Hi On Sun, 21 Mar 2004, Christopher D. Green wrote: > jim clark wrote: > > 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.
I guess I don't call a commitment to empirical evaluation of ideas about the world (including the practice of science and the reasons for its success) as a "crude disciplinary prejudice." Philosophers and historians don't generally conduct strong empirical evaluations of their ideas about science, unfortunately. > The fact that psychologists, when surveyed, parrotted > back the discliplinary injuntions they were taught as undergraduates is > not really germane. Reading our paper would reveal that this is not what we asked our participants to do. We simply asked them to rate psychological terms on various dimensions, with different psychologists rating different attributes of the terms. It is not obvious to me why a general "disciplinary injunction" would lead independent raters to rate terms in a manner very consistent with other raters, nor lead ratings of different attributes by different subjects to correlate highly with one another. > 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. I have already read these works quite some time ago, and did not find them compelling. In fact, Koch's writing was one of our primary motivations for doing the research in the first place. > Just for the record, Jim, my PhD was in psychology as well. > Connectionist computational models of deductive reasoning. Ah, that explains it! ;) > > 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. :-) My assertion concerned what is "known" about natural language, by which I meant scientific models of language, not the contents of a layperson dictionary. There is much empirical evidence for numerous correlates of word concreteness (e.g., intersubjective agreement), a dimension that parallels the observational-theoretical dimension in science. Best wishes 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]
