Kant, Brentano and Stumpf on Psychology and Anti-Psychologism 741

1 thetic because they are not analytic: the truth of the proposition ex-
2 pressed by ‘7 + 5 = 12’ doesn’t follow from the content of concepts.
3 Of course, this reasoning is unacceptable for an empirical psychologist
4 like Brentano. In his view, the descriptive analysis of a mathematical
5 proposition, or of any kind of proposition, always gives us the content
6 of the concepts involved. This content is mental in nature, whereas math-
7 ematical propositions are always analytic in nature.
8 A further problem coming from the Kantian characterization of
9 mathematical axioms as synthetic a priori is that all these axioms have
10 a negative form. Therefore, an analytic judgment may increase our
11 knowledge according to the school of Brentano. Mathematical axioms,
12 which are considered analytic, are evident in a way that makes them as
13 reliable as judgments of inner perception. For example, the judgment
14 to which the utterance ‘this is yellow’ gives voice is a judgment of
15 inner perception according to Brentano. That such a judgment is said
16 to be evident means that from the standpoint of one’s experience of seeing
17 a yellow spot, it is impossible for one to judge otherwise. This is why
18 Brentano often says that the true form of an evident judgment is basically
19 negative.5 It is then easy to understand why axioms and analytic judg-
20 ments are judgments that have a negative form or that are reducible to
21 such judgments since the true form of A-judgments like ‘All As are Bs’
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is ‘there is no A which is non-B’. This holds for both kinds of evident
23
judgments: those based on axioms or those based on inner perception.
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An evident judgment basically means that things are such and such
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and that they cannot be otherwise.
26
Let’s turn now to the first of the two factors mentioned in the intro-
27
duction. Against Kant’s view that psychology will never become an ex-
28
planatory science, especially because mathematics are not applicable to
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mental phenomena, Brentano partly takes sides with Herbart, according
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to whom one may use mathematics to do psychology in an exact manner,
31
provided that there is something you can count, such as quantities or in-
32
tensities. But unlike Herbart, Brentano does not believe that one can find
33
determinations of actual measurements in this way. Neither does he be-
34
lieve that the Weber-Fechner law is applicable because it rests on a con-
35
fusion between the attention to sensation (Ebenmerklichkeit) and the
36
37
5 In the case of our example, its true from could be rendered by ‘there is nobody
38 who judges that this is not yellow’. Although it is not fully unproblematic, I used
39 here the transformation rule proposed by Brentano for judgments about fictive
40 entities in Brentano, Franz: Die Lehre vom Urteil, Bern 1966, 56.
 742 Guillaume Frchette

1 comparison of sensations (Gleichmerklichkeit).6 In addition, the use of

2 mathematics in psychology is problematic for Brentano because sensa-
3 tions do not depend on the strength of the stimulus itself, but rather
4 on the mental conditions of the experience. In this sense, one can say
5 that Brentano defuses Kant’s objection to an experimental psychological
6 science on two levels: on the one hand, mathematics cannot be ruled
7 out of the field of psychology, but on the other hand, scientific practice
8 of psychology does not depend on its mathematization. According to
9 Brentano, the descriptive analysis of mental phenomena is a tool of the
10 same scientific quality as mathematics.
11
12
13 Stumpf versus Kant
14
15 After this brief review of the Brentanian account of Kantian philosophy,
16 and more specifically of his account of Kantian psychology, I turn now to
17 Carl Stumpf, who was the first among Brentano’s students to take into
18
account the Neokantian position on psychology, providing a uniquely de-
19
tailed reaction to the typical Kantian and Neokantian positions of that
20
time.
21
Stumpf sets the criticist position and the psychologistic position in
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contrast. From the psychologistic position, knowledge is a psychological
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process, and a psychological investigation should therefore be prior to
24
every theory of knowledge. For the criticist position, psychology leads
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to empirical laws and not to the knowledge of general and necessary
26
laws. According to the psychologistic position, one can know that the
27
28
square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the two
29
other sides without knowing the difference between analytic and synthet-
30
ic judgments. More generally, one can investigate mental states of affairs
31 without any theory or critique of knowledge. According to Stumpf, these
32 are unproblematic issues, but it is precisely the approach which is ques-
33 tioned by Kantian philosophers. Following Kant, knowledge without cri-
34 tique is knowledge without laws, without norms and without truth at all.
35
36 6 In a nutshell, the Weber-Fechner law states that every increase in sensations is
37 identical with an increase of the physical stimulation. Therefore, the intensity
of sensations increases in the same measures as physical stimulation. Its first for-
38 mulation is to be found in Weber, Ernst Heinrich: “Tastsinn und Gemeinge-
39 fhl”. In: Handwçrterbuch der Physiologie, mit Rcksicht auf physiologische Patho-
40 logie. Ed. R. Wagner. Volume 3, part 2. Braunschweig 1846, 481 – 588.