Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

The Force of an IdeaWolff and the Logic of the Human Mind

The Force of an Idea: Wolff and the Logic of the Human Mind [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.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

The Force of an IdeaWolff and the Logic of the Human Mind

Part of the Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Book Series (volume 50)
Editors: Araujo, Saulo de Freitas; Pereira, Thiago Constâncio Ribeiro; Sturm, Thomas
Favaretti Camposampiero, Matteo
The Force of an Idea — Jul 17, 2021
Download PDF
17 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/springer-journals/the-force-of-an-idea-wolff-and-the-logic-of-the-human-mind-R7hSWYcrtb

References (12)

Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
ISBN
978-3-030-74434-2
Pages
121 –138
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-74435-9_8
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

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.]

Published: Jul 17, 2021

Keywords: Christian Wolff; Natural logic; Psychology; Laws of thought; Mechanism

There are no references for this article.