Psychology's Bridgman vs Bridgman's Bridgman

Abstract

Since its inception as science, psychology has generated a rhetoric of `rigor' concerning the ideal characteristics of its inquirers. An early emphasis on experimental exactitude expanded, by the 1930s, to a conception that saw the first-year graduate student also as a mature theoretical physicist, logician and (when required) carpenter. By the 1960s, the student was expected also to be an expert in `computer science', and an adept in esoteric speciations of probability mathematics. Consistently missing from these autistic job specifications have been such trivial matters as the ability to read, to report reliably on what has been read, and to write. As for the more sophisticated hermeneutic and analytic skills of scholarship, these have apparently been seen as positive threats to scientific purity. This article illustrates the consequences of the divorce between psychology and even minimal requirements of the western scholarly tradition. The doctrine of `operational definition' (or `operationism') has been a central strand in the official epistemology governing psychological method for over 55 years. Despite a large literature of stipulation and pseudo-exegesis of operational procedure, it can be shown that any demand that `variables' or `concepts'-whether of psychological theory or experiment-be operationally defined in the senses advocated would, if literally construed, confine psychological discourse to matters so fragmented and trivial as to be worse than empty. The doctrine of `operational definition' in psychology was presumably based on the methodic thinking of the distinguished Harvard physicist, Percy William Bridgman, who, in many writings over some 46 years, elaborated a way of explicating the meaning-contours of concepts already in place within physics and other contexts-including that of natural language. He called his method `operational analysis' and did not suppose that he was stipulating any canonical schema for definition. The total misconstrual by psychologists of Bridgman's `critical concern', and the evidence suggesting that they had based their `reading' of Bridgman's position on little more than a single slogan taken out of the context of the very paragraph in which it had occurred (at the beginning of his first book on general methodic issues, The Logic of Modern Physics, 1927/1960), provides a dramatic case study of the quality of scholarship that has long prevailed in psychology.

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