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Australian Book Review, November 1979
Negative_rev.doc
Importance of negative results
Sutcliffe J. P. (ed.)
Conceptual Analysis and Method in
Psychology Essays in Honour of W.M .
O'Neil
Sydney University Press, 216 p., $10.00
ISBN 0 424 00055 5
By Jim Mackenzie
This collection of essays by his former
students marks the retirement of Bill O'Neil,
who has been Professor of Psychology m the
University of Sydney since 1945, though in the
last twelve years or so he has been occupied
more with university administration than with
leaching or psychology, as he tells us in a brief
and frank autobiographical essay included in
the book. The authors of the other papers are
his former students, now holding distinguished
academic positions in Australia, Canada,
Britain and America. The lest of a teacher is
the achievement of the pupils, and on conventional criteria O’Neil’s pupils have done
well A more searching test, however, is not in
terms of their positions, but rather in terms of
their work, and it is samples of this which we
are invited to peruse.
J. R. Maze gives a rather garbled presentation
of the eroticist theory of morality, known to its
opponents as the "Groper" theory- that moral
judgements such as ‘Abortion ought (or ought
not) to be legalised’ arc to be understood not
as malting statements but as expressing
internal stales such as ‘Legal abortions prr (or,
grr)’ He concludes with the remarkable
statement that moral beliefs are ‘a mental construction in much the same sense that a
delusion is a mental construction’ — or
perhaps, one might interject, in the same sense
as non-Euclidean geometries are mental
constructions — but that ‘Moralism (the
holding of moral beliefs and passing of moral
judgements) is of course, extremely widespread, and characterises enormous numbers
of persons who would not be described as
mentally disturbed by any orthodox set of psychiatric criteria’ I can find no hint that this was
intended as a joke
In the next paper Terence McMullen puts to
one side most ‘psi’ phenomena (such as
telepathy), and endeavours to Show that two
particular kinds, precog
nition and retrocognition, are logically
incoherent. His discussion of what he calls the
philosophy of time is rather brief, which is just
as well because it seems to rule out Einstein's
theory of relativity as unstable. He also denies,
without explaining his grounds, the apparent
disanalogy between precognition (knowledge
of the future) and retrocognition (of the past).
Certainly some form of retrocognition seems
possible, for since sunlight takes time to reach
us the sun we see directly is the sun of several
minutes ago. Thus though it is unlikely that
visual information from (say) ancient Babylon
may still be around to be picked up, it is not
self-contradictory.
Jean Jones discusses personal identity, a hoary
favorite among philosophers though she refers
to no philosophical writings more recent than
1949. She rejects what she calls c-identity,
meaning absolutely unaltered in any respect,
as a criterion for ‘being the same person’ (as
contrasted with ‘He’s quite a different person
now’). I cannot believe that c-identity is
anything more than a straw man. Roderick
McDonald argues that a statistical method
advocated (jointly and separately in different
writings) by himself and his mate S. A. Mulaik
is not subject to certain objections raised by
those who prefer a rival method. He seems
more concerned with the danger of saying that
something is there when it isn't than with the
danger of saying that something isn't there
when it is. Not having followed the debate of
which it is a part, 1 didn't find his paper easy
reading, but his conclusion, in which he argues
that stability from one sample to another is the
crucial factor for judging between the two
methods seems to me correct.
Many of O'Neil's students are interested in
vision. John Ross reports some rather
unsurprising experiments designed to decide
between two accounts of how it is that we can
see movies. Barbara Gillam gives a fascinating
analysis of the illusion of the double-headed
and double-tailed arrows, which is marred by
the omission of two of the diagrams referred to
in the text (6.6c and d).
Max Coltheart addresses the important,
question of what goes on when we
read. His approach of concentrating on single
words ignores the facts that reading requires
sentences — lots of illiterate Kids can identify
single words from advertising slogans — and
that proofreading (spotting typographical
errors in a text) is difficult. He describes
experiments in which people have to identify a
row of letters as being or not being a word, and
provides three arguments that the process
involved cannot be wholly phonological. One
— that English contains ideographs like the
numerals and pound — doesn't follow, for
these signs could be treated as representing
sounds (as in 'Car 4 sale’), and anyway isn't
relevant since his experiment did not include
any. The second, that we can distinguish meet,
meat and mete, isn't relevant either, since his
subjects didn't need to distinguish them. They
could have answered by finding (a) is it
pronounceable' (b) is it misspelt? His third
argument, that English spelling is irregular so
that a given letter combination can b§
pronounced several ways, ignores the
possibility that a phonological strategy which
tries several ways of making the combination
pronounceable might work. This is not to say
that his conclusions are false, but only that he
fails to prove them.
M. J. Meggitt, who has turned from
psychology to anthropology, reports on
relationships between the myths and the family
structures of some people in Papua New
Guinea, eschewing the extremes of Freud or
Levi-Strauss. He has a tendency to alliteration
— the 'perambulating punitive penis' and the
'vagrant voracious vulva' take central roles.
Bob Lockhart argues for what he calls
ecological validity, which he explains and
distinguishes clearly from social relevance, in
the investigation of memory. Peter Wenderoth
and Cyril Latimer argue against the reduction
of the psychology of perception to physiology.
They erroneously claim that, as a matter of
logic, no term can appear in the conclusion
which did not appear in the premises, and
neglect completely the voluminous literature
on reduction, theory-change and meaningchange by students of science published since
their authority Nagel (1961). Ray Over argues
persuasively that investigators' preconceptions
about vision have impoverished their
experimental research. His argument links up
with the independent remarks of Lockhart on
ecological validity. Alison Turtle contributes a
scholarly
Australian Book Review, November 1979
essay on the origins of the functionalist theory
of mind, and its relevance is not in doubt for
she contradicts the account given in recent
literature. One hopes that she has nipped an illfounded myth in the bud. Ali Landauer
provides another paper on perception, with
interesting historical resonances, but his
statement of his conclusion is appallingly
banal.
R. A. Champion points out some o! the
ambiguities and different patterns of use of
technical
terms
such
as
'backward
conditioning'
between
clinical
and
experimental psychologists. This sort of
confusion also bedevils the physical sciences,
and it is helpful to have the dangerous cases
explained, but Champion wanders off this
important topic on to more general criticisms
of the experimental methods used in behaviour
therapy. Peter Sheehan discusses various
attempts to place experimentation on a
collaborative footing instead
of the
impersonal, authoritarian one traditional in
psychology, though inconclusively. The last
paper, by the editor, Sutcliffe, deals with the
concept of progress. He begins pedantically,
brightens up to resuscitate Turing's Imitation
Game (to what extent can a machine imitate a
person0), but seems not to have digested the
arguments of Kuhn (whom he cites) about the
theory dependence of problems. His prose has
a tendency to degenerate into mind-paralysing
sequences of questions.
The paper I have not yet mentioned is by J.
Furedy on the importance of negative results.
Journal editors and referees, he claims, reject
or advise 'de-emphasis' of papers which report
failure to find anything (even when there is
adequate evidence of sensitivity of the
procedure to the sought effect), or which
report results inconsistent with those obtained
by others Furedy argues with cogency and wit
for the need to change this absurd and antiscientific policy. His paper is informed by a
considerable understanding of the philosophy
of science and recent work in that field This is
a splendid and timely paper, and should be
required reading for anyone advising graduate
students in psychology.
I have dealt with the papers in such detail
because they are such a mixed bag. Some are
decidedly disappointing. But overall, Bill
O'Neil has reason to be proud of his students.
Jim Mackenzie teaches
Wollongong University.
philosophy
at