saw logic as an indepen-
dent theoretical science which, as such, determines a normative science
by affixing a value to logical laws, so that for any law L of logic, the
law Thoughts that accord with L are good thoughts is a law of the
normative science (see LI, pp. 74-89, 168-77). True, this theory can
explain how we regularly think logically once good is granted psycho-
logical effectiveness, but the appearance of a one-sided dependence of
psychology on logic is shattered once we realize that it is to apply
essentially to every logical law. Indeed, so long as the objective
thoughts, propositions, and concepts, that Husserl thought were the
essential constituents of logic, are also the essential reference points of
our actual thinking, proposing, and conceiving, it seems impossible to
hold that any dependency of psychology on logic is only one-sided.
Dallas Willard has described Husserl's "way out" of this "paradox
of logical psychologism" by taking note of Husserl's theory of Ideas as
Species. 25 According to Willard, Husserl hoped by this means to fashion
an idealism that avoided the traditional problem of accounting for how
Ideas can inform the sensory world without existing in it. He describes
Husserl as having adapted Lotze's theory of universals - which reduced
talk of universals to talk of universal truths about particulars without
assigning them existence in a peculiar world - to Bolzano's theory
of ideal propos~tionsTin-themselves. This allowed Husserl to reconcile
logic's ideality with its information of the psychological world, since
the very nature of logical Ideas was to be Species of moments of
logically correct psychological judgments. As already noted, Mohanty
has pointed out that Husserl later abandoned this theory of Ideas as
Species in favor of the theory of noematic correlates, but this does not
alter the logic of Willard's argument since it makes no difference at
this level whether "subsumption" or "correlation" links psychological
judgments to logical Ideas. But neither view helps at all to overcome
330 JOHN AACH

the paradox of logical psychologism. For both deal only with how
logical psychological judgments are possible, not why they are usual.
This requires an account of why such judgments are probable, an
issue Husserl forever consigned to parenthetical comments and never
addressed directly. 26
My behavioristic psychologism overcomes this difficulty easily: Here
logical laws do indeed occur as terms in the sequence of causative
events, since such laws are verbal rules that are articulated in chains of
behavior that mediately direct our interactions with the world. As these
chains allow us to meet enduring contingencies of reinforcement in the
world, we come to execute these chains regularly, and our usage of
logic becomes usual.

Frege's and Husserl's arguments against psychologism fail because they

misidentified their target as psychology in general as applied to logic,
rather than the specific tradition of British empiricism that was opera-
tive in the particular psychologisms they fought against. 27 Yet, as be-
haviorism proves, psychology began moving out of reach of their argu-
ments even within their lifetimes, apparently without their notice. 28
Why not?
One reason is surely that they were never interested in psychology
except where it impinged on their main work. Because their fight with
psychologism was basically a border skirmish, neither pursued it very
far onto its home ground of psychology itself - Frege wrote that he
"was forced to enter a little into psychology, if only to repel its invasion
of mathematics" (FA, p. viii) - and where they went much beyond the
common conception of psychology as the science of subjective experi-
ence they were liable to disagree. 29 Both gave lip service to psychology
when it stayed on its own turf, though Husserl granted that it had made
some genuine discoveries 3° while Frege denied sufficient competency
to judge it (Review, p. 21). Husserl had studied with Brentano, whose
psychology he considered a stepping stone to phenomenology, but his
return contribution to psychology was idiosyncratic and slow in coming.
He wrote of his Logical Investigations that "Brentano was never willing
to recognize them as the mature execution of his idea", and that he
had originally "no thought of a reform of the existing psychology". 31
 PSYCHOLOGISM RECONSIDERED 331

