A Critique of Fine's Position

Reuben Fine's* recent indictment of behaviorism, of operationalism, and of the prevailing tendency to stress experimentation in contemporary psychological research is an interesting but curious amalgam of question-begging, half-truth, non-sequitur, methodological naivete, and downright error. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of science, and of scientific method. Consequently, this paper will address itself to a critical analysis and evaluation of some of his arguments in an effort to point up and to clarify certain salient weaknesses in Fine's position. The procedure adopted here will be to follow a summary or direct quotation of Fine's statements with the relevant critical comment.

After noting that Cronbach† has quite properly identified two aspects of psychology, the experimental and the observational, Fine asserts that it follows that “much of what has been written and taught about scientific method in psychology … for the past three or four decades … is incorrect, and has led to a large amount of waste motion on the part of those who have narrowly tried to fit psychology into one prescribed scheme.” The one prescribed scheme referred to is the approach Fine ascribes to the experimentalists in which, Fine maintains, observational methods are regarded as “at best ad hoc adjuncts to real science.”

Perhaps a more accurate interpretation of the experimentalist position would be to state that the experimentalist contends that observational methods are a necessary but not a sufficient condition of the scientific enterprise. Thus, while the experimentalist would hardly want to deny that science, of necessity, begins in observation, since science fundamentally is rooted in empiricism, he would probably go on to point out that simple, uncontrolled observation is but a first step in the hypothesis-formation stage of scientific method, an indispensable preliminary to the subsequent experimentation which ideally is the central focus of all scientific en