Psychologism Quotes

“That’s the rankest psychologism, and was conclusively revealed as hogwash by Gottlob Frege in the 1890s!”
― Sheldon Cooper

“We continue to conceive of the universe as consisting of things and forces that act on things.

My son’s ninth grade English class were given an essay question that instructed them to name the “qualities” “in” a certain character in a novel. We say that a person “has” courage, or pride, or arrogance, or “a” temper—as though these were substances like salt. Innumerable students are asked to write about “historical forces” or “movements.” Was Blake or Beethoven “a romantic”? Such is our deeply ingrained linguistic habit of reifying relationships and activities into things that you can “have.”

[...] “It is nonsense to talk about ‘dependency’ or ‘aggressiveness’ or ‘pride,’ and so on. All such words have their roots in what happens between persons, not in some something-or-other inside a person.” (Bateson, 1979)”
― Stephen Nachmanovitch

“[Plato's] achievements are impaired by his hatred of the society in which he was living, and by his romantic love for the old tribal form of social life. It is this attitude which led him to formulate an untenable law of historical development, namely, the law of universal degeneration or decay. And the same attitude is also responsible for the irrational, fantastic, and romantic elements of his otherwise excellent analysis. On the other hand, it was just his personal interest and his partiality which sharpened his eye and so made his achievements possible. He derived his historicist theory from the fantastic philosophical doctrine that the changing visible world is only a decaying copy of an unchanging invisible world. But this ingenious attempt to combine a historicist pessimism with an ontological optimism leads, when elaborated, to difficulties. These difficulties forced upon him the adoption of a biological naturalism, leading (together with ‘psychologism’, i.e. the theory that society depends on the ‘human nature’ of its members) to mysticism and superstition, culminating in a pseudo-rational mathematical theory of breeding. They even endangered the impressive unity of his theoretical edifice.”
― Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies - Volume One: The Spell of Plato