ABSTRACT
During Donald Fiske's long career at the frontiers of psychological measurement, the paradigmatic dogma of logical positivism, with its definitional operationalism for theoretical terms, has come and gone. While always a participant in the exciting philosophy-of-science discussions as they affected psychology, Fiske has been consistently postpositivist in his research. The discussions of logical positivism in psychology in the 1940s and 1950s, and that in mainstream philosophy of science, were quite different. Hermeneutic means interpretative. Logical positivism sought to eliminate all interpretation—all subjective discretion—from science. Facts were to be public meter readings that all saw alike, totally independent of theory and hence available to test theory. Theory choice was also to be nondiscretionary, impersonally dictated by “the facts” and by the formal logic that linked facts together in the theory under test. The hermeneutics of translation, although focused on texts and manuscripts, never treated texts as foundational.
