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Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science is a projected series of volumes that presents the ongoing research of Minnesota's Center for the Philosophy of Science into the philosophical and methodological problems of science. The second volume, like the first, is a collection of essays concerned particularly with psychology. Though none of the essays presupposed foreknowledge of any of the others, the collection is astonishingly integrated by a basic orientation in logical analysis. Indeed, this philosophical point of view, perhaps the most worthwhile one for regarding the broad epistemological issues of science, is so pervasively represented as to give one the experience of having happened upon a coterie. The individual essays themselves are written in an exemplary academic manner, which is to say, that they are scholarly, erudite, and exhaustively argumentative.
Despite the fact that the main current of thought in these essays is never intended to be either hostile or especially partial to psychoanalysis, someone with a professional stake in psychoanalysis is very apt to take exception in a number of places where the indifference to psychoanalysis reaches a rather implausible degree. The most striking example is Karl Zener's essay “The Significance of Experience of the Individual for the Science of Psychology.” In this essay Zener attempts to evaluate and extend the present established methodology of experimental academic psychology by describing some of the unfortunate consequences of a psychology that has practically succeeded in eliminating direct human experience from the realm of legitimate data. He correctly