Abstract

It is often suggested that Frege refuted logical psychologism. Recently, however, several new versions of psychologism have emerged. These new psychologisms tend to be theories, not of deductive logic, but, rather, of epistemic justification, scientific method, belief revision, and other roughly epistemological matters. I develop a general account of psychologism, and argue that, at bottom, the new psychologisms fail for roughly the same reasons that logical psychologism fails. In the first half of the dissertation, I argue that, at bottom, psychologism is a form of relativism. I then develop an original account of relativism, and novel arguments against both justificatory and alethic relativism. In the second half of the dissertation, I consider four prominent examples of the new psychologisms in detail . I show that, by employing the philosophical apparatus developed in the first half of the dissertation, all of these views can be shown to fail