Abstract
This chapter begins with material authored by myself. I discuss the way in which two of William Stern’s most prominent contemporaries in the subdiscipline of ‘differential’ psychology that he founded with works published in 1900 and 1911, E. L. Thorndike and Hugo Münsterberg, adopted views that diverged from his own in crucial respects but nevertheless came to dominate the thinking of differential psychologists then and since. The chapter’s second segment presents my translation of a chapter from Stern’s 1911 differential psychology book. That work provides a perspective on Stern’s personalistic understanding of the problem of individuality in scientific psychology that was obscured by Thorndike and Münsterberg, and that has remained lost to most mainstream differential psychologists up to the present. Issues arising in the writing of biographies are discussed at length.
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Notes
- 1.
This claim was repeated in editions of Anastasi’s text that were published in 1949, 1958, and 1981.
- 2.
The German expression for ‘common to all’ is allen gemein, and this is why the experimental discipline launched by Wundt was known as die allgemeine Psychology, or ‘the general psychology.’ The same discipline was also referred to as the ‘individual’ psychology, and occasionally even by the full expression ‘general experimental individual’ psychology. All of these labels are entirely sensible provided that one understands ‘general’ to mean ‘common to all’ and not, for example, ‘true on average.’
- 3.
- 4.
This was a feature of Stern’s thinking that the American psychologist Gordon W. Allport (1897–1967) found especially attractive, and in which Allport saw prospects for an ‘idiographic’ psychology of personality as an alternative to the individual differences approach that was dominating the mainstream (cf. Allport, 1937). It is most unfortunate that both Allport and the advocates of the individual differences approach that Allport was critiquing mistakenly thought that that approach qualified as ‘nomothetic.’ For further reading on this subject, see Lamiell (1987, 1997, 1998).
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- 6.
The fundamental epistemic error that thus infected differential psychology early in the twentieth century would soon spread to experimental psychology. As the original ‘Leipzig model’ for single-subject experimentation established by Wundt was gradually abandoned in favor of treatment group experimentation (cf. Danziger, 1987, 1990), the vast majority of experimentalists also became, effectively, investigators of individual and group differences. Unlike the original differential psychologists (who came to be known as the ‘correlationists’; cf. Cronbach, 1957), focused as they were on differences between people that had arisen outside of the laboratory and that would be ‘captured’ by tests of some sort, practitioners of treatment group experimentation trained their focus on variables marking differences between people that were deliberately created inside the laboratory through the imposition of different treatments on separate groups of subjects. The same aggregate statistical methods were adopted to guide data analyses in each of scientific psychology’s ‘two disciplines’—and in hybrids of the two spawned by Cronbach’s (1957) famous discourse on the subject—and, in this way, the research methods canon of virtually all of empirical psychology came to be anchored by the practice of interpreting statistical knowledge of variables with respect to which individuals have been differentiated—hence variables definable only for populations (or samples therefrom)—as if it constituted knowledge of the individuals within those populations. It is the language of population-level statistical realities that has enabled mainstream psychology’s correlational and experimental sub-disciplines to ask their questions in “one voice,” as urged by Cronbach (1957). The reader is referred to Lamiell (2019) for a fuller exposition of this history and its highly problematic epistemic legacy.
- 7.
Like Stern, Münsterberg was a native German, and as Lück and Löwisch (1994) documented by letters from Stern to his long-time friend and colleague, the Freiburg philosopher Jonas Cohn (1869–1947), Stern knew Münsterberg personally. Indeed, one gains the sense from the aforementioned letters that the two men were on friendly terms with one another despite the divergence of their respective views on certain key aspects of scientific psychology.
- 8.
This failure of critical attention to Stern’s writings was undoubtedly due in part to the fact that he was publishing in German whereas both Thorndike and Münsterberg were publishing in English. It is likely that this fact also contributed to the ‘origin myth’ of differential psychology that has featured William Stern (cf. Lamiell, 2006, 2019, Chap. 3).
- 9.
Despite those efforts, the views of Thorndike and Münsterberg, later furthered not only by Anastasi (1937) as described earlier but also by another highly influential ‘second generation’ differential psychologist, Leona Tyler (1906–1993; cf. Tyler, 1947) became canonical within the field. Elsewhere (Lamiell, 2019) I have discussed at greater length this highly important historical development. I must note here, however, to Tyler’s credit, that she did chastise herself in an unpublished paper written nearly four decades after the original publication of her 1947 textbook for having long mischaracterized Stern’s views (Tyler, 1985).
- 10.
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: In brackets I present here what Stern included as footnote 1 in the original text: [Completely unjustified is the opinion that the natural law/objective perspective on the world is irreconcilable with the individualizing/personalistic perspective. In my philosophical work, Person and Thing, I have shown thoroughly that the two perspectives are not only reconcilable but belong together and are mutually dependent upon one another.] Stern’s discussion of ‘the problem of freedom,’ included as part of Chap. 3 in the present volume, is the most direct point of reference for his remark in this footnote.
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Lamiell, J.T. (2021). The ‘Problem of Individuality’ in Scientific Psychology. In: Uncovering Critical Personalism. Palgrave Studies in the Theory and History of Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67734-3_6
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