Edgar A. Singer

Edgar Arthur Singer, Jr. (November 13, 1873 – April 4, 1954) was an American philosopher, professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and proponent of experimentalism.

Singer was a graduate student of George S. Fullerton (1839–1925) at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his Ph.D. in psychology in 1894 with the thesis entitled "The composite nature of consciousness." After his dissertation, he briefly taught at Harvard for William James as an instructor in the psychology laboratory. He was professor at the University of Pennsylvania from 1909 until 1943. His pupils included Henry Bradford Smith, Edwin Ray Guthrie Jr., C. West Churchman, Russell L. Ackoff and Gordon Clark.

Singer believed that consciousness was a historical construct and, as such, it was not a suitable object for a scientific psychology. As an object to unify psychology research, he suggested behavior, which was observable. He denied he was the father of Behaviorism. He was not a materialist. Neither was Singer an empiricist. His epistemology for a science of psychology was self described as Empirical-Idealism.

Most importantly, Singer carried on the philosophy of Pragmatism, which began with Charles Sanders Peirce, a conception which was greatly extended by William James and John Dewey, to the University of Pennsylvania. Thus informing the Department Chair of philosophy Thomas A. Cowan, C. West Churchman, and Russell L. Ackoff of the merits of describing the world functionally.

One student of Ackoff, W. Curtiss Priest, continued the conception, teaching Ackoff's 1967 book Choice, Communication, and Conflict at the Emma Willard School in 1971. Beginning in 2004, Priest and P. Kenneth Komoski published numerous papers under the Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE, see ED-Media) extending Pragmatism, which they prefer calling Functionalism, as a method to combine knowledge across the disciplines in an Internet-based hub called The Netting.

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