A.“Verification” of statements in psychology

✍ Scribed by D. Vuysje

• Book ID: 104784174
• Publisher: Springer Netherlands
• Year: 1956
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 232 KB
• Volume: 10
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0039-7857
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00484674

✦ Synopsis

In contradistinction to mathematics, physics and biology, psychology and psychiatry deal to a large extent with the verbal behaviour of their objects. They are faced with two kinds of "sense"-problems: those with which the observer has to do in his theory-construction, and those which are characteristic of the verbal behaviour of his subjects.

(2) Apart from a schematic and simplified usage, as it occurs in filllng-up exercises and other laboratory verbal behaviour, the psychologist has to do with statements the sense of which, on the one hand, is determined by the usage of his subjects and, on the other hand, so far as his records and theory are concerned, by his own language-sense.

(3) This situation may give rise, and often gives rise, to all kinds of verbal confusions. If we call object-language the language used in verbal behaviour of people which psychology investigates and recta-language the language psychology uses in its discourse about the verbal behaviour of people, it becomes obvious that in present-day