Operationalism

Dr. Frances, thank you for your kind and thoughtful response, entitled, “Phenomenology vs. Operationalism.” In this reply, we take this opportunity to clarify some frequent misunderstandings about phenomenology’s contribution (at least, our view) to diagnostic classification. In fact, our argument will be that the phenomenology is not the antithesis to operationalism but precisely the step required to translate the patient’s subjective experience of symptoms, etc., into workable operationalizable hypotheses which can be quantifiably measured using the experimental methods of clinical neuroscience (see Mishara, 2007). That is, qualitative description and quantitative measurement are not opposites but are ultimately inseparable (von Weizsäcker, 1950a), working together in both clinical judgment (e.g., the patient’s depressed mood is more or less severe) and in its scientific study (e.g., operationalizing this “more or less” into a clinical rating scale).

By appealing to phenomenological psychiatrists such as Jaspers, Conrad or Ey, we are not referring to the idiographic-nomothetic opposition which comes precisely with the realist assumptions of the nomologic approach. Rather, as in our previous contribution, we paraphrased Husserl (founder of the phenomenological approach), the perceived individual (whether object or person) is already perceived in terms of a type which subsumes the perception as a meaningful unit. More recent experimental findings have demonstrated the rapidity and automaticity of these processes in decision-making and everyday social cognition.