PSYC 308 Chapter Notes - Chapter 11: Psychoanalysis, Percy Williams Bridgman, Rudolf Carnap

• School: Simon Fraser University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: PSYC 308
• Professor: Timothy Racine

Document Summary

Tried to form general principles for gathering knowledge. Knowledge embodied in language: science is a set of statements referring to observations. Need procedure for verifying truth of statements objectively/publicly: verification principle: meaning of statement is its method of verification, meaning = conditions under which a statement is true and false. If you can"t verify a statement, it"s meaningless. Need protocol sentences: statements must be translatable into protocol sentences to have meaning. Protocol sentences are the meaning no surplus meaning i. e. publicly observable (like behaviorism. Psyc involves dispositional concepts: descriptions of lawful relationships b/w independent and dependent variables, x y (s r) if __, then ___, capable of falsifiability. Gestalt psyc damaged: study world as experienced i. e. subjective terms had surplus meaning (life space, wanted subjective experience legit in psyc. Psychoanalysis suffered terms didn"t have scientific definitions too vague and metaphorical i. e. untestable logical positivism and operationism rose w/ behaviorism in n. america. Bridgman really promoted operational analysis/method, not definition.