Frege on Anti‐Psychologism and the Role of Logic in Thinking

Abstract

According to (what I call) the Explanatory Problem with Frege's Platonism about Thoughts, the sharp separation between the psychological and the logical on which Frege famously insists is too sharp, leaving Frege no resources to show how it could be legitimate to invoke logical laws in an explanation of our activities of thinking. I argue that there is room in Frege's philosophy for such justificatory explanations. To see how, we need first to understand correctly the lesson of Frege's attack on psychologism as fundamentally marking a contrast between justification and explanation, and, second, we must take Frege to be committed to the idea that the laws of truth are normatively constitutive for the process of thinking. 303 FREGE, PSYCHOLOGISM, AND THE ACTIVITY OF THINKING 2 I do not think there need be any peculiar "we" who ask such questions. Ordinary people often ask why somebody believes something. Very often, such a question is answered by offering a justification. This I take to be ordinary, uncontroversial, but (I shall argue) within a Fregean framework, perplexing.