Psychology: natural science or humanistic discipline?

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Journal of Humanistic Psychology

DOI: 10.1177/002216786500500210 1965; 5; 210 Journal of Humanistic Psychology

Edward Joseph Shoben, JR Psychology : Natural Science or Humanistic Discipline?

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210

PSYCHOLOGY : NATURAL SCIENCE ORHUMANISTIC DISCIPLINE?

EDWARD JOSEPH SHOBEN, JR.Teachers College, Columbia University

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, his Irish testiness aroused by what he re-garded as the uncreative gentility of Victorian literature, once wrotethat &dquo;The mischief began at the end of the seventeenth century, whenman became passive before a nature mechanized....&dquo; One need shareneither Yeats’ literary judgments nor his general Weltanschauung tofind this insight a useful one. He was referring, of course, to the revo-lution in thought that, despite its earlier sources, is associated with thename of Descartes and - to state the case in a grossly oversimplifiedway - conceives of nature as a complex machine. The understandingof that machine depends on the discovery of the laws of matter andmotion, the two irreducibles out of which the world is built. Ntore-over, man himself is a part of the great world-machine, a complicatedbut straightforward product of matter and motion in interaction; thus,his comprehension of himself and his destiny consists in his findingthem accurately reflected in the laws of the universe. Creation andimagination, except as they abet the instrumental processes of discover-ing a pre-existent reality, are quite beside the point.

Pragmatically, the Cartesian vision provided a powerful support fora burgeoning science. Francis Bacon had already indicated the animat-ing motive and the effective reinforcements for the scientific enter-prise when he disposed of the idea of knowledge for its own sake assynonymous with using &dquo;as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be aspouse for fruit.&dquo; The ultimate aim of science, no matter how mazyits wanderings may be, is technological: The reason for plunderingnature’s secrets and for solving the riddle of the great machine - foreven conceiving it as a riddle to be solved -- lies in the promise ofincreased human comfort and authority. The famous chicken, refriger-ated in the snow, held out the hope of fresh meat more widely availableto a larger number of dining tables; and refinements in gunpowder,coupled with a greater knowledge of shell trajectories, meant cleargains in military might. And the discovery and clarification of thelaws of both refrigeration and explosives exalted man’s place in nature,according him the role of the machine’s governor, giving him thestatus of the regulatory device holding dominion over the rest of themechanism.

It was (and is) a conception as high in attractiveness as in potency,and we need pause only briefly to make two points to illumine itsdarker corners. First, as Ashley Thorndike has pointed out, scienceand its machine-model of the universe developed in the West con-



211

temporaneously with magic. Both were phenomena primarily of thensixteenth and seventeenth centuries; both were devoted to bending thecontours of the world to the yearnings of men, and both put a majorpremium on technique. Both, in other words, had their origins inlongings for dominance and case; and if science survived and flourishedwhile magic became an anachronism and a curiosity, it was probablylargely because science better served those motives. Second, the notionof nature as a machine, the workings of which are potentially fullycomprehensible to human minds, whatever its very real advantages, isfirst of all a conception and not a fact; also, it is only one of the con-ceptions men have evolved from their experience of the world. TheTaoist idea of the Orient, for example, paints nature not at all as amechanical contrivance to be mastered, but as an endlessly divertingseries of events to be appreciated. One is grateful to tall mountainsfor the panoramas they permit and to rivers for their cool waters thatsparkle in the sunlight. While questions of building roads or operatingwater-driven mills certainly arise, they are considered within the con-text of this very different view of nature, not as issues arising inherentlyfrom the Baconian or Cartesian propositions that have now become thefamiliar assumptions of VB7 estemers..The purpose of drawing this contrast is obviously not to force a

gratuitous choice between conceptions, but simply to underscore thefact that &dquo;nature&dquo; is a man-made concept. In its history and its variouscultural settings, it reflects wide-ranging and significant differences inits character, and it is intimately intenvoven in the fabric of the par-ticular culture of which it is a part. When we deal with a concept ofnature, then, we deal less with an immutable truth than with a cul-turally embedded hypothesis, the working validity of which must bejudged at Ieast-partly in terms of its context as well as in the light ofperhaps more culturally transcendent considerations.What has been said so far is prologue, a setting of the stage for an

examination of science, conceived as it has been in the West as a tech-nique for the ransacking of nature, as applied to man. The motive forthis application has been consistent with the original Baconian one -a need, as our sway over the external world has been marvelouslyextended, to gain a greater degrce of control over ourselves. This needhas been intensified by two major factors. One is a pattern of socialdevelopments - urbanization, population growth, the emergence ofeconomies that are highly dependent for their maintenance on gener-ated human wants, etc. - all of which demands an increasing degreeof regulation to preserve a decent order in human affairs. The secondis a function of the anxiety provoked by our enlarged powers overnature. Nuclear weaponry is only the most dramatic illustration of theway in which our progress in understanding the world-machine hasexposed us to mortal dangers. Surcease from such threats lies, it issaid, only through a comparable progress in undcrstanding ourselves,thus enabling us to control those impulses in us which could be ourwholesale undoing.



