Stanley A. Mulaik
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Stanley Allen Mulaik (born April 9, 1935, in
Biography
Mulaik began his education in 1940 at the Kindergarten at the Stewart School, the training school for teachers at the
Education
Mulaik obtained his B.S. (biology and secondary education, 1956), M.A. (psychology, 1962) and Ph.D. (clinical psychology, 1963) from the University of Utah.
Academic career
From 1964 to 1966 he was a research associate with Dr. Calvin W. Taylor (his dissertation chairman) and his wife to be Jane Stacy on a grant titled Measurement and Prediction of Nursing Performance. Working on this project he learned FORTRAN programming and wrote a factor analysis program to conduct analysis of the project's data. He married the co-principal investigator, Jane Stacy, in 1963, and they had two sons, Stephen and Robert. In 1966 he obtained a post doctoral fellowship in quantitative psychology at the L. L. Thurstone Psychometric Laboratory at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Between 1967 and 1970, he was an assistant professor and taught courses on personality and factor analysis in the Department of Psychology at UNC. In 1970 he took a position as an associate professor in the School of Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology and rose to full professor in 1981. He taught courses in introductory statistics, psychometric theory, factor analysis, multivariate statistics, structural equation modelling, personality theory, and introduction to psychology during his career. In 1972 he published the well-received advanced text The Foundations of Factor Analysis.
In 1982 he was second author with Lawrence James and Jean M. Brett of Causal Analysis: Models, Assumptions and Data. In the interim he published journal articles and book chapters on factor analysis, factor indeterminacy in factor analysis, factor rotation, confirmatory factor analysis, psychometric theory, structural equation modeling, and goodness of fit indices. The work on the book on Causal Analysis with James and Brett led him to a deep interest in the philosophy of causality, objectivity and philosophy in general. He struggled through Wittgenstein and Kant to a passable understanding of each, being strongly influenced by Kant's concepts of analysis and synthesis in thought, and saw their role in metaphors of objectivity, causality, and the self. He published several articles in the journal Philosophy of Science on the history of exploratory statistics in empiricism; metaphoric origins of objectivity, subjectivity and consciousness; a synthesis of deterministic and probabilistic causality with the functional relation concept; and the curve-fitting problem and degrees of freedom. He was strongly influenced by the works of George Lakoff on metaphor and abstract thought and their origin in embodied perception and action. As a result, Mulaik has argued that science is based on the metaphor that "science is knowledge of objects". In 1997 he was co-editor with L. Harlow and J. H. Steiger of the book What If There Were No Significance Tests? in which he was the principal author of a chapter with N Raju and R. Harshman defending significance tests in appropriate contexts. In 2009 he published the text Linear Causal Modeling with Structural Equations and in 2010 a revision of the earlier Foundations of Factor Analysis.
Work with Interlingua
His interest in
He was the President of the Societate American pro Interlingua, and the editor of its quarterly journal, Confluentes. He was also the editor of the psychological journal Multivariate Behavioral Research for 8 years.
References
- ^ "Dr. Stanley A. Mulaik". smep.org. Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology. Retrieved 3 September 2017.
- ^ "Spotlight: Stanley Mulaik - College of Social and Behavioral Science - The University of Utah". csbs.utah.edu. Retrieved 2017-09-03.
External links
- Stanley A. Mulaik faculty profile at George Tech School of Psychology
- Biographias - Stanley A. Mulaik - biography in Interlingua
- Interlingua Institute: A History - contains a short biographical entry