The Factors of the Mind
- Author:
Cyril Burt.
University of London Press, Ltd. 21s.
The book deals with the logical and meta- physical status of factors in psychology, the relations between different methods of factor analysis and the distribution of temperamental types. Subsidiary arguments, illustrative examples, and abundant footnotes are provided and printed in smaller type for the convenience of the reader. Statistical theory is not discussed but working methods for computers and an analysis of a matrix into its latent roots and vectors are given as appendices.
The book is concerned with methods rather than results. The author holds the view that many of the criticisms laid at the door of the ” factorist ” prove, when closely considered, to be criticisms, not of the mathematical method of analysis adopted, but rather of the logic, or lack of logic, the factorial arguments display, and unless we can fit factor-analysis into its true logical setting we shall utterly misconstrue its nature and be continuously led astray. ” I hold it to be far more important,” Dr Burt writes, ” that the student of a particular science should appreciate the logical method of his science than that he should memorise a mass of details about the facts and the latest fashionable theories.”
The thesis is developed that the factors arrived at, from the statistical analysis of and correlation between mental test measurements are not, in reality, psychological entities but result from the principles of classification and method of analysis employed by the investigator.
From the data discussed the conclusions are drawn that we use factors in psychology as we use rectangular co-ordinates in other sciences merely because such simplified descriptions enable us to organize our facts and help us to state our arguments more cogently. The value of such factors must consist in their utility for purposes of systematized description. Whether or not any factor actually extracted happens to have a psychological significance is a problem that must depend upon the proper and relevant selection of traits and persons.
There will undoubtedly be a general agreement with Dr Burt’s view that the current treatment of factors as causal abilities implies an antiquated attitude towards both scientific and meta- physical issues. On the other hand we cannot help feeling that his warning would have been more explicit had it been expressed more briefly- He illustrates the need for supplementing statistical analysis with case study but one wonders whether, after all, the writer has really escaped from the inevitable tendency of psycho- logists, to treat the creative qualities of mental activity as having properties capable of measure- ment with reference to rectangular co-ordinates and one feels that in the later sections of the book, the writer is still mastered by the machinery of the statistician.
After a highly technical discussion concerning the different methods of analysis Dr Burt asks if temperamental characteristics are, like intel- lectual characteristics, distributed in accordance with the normal curve. He discusses evidence to show that there can be no such things as mutually exclusive temperamental types, and that resemblance to the idealized type is essen- tially a matter of degree. It therefore only becomes necessary to devise some practical means of measuring the degree. For statistical purposes it is proposed to measure approxima- tion to type by the inverse hyperbolic tangent to the saturation coefficient, for by so doing the more typical introverts and extraverts appear in the main to be merely extreme cases taken from the opposite tail ends of a normal, or nearly normal, distribution.
The ” self”, the causal factor .which gives a unique bias to every psychological event, slips unobserved between the meshes of statistical technique. Its influence is evident throughout the book although, as a factor of the mind, it remains outside the field of enquiry. J.C.R. 4
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