ABSTRACT
During Donald Fiske's long career at the frontiers of psychological measurement, the paradigmatic dogma of logical positivism, with its definitional operationalism for theoretical terms, has come and gone. While always a participant in the exciting philosophy-of-science discussions as they affected psychology, Fiske has been consistently postpositivist in his research. I am thinking of his: (a) 1947 wartime (World War II) research on the validation of naval aviation selection tests, in which low-validity coefficients were explained as due, in part, to invalidity and unreliability in the criterion measures; (b) warnings about the biases due to individual differences in response fluency in Rorschach test scoring (Fiske & Baughman, 1953); (c) many studies of intraindividual variability between 1955 and 1974; and (d) subtle and creative preoccupation with invalidity in its many forms, which can be found in his individual articles and books: Measuring the Concepts of Personality (1971), Strategies for Personality Research (1978), and Problems with Language Imprecision (1981).
