Language and Psychologism

Yesterday I made a strange claim, namely that seeking logic in language and speech acts is a kind of psychologism. The idea is that the specific languages we study and the content of the speech acts are arbitrary. It doesn’t matter if we speak of English or French (though it may matter, of course, when considering non-European languages), and it doesn’t matter what the speech acts are about. Whether we seek to understand negation with the English ‘not’ or the French ‘non’ should amount to the same logical analysis. And whether we are talking about things that are not frogs or things that are not elephants shouldn’t change the logical analysis of negation.

But it’s precisely this arbitrariness of language and abstraction of content that suggests language itself isn’t where the logic is. Let’s consider a more concrete theory, by Hlobil and Brandom, an inferentialist theory that explores “reasons relations” found in the speech acts of assertion and denial. The validity of an argument can be analyzed by saying that one would be wrong to assert all the premises and deny all the conclusions.

Assertion and denial, however, do not require words or language. I can shake my head to say ‘yeah’ or ‘nay’. Indeed, I don’t even need to express assertion and denial in any kind of way when I’m alone. I do something when I accept premises and reject conclusions, but that doesn’t necessitate a speech act of assertion and denial.

But that’s where I see psychologism creeping in. I suggest that acceptance and rejection are more fundamental psychological attitudes than assertion and denial, and in fact, the psychological act that grounds the speech acts. I’m a bit confused with this chain of thought, so I’m not offering this here as the argument behind a belief I have. I’m genuinely exploring a difficulty I feel at the intersection of language and logic. Is this a real difficulty? Not sure.