On Wed, 05 Aug 2015 11:14:04 -0700, Christopher Green wrote:
On Aug 5, 2015, at 12:36 PM, Mike Palij wrote:
The article in question is the following:
Green, C. D. (1992). Of Immortal Mythological Beasts Operationism
in Psychology. Theory & Psychology, 2(3), 291-320.
The article appears in a special issue that appears to be devoted
to pistol whipping operationism like a blind kid (a "Topic Thunder"
reference). See the following for the table of contents:
http://tap.sagepub.com/content/2/3.toc
The "special issue" was a kind of happy accident. I submitted my paper
independently, but Hank Stam appeared to have a number of related
papers
submitted at about the same time and, so, PRANG! a "special issue" was
born.
PRANG? Well, now that's jenga! (If you did not see the movie "Paul",
see:
http://www.answers.com/Q/&ad=1
or the quotes page from IMDB:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1092026/quotes
There was a followup issue in the same journal in 2001, when Randolph
Grace
attempted to come to operationism's defence, and a number of us were
called
upon to respond to the attempt. I don't have them all, but my own reply
can be
found here: http://www.yorku.ca/christo/papers/Grace.reply.htm
Chris, I have a minor point to make: your footnote 2 in reference to
Hull seems to be in error or could be interpreted in an alternative
fashion.
The "inferring back" or the error of "affirming the consequent" is
only
an error if one is doing deductive reasoning but not in abductive
reasoning as proposed by Charles S. Peirce.
It might be, but I would be stunned and amazed if Clark Hull knew very
much
at all about Charles Peirce's work.
Why? Peirce was a acknowledged as a logician as well as knowledgeable
in other areas of philosophy and psychology as early as his years at
Johns
Hopkins, you know, as suggested here:
Green, C. D. (2007). Johns Hopkins's first professorship in philosophy:
A critical pivot point in the history of American psychology. American
Journal of Psychology, 120(2), 303.
An early form of abductive reasoning is presented in the following,
though
it is not called so:
http://psycnet.apa.org/books/12811/007
Ref:
Peirce, C. S. (1883) A theory of probable inference.
Peirce, C. S. (Ed), (1883). Studies in logic by members of the Johns
Hopkins
University. , (pp. 126-181). New York, NY, US: Little, Brown and Co,
vii, 203 pp.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/12811-007
When William James first publicly adopted the
term "pragmatism" in an 1898 talk at Cal (and then repeated the story
in
Varieties of Religious Experience just a few years later), he felt the
need to
explain who Peirce was because he expected that no one in either
audience would
know of the man or his work. If Hull had studied at Harvard with James,
then he
might have learned of P's "third form" of logic - abduction - but Hull
did his
PhD with Jastrow at Wisconsin, and then got picked up by Yale (presided
over by
James R. Angell).
By Jastrow, do you mean this Jastrow:
Jastrow, J. (1916). Charles S. Peirce as a teacher. Journal of
Philosophy,
Psychology & Scientific Methods, 13, 723-725.
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2012322
And this Jastrow (which you might recognize ;-):
http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Peirce/small-diffs.htm?iframe=true&width=100%&height=100%
Or do you mean some other Joseph Jastrow? ;-)
Hull's approach to science was explicitly hypothetic-deductive which,
to my
mind anyway, is distinct from abduction (at least William Rozeboom
thought
so:
http://web.psych.ualberta.ca/~rozeboom/files/1997_Good_science_is_abductive.pdf
)
Okay, I assume that you did not read my review of Haig -- again, I don't
know why I tell people to check sources I provide because they
invariably
don't -- because if you had you would have seen this quote from Peirce:
| . . there are but three elementary kinds of reasoning. The first,
|which I call abduction. . . consists in examining a mass of facts
|and in allowing these facts to suggest a theory. In this way we
|gain new ideas; but there is no force in the reasoning. The second
|kind of reasoning is deduction, or necessary reasoning. It is
|applicable only to an ideal state of things, or to a state of things
|in so far as it may conform to an ideal. It merely gives a new
|aspect to the premisses. . . . The third way of reasoning is induction,
|or experimental research. Its procedure is this. Abduction having
|suggested a theory, we employ deduction to deduce from that
|ideal theory a promiscuous variety of consequences to the effect
|that if we perform certain acts, we shall find ourselves confronted
|with certain experiences. We then proceed to try these experiments,
|and if the predictions of the theory are verified, we have a
|proportionate confidence that the experiments that remain to be
|tried will confirm the theory. I say that these three are the only
|elementary modes of reasoning there are. (Peirce, 1905, ca., CP 8.209)
It should be noted that Peirce started to use the term abduction or
abductive reasoning circa 1900 and before that to that referred to
this type of reasoning as "hypothesis", implying hypothesis generation
which is the role that most contemporary researchers use the term.
In the above framework, hypotheses are produced through abductive
reasoning, deductive reasoning is used to form a coherent explanation
for the hypothesis, and induction involves the process of empirical
testing of the hypothesis. The Hypothetical-Deductive (HD) method
basically ignores the abduction stage though today psychologists
would implicitly refer to it as the source of their hypotheses.
Re: Rozeboom was Brian Haig's doctoral supervisor and Haig's
work can be seen as an extension of Rozeboom's position. Haig's
book is on books.google.com and can be accessed here; see
https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=sPk0AwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PR7&dq=haig+rozeboom&ots=3sZWMHv9g0&sig=kI-m5cEH2XUyr99af58WwER1zaU#v=onepage&q=%20rozeboom&f=false
So, is it possible that Hull might have been exposed to Peirce's
conception of abductive reasoning, possibly through Jastrow or
others, and, like many other psychologists apparently saw no need
for it, that is, there was no need for a *hypothesis generation stage*
in research (though at least one contemporary textbook in experimental
psychology uses abduction as an explanation for how hypotheses
and theories are generated; see:
https://books.google.com/books?id=Mz1rK_vqzt4C&pg=PA441&dq=%22abductive+reasoning%22+elmes&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMI0e3cjfaSxwIViRkeCh0WZAwZ#v=snippet&q=abduction&f=false
)
I don't know. But there must be a pony somewhere in there. ;-)
-Mike Palij
New York University
[email protected]
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