Proposition-Constituent Analysis and the Decomposition of Idealism

Abstract

Anti-psychologism in logic, in its various incarnations, was a commonly held position prior to Russell’s break with idealism, though there was considerable disagreement as to what the position entailed.¹ In the second half of the 19th century, a number of logical works had exhibited antagonism toward views that made the laws of thought, the propositions of logic, or ‘logical ideas’ dependent upon psychological processes.² What complicates matters is that many of the objections leveled against this form of psychologism were leveled at those who intended their doctrines to be anti-psychologistic and yet were supposed to subscribe to this thesis tacitly. Even as an idealist, Russell himself had rejected the psychologistic views that laws of logic are psychical laws, that thoughts (ideas) rather than things are the subject matter of arithmetic, and that epistemology could take the form of a ‘psychology of thought’ (Griffin and Godden, 2009, p. 4). F. H. Bradley, to whose views Moore’s and Russell’s new realist philosophy was opposed, and Gottlob Frege, had, at nearly the same time, written important logical works which aimed to divest logic of psychologism. Frege attempted to distinguish the origins of a belief from the ultimate grounds for its justification and logical laws from laws of thought.