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If one would like to get an objective and clear idea of the contemporary state of psychology and the dimensions of its crisis, it would suffice to study the psychological language, i.e., the nomenclature and terminology, the dictionary and syntax of the psychologist. Language, scientific language in particular, is a tool of thought, an instrument of analysis, and it suffices to examine which instruments a science utilizes to understand the character of its operations. The highly developed and exact language of contemporary physics, chemistry, and physiology, not to speak of mathematics where it plays an extraordinary role, was developed and perfected during the development of science and far from spontaneously, but deliberately under the influence of tradition, critique, and the direct terminological creativity of scientific societies and congresses. The psychological language of contemporaneity is first of all terminologically insufficient: this means that psychology does not yet have its own language. In its dictionary you will find a conglomerate of words of three kinds: (1) the words of everyday language, which are vague, ambiguous, and adapted to practical life (Lazursky levelled this criticism against faculty psychology; I succeeded in showing that it is more true of the language of empirical psychology and of Lazursky himself in particular; see Preface to Lazursky in this volume). Suffice it to remember the touchstone of all translators—the visual sense (i.e., sensation) to realize the whole metaphorical nature and inexactness of the practical language of daily life; (2) the words of philosophical language. They too pollute the language of psychologists, as they have lost the link with their previous meaning, are ambiguous as a result of the struggle between the various philosophical schools, and are abstract to a maximal degree. Lalande (1923) views this as the main source of the vagueness and lack of clarity in psychology. The tropes of this language favor

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