fact; it can be its mythology and its scientific theory. When Lichtenberg33 said: “Es denkt, sollte man sagen, so wie man sagt: es blitzt,” be was fighting mythology in language. [39] To say “cogito” is saying too much when it is translated as “I think.” Would the physiologist really agree to say “I conduct the excitation along my nerve”? To say “I think” or “It comes to my mind” implies two opposite theories of thinking. Binet’s whole theory of the mental poses requires the first expression, Freud’s theory the second and KUlpe’s theory now the one, now the other. Høffding [1908, p. 106, footnote 2] sympathetically cites the physiologist Foster who says that the impressions of an animal deprived of [one of] its cerebral hemispheres we must “either call sensations, or we must invent an entirely new word for them,” for we have stumbled upon a new category of facts and must choose a way to think about it—whether in connection with the old category or in a new fashion.

Without fear of exaggeration it can be said that the description of any psychological process becomes different whether we describe and study it in the categories of the psychological system of Ebbinghaus or Wundt, Stumpf or Avenarius, Meinong or Binet, James or (3. E. Muller. Of course, the purely factual aspect must remain the same. However, in science, at least in psychology, to separate the described fact from its theory, i.e., from those scientific categories by means of which this description is made, is often very difficult and even impossible, for in psychology (as, by the way, in physics, according to DuhemM) each description is always already a certain theory.. .. Factual investigations, in particular those of an experimental character, seem to the superficial observer to be free from those fundamental disagreements about basic scientific categories which divide the different psychological schcols.

But the very statement of the questions, the use of one or the other psychological term, always implies a certain way of understanding them which corresponds to some theory, and consequently the whole factual result of the investigation stands or falls with the correctness or falsity of the psychological system. Seemingly very exact investigations, observations, or measurements may, therefore, prove false, or in any case lose their meaning when the meaning of the basic psychological theories is changed. Such crises, which destroy or depreciate whole series of facts, have occurred more than once in science. Lange compares them to an earthquake that arises due to deep deformations in the depths of the earth. Such was [the ease with] the fall of alchemy. The dabbling that is now so widespread in science, i.e., the isolation of the technical executive function of the investigation—chiefly the maintenance of the equipment according to a well-known routine—from scientific thinkng, is noticeable first of all in the breakdown of scientific language. In principle, all thoughtful psychologists know this perfectly well: in methodological investigations the terminologieal problem which requires a most complex analysis instead of a simple note takes the lion’s share. Rickert regards the creation of unequivocal terminology as the most important task of psychology which precedes any investigation, for already in primitive description we must select word meanings which “by generalizing simplify” the immense diversity and plurality of the mental phenomena [Binswanger, 1922, p. 26]. Engels [1925/1978, p. 553] essentially expressed the same idea in his example from chemistry:

In organic chemistry the meaning of some body and, consequently, its name are no longer simply dependent upon its composition, but rather upon its place in the series to which it belongs. That is why its old name becomes an obstacle for understanding when we find that a body belongs to such a series and must be replaced by a name that refers to this series (paraffin, etc.).