Abstract

Throughout his career, Peirce denied that psychology could make any contribution to normative logic. After clarification of the anti-psychologist position, the chapter evaluates Peirce’s arguments against psychologism. Peirce’s objections to using psychology in logic are manifested most clearly in his detailed criticisms of John Dewey’s new approach to logical theory which drew on Darwinian ideas and sought a rapprochement between logic and psychology. Peirce’s own approach to logical theory involved using phenomenology to identify a system of categories and then using the result to provide foundations for the normative sciences of aesthetics, ethics, and logic.