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Relativity and Representativeness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2022

Kenneth R. Hammond
Kenneth R. Hammond*
Affiliation:
University of Colorado
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Extract

Certain suggestions recently made by Brunswik (2) concerning the design of experiments in psychology seem to have far reaching implications. Indeed, Brunswik's suggestions appear to the writer to be congruent with Einstein's General Theory of Relativity. Congruences between such diverse disciplines as psychology and physics bear watching if for no other reason than the fact that psychologists frequently point to the physicist as the ideal scientist. Unfortunately, in the writer's opinion, the ideal which the psychologist still admires is the classical, or Newtonian, physicist rather than the modern, or Einsteinian, physicist—the psychologist's outlook being concomitantly distorted. Brunswik's theories of experimental design in psychology, however, are appealing for the very reason that they do not fit the mold of the classical physical experiment, but do seem to be congruent with Einstein's physical theories—with concomitant expansion of scope.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 18 , Issue 3 , July 1951 , pp. 208 - 211
Copyright
Copyright © 1951, The Williams & Wilkins Company

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References

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