Abstract
The language of psychology is a semantically fearsome thing. It is a gross mix of words from traditional folk psychology given a pseudo-technical veneer (perception, motivation, aggression, attitude and so forth), jargon imported from neighboring disciplines (feedback, reflex, figure-ground, instinct and so forth) and concepts generated by specific theoretical frameworks (transference, reinforcement, closure, life-space and so forth). It contains terms which are only clearly defined by narrow experimental or test procedures but which carry vast auras of extended meaning — spatial intelligence, authoritarian personality, habit strength, short term memory and so forth. The whole mongrel vocabulary is further splintered, by academic and professional vested interests, into mutually exclusive sub-languages. For example, the working language of physiological psychology can, in no way, communicate with the working language of social psychology. Though officially speaking from within the same “science” the two specialisms have no more in common than have, say, biology and economics.
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