The characterization of what is logical taking the exact sciences as point of departure

pp. 3-32

in: Edmund Husserl, Introduction to logic and theory of knowledge, Berlin, Springer, 2008

Abstract

A distinction is universally made, and already has been made for thousands of years, between logic and psychology. Not only psychology deals with thinking and the understanding, but logic does too. This is surely nothing new to you. From the start, you had associated the word logic with the idea that it is a science having to do with certain rules, norms for thinking, and more precisely, with thinking whose goal is truth. And you are, moreover, also familiar with the idea that truth is precisely a goal, therefore, something not given automatically from the start, but that it must be attained by working in certain ways, by certain set procedures of thought, by so-called methods. And further, that the so-called logical laws are norms to which one must adhere, or that one does well to observe, if one wants actually to attain this goal, and if the methodology is really to be useful. This already points, though still in a vague and by no means adequate way, to certain differences between logic and psychology of knowledge and, in general, of thinking.