Overcoming Psychologism. Twardowski on Actions and Products

This paper is about the topic of psychologism in the work of Kazimierz Twardowski and my aim is to revisit this important issue in light of recent publications from, and on Twardowski’s works. I will first examine the genesis of psychologism in the young Twardowski’s work; secondly, I will examine Twardowski’s picture theory of meaning and Husserl’s criticism in Logical Investigations; the third part is about Twardowski’s recognition and criticism of his psychologism in his lectures on the psychology of thinking; the fourth and fifth parts provide an overview of Twardowski’s paper “Actions and Products” while the sixth part addresses the psychologism issue in the last part of this paper through the delineation of psychology and the humanities. I shall conclude this study with a brief assessment of Twardowski’s solution to psychologism

GUEST EDITOR\u27S NOTE

This thematic issue of the journal Psychological Topics is dedicated to meta-reasoning, a study of metacognitive processes of monitoring and control involved in thinking and complex cognition. Meta-reasoning is a novel field of research that stands at the intersection between the two well-established areas of cognitive psychology: psychology of thinking and metacognition.Psychology of thinking and metacognition have developed in the last few decades quite independently, with only sporadic attempts of crossing borders between the fields. However, this changed recently. Within the psychology of thinking, the focus of the research has shifted from normative accuracy of human thinking towards more fine-grained analyses of cognitive processing involved in reasoning, judgment, decision making and problem-solving. On the other hand, there is a growing awareness that metacognitive processes of monitoring and control play a pivotal role in many cognitive domains, not only in memory and in reading comprehension, the two domains that have been extensively studied within the metacognitive framework.The research on meta-reasoning processes is in the early stages, with many questions still unanswered. However, the work done so far has important implications for both psychology of thinking and for metacognition, but also for general theories of cognition, for some long-lasting problems in cognitive science (for example, the problem of rationality), and for applied psychology as well, including educational and clinical psychology.This volume presents theoretical and empirical papers that address a variety of topics related to meta-reasoning: heuristic cues for meta-reasoning judgments, dual-strategy models of deductive reasoning, fluency and feeling of rightness, consistency and consensuality in syllogistic reasoning, metacognitive analysis of covariation detection task, confidence and affect, individual differences in syllogistic reasoning, metacognition and mathematics anxiety, metacognitive feelings and illusion of linearity, and estimations of competence in neurodevelopmental conditions.I would like to express my sincere gratitude to all the authors who contributed to this thematic issue, and to academic reviewers. I would also like to thank Editor-In-Chief and Editorial Board for their support and assistance.Igor Bajšanski</p

The Influence of Semantic and Pragmatic Factors in Wason's Selection Task: State of the Art

One of the cognitive processes, which has generated more research within the framework of the Psychology of thinking is human reasoninig. Through the history of the Psychology of reasoning one of the experimental task most frequently used to study how subjects reason and why make mistakes is the Wason's selection task or the four card problem (Wason 1966, 1968). This work presents the current state of the experimental research on this task, using as a common thread the empirical studies which have lightigtted the plasticity of reasoning towards semantic and pragmatic factor

Complex problem solving: a case for complex cognition?

Complex problem solving (CPS) emerged in the last 30 years in Europe as a new part of the psychology of thinking and problem solving. This paper introduces into the field and provides a personal view. Also, related concepts like macrocognition or operative intelligence will be explained in this context. Two examples for the assessment of CPS, Tailorshop and MicroDYN, are presented to illustrate the concept by means of their measurement devices. Also, the relation of complex cognition and emotion in the CPS context is discussed. The question if CPS requires complex cognition is answered with a tentative “yes.

Psychology of Thinking in Search of Human Dimension: A Systemic and Anthropological View

The psychology of thinking needs to expand its subject area in order to match the psychology of human existence. The processual and complicated life world of a person is an integral ontological space of thinking, in the context of which problematization and mental search unfold. The author believes that life relations and existential mood should be regarded as operational, dynamic, subject-thematic, and stylistic aspects of thinking. Acts and events of thought of a holistically understood personality cannot be separated from their active thinking relationship with the Self and the world. The great dynamics of thinking includes transtemporal and chronotopic aspects of the ongoing mental experience and the topology of cognitive identity. New promising directions for further theoretical and experimental research in the psychology of thinking can be implemented in line with systemic anthropological psychology

Why good thoughts block better ones: The mechanism of the pernicious Einstellung (set) effect.

