Edward Thorndike Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Geraldine Joncich Clifford

Critical Essay by Geraldine Joncich Clifford

SOURCE: “E. L. Thorndike: The Psychologist as Professional Man of Science,” in Historical Conceptions of Psychology, edited by Mary Henle, Julian Jaynes, and John J. Sullivan, eds., Springer Publishing Company, Inc., 1973, pp. 230-45.

In the following essay, which appeared in an unabridged form in American Psychologist in 1968, and was published in 1973 in Historical Conceptions of Psychology, Clifford discusses the ways in which Thorndike propelled the notion of psychologists and educators as scientists.

During the celebration of Thorndike's twenty-fifth year at Teachers College, Columbia psychologist James McKeen Cattell (1926) quoted William James to the effect that E. L. Thorndike, more than anyone else he knew, had that objectivity essential to scientific work. And the introduction that James wrote for Thorndike's The Elements of Psychology (1905) seemed to Cornell psychologist E. B. Titchener (1905) to be so extreme in its “unstinted praise” that he even questioned its tastefulness in...
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