Chapter 8: Reflections On Some Neglected Ideas About Psychological Measurement From The Personalistic Perspective of William Stern (1871–1938)

“No science,” wrote the German philosopher and psychologist William Stern (1871-1938) in 1906, “seems more impersonal than mathematics” (Stern, 1906, p. 398). Elaborating on this observation more than a decade later, Stern opened the sixth chapter of The Human Personality, titled “Principles of Personality Measurement,” as follows:

And yet, Stern continued:

The perspective on psychological measurement that Stern was urging here, as well as his outlook on all other aspects of psychological investigation, was firmly grounded in and guided by a comprehensive system of thought he developed under the name of critical personalism. Unfortunately, that Weltanschauung or worldview never gained widespread attention within the mainstream of scientific psychology. It thus became, and up to now has remained, almost entirely unknown to several generations of psychologists not only in the US and other English-speaking countries but in Stern’s native Germany as well (cf. Deutsch, 1991).