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Full Idea
Frege disagree that logic should merely describe the laws of thought - how people actually did reason. Logic is essentially normative, not descriptive. We want the one logic which successfully tracks the truth.
Gist of Idea
We should not describe human laws of thought, but how to correctly track truth
Source
report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Jennifer Fisher - On the Philosophy of Logic 1.III
Book Ref
Fisher,Jennifer: 'On the Philosophy of Logic' [Thomson Wadsworth 2008], p.17
A Reaction
This explains Frege's sustained attack on psychologism, and it also explains we he ended up as a platonist about logic - because he wanted its laws to be valid independently of human thinking. A step too far, perhaps. Brains are truth machines.
| 19360 | General principles, even if unconscious, are indispensable for thinking [Leibniz] |
| 19404 | Necessities rest on contradiction, and contingencies on sufficient reason [Leibniz] |
| 7807 | The laws of thought are true, but they are not the axioms of logic [Bolzano, by George/Van Evra] |
| 6933 | The laws of reality are also the laws of thought [Feuerbach] |
| 8939 | We should not describe human laws of thought, but how to correctly track truth [Frege, by Fisher] |
| 5396 | Three Laws of Thought: identity, contradiction, and excluded middle [Russell] |
| 5405 | The law of contradiction is not a 'law of thought', but a belief about things [Russell] |
| 9131 | Two long understandable sentences can have an unintelligible conjunction [Sorensen] |
| 6560 | The law of noncontradiction is traditionally the most basic principle of rationality [Fogelin] |