Recently I was reading about phenomenology, and I find it particularly interesting. When I was studying Husserl, however, I found that I didn’t like the argument he made against psychologism. He says particularly that logic is not something psychological because it is an ideality that does not change across time. Whereas psychology as a science still has uncertainty, logic does not. It does not make sense to use psychology to try and investigate an ideality like this. He further states that the act of knowing is a subjective process, objects of logic do not change. Therefore, the idea that logic is a psychological entity does not make sense.
When I read this, I didn’t have an answer I thought could counter it. However, like many people, it did dawn on me that the conclusion didn’t feel correct. I generally like to think that we can only rely on our human senses and experience in order to get all knowledge. I believe this mainly because I just don’t see a way that without sensory input we can abstract to get objective knowledge. For example, we know that 2+2=4 because of abstraction. Our brain sees things in real life and therefore can abstract numbers from it. Without abstraction, I do not see a particular way to get formal logic, and you need something concrete from your senses to abstract from.
So, I constructed the best argument I could against Husserl’s arguments, and it follows like this. Yes, objects of logic are ideals that should not change. They are metaphysical entities. However, there is a clear difference between epistemic entities and these metaphysical entities. Let’s say you have an object of logic and an object of perception, or a sense of knowledge we can use to perceive these objects of logic. An object of logic is ideal, but we do not always have these objects of logic within our knowledge. For example, we might know what a triangle is (from an object of perception), and from object of logic of a triangle we can create the Pythagorean theorem, another object of logic. However, if we assume that someone may know what a triangle is and not the Pythagorean theorem, then that person does not have an object of perception for the Pythagorean theorem. Once that person gets that object of perception for the object of logic, we might argue that this object of perception is the same across everyone’s object of perception. However, epistemically, it is impossible to consciously access this object of perception without the properties of that specific object. For example, for the Pythagorean theorem, in order to know it I must know the formula a^2 + b^2=c^2 or have some visual diagram in my head. Someone who learns the theorem through pure algebra has a different object of perception than someone who learns the theorem with a diagram. They both have objects of perception that point to the same object of logic, but epistemically they are not the same. This, of course, assumes that the objects of perception are necessary to access the object of logic, and that an object of perception also contains the sensory, unabstracted versions of that object of logic.
However, I think it makes sense to assume those, even though there is likely a counterargument against it. Without the sensory experience of deriving certain objects of logic, we cannot know those objects of logic. And of course, for something to be abstracted, it has to come from concrete, unabstracted objects.
While this is a very loose argument, I think this has some merit to it and can at least be restructured into a more epistemically sound argument. I am going to look more into the topic of abstraction, as I want to know what applications it can have in real life. But until then, it looks like I’m not going to have an answer to why Husserl’s argument does not strike me as correct.