ABSTRACT
Contrary to the accusations of some of his critics, Spence never claimed that logical positivism and operationism could serve as a blueprint for the science of psychology. In his many published articles, which interpreted the positivistic philosophy of science to the psychological community, Spence took positions that now seem obviously correct. This chapter began as a joint contribution, by Howard H. Kendler and me, with Howard as the senior author. The plan was to make it a revision of Kendler's biography of Kenneth W. Spence, supplemented by materials that appeared in his article on Spence in Squire's Encyclopedia of Learning and Memory. Against this background, contemporary psychology's amnesia for Kenneth Spence and his psychology begins to look like the Freudian mechanisms of denial and repression. More realistically, however, it seems probable that psychology's forgetfulness in this case reflects the cyclic pattern that has characterized the history of psychology.
