Article ID: CBB690893535

The Fashionable Scientific Fraud: Collingwood’s Critique of Psychometrics (2020)

unapi

In his review of Charles Spearman’s The Nature of ‘Intelligence’ (1923), R. G. Collingwood launched an attack upon psychometrics that was expanded in his Essay on Metaphysics (1940). Although underrated by friend and foe alike, Collingwood’s critique identified a number of defects in the thinking of psychometricians that subsequently became entrenched. However, his main complaint was that psychology generally (and, by implication, psychometrics) was a ‘fashionable scientific fraud’. This charge was inspired by his more general views on logic and metaphysics, which, however, as I argue, are logically unsustainable. Ironically, other elements of his philosophy – his ‘fallacy of calculation’ and concept of ‘scale of forms’ – are relevant to psychometrics and tip the scales in favour of his otherwise unwarranted charge.

...More
Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB690893535/

Similar Citations

Article Gordin, Michael D.; (2012)
How Lysenkoism Became Pseudoscience: Dobzhansky to Velikovsky

Article Jim Wynter Porter; (2020)
Guidance counseling in the mid-twentieth century United States: Measurement, grouping, and the making of the intelligent self

Article Luke Stark; (April 2018)
Algorithmic psychometrics and the scalable subject

Article Giuseppina D'Oro; (2015)
Unlikely Bedfellows? Collingwood, Carnap and the Internal/External Distinction

Article Sebastiaan Broere; (2019)
Picturing Ethnopsychology: A Colonial Psychiatrist’s Struggles to Examine Javanese Minds, 1910–1925

Book Michael D. Gordin; (2021)
On the Fringe: Where Science Meets Pseudoscience

Book Bauer, Henry H.; (2001)
Science or Pseudoscience: Magnetic Healing, Psychic Phenomena, and Other Heterodoxies

Book Allison B. Kaufman; James C. Kaufman; (2018)
Pseudoscience: The Conspiracy Against Science

Book Gordin, Michael D.; (2012)
The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe

Thesis Coopersmith, Jared Scott; (2012)
Scientific Controversies and Boundary Disputes: The Intelligent Design Movement Network

Book Baasanjav Terbish; (2022)
State Ideology, Science, and Pseudoscience in Russia: Between the Cosmos and the Earth

Book Krister Dylan Knapp; (2017)
William James: Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity

Article van Wyhe, John; (2004)
Was Phrenology a Reform Science? Towards a New Generalization for Phrenology

Book Paul-André Rosental; (2019)
A Human Garden: French Policy and the Transatlantic Legacies of Eugenic Experimentation

Article Silvana Vetö; Marcelo Sánchez; (2017)
Sigmund Freud and Alejandro Lipschütz: Psychoanalysis and Biology between Europe and Chile

Article Guillaume Fréchette; (2020)
Descriptive Psychology: Brentano and Dilthey

Article Bouterse, Jeroen; Karstens, Bart; (2015)
A Diversity of Divisions: Tracing the History of the Demarcation between the Sciences and the Humanities

Article Horst, Frank C. P. van der; Veer, René van der; (2009)
Separation and Divergence: The Untold Story of James Robertson's and John Bowlby's Theoretical Dispute on Mother-Child Separation

Article Scott Edgar; (2020)
Völkerpsychologie and the Origins of Hermann Cohen’s Antipsychologism

Article Taves, Ann; (2014)
A Tale of Two Congresses: The Psychological Study of Psychical, Occult, and Religious Phenomena, 1900--1909

Authors & Contributors
Gordin, Michael D.
Bauer, Henry H.
Coopersmith, Jared Scott
Edgar, Scott
Karstens, Bart
Knapp, Krister Dylan
Journals
History of Science
HOPOS
Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences
British Journal for the History of Philosophy
History of Psychology
History of the Human Sciences
Publishers
University of Pittsburgh
Berghahn Books
Lexington Books
MIT Press
Oxford University Press
University of Chicago Press
Concepts
Controversies and disputes
Psychology
Pseudoscience
Science and society
Psychometrics
Authority of science
People
Dilthey, Wilhelm
Velikovsky, Immanuel
Bowlby, John
Brentano, Franz Clemens
Carnap, Rudolf
Cohen, Hermann
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
20th century
20th century, late
21st century
Modern
Places
United States
Great Britain
Chile
Soviet Union
Java (Indonesia)
France
Institutions
National Defense Education Act (NDEA)
Facebook (firm)
Comments

Be the first to comment!

{{ comment.created_by.username }} on {{ comment.created_on | date:'medium' }}

Log in or register to comment