He never worked out his suggested phenomenological reform in any

detail.
As the first who expounded the systematic errors of the psychologism
of their day, Frege and Husserl may perhaps be forgiven for not noticing
the limitations of their arguments, but their misidentification set in
motion a cycle of deepening blindness about it. Assuming that psycho-
logism had been disposed of for all time, succeeding generations of
philosophers could take the Independence Assumption for granted
without ever feeling the need to closely examine it, as Frege and Husserl
had been forced to. But this has not only barred philosophers from
noticing further movement of psychology out of reach of Frege's and
Husserl's arguments; the blindness has also been within: Other influ-
ential philosophies soon developed alongside phenomenology which
denied psychology place, but which also undercut the very grounds that
originally justified this position. Thus, Carnap and Wittgenstein wrote
psychology out of their philosophy, 32 but neither could have accepted
Frege's and Husserl's arguments against psychologism, which depended
on notions of eidetic intuition and Ideal objects that both rejected.
Indeed, when Carnap opted for a physicalistic grounding of psychology
over his original phenomenalistic one, he himself took psychology out
of reach of the first class of their arguments, apparently without noticing
it.
This inability to correctly see the limitations of Frege's and Husserl's
arguments persists today in the distinction of "strong" and "weak"
psychologism that Mohanty has used to defend Husserl's early Philoso-
phy of Arithmetic from Frege's charge of psychologism. According to
Mohanty
Weak logical psychologism holds the view t h a t . . , psychological inquiry into actual
human thought processes constitutes necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for inquiring
into the foundations of logic. Strong logical psychologism considers logic to be a branch
of psychology, the laws of logic to be descriptive laws of actual human thought processes,
and understands those laws as making assertions about mental events . . . . 33

This view not only apparently saves Husserl from Frege's criticism,
but it seems to save them both from mine, since my behavioristic
psychologism could be characterized as "weak". But this distinction
misses the point: It is not psychologisms that need to be distinguished
but psychologies. There is nothing "strong" about the "strong psycho-
logism" described here, it is simply based on a particular kind of
332 JOHN AACH

psychology that sees its laws as "making assertions about mental

events" -just that type of psychology which Frege and Husserl opposed.
By casting the issue in these terms, Mohanty perpetuates the false view
that all psychology is a threat to logic unless its application to it is
suitably "restrained" (weakened), when the problem is really that one
particular type of psychology was driven by its own internal assump-
tions to be a threat. It is worth noting that neither Frege nor Husserl
distinguished "weak" and "strong" psychologism (which limits its use
in defending Husserl against Frege), as, indeed, they did not distinguish
different psychologies in this regard; within their limited conception of
psychology, all psychology was a threat and all psychologism "strong".
Moreover, though a "weak" psychologism such as my behavioristic one
may not reduce logic to psychology, it still strongly challenges the
notion that logic is a fully independent field, as Frege and Husserl
thought.
Any blindness in philosophy is bad, but in this case the costs have
been high. The widespread acceptance in our century of Frege's and
Husserl's view that logic and psychology are mutually exclusive has
made the application of logic itself inexplicable. This can be seen in
Carnap's "principle of tolerance", which describes the choice of a
logical language as a pragmatic, not a theoretical, issue, for this implies
that there is no theoretical explanation for why we use the languages we
do. Wittgenstein's attempt to resolve philosophical questions through
linguistic therapy also passed over this question in silence, leaving the
therapy itself unexplained. Frege's and Husserl's victory has accus-
tomed us to believing that we can express logical and scientific laws in
suitably structured languages, but that it is irrelevant to understand
how and why we bother. But these questions cannot be less important
than the validity of logic itself, and the philosophy of our time has
only managed to keep its hands clean of them by hiding behind old
arguments.
On a larger scale, the philosophy of our time, by failing to properly
recognize a moment of history for what it was, has denied itself the
opportunity to advance beyond it. Once it is recognized that the proper
target of Frege's and Husserl's attack against psychologism was British
empiricism, it cannot go long unseen that, with behaviorism, psychology
rejected the same tradition, and that, indeed, in behaviorism's striving
for an objective science of psychology, it reacted to the same inerad-
icable subjectivity of that tradition that Frege and Husserl thought
 PSYCHOLOGISM RECONSIDERED 333

threatened logic. The psychology that followed paralleled the error of

philosophy by viewing its antagonist as philosophy in general, rather
than the specific philosophy that confounded its scientific aims. But if,
with these developments, psychology and philosophy each individually
overcame a common problematic tradition, they may now be ready to
join in a mutually beneficial partnership. It is time to bridge Husserl's
"fundamental, essential, never-to-be-bridged gap".

