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The Empirical Basis and Theoretical Structure of Psychology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Kenneth W. Spence
Kenneth W. Spence*
Affiliation:
State University of Iowa
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Extract

In accepting the invitation of your society to discuss some aspects of the philosophy of science, particularly as they might bear on the problems of an experimental psychologist, I should like from the start to make it very clear that I do not consider myself a philosopher, not even an amateur one. Like most empirical scientists, particularly of the laboratory variety, I usually take it for granted that my world is real and that the things I perceive as existing in it can be investigated by my empirical methods. I seem to get along quite well with this unpremeditated, common-sense realism, and, for the most part, I go along minding my own experimental business. As the psychologists among you may know, however, every once in a while I seem to have to abandon this happy, naive state and let myself get involved in questions about my science, the kinds of questions that are more properly the business of the philosopher of science.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 24 , Issue 2 , April 1957 , pp. 97 - 108
Copyright
Copyright © 1957, The Williams & Wilkins Company

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Footnotes

1

An address given to a joint meeting of philosophers and psychologists of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology, Asheville, March, 1956.

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