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Psychology 269
means of new combinations of structures that they assimilated and then far
surpassed, the actual process of such reorganization and then of surpassing
them wil probably long elude structural analysis, because occurring in excep-
tional if not essentially individual cases.
IO. Rekthships between psychology and other sciences
I have already spoken - and could not have done otherwise - of the relation-
ships between psychology and those sciences to which it is closely linked :
biology and sociology. Now, however, we still have to inquire into the connexion
between psychology and those sciences which are more remote from it, such
as logic, mathematics, etc., or the epistemology of science itself. The links be-
tween psychological research and human sciences other than sociology wil be
dealt with in Chapter VII.
I. At first glance there does not appear to be any relationship between logic,
which is a formal, deductive and normative science, and psychology, which is
concrete, experimental and in no way normative. However, two kinds of con-
siderations make it necessary to establish some relationship between them: to
begin with, neither side wanted this, but as we shall see, recent trends oblige us
to examine these considerations attentively. The first may seem to be of second-
ary importance: although symbolic logic has been called ‘logic without a sub-
ject’, there cannot be any subjects without logic and, just as these subjects
succeed in constructing ‘natural numbers’ (or positive integers, the negatives
being implicit in many spontaneous acts), so they may be led to elaborate
further and to use transitivity and many other inferences, syllogisms, classifi-
cations and seriations, correspondences and matrices, etc., and to submit (more
or less effectively) to such norms as identity, noncontradiction, etc. This ‘natu-
ral‘ logic poses a problem for psychologists who are then obliged to compare it
to the formal logic of logicians. That the latter are not in the least interested in
making such comparisons, since formal truths do not rest on statements of
facts (even though IOO per cent of the subjects accept this or that inference), is
another question, but one which, as we shall see, is now being re-examined.
The other considerations which necessitate a comparison derive not from
the technique of logic but from its epistemology. When epistemological logi-
cians claim that logic is only a language (syntax and stripped down and gener-
alized semantics), they are drawing nearer to psychology. Even when they are
Platonists, as Bertrand Russell was at the beginning of his career, they are
still bordering on psychology, for it remains to be discovered how man, in his
mortal life, can comprehend eternal Ideas: and for this purpose Russell invented
a special mental function, called ‘conception’, which applied to Ideas as ‘per-
ception’ does to objects. The epistemology of logic therefore implies a compari-
son with psychology.
This being said, two new developments have caused the matter to be reopen-
ed, and have led certain logicians to examine these possible relationships