NOTES

1 Historically speaking, psychologism also entailed that ethics and metaphysics can be
explained by psychology, but I will ignore this here.
2 I list here the works of Frege's and Husserl's that contain their main arguments against
psychotogism, together with abbreviations I will use in subsequent citings: Gottlob Frege,
The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J. L. Austin, 2nd. rev. ed. (Evanston: Northwestern
University, 1980) (hereafter cited as "FA"); Gottlob Frege, 'Review of Dr. E. Husserl's
Philosophy of Arithmetic', trans. E. W. Kluge as reprinted in Readings on Edmund
Husserl's Logical Investigations, ed. J. N. Mohanty (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977),
pp. 6-21 (hereafter cited as "Review"); Gottlob Frege, The Basic Laws of Arithmetic,
trans, and ed. Montgomery Fnrth (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, !967) (hereafter cited as "BLA"); Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, trans.
J. N. Findlay, 2 vols. (London and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, and New Jersey:
Humanities Press, 1970) (hereafter cited as "LI"); Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General
Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier
Books, 1931) (hereafter cited as "Ideas").
3 Ned Block argues in 'Psychologism and Behaviorism', Philosophical Review 90 (1981),
that behaviorism is not consistent with psychologism, but the falsity of this claim, at least
for scientific behaviorism, will be apparent by the end of this article. Block also has an
idiosyncratic view of psychologism, which he accepts as true, as "the doctrine that whether
behavior is intelligent behavior depends on the character of the internal information
processing that produces it" (p. 5). Robert C. Richardson agrees that psychologism is
true but argues against Block that it is not inconsistent with behaviorism (which he
also rejects) in 'Turing Tests for Intelligence: Ned Block's Defense of Psychologism',
Philosophical Studies 41 (1982).
4 Mohanty has pointed out that Husserl later abandoned the notion that irreal objectivi-
ties are Species in favor of the notion that they are objective correlates of subjective acts,
but this leaves the basic distinction between subjectivities and objectivities untouched. J.
N. Mohanty, 'Husserl's Thesis of the Ideality of Meanings', in Mohanty, Readings on
Husserl's Logical Investigations, p. 78.
5 Frege goes further than this and identifies subjective ideas as "what [are] governed by
the psychological laws of association" (FA, p. 37), implicitly reducing all psychology to
associationistic psychology. By contrast, Husserl is always careful to distinguish "associ-
ation psychology" from psychology in general. Mohanty describes some more general
334 JOhN AACH

differences between Frege's and Husserl's conceptions of psychology in Husserl and Frege
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), pp. 32-35.
6 Dagfinn F¢llesdal, Husserl und Frege (Oslo: Aschehoug, 1958), pp. 34-40, 49-51.
7 Mohanty, Husserl and Frege, pp. 26-32.
s Mohanty, Husserl and Frege, p. 51 (free translation). F¢llesdal also observes that
Husserl's acceptance and Frege's rejection of Evidenz encouraged each to see each other's
theories of logic as psychologistic: While Frege thought Evidenz a way of smuggling a
new psychological notion into logic's foundation, Husserl thought Frege's rejection of it
left him with no recourse except psychologism.
9 Mohanty observes that even if Frege "officially" denied psychologism's refutability, he
still mounted logical arguments against it, but this does little damage to F011esdal's
position. Though Frege consistently denies psychologists permission to call the results of
their work "logic", violation of his commandment carries no sanction. Thus (BLA, p.
15): "If other persons presume to acknowledge and doubt a law in the same breath, it
seems to me an attempt to jump out of one's own skin against which I can do no more
than urgently warn them."
10 A similar point arises in connection with a debate over another possible gap in
Husserl's arguments against relativism: In ~Psychologism in Logic: Husserl's Critique',
Inquiry 19 (1976), Jack W. Meiland suggests that Husserl's critique needs to be supple-
mented by noting that, under psychologism, a change in the nature of the mind could
permit affirmations of propositions which had already been judged impossible for all time
by a former logic, and that this is absurd. But Remmel T. Nunn sees no absurdity here;
by describing a machine that can learn different systems of inference based on a single
machine table, he suggests that laws, like the law of contradiction, deemed eternally true
at one time might well be rejected at another (see 'I. Psychologism, Functionalism, and
the Modal Status of Logical Laws', lnquiry 22 (1978)). But the key point is not whether
machines or humans may learn different inference procedures, but which such procedures
are properly conceived as logics, and this, Mohanty emphasizes, is "independent of the
psychological vagaries of the inferring agents . . . . [This is not] just an arbitrary decision
on the part of the absolutist, but follows from the only concept of logic we have and is
justified by the only way we are entitled to talk about logics" (Husserl and Frege, p. 30).
Again, psychologism qua relativism can only be defeated by reference to an objective
idea of logic.
n Edmund Husserl, ' A Reply to a Critic of my Refutation of Logical Psychologism', in
Mohanty, Readings in Husserl's Logical Investigations, p. 39.
12 This is not Husserl's terminology.
13 Thus he writes: "Those w h o . . , confuse the consciousness o f . . . e s s e n c e s . . , with
these essences themselves, ascribe to the flow of consciousness as a real part of it what
is in principle transcendent to it. But that is on the one hand a corruption of psychology,
for it affects the purity of the empirical consciousness; on the other h a n d . . , it is a
corruption of phenomenology". (Ideas, pp. 163-64.) He raised the same point again in
Formal and Transcendental Logic, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff,
1978), where he warned against any "shifting of the concept of psychology" away from
being a "positive worldly s c i e n c e . . . [of] mental processes a n d . . , dispositions". Indeed,
"it is a falsifying dislocation, if one mistakes this psychological internal experience for
the internal experience relied on transcendentally as an evidential experiencing of ego-
cogito" (p. 253).
 PSYCHOLOGISM RECONSIDERED 335

