Whether experimental and psychological or analytic and philosophical, aesthetic inquiry is concerned with isolating a field of relevant data, interpreting it, and when most ambitious, with formulating hypotheses to explain the law-like reoccurrences that may appear in the phenomena under investigation. It is our purpose in this chapter to examine the methodological assumptions and the practical results of applying specific research techniques to "aesthetic" phenomena in order to determine the workability of educational procedures that depend upon various methods of aesthetic research. We examine the claims of psychologists, linguistic philosophers, and phenomenologists that they have the methods appropriate to develop a workable tool for teaching aesthetic materials.
Experimental psychologyTwo dominant experimental techniques for determining the aesthetic preferences of individual subjects-rank ordering of items and paired comparisons-stem from the simple "method of choice" introduced into psychology by Gustav T. Fechner (1876). Fechner instructed his subjects to choose which one of a given number of rectangles was more pleasing to that person's taste. (See Woodworth and Schlosbert, 1954, pp. 252-61.) When, instead of giving a simple choice, subjects are asked to rank objects from most to least preferred, there is an obvious increase in the amount of information obtained in "choice" experiments. Still more information should be obtained by requiring the subjects to choose one of a pair selected from the range, and then exhausting the number of possible pairs to be combined from the items within that range. This last technique has the added advantage of allowing a test of consistency in the individual's 577 at University of Ulster Library on March 17, 2015 http://rer.aera.net Downloaded from Vol. 39, No. 5
REVIEW OF EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH