In Chapter 8 I talked about improved self-knowledge making better knowers. This has never been "proved" in the ordinary sense. How, then, dare I make such a statement?
I base this statement - for instance - upon thousands of clinical experiences, single individual patients with single therapists as well as the personal reports of the therapists themselves. For most common-sense people this experience is a form of knowledge, even though it has relatively low reliability. There is no question at all that our confidence in this "truth" would be far greater if a carefully planned and designed experiment would report statistically significant superiority of scientists who were more healthy over those who were less healthy, or of scientists who had gone through psychoanalysis, etc. Such data are far more reliable than "clinical experience". But in the absence of such experiments, are we not being realistic and "scientific" if we are quite aware of the degree of confidence that the data warrant, and if we specify this clearly to each other?
Knowledge is a matter of degree. Any increment of knowledge or of reliability is better than nothing. One case is better than none, and two are better than one. Neither knowledge in general nor reliability in particular is an all-or-none matter. There is no sharp shoreline which marks off the land of knowledge from the ocean of not-knowledge.
There are some who will insist that "scientific" knowledge is and must be clear, lucid, unequivocally defined, unmistakable, demonstrable, repeatable, communicable, logical, rational, verbalizable, conscious. If it is not these, then it is not "scientific"; it is something else. But what shall we say, then, about the first stages of knowledge, the precursors of these final forms, the beginnings that each of us can easily enough experience in himself.
First comes the uneasiness, the restlessness, the unhappiness, the feeling that something is not quite right. This uneasiness can come before it finds its explanation. That is, we can feel something that, if put into words, would run, "I feel uneasy, but I don't know why. There's something not quite right here, but I don't know what it is". To make it even more confusing,this feeling can be totally unconscious or only half conscious, and it may be recognized only sometime later, retrospectively.
At this point all that we have to deal with are hunches, guesses, intuitions, dreams, fantasies, vague "prethoughts" not yet verbalized. Fortuitous associations can send us off in one direction or another. We may suddenly wake out of sleep with an answer that may then be put to the test and may turn out to be either right or wrong. Communication within ourselves or with others is often vague, inconsistent, self-contradictory, illogical, even irrational. It may be couched in figures of speech, metaphors, similes, etc. We may begin researching by sensing a gap and talking about it as a poet talks rather than as a scientist is supposed to talk. And we may then behave more like a physician or a gambler or a teacher than like the traditional scientist.
Think, for instance, of the language of psychoanalysis, with its physical analogies and parallels, reifications, personifications, and half-mythological entities. It is easy to criticize all this from the point of view of finished and elegant science. But - and this is my main point here - these words are the fumbling efforts to communicate intuitive, clinical feelings that cannot yet be expressed in any other way. They are the best that can be done at the present stage of development of knowledge. The best logicians, mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and biologists in the world could do no better if faced with the task of describing, for instance, the phenomena of transference or repression or anxiety. These phenomena exist and have been experienced and reported by thousands of patients in one form or another, and they have been witnessed by thousands of psychotherapists in one version or another. And yet it is impossible to describe them well or even to get agreement on which words to use in descriptions.
It is easy for the laboratory scientist to criticize all this. But in the end these criticisms come down to an accusation that a final state of knowledge has not yet been achieved. This is why inchoate knowledge is apt to be sloppy and ambiguous. This is a stage through which knowledge must pass! There is no known alternative. There is no other way to do things. [13-2]
If this fact is fully understood, we are apt to turn back upon the critics with some irritation and even with some readiness to make psychoanalytic interpretations of the critic rather than to answer him with logical arguments. For at this point we realize that the critics often need neatness, exactness, or precision and cannot tolerate its absence, that they select only those problems to work with that already satisfy this criterion, and that in effect their criticisms may amount to a rejection of the problems themselves. They may be criticizing not your methodology but you yourself for asking that particular question.
Scientists who need neatness and simplicity generally have sense enough to stay away from the humanistic and personal problems of human nature. Such a choice may indicate a preference for neatness over new knowledge of human nature, and this can be a way of avoiding the tough problems.
There is some tendency to dichotomize knowledge into true or false, significant or nonsignificant, reliable or unreliable. It takes only a moment's thought to see that this is unwise. Reliability of knowledge is a matter of degree. So is truth and falsehood. And certainly so also is significance and pertinence.
