Hi On Sun, 21 Mar 2004, Christopher D. Green wrote: > characterize it as an "operationalization." "Operational definitions" > were badly misunderstood and badly distorted by the behavioral > psychologists who picked them up from physics in the first place, and > the "operational attitude" turned out to be a failure even in the > discipline of its birth. They were flirted with and then abaandoned by > logical positivist philosophers of science pretty early in the day. You > might be interested in my 1992 _Theory & Psychology_ article, "Of > Immortal Mythological Beasts: Operationism in Psychology" (avaliable > on-line at http://www.yorku.ca/christo/papers/operat.htm)
For an alternative take on some issues that overlap with the value of operational definitions, see Clark & Paivio, (1989), Observational and theoretical terms in psychology: A cognitive perspective on scientific language. Amer. Psyc., 44, 500-512. In that paper we take an empirical approach to the considerable debate about observational and theoretical terms in philosophy of science. We had 72 psychological terms rated on a variety of dimensions by psychologists and responded to in several cognitive tasks (image generation, free association) by graduate students. In essence, a number of predictions of empiricism were confirmed, contrary to the views of critics of empiricism in philosophy and history of science. For example, terms rated high on an observationalness scale were viewed as having more intersubjective agreement than were terms rated low on the scale (i.e., theoretical terms). We argued that the findings were consistent with basic tenets of empiricism, of which operationism is one brand, as well as being consistent with Paivio's dual coding theory, which makes a fundamental distinction between concrete and abstract words. Scientific psychologists should take philosophy and history of science with a real heavy dose of salt (i.e., skepticism). Our scientific practices should be based on a science of science, not philosophy or history (at least the nonempirical variants of those disciplines), and of course cognitive psychology will be a major contributor to a valid psychological model of science. Furthermore, it seems likely that science and its languages will share many features with what is already known about natural languages. Jim ============================================================================ James M. Clark (204) 786-9757 Department of Psychology (204) 774-4134 Fax University of Winnipeg 4L05D Winnipeg, Manitoba R3B 2E9 [EMAIL PROTECTED] CANADA http://www.uwinnipeg.ca/~clark ============================================================================ --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
