Logic and Psychology

Abstract

The history of the interrelationship between logic and the biological sciences (including psychology), if it were to be traced from Aristotle to Wundt, and from Wundt to Piaget, would manifest a remarkable conceptual transformation. This transformation, however, appertains more to the contents of logic itself rather than to its basic relationship to the natural sciences. The essential objective, throughout, has remained the same: If the physical sciences, given their quantitative nature, have been able to engage the services of mathematical analysis, then the biological sciences, given their qualitative framework, have more appropriately sought to engage the methods of logical analysis. For logic necessarily possesses two essential traits which render it a proper instrument for cognitive psychology as well as comparative biology. Firstly, it consists of a system of qualitative schemata, in contrast to the quantitative atomism of the statistical methods; and secondly, it is susceptible of a high degree of precision, relative to the inexactness of the method of simple description. Thus logic, combining the merits of both the morphological and the mathematical analyses, permits psychology to pursue its objectives without methodological compromise: Namely, the description and explanation of psychological phenomena (cognitive, emotive, and adaptive), with a reasonable degree of precision, with reference to a set of psychological structures and operations. In this chapter, we shall first examine the theoretical relationship between logic and psychology, and subsequently describe the special system of logical analysis employed in genetic psychology (especially the School of Geneva).