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Beyond Structure: In Search of Functional Models of Psychological Process

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2025

Samuel Messick
Samuel Messick*
Affiliation:
Educational Testing Service
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Extract

Silvan Tomldns [1962] once remarked that it seemed to him that human personality was “organized as a language is organized, with elements of varying degrees of complexity–from letters, words, phrases, and sentences to styles–and with a set of rules of combination which enable the generation of both endless novelty and the very high order of redundancy which we call style.” He went on to note that “if we had to be blind about one or the other of these types of components, we should sacrifice the elements for the rules,” although “factor analysis appears to have made the opposite decision. It would tell what letters, or words, or phrases, or even styles were invariant and characteristic of a personality or of a number of personalities,” but by itself it does not and cannot “generate the rules of combination which together with the elements constitute personality” [Tomkins, 1962, p. 287].

Type
Original Paper
Information
Psychometrika , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , December 1972 , pp. 357 - 375
Copyright
Copyright © 1972 The Psychometric Society

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Footnotes

*

Presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the Psychometric Society, held jointly with Division 5 of the American Psychological Association, Honolulu, Hawaii, September 5, 1972. The author wishes to thank Walter Emmerich for his clarifying comments and conceptual contributions to this work.

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