14 John B. Watson, 'Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It", Psychological Review 20

(1913), p. 163.
15 I give here a most cursory sketch of Skinner'a theory of operant behavior, details of
which can be found in The Behavior of Organisms (New York: Appleton Century Crofts,
I938), and Science and Human Behavior (New York: The Free Press, 1953). Among
the topics I ignore are negative reinforcement, generalized reinforcers, schedules of
reinforcement, and states of deprivation, all ultimately essential to Skinner's behaviorism
and the psychologism that arises from it; unfortunately to include them here would too
greatly complicate my discussion. I also omit references to the many critiques of Skinner's
positions that have arisen within behaviorism for the same reason.
16 Skinner does not use the term "'objective" in connection with behavior, but does call
behavior that is nonoptimal in the way just described "'superstitious". See Science and
Human Behavior, pp. 84-87, '"Superstition" in the Pigeon', and 'A Second Type of
"Superstition" in the Pigeon' (with W. H. Morse) in Cumulative Record: A Selection of
Papers, 3rd ed. (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1972), pp. 524-32. He also calls
some "objective" behavior "rational" in connection with his theory of rules (see note 19
below).
17The latter with the possible exception of Husserl's perceptual noemata.
~s See B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior (New York: Appleton Century Crofts, 1957).
Noam Chomsky's challenge to Skinner's view has been foundational for cognitive psychol-
ogy (see 'Review of Skinner's Verbal Behavior' in Leon Jakobovits and Murray Miron,
Readings in the Psychology of Language (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1967), pp.
142-71). For a strong behavioristic rejoinder, see Ilona Lappo, Language and Behavior:
Reevaluation of the Chomsky-Skinner Debate, dissertation at Boston University (1982).
t9 Though essential for complete understanding of this point, I cannot here go into
Skinner's theory of rules as verbal stimuli which add the control necessary for other
behavior (which 'follows' the rule) to be reinforced. See "An Operant Analysis of Problem
Solving' in Contingencies of Reinforcement: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Appleton
Century Crofts, 1969), pp. 133-71, and About Behaviorism (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1974), pp. 119-36.
20 The behavioristic notion of ideal object also loses the Husserlian property of eternality,
and, more importantly, is ultimately empirical, but Husserl's positions lose much of their
support once intuitive access to objects is denied.
2~ See B. F. Skinner, 'The Phylogeny and Ontogeny of Behavior', in Contingencies of
,Reinforcement, pp. 172-217, and "Selection by Consequences', Science 213 (t981). Skin-
ner sees two distinct levels of behavioral evolution - individual and cultural - each
governed by its own "survival value". This provides him a basis for explaining how
behavior that is "justified" for an individual need not be "justified" for a culture as a
whole (and vice versa).
22 Obviously these are idealizations, as no empirical science is ever either completely
inductive or completely theoretical.
23 David Finkelstein, "Matter, Space, and Logic', in Boston Studies in the Philosophy of
Science, vol. V, eds. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (New York: Humanities
Press, 1969), pp. 199-215, and Hilary Putnam, "Is Logic Empirical?' on pp. 216-41 of
the same volume. Quantum logic interprets "paradoxes' of quantum mechanics as evi-
dence that some laws of classical logic are invalid - specifically, the distributive laws of
"and' over "or' and vice versa. For instance, it is a consequence of the Heisenberg
336 JOHN AACH

uncertainty principle that a particle P with precisely known momentum m cannot be

located in space - e.g., by determining which of two holes H I and H2 it has passed
through - even though it has to go through one or the other. But quantum logic interprets
this as a failure of the inference from:

(P has momentum m) and

((P went through H1) or (P went through H2))

to:

((P has momentum m) and (P went through HI )) or

((P has momentum m) and (P went through H2)).

