Re: Independent and Dependent Variables

[Christopher D. Green]

Paul Okami wrote: Karl Wuensch wrote: Being fastidious about mere vocabulary is unlikely to help. Even the most fastidious experimental psychologists' views of what does, in fact,  warrant causal inference is so naive and outdated as to not really be worth defending so vigorously.   Can you elaborate on the above please? Karl was paraphrasing a comment I made in response to his query. The idea that causation can be determined simply by manipulating one variable and then seeing whether another variable "moves" -- adopted by psychology in the early 20th century -- is based on long-refuted philosophies of causation that find their origins in the work of David Hume and John Stuart Mill. There was much progress made on the theory of causation in the second half of the 20th century, none of which is reflected in experimental psychologists' methodology. For those interested, I recommend the Oxford (1993) collection of "classic" readings edited by Sosa & Tooley under the title of _Causation_. As for what I teach my students, I teach them the "standard" definition used by most experimental psychologists (that one should use the terms IV and DV only if one is experimentally manipulating the IV in order to discover a causal relation), and then I point out that this usage is idiosyncratic to psychology (compare, for instance, the use of "IV" and "DV" in mathematics), and that causation is not definitively determined by the "standard" psychological procedure in any case. In short, they should know it (because it is widely used in the discipline), but they should also know its shortcomings and not become too "liturgical" about it. 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/ ============================ . --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]