Operationism again

Abstract

Grace's (2001) critical analysis of the use of operationism in psychology is founded on two basic claims. First, he argues that the main difficulty with mid-20th-century psychologists' interpretation of Bridgman was that they believed a single operation to be sufficient to define a new concept. Second, he claims that the main thrust of recent criticisms of operationism is that operational definitions should be used for existing concepts only and not to create new ones. In his view, both the earlier difficulty and the recent criticism are effectively quashed by the adoption of `convergent operationism', first proposed in the 1950s. In the present commentary, I try to show that neither of the basic claims is quite correct, nor does `convergent operationism' do much to resolve the matter. The primary difficulty with operationism, in contrast to Grace's analysis of the situation, was that it was proposed as a solution to a metaphysical problem which it was not even remotely adequate to meet, and, in addition, that the presumed metaphysical problem it was intended to solve was, in the first place, a mistaken diagnosis of the difficulties that faced science in the 1920s, when operationism was first proposed.