PSYC85H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 11: Falsifiability, Operational Definition, Factor Analysis
Document Summary
: tried to formulate general principles for gathering knowledge (taking principles from things such as physics and chemistry) Rudolph carnap emphasized that knowledge is embodied in language. It"s all meaningless: once you"ve made a protocol sentence, it becomes the meaning of the statement. There is no surplus: argued that psychology involved dispositional concepts: descriptions of lawful relationships between independent and dependent variables, if x (stimulus) then y (behaviour, capable of being falsified. Falsifiability (important part of science): should observations become outdated, they should be replaced with a more likely answer. : investigator must specify how a concept is to be measured: operational definitions: specifications, for any psych concept, a researcher should be able to give an operational definition. This means that they are referring to publicly observable events. Logical positivism and operationism were welcomed by behaviourist psychologists (especially neo-behaviourists: skinner. They were involved with the world as it is experienced, cannot be expressed in this logical positivist framework.
