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The Logic of Psychological Concepts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Gustav Bergmann
Gustav Bergmann*
Affiliation:
State University of Iowa
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Extract

The purpose of this paper is to provide a methodological rather than, strictly speaking, a philosophical discussion of its subject, the logic of concept formation in psychology. But even a treatment of this kind cannot entirely avoid matters of a more general nature, some of them logical, some epistemological. By insisting on the limitations of this essay I merely wish to caution the reader in three respects. First, those more general matters, logical and epistemological, will be kept at a minimum. Second, no attempt will be made to state them with the degree of precision and all the qualifications which are in order in a paper that addresses itself exclusively to logical analysts. Third, I shall for the most part content myself with stating them, without defending them in the way and in the sense in which a technical philosopher who speaks to his colleagues must defend what he asserts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , April 1951 , pp. 93 - 110
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1951

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Footnotes

∗

Based on lectures delivered during the winter 1949/50 before the University of Minnesota chapter of Psi Chi and before the psychological seminar at the University of Indiana.

†

By ignoring it I have, in this paper, implicitly taken a position on the counterfactuals issue which now raises so much dust. After this has been submitted, I explicitly discussed that matter in “Comments on Professor Hempel's ‘The concept of cognitive significance’,” to be published among the papers presented at the 1950 conference of the Institute for the unity of Science. See also Julius R. Weinberg, “Contrary-to-fact conditionals,” J. Phil., 1951, 48, 17–22.

References

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