Abstract
During an informal presentation given for interested departmental colleagues several years ago, I characterized personality psychology as a discipline concerned to provide theoretically based explanations for and hence an understanding of the behavior/psychological functioning of individuals. Immediately, a colleague with scholarly interests in the area of sensation/perception challenged the adequacy of my circumscription of the field on the grounds that, in the final analysis, it would fail to differentiate the study of personality from various other subdisciplines of psychology. Conceding that he was probably correct on this point, I hastened to add that, for reasons once well put by Gordon Allport, that prospect did not particularly trouble me:
Every mental function is embedded in personal life. In no concrete sense is there such a thing as intelligence, space perception, color discrimination, or choice reaction; there are only people who are capable of performing such activities and of having such experiences (Allport, 1937, p. 18).
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Lamiell, J.T. (1990). Explanation in the Psychology of Personality. In: Robinson, D.N., Mos, L.P. (eds) Annals of Theoretical Psychology. Annals of Theoretical Psychology, vol 6. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0631-3_11
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