Dialogue with a Human Scientist:

Most psychologists today come across the name of William Stern only in historical footnotes, and that mainly either in connection with the concept of I.Q., which he introduced, or perhaps in connec tion with the study of child language.2 In fact, William Stern’s con tributions to psychology were massive, both in scope and in signifi cance, and there is much that is still of relevance to us today. William Stern laid the groundwork for many separate subspecialities of psychology. At the same time, and throughout his career, he insisted that the emancipation of psychology from philos ophy did not imply that psychology had no need of philosophy. He himself wrote many papers and three volumes (Person und Sache) (1906, 1908, 1924) in which he articulated a philosophic grounding for psychology. In General Psychology from the Personalistic Standpoint (1938), which he himself regarded as his crowning achievement, philosophical questions arising from the empirical and experimental data are constantly raised. I quote from the intro duction to this work: philosophical problems of psychology do not constitute an isolated prov ince with which empirical psychology need have no concern. On the con trary these problems penetrate the tissue of the empirical sciences of mental life, reducing its findings to order and system, sense and mean ing. On the other hand, as special researchers advance they impose upon philosophical psychology limitations, concrete demands, and controls that protect it from the confusion that formerly characterized speculative, unrealistic psychology. (p. 9) What I propose to do in this paper is to analyze the relation—or bet ter, the interaction—between his empirical and his philosophical endeavors, and to deal with the world-view he articulates, in the context of the time and the world in which he lived. In doing this I hope to generate questions about the world in which we live, and what this might imply for the way in which we conduct research in the human sciences today