Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The explanation or interpretation of events or ideas in psychological terms.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun philosophy The tendency to describe things in psychological or subjective terms

Etymologies

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Examples

  • Kant's position, which served as a starting point for Stumpf in this article, was that of the neo-Kantian W. W.ndelband who had been using the term psychologism since 1877 in a pejorative sense to denounce opponents of Kant or those who, like Fries and Beneke, advocated a psychological interpretation of his philosophy.

    On A Trans-Atlantic Flight 2009

  • Dancy wants to reject what he calls psychologism: “the claim that the reasons for which we act are psychological states of ourselves” (2000, 98).

    Reasons for Action: Justification vs. Explanation Lenman, James 2009

  • Yet the kind of psychologism that Stumpf criticizes does not take this distinction into account when it assigns to a theory of knowledge the task of accounting for the physiological processes and causal connections underlying mental acts (judgments).

    On A Trans-Atlantic Flight 2009

  • On the other hand, considering Husserl's criticism against Mach's psychologism in the Prolegomena, he argues that the error of this kind of psychologism is to overestimate the domain of phenomenal experience, to which Mach reduces the objects and laws of the natural sciences.

    On A Trans-Atlantic Flight 2009

  • Popper, however, misunderstands the rest of Fries's theory, accusing him of "psychologism" in the sense that Fries supposedly relies on a psychological or subjective sense of certainty to justify instances of immediate knowledge.

    Archive 2005-10-01 Tusar N Mohapatra 2005

  • Popper, however, misunderstands the rest of Fries's theory, accusing him of "psychologism" in the sense that Fries supposedly relies on a psychological or subjective sense of certainty to justify instances of immediate knowledge.

    Wittgenstein, Popper Tusar N Mohapatra 2005

  • The view from the top is epistemologically crippling, and reduces its subjects to the illusions of a host of fragmented subjectivities, to the poverty of the individual experience of isolated nomads … This placeless individuality, this structural idealism which affords us the luxury of the Sartrean blink, offers a welcome escape from the ‘nightmare of history,’ but at the same time it condemns our culture to psychologism and the ‘projections’ of private subjectivity.

    Matthew Yglesias » Time to Play This Video Again I Guess 2009

  • At the heart of Dancy's case against psychologism is a strong emphasis on the restatement and development of Williams 'thesis WB, discussed above in section 3.

    Reasons for Action: Justification vs. Explanation Lenman, James 2009

  • In order to overcome psychologism and to achieve a strict separation of logic from psychology, Bolzano “opened up” for logic a realm or “world” of its own, different from the world of material objects as well as from the world of mental phenomena, a World 3 to speak with Karl Popper.

    Slices of Matisse gerard varni 2009

  • This joint claim serves as a supporting argument against the reproach of psychologism.

    Salvation Santa 2009

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