| Item Description: | "Having, during certain stages in my own student days, experienced something of the futility resulting from unadmitted fundamental differences in theoretical presuppositions, I have grown more and more convinced that experimental methods are largely instances of the more or less systematic theories of the experimenter. Practically any publication from the Cornell Psychological Laboratory carries a majority of the earmarks of Structuralism. One would look in vain for those ear-marks in any scientific article from Watson, Hunter, or Lashley, --for the ear-marks of Behaviorism attract attention there. Any scientific publication from Berlin these days establishes once more the Gestalt Theorie. The pedagogical danger here is caused by the tendency of each of these theoretical groups to think of its rivals in terms of caricature, and so to describe them to the public and to young students. The result is that theoretical tradition becomes established in certain educational communities, and students are born structuralists or behaviorists just as one may be born a democrat or a presbyterian. We have here a genuine cross-section of contemporary theoretical psychology. Here are the norms with which future psychologies can be compared. Here are the principles which are up-to-date through the year 1925"--Preface. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved) -- Also issued in printing.
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