Psychology and Metaphysics from Maine De Biran to Bergson

Introduction What can psychology, understood as a study of the nature of mental phenomena, tell us about metaphysics, understood as an account of the nature of being and of the most general properties of the world? At a certain degree of generality this question is itself a metaphysical one: how can what we know about our own minds tell us something about the world? But the meaning of the question depends in turn upon what one means by " knowledge of our own minds ". If this knowledge is subjective and first person, then we have the familiar idealist question concerning the relationship between the contents of our minds and the nature of an objective reality external to them. On the other hand, if knowledge of our minds is objective, or can claim some form of objectivity, than the question becomes how the account of what humans think, feel and do impinges upon their conception of reality. Psychology, along with sociology, history, and anthropology, belongs among the disciplines which deal with the latter question. There are many different ways to understand the nature of this enterprise and these depend upon what one takes psychological properties to involve. Correlatively there are various ways of understanding our initial question about what psychology can tell us about metaphysics. Two of these are prominent. One distinctive project proceeds along the lines of Hume's naturalism. It consists in the attempt to understand the origins of our " ideas " , or 2 " representations " or concepts " , starting from a study of " human nature "-which Hume himself conceived as a study of the laws of association of ideas. considered as pertaining to metaphysics or ontology. Such metaphysical notions are found to have a natural origin in our minds. A contemporary version of this naturalistic enterprise, which replaces associationist psychology with modern day cognitive science, consists in an investigation into our " naïve physics " , our " natural theories of mind " , or our common sense notions of object, property or event. explicates a project of this sort, and it is today pursued in various ways elsewhere. 1 It purports to give us a psychological account of metaphysics. It is important to understand how this kind of descriptive metaphysics differs from the two traditional forms of metaphysics: speculative metaphysics and revisionary metaphysics respectively. It differs from the speculative metaphysics first in …