Psychologist’s Fallacy
Frank Scalambrino
Is my having consciousness a fact of experience? - But doesn’t one say that human beings have consciousness, and that trees or stones do not? - What would it be like if it were otherwise? - Would human beings all be unconscious? - No; not in the ordinary sense of the word.
But I, for instance, would not have consciousness - as I now in fact have it.”Ludwig Wittgenstein
William James, in his Principles of Psychology, coined “the psychologist’s fallacy.” It is a fallacy of relativism. As the following will indicate, there are three versions of the psychologist’s fallacy, which may be listed from least to most extreme. Whereas the first two versions retain the name “psychologist’s fallacy,” the most extreme version is called “psychologism.”
James articulated the psychologist’s fallacy as if it were a confusion between first-person and third-person points of view. He noted, “Crude as such a confusion of standpoints seems to be when abstractly stated, it is nevertheless a snare into which no psychologist has kept at all times from falling, and which forms almost the entire stock-in-trade of certain schools [of psychology]” (James 1898, 197). Importantly, an experience and its description are different, and from the first-person point of view, whatever a person experiences is identical with what that experience is. Therefore, the first-person point of view of an experience, because it is the view of actually
having the experience itself, is itself the truth of the experience. This is not to say that descriptions of the experience cannot be true. Rather, it is to emphasize that a description of an event should not be confused with the actual event it is supposed to describe.
Now, according to James, “We must be very careful therefore, in discussing a state of mind from the psychologist’s point of view”; for, “the poverty of the psychological vocabulary leads us to drop out certain states from our consideration, and to treat others as if they knew themselves and their objects as the psychologist knows both, which is a disastrous fallacy” (James 1890, 197-198).
To commit the first version of the psychologist’s fallacy, then, is to assume psychological descriptions pertain to the experience itself. The second version is committed when one assumes the psychological descriptions must be a part of the experience itself. “Another variety of the psychologist’s fallacy is the assumption that the mental state studied must be conscious of itself as the psychologist is conscious of it” (James 1890, 197). The term “psychologism,” referring to the most extreme version, according to Edmund Husserl (1969), applies to “any interpretation which converts objectivities into something psychological in the proper sense” (169), that is, descriptions that attempt to “psychologize” experience.The following is an example of the psychologist’s fallacy. Using a psychological vocabulary to describe the first-person experience of an infant facing a mirror, Jacques Lacan popularized the term “mirror stage.” The term, though associated with “Lacanian psychoanalysis,” of course, comes from a psychological vocabulary; in fact, Lacan’s biographer, Elizabeth Roudinesco, “despite her admiration for Lacan, accuses him of plagiarizing [the psychologist Henri] Wallon” (Billig 2006, 17). Lacan (2001), regarding the infant’s joy and activity of leaning toward its mirror image, describes the experience’s “meaning” in the following way:
This meaning discloses a libidinal dynamism [...] as well as an ontological structure of the human world that accords with my reflections on paranoiac knowledge. We have only to understand the mirror stage as an identification, in the full sense that analysis gives to the term: namely, the transformation that takes place in the subject when he assumes an image [...]. This jubilant assumption of his specular image by the child [.] would seem to exhibit in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form, before it is objectified in the dialectic of identification with the other, and before language restores to it, in the universal, its function as subject.
(2)Notice, then, to the extent that one understands the infant’s first-person encounter with the mirror in terms of Lacan’s sophisticated “mirror stage” description, one commits the extreme form of the psychologist’s fallacy, that is, psychologism. Commenting in this regard, Michael Billig (2006) notes, “Lacan is explicit in his acceptance of psychologist’ observations and his dismissal of their failures to appreciate what they observe” (11).
Consider the following from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (2009) Philosophical Investigations, which may be taken as a criticism of the psychologist’s fallacy:
Do I observe myself, then, and perceive that I am seeing or conscious? And why talk about observations at all? Why not simply say ‘I perceive I am conscious’? - But what are the words ‘I perceive’ for here - why not say ‘I am conscious’? But don’t the words ‘I perceive’ here show that I am attending to my consciousness? - which is ordinarily not the case. - If so, then the sentence, ‘I perceive I am conscious’ does not say that I am conscious, but that my attention is focused in such-and-such a way [...] isn’t it a particular experience that occasions my saying ‘I am conscious again’? - What experience? In what situations do we say it? (§417)
Notice, Wittgenstein highlights the fact that even when the psychologist’s vocabulary intuitively resonates with ordinary language, “psychological” features supposed to be aspects of experience require alterations to the first- person perspective to be part of experience; yet, such alteration produces an experience which is, thereby, not the same as the experience from the non-altered-first-person perspective.
To avoid this fallacy, one needs to ground arguments with claims that hold necessarily and universally (Scalambrino 2015). A truism since the time of Aristotle, a science cannot be based on that which is accidental. Thus, on the one hand, psychological development should not be necessarily based on the description of accidental events, which one may or may not experience.
On the other hand, whether it is a third-person description of an event which is supposed to include a first-person perspective taking place in the event or a first-person perspective from the experience of an event, in order to avoid the relativity inherent in the psychologist’s fallacy, the description must pertain to the event and the experience of the event with necessity and universality. Neither descriptions of experience based on subjective (avowedly “paranoic”-based in Lacan’s case) judgments nor the occurrence of specific accidental-psychological events hold necessarily or universally regarding human psychology.References
Billig, Michael. 2006. “Lacan’s Misuse of Psychology.” Theory, Culture & Society 23(4): 1-26.
Husserl, Edmund. 1969. Formal and Transcendental Logic, translated by D. Cairns. The Hague: Matinus Nijhoff.
James, William. 1890. The Principles of Psychology. New York, NY: Henry Holt.
Lacan, Jacques. The Mirror Stage: Ecrits, A Selection, translated by A. Sheridan. London: Routledge.
Scalambrino, Frank. 2015. “Phenomenological Psychology.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, June 1. http://www.iep.utm.edu/phen-psy/ (accessed September 28, 2017).
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical Investigations, translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. London: Wiley-Blackwell.