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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Criticisms of Frege's Antipsychologism
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1 Necmettin Erbakan Üniversitesi, Ahmet Keleşoğlu İlahiyat Fak., Felsefe ve Din Bilimleri 42090, Konya,
Türkiye
Received: 26 May 2025 | Published online: 29 December 2025
© 2025 by the Authors. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution -Noncommercial 4.0 International License (CC-by the license) ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ )
Abstract
This article examines Gottlob Frege’s arguments against psychologism and surveys a range of modern critiques and reinterpretations of his position. Frege holds that logic comprises normative and universal laws, independent of individual psychological processes. In contrast, psychologism seeks to ground logic in mental activity, which Frege decisively rejects, proposing instead that meanings and truths reside in an objective “third realm.” The article discusses responses from five key perspectives: Husserl, Quine, Dummett, Putnam, and the trio Pelletier, Elio, and Hanson. These thinkers either reinforce, revise, or challenge Frege’s core assumptions regarding logic, truth, and meaning. While Frege's antipsychologism had a formative role in 20th-century logic and philosophy of language, contemporary debates show a more nuanced spectrum of positions, reevaluating the boundaries between logic and psychology.
Keywords
Logic
meaning
truth
psychologism
antipsychologism.
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