Stanley Mulaik

Who is Stanley Mulaik?

Stanley A. Mulaik is Professor Emeritus at the School of Psychology at the Georgia Institute of Technology, as well as the head of the Societate American pro Interlingua. Although born in Edinburg, Mulaik lived in Salt Lake City, Utah from 1939 - 1966. For the last 42 years, he has lived in or around the Atlanta, Georgia area. He has two sons who live with their families in the Atlanta area.

Mulaik began his education in 1940 at the Kindergarten at the Stewart School, the training school for teachers at the University of Utah. He proceeded through the elementary grades to "graduate" from the 9th grade in 1950. That fall he began high school at East High School in Salt Lake City. At the end of his junior year he applied and was accepted to be a Ford Scholar in a special program at the University of Utah financed by the Ford Foundation that took exceptional students at the end of their junior year in high school and admitted them to the University of Utah as freshman to see if they could handle university level courses. Students in this program performed exceptionally and a major portion of Mulaik's class of Ford Scholars later obtained Ph.D.'s in various subjects. Mulaik also entered the Reserve Officers Training Corps at the University and at graduation received a commission of 2nd lieutenant in the Army. He received training in artillery at Ft. Bliss, Texas and served in a field artillery battalion in the Army Reserves until 1963, and then joined a research and development unit with assignments to the Pentagon until 1970, when he went inactive as a captain. Mulaik obtained his B.S., M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Utah. From 1964 - 1966 he was a research associate with Dr. Calvin W. Taylor 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 UNC in 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.