Kusch Martin. Psychologism: A case study in the sociology of philosophical knowledge

Published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library. 2005. ISBN : 0-203-98389-0 (Master e-book ISBN). (345 pages). Series : Philosophical issues in science.
Subject : Psychologism. Phenomenological psychology. Frege, Gottlob, 1848–1925. Husserl, Edmund, 1859–1938.How do things stand today between the department of philosophy and the department of psychology? I mean: how do we think of their relative positions on the map of knowledge? Naturally, opinions will vary, and developments in cognitive science have disrupted some of the old certainties, but until recently the answer would have seemed clear to many philosophers—and to some minds the old certainties remain. Philosophy, it would be said, deals with knowledge, with what makes something into knowledge rather than mere belief. Psychology, by contrast, deals with the processes and conditions of coming to know. These are quite different and disjoint concerns. Psychology deals with causes, philosophy with reasons. Philosophy concerns truth; psychology cannot rise above belief and taking-for-true. Well rehearsed lines of this sort tripped off the tongues of bright philosophy students. They would quickly pick up the manner and tone of their tutors in expressing these truths. I don’t think it unfair to say that philosophers have cultivated a certain complacency in this regard and, perhaps unwittingly, conveyed to their students a disdain for those who believed they could illuminate knowledge by studying rats in mazes, or learning curves for lists of nonsense syllables or the documentation of a child’s growing skills. If the aim was conceptual analysis, only a minimum of factual knowledge of this kind was needed. During the heyday of Oxford ordinary language philosophy, students would occasionally expose their naivety by asking why the likes of Austin or Ryle didn’t study the use of language empirically, rather than from the armchair. Such enquiries were not welcome, though I doubt if they ever received a fully satisfactory answer.
Dr Kusch is looking at the emergence of experimental psychology within German departments of
philosophy, and the processes attending its birth as a separate discipline. There is no compelling reason why that process had to have the outcome it did. There is nothing uniquely rational or logical about it. A simple thought experiment will serve to make the point. Couldn’t we imagine the present occupants of what are called ‘philosophy departments’ distributed among departments of history, economics, law, psychology, sociology and, perhaps in a few cases, physics, mathematics and biology? Is it obvious that this would be a net loss rather than a net gain? Why should there be a department that gathers together activities and material that really consist of one phase of many different lines of enquiry? After all, even some philosophers have advocated versions of this scenario, with their talk of the underlabourer conception, or the gradual replacement of philosophical by scientific questions. All of this is ground that we can see traversed in the story told by Dr Kusch.