Abstract
This chapter addresses the issue of Wolff’s alleged psychologism by offering a historical and systematic reconstruction of his doctrine of natural logic, which captures his mature views on the relation between logic and psychology. The long gestation of this doctrine began in 1705 with Wolff’s re-evaluation of syllogism. The subsequent discovery that syllogism also informs all of our inferential processes gradually led him to the idea that there is a logic embedded in the human mind which determines the laws of thought. Wolff had metaphysical reasons to ascribe a syllogistic structure to human reasoning. Endorsing mechanism, he deemed it possible to describe the mind as a machine governed by a set of fixed laws, and took the rules of syllogistics to be the only plausible candidate for the role of genuine laws of thought. This suggests that a fundamental assumption of modern psychology – the assumption that there are psychological laws – owes something to both early modern mechanism and the doctrine of natural logic.
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Notes
- 1.
I read “dieselben” instead of “dieselbe”, which would otherwise refer to “nature”.
- 2.
See also Wolff (1738/1968, §.392n, §.395n).
- 3.
This qualification means that the three reasons given here are sufficient to explain cognitive processes but not other psychological phenomena like volitional processes and emotional states (which require the representation of good and evil) or pleasure and sorrow (which arise from the feeling of perfection and imperfection, respectively). See Wolff (1735/1972a, section II, ch. 3, §.20).
- 4.
“Every thought must have its sufficient reason. But if we omit one of the previous propositions, we will no longer be able to intelligibly show how we have come to this or that thought” (Wolff, 1751/1983b, §.343, p. 198).
- 5.
As far as I can see, the analysis Wolff advances here of the oppositional inference “All envious people are miserable; thus, it is false that some envious people are not miserable” (Wolff, 1751/CitationID="CR23">1983b</CitationRef>, §.354, p. 209) contains a serious fallacy.
- 6.
Thus, I do not agree that Wolff “conveys the impression that it was he who invented this distinction” (Hoenen, 2010, p. 105).
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Favaretti Camposampiero, M. (2021). Wolff and the Logic of the Human Mind. In: Araujo, S.d.F., Pereira, T.C.R., Sturm, T. (eds) The Force of an Idea. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 50. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74435-9_8
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