Naturalistic Methodology in an Emerging Scientific Psychology: Lotze and Fechner in the Balance

Abstract

The development of a methodologically naturalistic approach to physiological and experimental psychology in the nineteenth century was not primarily driven by a naturalistic agenda. The work of R. Hermann Lotze and G. T. Fechner help to illustrate this claim. I examine a selected set of central commitments in each thinker's philosophical outlook, particularly regarding the human soul and the nature of God, that departed strongly from a reductionist materialism. Yet, each contributed significantly to the formation of experimental and physiological psychology. Their work was influenced substantively by their respective philosophical commitments. Nevertheless, the evaluation of the merits of their specific proposals, Fechner's psychophysics and Lotze's local sign hypothesis respectively, did not depend upon sharing their metaphysical views regarding the human soul or the nature of God. A moderate, but significant, distinction between the contexts of discovery and of justification aids in understanding this balancing act.

Conceptual replication of Seo (2008), “Self-efficacy as a mediator in the relationship between self-oriented perfectionism and academic procrastination”

“…While we reported Cronbach’s α as an estimate of reliability for each scale in the method section, alpha relies on the assumption of tau equivalence (i.e., that, for a set of items intended to measure a single factor, the loadings are all identical). An alternative estimator of reliability that does not assume tau equivalence is McDonald’s ω ( McDonald, 1999 ). Omega can be defined and calculated in several different ways.…”