Polytropy

Preface (January 17–18, 2019). This essay is built around two extended quotations from Collingwood:

1. From the posthumous Idea of History (1946) with the core idea, “people do not know what they are doing until they have done it.”
2. From An Essay on Philosophical Method (1933), about how logic is neither a purely descriptive nor a purely normative science.

The quotations pertain to the title subject of psychology for the following reasons.

1. Psychological experiments show that we may not know what we are doing until we have done it.
2. Psychology is a descriptive science.

Psychological experiments can tell us about what we do, only when we presuppose the general applicability of their findings. This is true for any descriptive science. Philosophy demands more. A philosophical science like logic is categorical, in the sense of the second listed quotation, because it is what Collingwood will later call criteriological. I go on to discuss criteriological sciences as such in “A New Kind of Science,” but not here.

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