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Husserl's Refutation of Psychologism and the Possibility of A Husserl's Refutation of and the Psychologism Possibility of a Phenomenological Psychology* LARRY DAVIDSON As Marvin Farber has remarked, Husserl first conceived of phenomenol- ogy as a "new kind of 'rational psychology"' (1967, pp. 210-1 1 ) . And in fact in the first edition of the Logical Investigations ( 1970b), Husserl himself defined phenomenology as "descriptive psychology" (p. 262n). Yet the major thrust of the entire first volume of these same Logical Investigations was a refutation of psychologism, which showed conclusively how psychol- ogy could not provide an adequate philosophical grounding for logic and positive science. The science which must provide this grounding, instead, and which thus takes the place of psychology in the overcoming of psychologism, is the newly created science of "phenomenology." A phe- nomenology which, as Husserl writes in the Logical Investigations, is "a science infinitely removed from psychology as the empirical science of the natural attributes and states of animal realities" (1970b, p. 253). This introduction of phenomenology enables Husserl to overcome psycholog- ism because it is in no way psychological - it is "infinitely removed" from the psychological. We may well wonder, then, whether phenomenology is a form of psychology or whether it, by definition, excludes the psychological. This *This paper was originally presented at the Fifth Annual International Human Science Research Conferenceat the University of California,Berkeley May 1986. 2 paper attempts to look into the persistently problematic relationship between these two disciplines; a relation which has been said to imply "the whole program of Husserl's philosophy" (Paci 1972, pp. 148-9). It is evident already in the prolegomena of the first volume of the Logical Investigations that Husserl's first interest is the overcoming of the psychologism prevalent in the logic of his day; a psychologism, inciden- tally, which he had recently uncovered in his own previous publication, The Philosophy of Arithmetic. This psychologism had largely resulted from the attempt to conceive of logic as the psychology of thinking; that is, as comprised of the subjective acts of knowing, judging, etc., understood as real events taking place in the natural-causal context of psychic life. In this way, logic had become the study of the natural laws which determine "logical" behavior, and logical laws were understood to be natural- psychological laws, pertaining to the subjective acts of knowing, judging, etc., which comprise the domain of the psychologist. Husserl takes up this position in his Prolegomena and asks: "Does the assessment of thoughts by logical laws amount to proof of their causal origin in these same laws as laws of nature?" ( 1970b, p. 102). The answer which he goes to great length to justify is a resounding "no." He explains that this position could only have resulted from two rather fundamental confusions. The first is that of a confusion between the acts (of judging, etc.) themselves as real, psychological events and the contents of these acts which are objective and ideal. Natural-psychological laws only pertain to and explain the acts themselves as real events in the causal context of nature; psychic life being one domain of this natural context. They do not pertain to the objects or content of these acts. Laws of logic, on the other hand, pertain only to the content, or what is known through these acts; they have nothing to do with the acts themselves as real events. This initial confusion then leads to a second confusion, whereby the law as descriptive of a causal connection is confused with the law as being itself a term in a causal connection. Psychologism had also been based upon the belief that logical laws act to determine subjective acts of judgment, rather than just to describe the necessary causal connections between them. In this way, the law itself came to be seen as a cause, so that contradictory statements could not be true because the law of contradiction determines that we will not entertain contradictory judg- ments in the same unified train of thought. If one does so, then one is no longer simply wrong logically, but one's thought must now be seen as deviant and must somehow be explained on the basis of another set of .
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