psychologism, in philosophy, the view that problems of epistemology (i.e., of the validity of human knowledge) can be solved satisfactorily by the psychological study of the development of mental processes. John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) may be regarded as the classic of psychologism in this sense. A more moderate form of psychologism maintains that psychology should be made the basis of other studies, especially of logic. A classical attack on both forms of psychologism was Edmund Husserl’s Logische Untersuchungen (1900–01; “Logical Investigations”).
Psychologism, however, continued to find adherents. Early in the 20th century, James Ward developed a genetic psychology that he considered essential to any adequate epistemology; Brand Blanshard’s monumental The Nature of Thought, 2 vol. (1939), insisted that epistemological studies must be rooted in psychological investigation; and Jean Piaget conducted considerable psychological research on the genesis of thought in children, accepted by some philosophers as a contribution to epistemology. Similarly, empirical studies of innateness (via the “visual cliff,” in which an infant placed at the edge of a glassed-over “cliff ” shows behaviour suggestive of innate depth perception) continue to be seen as epistemologically significant.