If we know only one fact, that a coin tossed once has turned up heads, then the probability of turning up heads in a second toss is greater than one half, and any wise man would bet accordingly. This is so because the slight possibility of the coin being lopsided has been raised by the one bit of knowledge. Knight Dunlap long ago showed that people who were asked to guess which of two slightly different weights was heavier, would guess correctly more often than chance, even though they had no conscious confidence at all in their judgments. Consciously they felt that they were making pure guesses. Other researches have extended this kind of finding to group guessing. The mean of ten people guessing blindly (i.e., without subjective confidence) is apt to be closer to the true mean than will be the mean of five people guessing blindly.
The history of medicine - pharmacology in particular - demonstrates again and again that it pays to take seriously the beliefs of primitive tribesmen, for example, in the therapeutic powers of some herb or bark, even when their explanations are weird or can be proved false. A confused glimmer of the truth is possible from only vaguely understood learning experiences. And so in this realm as in others we give some credence, if only a little, to the expert opinion, to the hunch of the experienced clinician, to the educated guess. When we have no reliable facts to go on, we will turn for guidance to the best that's available.
All of us are used to this - when we deal with surgeons, psychiatrists, lawyers, etc. Especially is this so when we are forced to make decisions in the absence of satisfactory knowledge. But Polanyi (60,61,62), Northrop (59), Kuhn (30), and others have shown that something of the sort is also true in the strategy and tactics of the scientist himself. Creative persons have often reported their reliance on hunches, dreams, intuitions, blind guessing, and gambling in the early stages of the creative process. Indeed, we could almost define the creative scientist in that way - as the creative mathematician is already defined - i.e., as one who reaches the truth without knowing why or how. He just "feels" something to be correct and then proceeds post hoc to check his feeling by careful research. The choice of hypothesis to test, the choice of this rather than that problem to invest oneself in, is proved correct or incorrect only after the fact. We may judge him correct because of the facts that he has gathered, but he himself did not have these facts to base his confidence on. Indeed the facts are the consequence of his "unfounded" self-confidence, not the cause of it. We call a scientist "talented" for just this reason, that he is often right in spite of insufficient evidence. The lay picture of "the scientist" as one who keeps his mouth shut until he is sure of his facts is quite incorrect, at least for talented, "break-through" scientists. Polanyi rightly speaks of faith, connoisseurship, courage, self-confidence, and boldness in gambling as intrinsic to the nature of the trail-blazing theorist or researcher, as defining characteristics, not as accidental, fortuitous, or expendable.
And this can also be stated in terms of probabilities. The bold and productive scientist must be able to be comfortable with low probabilities. He must take them seriously as the clues to what he ought to do and the directions in which he ought to go. He must be sensitive to them and be guided by them. At least he must regard them as scientifically "real" and therefore worthy of his attention as a scientist.
It is both useful and correct to consider as falling within the definition of knowledge all "protoknowledge", so long as its probability of being correct is greater than chance. This usage would imply then a hierarchy of stages or levels or degrees of knowledge, ranging downward in degree of reliability to expert guesses, hunches and intuitions, tentative conclusions based on insufficient cases or upon crude methods, etc. Knowledge is then seen as more reliable or less reliable but still knowledge so long as its probability is greater than chance. The word "empirical" then gets used as the physician uses it, i.e., to describe an inchoate, apperceptive mass made up of thousands of experiences of "trying out" remedies on himself as well as upon his patients, of accepting common sense remedies tentatively, of judging face plausibility, etc. This adds up to the tacit knowledge accumulated by the "experienced" physician. Hardly anything he knows has been adequately proved.
The originator is to some extent more attracted to the complex rather than to the simple or easy, to the mysterious and unknown rather than to the known. What challenges him is that which he does not know. What fun, he feels, is there in a puzzle whose solution he knows? A known puzzle is no puzzle. It is the not knowing that fascinates him and that sets him into motion. For him the mystery "calls for" solving. It has "demand character". It beckons, attracts, and seduces.
The feeling of the scientific originator is that of a first explorer of an unknown wilderness, an unknown river or a strange mountain pass. He doesn't really know where he is going. He has no maps, no predecessors, no guides, no experienced helpers, few hints or orientation points. Every step he takes is a hypothesis, as likely to be a mistake as not.
