This book is not an argument within orthodox science; it is a critique (a la G?del) of orthodox science and of the ground on which it rests, of its unproved articles of faith, and of its taken-for-granted definitions, axioms, and concepts. It is an examination of science as one philosophy of knowledge among other philosophies. It rejects the traditional but unexamined conviction that orthodox science is the path to knowledge or even that it is the only reliable path. I consider this conventional view to be philosophically, historically, psychologically and sociologically naive. As a philosophical doctrine orthodox science is ethnocentric, being Western rather than universal. It is unaware that it is a product of time and place, that it is not an eternal, unchangeable, inexorably progressing truth. Not only is it relative to time, place, and local culture, but it is also characterologically relative, for I believe it to be a reflection far more narrowly of the cautious, obsessional world view centered on the need for safety than of a more mature, generally human, comprehensive view of life. Such weaknesses as these become especially glaring in the area of psychology, where the goal is the knowledge of persons and of their actions and works.
In spite of the fact that many great scientists have escaped these mistakes, and in spite of the fact that they have written much to support their larger view of science as nearly synonymous with all knowledge rather than merely as knowledge respectably attained, they have not prevailed. As T. S. Kuhn (30) [1-1] has shown, the style of "normal science" has been established not by the great eagles of science-the paradigm-makers, the discoverers, the revolutionizers - but on the contrary by the majority of "normal scientists", who are rather like those tiny marine animals building up a common coral reef. And so it is that science has come to mean primarily patience, caution, care, slowness, the art of not making mistakes, rather than courage, daring, taking big chances, gambling everything on a single throw, and "going for broke". Or to say this another way: our orthodox conception of science as mechanistic and ahuman seems to me one local part-manifestation or expression of the larger, more inclusive world view of mechanization and dehumanization. (An excellent exposition of this development can be found in the first three chapters of Floyd Matson's Broken Image).
But in this century, and especially in the last decade or two, a counter philosophy has been rapidly developing along with a considerable revolt against the mechanistic, dehumanized view of man and the world. It might be called a rediscovery of man and his human capacities, needs, and aspirations. These humanly based values are being restored to politics, to industry, to religion, and also to the psychological and social sciences. I might put it so: while it was necessary and helpful to dehumanize planets, rocks, and animals, we are realizing more and more strongly that it is not necessary to dehumanize the human being and to deny him human purposes.
Yet a certain rehumanization is also taking place even in the nonhuman and impersonal sciences, as Matson points out. This change is part of a larger and more inclusive, more "humanistic" world view. For the time being these two great philosophic orientations, the mechanistic and the humanistic, exist simultaneously like some species-wide two-party system. [1-2]
I consider that my effort to rehumanize science and knowledge for myself (but most particularly the field of psychology) is part of this larger social and intellectual development. It is definitely in accord with the Zeitgeist , as Bertalanffy pointed out in 1949 (7, 202):
The evolution of science is not a movement in an intellectual vacuum; rather it is both an expression and a driving force of the historical process. We have seen how the mechanistic view projected (itself) through all fields of cultural activity. Its basic conceptions of strict causality, of the summative and random character of natural events, of the aloofness of the ultimate elements of reality, governed not only physical theory but also the analytic, summative, and machine-theoretical viewpoints of biology, the atomism of classical psychology, and the sociological helium omnium contra omnes. The acceptance of living beings as machines, the domination of the modern world by technology, and the mechanization of mankind are but the extension and practical application of the mechanistic conception of physics. The recent evolution in science signifies a general change in the intellectual structure which may well be set beside the great revolutions in human thought.
Or if I may quote myself (1943) saying this in another way (38, 23):
... The search for a fundamental datum (in psychology) is itself a reflection of a whole world view, a scientific philosophy which assumes an atomistic world - a world in which complex things are built up out of simple elements. The first task of such a scientist then is to reduce the so-called complex to the so-called simple. This is to be done by analysis, by finer and finer separating until we come to the irreducible. This task has succeeded well enough elsewhere in science, for a time at least. In psychology it has not.
This conclusion exposes the essentially theoretical nature of the entire reductive effort. It must be understood that this effort isn o t of the essential nature of science in general. It is simply a reflection or implication in science of an atomistic, mechanical world view that we now have good reason to doubt. Attacking such reductive efforts is then not an attack on science in general, but rather on one of the possible attitudes towards science.
And further on in the same paper (p. 60):
This artificial habit of abstraction, or working with reductive elements, has worked so well and has become so ingrained a habit that the abstractors and reducers are apt to be amazed at anyone who denies the empirical or phenomenal validity of these habits. By smooth stages they convince themselves that this is the way in which the world is actually constructed, and they find it easy to forget that even though it is useful it is still artificial, conventionalized, hypothetical - in a word, that it is a man-made system that is imposed upon an interconnected world in flux. These peculiar hypotheses about the world have the right to fly in the face of common sense but only for the sake of demonstrated convenience. When they are no longer convenient, or when they become hindrances, they must be dropped. It is dangerous to see in the world what we have put into it rather than what is actually there. Let us say this flatly - that atomistic mathematics or logic is, in a certain sense, a theory about the world, and any description of it in terms of this theory the psychologist may reject as unsuited to his purposes. It is clearly necessary for methodological thinkers to proceed to the creation of logical and mathematical systems that are more closely in accord with the nature of the world of modern science.
It is my impression that the weaknesses of classical science show up most obviously in the fields of psychology and ethnology. Indeed, when one wishes knowledge of persons or of societies, mechanistic science breaks down altogether. At any rate, this book is primarily an effort within psychology to enlarge the conception of science so as to make it more capable of dealing with persons, especially fully developed and fully human persons.
I conceive this to be not a divisive effort to oppose one "wrong" view with another "right" view, nor to cast out anything. The conception of science in general and of psychology in general, of which this book is a sample, is inclusive of mechanistic science. I believe mechanistic science (which in psychology takes the form of behaviorism) to be not incorrect but rather too narrow and limited to serve as a general or comprehensive philosophy. [1-3]