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Theory & Psychology
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Using Common Psychological Terms to Describe Other People

From Lexical Hypothesis to Polysemous Conception

Patrick Mollaret

UNIVERSITY OF REIMS CHAMPAGNE ARDENNE, patrick.mollaret{at}univ-reims.fr

According to the lexical approach to personality, psychological adjectives used in everyday language (e.g., "extraverted") are a valid basis for describing the psychological properties that can be measured using personality inventories. In the present contribution, both the foundations and the consequences of this approach are subjected to a critical analysis, which comes to the conclusion that it is based on a mistaken conception of psychological terms and a questionable assumption as to the purpose of personality inventories. A fresh method is therefore put forward, defending a polysemous approach to psychological terms, partly inspired by Wittgenstein's second philosophy (1953). This approach stresses the fact that every adjective encompasses different meanings (i.e., no adjective can be summed up by a single essential meaning); and one of these meanings may become dominant, to the detriment of the others, according to the forms of life (i.e., social and linguistic practices) in which people are objectively involved. The need to link the definition of adjectives to peoples' concrete forms of life paves the way for a new and radically different program of research from that constructed within the framework of the lexical hypothesis.

Key Words: evaluation • lexical hypothesis • personality • polysemy • trait psychology

Theory & Psychology, Vol. 19, No. 3, 315-334 (2009)
DOI: 10.1177/0959354309104157
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