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Thesis ID: CBB001561972

Operationalism, Experimentation, and Concept Formation (2003)

Machamer, Peter K.
University of Pittsburgh
Publication date: 2003
Language: English

Publication Date: 2003
Edition Details: Advisor: Machamer, Peter
Physical Details: 295 pp.

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Philosophy Behaviorism Psychology Experimental psychology 20th century United States

I provide a historical and philosophical analysis of the doctrine of operationism, which emerged in American psychology in the 1930s. While operationism is frequently characterized as a semantic thesis (which demands that concepts be defined by means of measurement operations), I argue that it is better understood as a methodological strategy, which urges that scientific concepts have to be cast in a form that makes their referents amenable to experimental investigation. I present three historical case studies of the work of early proponents of operationism and show that all of them were impressed by behaviorist critiques of traditional mentalism and introspectivism, while still wanting to investigate some of the phenomena of traditional psychology (consciousness, purpose, motivation). I show that when these psychologists used operational definitions, they posited the existence of particular psychological phenomena and treated certain experimental data---by stipulation ---as indicative of those phenomena. However, they viewed these stipulative empirical definitions as neither a priori true, nor as unrevisable. While such stipulative definitions have the function of getting empirical research about a phenomenon off the ground, they clearly don't provide sufficient evidence for the existence of the phenomenon. In the philosophical part of my dissertation, I raise the epistemological question of what it would take to provide such evidence, relating this question to recent debates in the philosophy of experimentation. I argue that evidence for the existence of a given phenomenon is produced as part of testing descriptive hypotheses about the phenomenon. Given how many background assumptions have to be made in order to test a hypothesis about a phenomenon, I raise the question of whether claims about the existence of psychological phenomena are underdetermined by data. I argue that they are not. Lastly, I present an analysis of the scientific notion of an experimental artifact, and introduce the notion of an artifactual belief, i.e. an experimentally well-confirmed belief that later turns out to be false, when one or more of the background assumptions (relative to which the belief was confirmed) turn out to be false.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 64 (2004): 4071. UMI order no. 3111163.

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