ABSTRACT
An interest in temperamental differences among children brings together people of widely differing scientific concerns—a heterogeneous group of people pursuing very different questions, looking for different kinds of answers, satisfied with different levels of precision in those answers. It is important to keep in mind that different levels of precision may indeed be appropriate for the varied questions which are at issue. A clinician faced with a series of distraught and difficult toddlers looks for a very different order of precision in his attempts to suggest strategies of management than does the researcher concerned with, say, the details of stability in measures of heart rate over time. The point was clearly made by Aristotle (1959):
It is the mark of the educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician logical proof.
