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.
Crude disciplinary prejudices don't really address the issue either. The question is not whether the analysis come from "scientists," "philosophers," or "historians." The question is whether the answers are compelling or not. The fact that psychologists, when surveyed, parrotted back the discliplinary injuntions they were taught as undergraduates is not really germane. What is significant is that (a) operationism turned out to be logically incoherent (leading immediately to an infinite regress of definitions) and (b) the psychologists who introduced it to the discipline back in the 1930s mostly got it wrong in the first place, afterwards transmitting to generation of psychologists who continued to accept this distortion part of their methodological liturgy. If you think this attitude is idiosyncratic to me, I invite you to read other work in the same vein by psychologists (if that's makes a difference to you) Sigmund Koch and Thomas Leahey.
Just for the record, Jim, my PhD was in psychology as well. Connectionist computational models of deductive reasoning.
Furthermore, it seems likely that science and its languages will share many features with what is already known about natural languages.
Indeed, and to my knowledge, no natural language has ever been based on operational definitions. Just check out a dictionary. :-)
Regards, -- Christopher D. Green Department of Psychology York University Toronto, Ontario, Canada M3J 1P3 e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] phone: 416-736-5115 ext. 66164 fax: 416-736-5814 http://www.yorku.ca/christo/ ============================ .
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