Scientific Psychology: Principles and Approaches

"Scientific Psychology" is a misleadingly brief title for this book, and even its subtitle is too vague to remedy the difficulty. "Philosophical Issues of a Scientific Psychology" would have come closer to defining the aim and the scope of this work to which 30 psychologists and philosophers have contributed. The editors are, fittingly, Wolman, a psychologist with a philosophical leaning, and Nagel, a philosopher with an appetite for psychology. To the medical reader there will be little here of scientific interest in the specifically experimental or clinical senses. But if the physician or researcher who turns to these pages is prepared for deliberating with Jean Piaget about the possibilities of an empirical genetics of epistemology (in which the naïve child informs his naïve elders about how they got to think as they do); with Anatol Rapoport about the uses of mathematics in psychology; with Benbow Ritchie about "an incurable vagueness