Aspects of Psychologism: Précis

Abstract

ASPECTS OF PSYCHOLOGISM IS A collection of essays unified around a philosophical approach to the mind that is non-reductive and yet compatible (or continuous) with scientific psychology. The essays in the book, published over a period of twenty years, investigate the phenomena of intentionality and consciousness, with a special emphasis on perceptual phenomena. The central theme which unites the essays is an approach to the mind which I call “psychologism about the psychological”. Psychologism about the psychological, as I understand it, is a vision of what is important in the study of the mind. It asserts the reality of the psychological and the need to investigate it through a variety of approaches, of which metaphysics, psychology, cognitive science and phenomenology are examples. These disciplines, according to psychologism, are concerned with fundamentally the same subject-matter: the mind. But since I have found it difficult sometimes to get this point across in abstract terms, perhaps it is easier to introduce what I mean by “psychologism” by saying what it is not. The last fifty or so years of analytic philosophy of mind have been dominated by two problems: the problem of consciousness and the problem of intentionality. Both of these problems have been framed against the background of a physicalist or materialist metaphysics: the problems are about how physicalism or materialism can account for consciousness and intentionality. But there is a prior question: how should consciousness and intentionality be conceived? A crude description of the philosophical answers of the last fifty years to this question is this: consciousness should be understood in terms of qualia, and intentionality in terms of the propositional attitudes, mental states thought to be relations to abstract entities called “propositions”. My psychologism rejects both these answers. The best way to understand this rejection is to consider the usual approach to the propositional attitudes. I think it is fair to say that the investigation of the propositional attitudes in the last few decades has progressed by looking at the semantic form or structure of natural language propositional attitude ascriptions, and has read off from these ascriptions claims about the psychological nature of intentionality. This is the only way to understand the pervasive claim that intentional states are “relations to propositions”. A much more natural thought – although one I ultimately reject – is that intentional states are relations to things in the world: the objects around us and their properties. The idea that intentional states are relations to Symposium