During the century and a half that psychology has sought to function as a distinct discipline, norms have had trouble finding a home in it. We psychologists ought to find this distinctly odd, given our subject matter. Human beings pursue goals, develop values, deal out praise and blame, accept or reject moral codes, make judgments of truth and falsity, draw conclusions about what is necessary and what is possible. Every one of these activities involves norms. Yet Western philosophy has long struggled with the relationship between norms and facts. In what was really a brief against emergence of any kind, David Hume declared that normative conclusions can never be logically derived from factual premises. As psychology and philosophy were starting to go their separate ways, Gottlob Frege widened the gulf by calling on philosophers to reject 'psychologism'.
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