hypothetico-deductive theory

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What does Hull's hypothetico-deductive theory entail and what/who influenced him to come to his conclusions?

-- ryan (rbgeno7@yahoo.com), October 20, 2002

Answers

Hull was nominally associated with some of the logical positivists who had come from Germany just before and during WWII. He probably got the term "hypothetico-deductive" from them. His association with them was not as strong, however, as is often assumed. See Laurence D. Smith's book _Behaviorism and Logical Positivism: A Reassessment of the Alliance_ for details. Although the behaviorists saw LP as being favorable to their own approach to psychology (and vice versa), it seems that they did not actually know that much about LP in detail, nor did they communicate with them regularly about issues in science (though the behaviorists sometimes appeared on the editorial boards of LP publications).

-- Christopher Green (christo@yorku.ca), October 21, 2002.

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