And yet the word "mistake" hardly applies to a scout. A blind alley explored is no longer an unexplored blind alley. No one else need ever explore it. Something has been learned. If presented with a choice between a left and a right fork in the river, and having tried the left fork and found it to be a dead end, he doesn't consider that his choice was a "mistake" or an error. Certainly he would feel no guilt or regret and would look with astonishment upon someone who upbraided him for having made a choice without evidence or for moving ahead without being sure. He might then point out that upon such principles and with such rules no wilderness could ever be explored and that such principles were useful in re-exploring but not in exploring for the first time.
In a word, the rules, principles or laws of the explorer or the scout are different from the rules suitable for later settlers simply because the tasks are different. What is functionally suitable for one is not suitable for the other. The beginning stages of knowledge should not be judged by the criteria derived from "final" knowledge.
One trouble with defining science in terms of its highest reaches and ultimate skills is that it makes science and the scientific spirit inaccessible to most people. Stressing its technology and showing off its most esoteric abstractions make it look far more difficult than it really is. It comes to be seen as a matter for the expert, something done by a certain kind of highly trained professional and by nobody else. In effect this kind of science, after dividing the world into scientists and nonscientists, says to the nonscientists, "This is none of your business! Stay out! Leave it to us experts. Trust us!"
It is certainly true that the sciences of the impersonal, which are also our oldest sciences, have reached a high level of abstraction and that their technology is in fact a matter for trained experts. (I won't say "most advanced" sciences because this implies that all sciences can be ranked in a single scale, which is not true.) But it is equally true that the psychological and social or even the life sciences are far from being as complex, as abstract, or as technologized. There is still plenty of room for the amateur - many simple questions yet to be asked, many nooks and corners to be probed for the first time. In its beginnings, science is easy.
But my main point is more radical. If we define science in terms of its beginnings and its simplest levels rather than in terms of its highest and most complex levels, then science is simply looking at things for yourself rather than trusting to the a priori or to authority of any kind. It is this empirical attitude that I claim can and should be taught to all human beings, including young children. Look for yourself! Let's see how it works! Is that claim correct? How correct? Such as these, I believe, are the fundamental scientific questions and methods of science. And it follows that checking for yourself by going into the back yard and looking with your own eyes is more truly empirical and therefore more "scientific" than looking up the answer in Aristotle or, for that matter, in a textbook of science. It follows also that a child can be "scientific" watching an anthill and so can a housewife comparing the virtues of various soaps by trying them out in her basement.
The empirical attitude is a matter of degree rather than an all-or-none skill acquired all at once in a single moment when you get a Ph.D. and that you can only then practice. This attitude can therefore be cultivated and improved bit by bit. And when phrased in this way - keeping in touch with reality, keeping your eyes open - it becomes almost a defining characteristic of humanness itself. Helping people to become more empirical is one way of improving their knowing and their knowledge. It helps their "reality testing", to use the psychoanalytic word. That is, it helps people to distinguish facts from wishes, from hopes, or from fears. And it also should help toward improvement of what I might call "psyche testing", truer knowledge of one's subjective world. It is necessary to know when one is wishing or hoping or fearing and whose wishes they are.
In a word, scientists are not a different species. They share with others the characteristic of curiosity, the desire and even the need to understand, to prefer seeing to being blind, and to prefer more reliable to less reliable knowledge. The specialized abilities of the professional scientist are intensifications of these general human qualities. Every normal person, even every child, is a simple, undeveloped, amateur scientist who can in principle be taught to be more sophisticated, more skilled, more advanced. A humanistic view of science and of scientists would certainly suggest such a domestication and democratization of the empirical attitude.
Such a recommendation flows even more strongly from a transhuman or transcendental view of science and scientists. The process of acquiring knowledge (at all its levels) and the contemplation and enjoyment of it is turning out to be one of the richest sources of esthetic raptures, of semireligious ecstasies, of experiences of awe and mystery. Such emotional experiences are among the ultimate joys of living. Orthodox desacralizing science has for various reasons tried to purge itself of these transcendent experiences. Such purging, far from being necessary in order to safeguard the purity of science, is instead a deprivation and a removal from science of its human necessities. It is almost like saying that science need not or cannot be enjoyed.
Such experiences of joy are necessary not only because they bring people into science and keep them there, but also because these esthetic joys may also be cognitive signs, like signal rockets that go off to tell us we have found something important (63). It is in the peak experiences that Being-cognition (43, 44, 46) is most likely to take place. In such moments we are perhaps most able to see into the heart of things.