Putnam argues that quantum logic makes logic out to be an empirical science, since it
implies that logical laws are ultimately validated by experience. But nothing about it
suggests that the basic laws of logic are conceptually inexact. (True, the distributive laws
of 'and' and 'or' are approximations that only apply with precision to macroscopic objects,
but these are no longer considered basic laws.)
24 Paul Natorp, 'On the Question of Logical Method', in Mohanty, Readings on Husserl's
Logical Investigations, p. 60-61. See LI, pp. 187-96 for Husserl on "inward evidence'.
2s Dallas Willard, 'The Paradox of Logical Psychologism: On Husserl's Way Out', in
Mohanty, Readings in Husserl's Logical Investigations, pp. 43-54. Strictly speaking,
Willard asks why the regular occurrence of logical judgments cannot be taken as evidence
for logical truths, rather than why the latter cannot be construed as causes of the former,
but these considerations are parallel and I will not distinguish them here. He defends
Husserl's rejection of psychologism by asking for the empirical data that we should need
to validate logical laws if it were true, but the case of quantum logic shows that it can
sometimes make good sense to ask for such data.
26 Husserl makes frequent reference to the need for an a priori theory of probability as
a foundation for empirical science (e.g., LI, pp. 185, 246-47). This would seem to fill
the same role as Carnap's logical theory of probability, which prescribes the degree to
which any statement is confirmed by another statement which describes evidence for it.
(See Rudolf Carnap, Logical Foundations of Probability, 2nd ed., Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1962.) But even this is not enough to resolve the 'paradox'. Following
Husserl, Carnap conceived logical truths to be independent of empirical truths, and, in
this case, that logical probabilities of statements about the world (even when based on
all relevant evidence) would not always correspond to the empirical (physical) probabili-
ties of the events described by them (defined as long-run relative frequencies of occur-
rence). Yet, these probabilities must be related if empirical science is to successfully
predict physical events. Carnap finds the required relation to consist in the analyticity of
the statement " O n the basis of available evidence it is very probable that the degree of
uniformity of the world is high" (p. 180). This Carnapian claim points in the same
direction as Husserl's often repeated claim that the sense of a world in general grounds
the natural attitude's presumption of the world as a field of unending harmonious ver-
ification. But neither ever justified their claims by a detailed delineation of the sense of
a world, nor did either ever clearly show why a nonuniform world should be considered
logically impossible.
27 British empiricism was not their exclusive target, however, as other psychological
 PSYCHOLOGISM RECONSIDERED 337

theories came under attack to the extent that they shared key features of empiricism.
The case of Brentano is illustrative. Although, according to Mohanty, Husserl specifically
exempted Brentano's act psychology from his attacks on psychologism (Husserl and
Frege, p. 34), Husserl still accused him of naturalism because his psychology, though it
recognized the distinction between subjective acts and the objectivities they intend, still
recommended empirical methods to categorize the acts. This made it subject to the second
of the two classes of arguments identified above. See Edmund Husserl, Phenomenological
Psychology: Lectures, Summer Semester; 1925, trans, by John Scanlon (The Hague:
Martinus Nijhoff, 1977, pp. 25-26, and also Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, (Evanston: Northwestern University Press,
1970), pp. 233-34.
2s Husserl's one reference to behaviorism in a major work is on The Crisis of European
Sciences, p. 247n., where he accuses it of exaggerations.
29 See note 5.
30Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology, p. 2. Husserl went so far as to argue that
empirical psychology must succeed, because the psyche, in addition to having an internal
unity, "must necessarily have also an inductive structure in experience" (p. 107).
31 Husserl, Phenomenological Psychology, pp. 24, 29.
32 Carnap could sum up history by saying that "'one of the important achievements in
the development of modern logic has been the gradual elimination of psychologism...
[which] is chiefly due to the efforts o f . . . Gottlob F r e g e . . . [and] Edmund Husserl"
(Carnap, Logical Foundations of Probability, p. 40.).
33 Mohanty, Husserl and Frege, p. 20.

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