[MD] Psychology and Philosophy

[Matt Kundert]

Hi Mark,

Mark said:
When a quasi-scientific discipline such as psychology is used to 
describe philosophy, I find it to be somewhat misleading and perhaps 
derogatory.  Science does not analyze concepts, it applies concepts. 
Psychology is being "applied" to philosophy so as to modify it towards 
psychological ends.  The governence of psychology thus stands over 
philosophy.  This, I know is not your perspective, but I see this 
tendency in some of these posts.

Matt:
There's a slide going on in what is meant by "psychology" between 
the way I (and Dave) was using it and the way you typically used it.  
In the above, you're talking about psychology as a discipline.  Dave 
and I were talking about the makeup of a person's mind, "my 
psychology" or "our psychology,"  which is closer to your use of 
"psyche."  I don't see Dave as "applying" psychology, the discipline, 
to philosophy.  He's rather interested in something we might just 
call "philosophical psychology," or in deference to your reversals in 
your reply to Dave, "psychological philosophy."  It doesn't matter, 
because I don't think Dave is being reductionistic (or at least he 
doesn't want to be).  Whatever philosophical psychology is, it is 
currently an un-discipline: there's no research program for the kind 
of humanistic study that goes into the study of the problems that 
Dave was talking about.  One could draw quite easily from Plato, 
Augustine, Cervantes, Hume, Hawthorne, Nietzsche, Freud, Henry 
James, William James, John Austin, Vladimir Nabokov, Wittgenstein, 
D.W. Winnicott, Ralph Ellison, E. R. Doods, Bernard Williams, Don 
DeLillo, Owen Flanagan, and Kwame Anthony Appiah.

What is this study?  Hard to say, but if you accept the proposition that 
philosophy is a human response to life, then you will be concerned 
about the state of the mind when it responded in a particular fashion.  
That doesn't mean the "particular fashion" (e.g., "philosophy") can be 
_reduced_ to the "state of the mind."  But pragmatists were really big 
on emphasizing the continuity of philosophy to other tools humanity 
had constructed to help itself deal with reality (like fire, airplanes, or 
science).  And because of that it verged into uncharted territories 
about what certain kinds of beliefs do for us, in all kinds of facets of 
"do for us."

Does this mean that psychology "governs" philosophy?  I don't think 
so.  If you could reduce propositions to psychological states, then 
there could be that possibility.  But as I see the issue, even if a 
proper research program could be pulled together from the currently 
haphazard state of this nebulous thing I've dubbed "philosophical 
psychology," that still doesn't mean it would be master over anything.  
It would just describe the interface between, as Steve put it, truth 
and passion.

Did the invention of a discipline called "psychology" alter our 
psychology?  Absolutely.  I think you are right when you say that.  
Working out just how this can be right is difficult, but it's a Hegelian 
idea that I endorse.  As we better understand ourselves, it is difficult 
to retrospectively deduce whether we altered ourselves because we 
better understand, or better understand because we altered.  I'm 
not sure it matters.

Matt