ABSTRACT
Here is also the place to take up an attitude towards a widely held conception of logical law, which characterizes correct thought by its conformity with certain laws of thought (however we may formulate them), but is disposed at the same time to interpret such conformity in the following psychologistic manner: The laws of thought count as natural laws characterizing the peculiarity of our mind qua thinking, and the essence of the conformity, as definitory of correct thinking, lies in the pure operation of these laws, their non-disturbance by alien mental influences (such as custom, inclination, tradition). (Cf. the citations above in §19 from Lipps’ article on the task of epistemology.)
We need only instance one of the grave consequences of this doctrine. Laws of thought, as causal laws governing acts of knowledge in their mental interweaving, could only be stated in the form of probabilities. On this basis, no assertion could be certainly judged correct, since probabilities, taken as the standard of all certainty, must impress a merely probabilistic stamp on all knowledge. We should stand confronted by the most extreme probabilism. Even the assertion that all knowledge was merely probable would itself only hold probably: this would hold of this latter assertion, and so on in infinitum. Since each successive step reduces the probability level of the previous one a bit, we should become gravely concerned about the worth of all knowledge. One may hope, however, that, with some luck, the probability-levels of these infinite series may always have the character of a Cantorian ‘fundamental series’, of such a sort that the final limiting value or the probability of the knowledge to be judged is a real number > 0. Sceptical awkwardnesses would of course vanish if one looked on the laws of thought as matters of direct insight. But how should one have insight into causal laws?
