ABSTRACT
It is with an acute sense of my own temerity that I take up my fountain pen to write an article highly critical of a major living behavioural scientist. It is the same fountain pen with which I passed my examinations in psychology years ago, for which I closely studied—with more than a decent respect, with a certain piety even (science and learning are not mere instruments to me)—the research and theories of the man whom I now disparage. I take my justification from Dr Johnson, who observed, to a self-deprecating friend, ‘You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table’ (Boswell, 1791/1949, p. 253). This volume is not, after all, a Festschrift.
