A Polemicist Devoted to the Truth Both in Research and Graduate Teaching*
lykken06.doc
David Lykken (1928-2006):
A Polemicist Devoted to the Truth both in Research and Graduate Teaching*
*The reasons for my title emerge more clearly from a reading of the web reference at the end of my text, which is a collection of reminiscences of individuals who had been supervised by David Lykken.
Lykken's style of supervision was quite similar to the style of my supervisor, the late Dick Champion (see: Common to these two supervisors were the following features:
- Devotion to the search for truth and a commitment to precision in the definition of fundamental terms.
- Respect for the intellectual integrity of the student, who is viewed as a student rather than as a disciple (Socrates had students, Jesus had disciples), and in whom disagreement over fundamental issues with the supervisor is encouraged.
- A Socratic rather than Sophistic view of higher education (see in which students are not trained for a profession, but educated in an academic discipline.
- Avoidance of the overly use of positive reinforcement (fulsome praise) that may be effective for rats and children, but is not appropriate for another adult mind that one respects.
Unlike some academics who are carefully polite in public disputes, David Lykken was never concerned with niceties of diplomacy when he thought an opinion, like support for the polygraph, was not only false, but as is currently documented on also evil.
Accordingly, David did not hesitate to use undiplomatic rhetorical methods against the academic supporters of what he described in his writings as the “psychological rubber hose.” David could be impolite at the oral level, too. I recall a presentation of his that was designed to set the audience straight after his opponent, another psychophysiologist, had previously given a very favourable account of the polygraph at a debate in my department.
David startled the audience by introducing his presentation with a large black and white and rather unflattering close-up photo of his opponent. After a pause, David turned to the audience and asked: “Would you want to be polygraphed by this man?” The audience’s unease did not last, however. David delivered a closely-reasoned talk that convinced most of them that his opponent’s position was not only wrong, but socially dangerous.
That talk had a great impact on me: It led me to examine how the polygraphic community used terms like “control,” “test,” and “quantification” in ways that appeared to be scientifically meaningful, but were actually misleading and pseudo-scientific. By the time Gershon and I wrote our book on the detection of deception, our acknowledgement of David as our main source of wisdom in this area was most fitting.
In a community of scholars, however, being influenced by someone else’s ideas is compatible with having sharp disagreements with that scholar. David and I had such disagreements, both regarding the polygraph and also with respect to more esoteric issues. In the polygraph area, our disagreements included questions such as whether the polygraph should be called a test (I do not think so) and whether the claim that the polygraph is no better than chance at detecting guilt should be made (again, I do not think so). But never during these published disagreements did David show any signs of the professional tension that one often finds among academics. With David, these arguments continued for some 30 years but our relations remained cordial, as one would expect in a community of scholars who advance knowledge through the conflict of ideas, not personal conflict.
David was a scholar par excellence and a most articulate one at that. His command of English was unrivaled among psychologists, at least in my experience. For example, in an abstract of an article that he wrote in response to a paper by one of his critics, he said that, “after careful debridement, nothing of substance was found to remain.” When I looked up “debridement” in the dictionary (surgical removal of foreign matter and dead tissue from a wound), I was amused to see how apt that term was in David’s skilful polemical hands.
So, like Gershon and many others, I’ll miss David’s wisdom, but also the way in which he purveyed that wisdom to the academic and scientific community.
John Furedy
University of Toronto (Sydney, Australia)
For other tributes to Lykken, see: