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Psychology: The Propaedeutic Science

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

S. S. Stevens
S. S. Stevens*
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
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Extract

Previous claims that psychology is propaedeutic to the other sciences have been met with enthusiastic indifference. Contributing to this indifference has been the fact that psychology, a young and unproved discipline which habitually borrowed the methods of the older sciences, has too frequently revised its notion as to its own nature and subject-matter. More important, however, has been the faith of the physical sciences in the absolute character of their own basic concepts: in the reality of Absolute Space and Absolute Time and in the universality of deterministic principles, for, as long as physics presumed to deal with entities which are what they are regardless of the nature of man, nothing other than these entities appeared to demand prior consideration. The problem of the nature of the observer in the physical experiment became important to physics only as a consequence of the recent ‘subjective’ revolution. It is this revolution which has revitalized the problem of the propaedeutic science and has accentuated the distinction which we must make between the behavioral phenomenon of individuals creating formal arrays of words or symbols which are without operational meaning and the discriminatory responses, or operations, by which the empirical meaning of such arrays is determined.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , January 1936 , pp. 90 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © Philosophy of Science Association 1936

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References

1 Cf. discussion by E. G. Boring, The Physical Dimensions of Consciousness, 1933, Chap. 1.

2 S. S. Stevens, The operational basis of psychology, Amer. J. Psychol., 47, 323–330 (1935).

3 S. S. Stevens, The operational definition of psychological concepts, Psychol. Rev. 42, 517–526 (1935).

4 Nothing attests more convincingly the futility of the approach to epistemology by way of the immediately given, a private affair of mine alone, than the fact that such procedures have never got us anywhere. Cf. the review of the situation given by P. A. Schlipp, Philos. Sci., 2, 128–138 (1935).

5 Philosophy, for all the questing it has done in search of truth, has, in the opinion of some of its own, for example, C. J. Ducasse, Philos. Sci., 2, 111–127 (1935), failed to build up a body of accepted knowledge. To that extent it has no truth in the present sense. The same can be said of those other diciplines which produce less and less agreement the more earnestly they are pursued.

6 The word formal is used here to include such diverse fields as mathematics, metaphysics and certain kinds of fiction and poetry, because they have as a common feature the fact that they consist of arrays of symbols without operational meaning—regardless of whatever other diverse and important values they may have.

7 The distinction has been made by M. Margenau [Philos. Sci., 2, 48–72 (1935)] between data and constructs and by H. Feigl [Philos. Sci., 1, 420–445 (1934)] between the language of data and the language of constructs.

8 Quoted by R. Carnap, Philos. Sci., 1, 5–19 (1934).

9 By operation is meant throughout this paper the physical, concrete operations which are differential reactions on the part of living organisms. These operations are in no sense imaginary or ‘mental’—unless, of course, ‘mental’ is operationally defined. The mathematician also speaks of operations, but he refers to the manipulation of symbols according to rule, which he carries out on the formal level.

10 P. W. Bridgman has discussed the problem of making the formal ‘model’ fit the observations. See his On the nature and limitations of cosmical inquiries, Sci. Monthly, 37, 385–397 (1933).