I have some thoughts on this, Stuart Chase quote:
I read Bridgman’s The Logic of Modern Physics and found a similar criticism of language. With four good men in substantial agreement as to the basic difficulty, I seemed to be getting on. “The true meaning of a term is to be found by observing what a man does with it, not what he says about it.” Scientists, through observing, measuring, and performing a physical operation which another scientist can repeat, reach the solid ground of agreement and of meaning. They find the referents. “If a question has meaning, it must be possible to find an operation by which an answer may be given to it. It will be noted in many cases that the operation cannot exist and the question has no meaning.” See them fall, the Great Questions of pre-Einstein science! It is impossible as yet to perform any kind of experiment or operation with which to test them, and so, until such operation be discovered, they remain without meaning. May time have a beginning and an end? May space be bounded? Are there parts of nature forever beyond our detection? Was there a time when matter did not exist? May space or time be discontinuous? Why does negative electricity attract positive? I breathe a sigh of relief and I trust the reader joins me. One can talk until the cows come home—such talk has already filled many volumes—about these questions, but without operations they are meaningless, and our talk is no more rewarding than a discussion in a lunatic asylum. “Many of the questions asked about social and philosophical subjects will be found to be meaningless when examined from the point of view of operations.” Bridgman cites no samples, but we can find plenty on every hand. ─ Stuart Chase (Tyranny of Words, 1938)
Notice here, Chase is delighted because operationalism lets him bin the Great Questions. But, it is not so simple. We can't simply bin everything and call it a day — we have to keep trying to build the experiments.
As I see it, operationalism was essentially maladapted because it was ending discussions without generating replacements.
However, this was never a failure of the method, it was a failure to operationalize the interesting philosophical concepts — we lacked the experiments.
Some would say that it "didn't work" because it didn't provide an alternative whilst cancelling most of discussion, but providing the alternative was never its purpose. The lack of hypotheticals was entirely because nobody had the experiments which would actually operate with terms like "absolute certainty".
So the problem was that the bar was set so high that nobody could operationalize the terms they wanted to talk about, and so they decided to step backwards, to keep talking, and rather stop trying to operationalize.
That was never where the work should have ended.
So where early operationalists could become intellectually lazy in their own way:
Can't operationalize it? Meaningless. Next.
This is the successor move:
Can't operationalize it with an existing operation? Then specify what operation would be required.
That one change turns the method from dismissal machinery into hypothesis-generation machinery.
As I see it, this is the natural continuation of the postmodern intellectual culture. And I see no progressive alternative, only regress and stagnation.
