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Operationism as a Cultural Survival

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Frank E. Hartung
Frank E. Hartung*
Affiliation:
Wayne University
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Extract

Operationism may tentatively be defined as that scientific method which defines its concepts in terms of observable or communicable operations, however carried out. With few exceptions, it has been put forward as representing positivism in contemporary sociology. Sellars refers to it as a new and virulent form of positivism—logical positivism. In philosophy, logical positivism is the culmination of the sensationalism of Berkeley and Hume, the positivism of Mach and Avenarius and Comte, and the logistic of Russell and Wittgenstein. In sociology, the philosophic assumptions of this school have been stated in a naive form, in addition to presenting Kantian idealism contradicted by an assumption of philosophic realism.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , October 1944 , pp. 227 - 232
Copyright
Copyright © The Philosophy of Science Association 1944

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References

1 Tylor defines survivals as “... processes, customs, opinions and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and they thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has evolved. ... Sometimes old thoughts ... will burst out afresh, to the amazement of a world that thought them long since dead or dying.” E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, vol. 1, pp. 16–17. 3rd American Edition.

2 P. W. Bridgman, The Logic of Modern Physics, p. 6; The Nature of Physical Theory, pp. 9–10; “Operational Analysis,” in Phil, of Sci., April, 1939, pp. 128, 130; The Intelligent Individual and Society, pp. 86 ff.

3 Roy W. Sellars, “Positivism in Contemporary Philosophic Thought” in Amer. Soc. Review, Feb., 1939, pp. 26–42; V. J. McGill, “An Evaluation of Logical Positivism,” in Science and Society, Fall, 1936, pp. 45–81. I am indebted to this excellent article for the specific form of some of the points made against sensationalism in sociology in the present paper. Frank E. Hartung, “Operationalism: Idealism or Realism?” in Phil. of Sci., Oct., 1942, pp. 350–355.

4 George A. Lundberg, Foundations of Sociology, pp. 8–9. Lundberg has been the most vigorous exponent of operationism in sociology, and this paper is largely devoted to an examination of his position.

5 Op. cit., pp. 220–221. George H. Mead says that “Locke assumed that we could go outside of our experience of color and sound into a world of moving physical particles which cause such impressions as those of color and sound. Berkeley assumed that we could get outside of our experience of an extended matter to a God which caused in us the experience that we called an experience of extended matter. Hume showed that the law of causation. ... lies inside of experience and that there is no way of gettin goutside of that experience. ... Berkeley accepted Locke and went him one better; Hume accepted Berkeley and went him one better...”, Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century, pp. 34, 39. Mead refers to Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

6 McGill, op. cit., p. 47.

7 Lundberg, op. cit., pp. 10–14.

8 Op. cit., pp. 292–294; 326–327. For a more extended discussion of Lundberg's self-contradictory positions, see Hartung, op. cit. On the basis of what may be termed Mead's “necessary assumption” of one having the response of the other implicit in oneself, it may be said that responses as such are never communicated, but serve as a stimulus to a responding organism. On this basis, it seems to the present writer that Lundberg has an incomplete meaning of “communication” as used by Mead.

9 It is very interesting to compare Lundberg's position with Berkeley's statement. The latter's A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (2nd ed.) starts the first paragraph with the statement that “It is evident to anyone who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the sense; or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind; or lastly, ideas formed by the help of imagination and memory. ...

“2. But ... there is likewise something which knows or perceives them. ... This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul or myself ... the existence of an idea consists in being perceived.

“3. ... And to me it is no less evident that the various sensations ... cannot exist otherwise than in a mind perceiving them ... what is meant by the term exist when applied to sensible things. The table I write on I say exists, that is, I see and feel it; and if I were out of my study I should say it existed—meaning thereby that if I was in my study I might perceive it, or that some other spirit actually does perceive it. There was ... a colour or figure, and it was perceived by sight or touch. This is all that I can understand by these and like expressions. For as to what is said of the absolute existence of unthinking beings without any relation to their being perceived, that is to me perfectly unintelligible. Their esse is percipi, nor is it possible that they should have any existence out of the minds or thinking things which perceive them.

page 231 “... all the choir of heaven and the furniture of the earth ... have not any subsistence without a mind. ... To be convinced of which, the reader need only reflect, and try to separate in his own thoughts the being of a sensible thing from its being perceived.

“96. Matter being once expelled out of nature drags with it so many sceptical and impious notions, such an incredible number of disputes and puzzling questions, which have been thorns in the sides of divines as well as philosophers, and made so much fruitless work for mankind, that if the arguments we have produced against it are not found equal to demonstration ... yet I am sure all friends to knowledge, peace and religion have reason to wish they were.”

10 McGill, op. cit., p. 51.

11 In “Testability and Meaning,” Phil. of Sci., vol. 3, p. 466. Quoted in Sellars, op. cit., p. 41.