The Einstellung (set) effect occurs when the first idea that comes to mind, triggered by familiar features of a problem, prevents a better solution being found. It has been shown to affect both people facing novel problems and experts within their field of expertise. We show that it works by influencing mechanisms that determine what information is attended to. Having found one solution, expert chess players reported that they were looking for a better one. But their eye movements showed that they continued to look at features of the problem related to the solution they had already thought of. The mechanism which allows the first schema activated by familiar aspects of a problem to control the subsequent direction of attention may contribute to a wide range of biases both in everyday and expert thought - from confirmation bias in hypothesis testing to the tendency of scientists to ignore results that do not fit their favoured theories

Review of Wittgenstein-a critical reader Hans-Johann Glock (ed.) (2001)(review revised 2019)

The aim of the 17 original papers here is to summarize and analyze Wittgenstein's thought. At the time these were being written, the Oxford/Intelex CDROM ($2040 on Amazon but available thru interlibrary loan and steeply discounted on the net) with 20,000 some pages of W's nachlass, as well as the various online versions of the nachlass, were not yet available, and only those fluent in German and willing to find and slog thru the incomplete Cornell microfilm were able to examine it. To this day, much of it remains untranslated from the German typescripts and handwritten manuscripts. I note this at the outset as W's untranslated or unpublished writings often shed crucial light on his thought and few to this day have made substantial use of them. In addition, there are huge problems with translation of his early 20th century Viennese German into modern English. One must be a master of English, German, and Wittgenstein in order to do this and very few are up to it. Several of the current authors note unfortunate translation errors in the only available English editions and I have seen similar comments countless times. As is well known, W's thought changed dramatically between the publication of the Tractatus (TLP) in 1922 and the Philosophical Investigations (1953). The continuity or lack thereof between his early and late work is the subject of a vast literature and is taken up here by several authors. Ishiguro on the picture theory and Mounce on the logical system in TLP are good, but for me the endless discussions of exactly how he was mistaken in his early work is of as little interest as the mistakes in most previous philosophy. Ammereller on Intentionality is a good, if prosaic, summary of (mostly) the early and middle W on belief and interpretation which, like virtually everyone, totally fails to give an adequate overview of W's pioneering work. In giving the general outline of our innate evolutionary psychology (i.e., roughly our personality) and showing how this describes behavior, W represents a major milestone in human thought. There are unmistakeable indications of this even in his early writings (e.g., see p 40, 49-58 here) and it has been documented by Hacker (e.g., see his paper in The New Wittgenstein) and others but without any comprehensive account in book form to date (but see the many recent writings of Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, Coliva etc.). Overall a good book for introducing W to a general philosophical audience but now very dated by the recent work of Hacker, Daniele Moyal-Sharrock, Coliva, Hutto, Read and others. Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019), The Logical Structure of Human Behavior (2019), and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019

Review of The New Wittgenstein-- Crary & Read Eds 403p (2000)(review revised 2019)

Ludwig Wittgenstein is the most famous philosopher of modern times but very few understand his pioneering work and there has been a collective amnesia regarding him in recent decades. Most of the essays are new but some date as far back as 1979 and whether they give a new view of his ideas depends on one’s understanding of what he said. For me, the interpretations are not new and mostly just as confused as nearly all the other commentary on W and on human behavior throughout the behavioral sciences and by the general public. As usual, nobody seems to grasp that philosophy is armchair psychology, and that W was (in my view) the greatest natural psychologist of all time. He laid out the general structure of how the mind works, which is often referred to as intentionality and is roughly equivalent to cognition or personality or thinking and willing or higher order thought (HOT). He can thus be regarded as a pioneer in evolutionary psychology, although hardly anyone but me seems to realize it. W was thus nearly 50 years ahead of his time as the first to reject (though not entirely consistently) the blank slate or cultural view of human nature, though this has gone unrecognized and he has generally been interpreted as supporting a communal consensus view of psychology—exactly the opposite of his overall thrust (e.g., see Short’s comment on p 115). I provide a table of intentionality for a current frame of reference from the two systems point of view before remarking on each of the essays. Those wishing a comprehensive up to date framework for human behavior from the modern two systems view may consult my book ‘The Logical Structure of Philosophy, Psychology, Mind and Language in Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Searle’ 2nd ed (2019). Those interested in more of my writings may see ‘Talking Monkeys--Philosophy, Psychology, Science, Religion and Politics on a Doomed Planet--Articles and Reviews 2006-2019 3rd ed (2019) and Suicidal Utopian Delusions in the 21st Century 4th ed (2019)