Bibliographic record
Abstract
Grace's (2001) critical analysis of the use of operationism in psychology is founded on two basic claims. First, he argues that the main difficulty with mid-20th-century psychologists' interpretation of Bridgman was that they believed a single operation to be sufficient to define a new concept. Second, he claims that the main thrust of recent criticisms of operationism is that operational definitions should be used for existing concepts only and not to create new ones. In his view, both the earlier difficulty and the recent criticism are effectively quashed by the adoption of `convergent operationism', first proposed in the 1950s. In the present commentary, I try to show that neither of the basic claims is quite correct, nor does `convergent operationism' do much to resolve the matter. The primary difficulty with operationism, in contrast to Grace's analysis of the situation, was that it was proposed as a solution to a metaphysical problem which it was not even remotely adequate to meet, and, in addition, that the presumed metaphysical problem it was intended to solve was, in the first place, a mistaken diagnosis of the difficulties that faced science in the 1920s, when operationism was first proposed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.030 | 0.010 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".