Talk:Raymond Cattell

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.

Biography Portal

Start

This article has been rated as Start-Class on the Project's quality scale. [FAQ]
(If you rated the article, please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.)

Portal

This article is within the scope of WikiProject Psychology, which collaborates on Psychology and related subjects on Wikipedia. To participate, help improve this article or visit the project page for details on the project.

Start	This article has been rated as Start-Class on the quality scale.
Mid	This article has been rated as Mid-importance on the importance scale.
Article Grading: The article has been rated for quality and/or importance but has no comments yet. If appropriate, please review the article and then leave comments to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article and what work it needs.

Cattell egunetics and early racist ideas.

I was shocked that this page on the controversial but important pshychologist had gone unnoticed so that there was no mention of his extreme genocidal nature. It follows from this page that he something of a Saint; to his family and and close collaborators maybe, but to all leading psys. today he is somewhat of an embarrassment when it comes to his political views. However scientific, psychology is a social science, and the nature/nurture debate is intimately connected with the atrocities of 20th century politics. Leaving out Cattells strong views on eugenetics is at least irresponsible, at worst a form of colonial and holocaust apologism so common among the extremist of neo-eugenetists. That man should have be brought to justice much earlier than the APA controversy, for his hate-speech and instigation to murder and genocide. But that's my personal view, shared by many others. In this Wiki article, howeverm a temperate but accurate quotes of his wievs are needed, and further sources of the of research into his race and genocide politics. His writing speak for themselves AND he wrote much more than only on factoranalysis, in fact many question that his contribution even there can be considered as innocent and unrelated to his ideas of 'final solutions'. I guess the first contributors to this article are sympatizer of Cattell, and even worse, eugenics - so I call for people putting up the gloves and watch the devolopment of this article.

best regards

[edit] Changes back

I can’t see that Nectarfloweds total reversion of the changes is warranted without justification. The older version contained no information on Cattells political statements other than his official remarks after the APA affair. But if there is no reference to the nature of his ideas on race in earlier years you get the impression that he was the innocent victim of smearing campaign. One only has to look at what Cattell him self said. Also the older version contained POV and repetitive praise on how he brought 'rigorous' science to a soft psychology - This is a matter of philosophy of science, the demarcation problem in social sciences, which is itself a debatable issue, and could have been rephrased. My changes might need some editing but I call for the ‘principle of charity’ so people don’t go and delete it whole-sale. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Tviund (talk • contribs).

Hi Tviund. It's not other Wikipedians' job to make your essay conform reasonably to Wikipedia policy regarding neutral point of view, as well as formatting. In this case, that means represent your pov as a pov rather than the truth, and don't try to turn it into a moralistic narrative* or prioritize it over the other mainstream povs. Substituting 'notorious' for 'famous' is emblematic of that approach. Overall, keep in mind that he's still regarded as prominent for the work in his field that made him famous, and Mehler achieves his argument by omitting the other side of the debate. The principle of charity means represent the other side of the debate in its best form so that your argument can refute it fairly and the discussion can be progressive. The principle of humanity means regard people on the other side of the debate as also having humanity, rather than being malicious straw men.