This book traces how such a seemingly immutable idea as measurement proved so malleable when it collided with the subject matter of psychology. It locates philosophical and social influences reshaping the concept and, at the core of this reshaping, identifies a fundamental problem: the issue of whether psychological attributes really are quantitative. It argues that the idea of measurement now endorsed within psychology actually subverts attempts to establish a genuinely quantitative science and it urges a new direction. It relates views (...) on measurement by thinkers such as Holder, Russell, Campbell and Nagel to earlier views, like those of Euclid and Oresme. Within the history of psychology, it considers contributions by Fechner, Cattell, Thorndike, Stevens and Suppes, among others. It also contains a non-technical exposition of conjoint measurement theory and recent foundational work by leading measurement theorist R. Duncan Luce. (shrink)

This introduction to the philosophy of social science provides an original conception of the task and nature of social inquiry. Peter Manicas discusses the role of causality seen in the physical sciences and offers a reassessment of the problem of explanation from a realist perspective. He argues that the fundamental goal of theory in both the natural and social sciences is not, contrary to widespread opinion, prediction and control, or the explanation of events. Instead, theory aims to provide an understanding (...) of the processes which, together, produce the contingent outcomes of experience. Offering a host of concrete illustrations and examples of critical ideas and issues, this accessible book will be of interest to students of the philosophy of social science, and social scientists from a range of disciplines. (shrink)

Peirce’s theory of the origin of abduction in Aristotle’s Prior Analytics II.25 is based on his account of abduction as a second-figure syllogism. Peirce read the difficult and (what he thought to be) corrupted passage of Prior Analytics II.25 and tried to amend its errors and explain its difficulties in order to argue that Aristotle was trying to present a syllogism in the second figure that infers a case, which is Peirce’s definition of abduction. “[H]e would not be Aristotle, to (...) have overlooked [the] question” whether such an inference sometimes occurs, said Peirce in his 1901 paper “The Logic of Drawing History from Ancient Documents” (CP 7.249). Several years after suggesting that Aristotle had described.. (shrink)