PSYC85H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 11: Percy Williams Bridgman, Logical Positivism, Rudolf Carnap
Document Summary
Psyc85: midterm material: titchener was known for the investigative practice called introspection and watson was known for the investigative practice called methodological behaviourism. Logical positivism: logical positivism justified behaviourist methodology and casted doubt on gestalt and psychoanalytic, group of physicists, logicians, and mathematicians called vienna circle tried to formulate general principles for gathering knowledge. The meaning of a statement is its method of verification. We want a description of the conditions under which the sentence will form a true proposition, and of those which will make it false. Unless we can describe a procedure for verifying our statements, they are meaningless: observations should be described by protocol sentences: publicly observable events. Once you have translated a statement into protocol sentences, the protocol sentences are the meaning of the statement. If x then y, where x is a stimulus and y is some behaviour. Are capable of being falsified: falsifiability: regarded as an important characteristic of scientific concepts.
