Bridgman's "operational analysis" versus "operational definition" in psychology

a study in the pathology of scholarship

Sigmund Koch

pp. 3-16

in: Stam, Leendert Mos, Warren Thorngate, Bernie Kaplan (eds), Recent trends in theoretical psychology, Berlin, Springer, 1993

Abstract

The doctrine of "operational definition" in psychology was presumably based on the methodic thinking of the distinguished Harvard physicist, Percy William Bridgman, who in many writings over some 46 years, elaborated a way of explicating the meaning-contours of concepts already in place within physics and other contexts-including that of natural language. He called his method "operational analysis' and did not suppose that he was stipulating any canonical schema for definition. The total misconstrual by psychologists of Bridgman's "critical concern," and the evidence suggesting that they had based their "reading" of Bridgman's position on little more than a single slogan taken out of the context of the very paragraph in which it had occurred (at the beginning of his first book on general methodic issues, The Logic of Modern Physics, 1927)-provides a dramatic case study of the quality of scholarship that has long prevailed in psychology.