212

Thus motivated, it is not hard to understand our readiness, given ourseventeenth-century conceptual heritage and our awesome triumphs inall types of engineering and medicine, to apply the methods of scienceto human nature as well as to the external world. That readiness,moreover, has been conformed by the very real achievements of psych-ology and the other behavioral sciences, which have been by no meansunproductive of solid knowledge about social structures, communica-tion processes, the nature of human abilities, the conditions affectinglearning and perception, and a host of other topics. There remain,however, problems of sweeping scope and significance.One of these problems has to do with the relationship between the

investigator and the investigated in the human as opposed to thenatural sciences. In physics, chemistry, biology, and even in engineer-ing and medicine, the research worker and practitioner stand outsidethe field of their inquiry, regarding something conceived as differentfrom themselves. This distance lends both perspective and leverage totheir enterprise, and it implies that the thing or process studied isunchanged by the results obtained. Presumably, E equalled mc~’ longbefore Einstein wrote his famous equation or the first atomic pile wasbuilt under the bleachers at Stagg Field in Chicago. The laws ofinternal combustion engines were as valid before the extraction ofgasoline as a fuel from oil permitted us to discover them as they arenow. Further, the process of discovery does not change the laws ortheir working; it merely allows us to progress to other discoveries ofhow the world-machine functions in its grand regularity. We do notalter the behavior of sound waves or gravitational fields or neutrons;we simply harness their activity to our own purposes. Our ability todo so is a consequence of the systematic fit between the verificationoperations of science and what we have here called the Cartesianconception of nature: What is &dquo;natural&dquo; is completely lawful, i.e.,determined by the character of the mechanicm; the verification pro-cedures are merely the rules of observation and inference by which thepostulated regularities may be noticed and stated in generalized terms.Our question is one of whether this highly effective system retains its

power when extended to human beings; the response is one of massivedoubt. Whereas a highly accurate proposition about the physical uni-verse has no effect on the thing described, propositions about the socialworld are likely to function as what Merton has designated as self-fulfilling prophecies. As the trends in the popular literature on childcare suggest, the sheer assertion, backed with the authority of science,that frustration evokes aggression has an effect on the frequency andintensity with which parents frustrate children - at least within thosecategories of action that define frustration as it is presently understood.The famous Footnote 11 in the Brown decision of the Supreme Courtrepresents the way in which even poor social science becomes both adeterminant and an instrument of social policy; and if the first twoKinsey reports were, as is possible, more expressions of the sexualZeitgeist than shapers of it, it is also highly probable that they were



213

taken by many as a license to behave in a manner that had beenrelatively inhibited prior to their publication. Whatever errors Kinsey’svolumes may have contained, it is likely that they were smaller afterthey became public property than they were before.

There is still another way in which behavioral science has the pro-perties of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Every psychological theory containswithin it an implicit image of man, a conception - more or lessCartesian in its quality - of what the human- species is. In the caseof psychonalysis, the model of man is that of a kind of hydraulic systemin which psychic fluids under pressure must be kept in equilibriumthrough the opening and closing of various psychic valves. While it isimportant not to overstress the point, it can be cogently argued, asLaPiere has tried to do, that the widspread diffusion through societyof this image of the human beings has done much to break down oldernotions of personal accountability and to promote a freer expressionof aggressive and erotic impulses. In most forms of stimulus-responsepsychology, like that of B. F. Skinner, the vision of man is that of. ahighly complex slot-machine: Program the person through controllinghis reinforcement history; drop in a stimulus, and out comes a pre-determined response. In computer-based information theories, on theother hand, men are perceived as somewhat inferior electronic devices.In so far as the mechanical and electronic models are persuasive -and they are likely to be persuasive to the extent that they pragmatic-ally accomplish some designated task - one may at least hypothesizethat they facilitate a strangely utilitarian set of attitudes among people.Individuals, being machines, are to be evaluated as machines. Theyare to be used, repaired, reused, and discarded, depending on theirefhciency. The criterion of efficiency, however, draws its authority inthis context not from science but from ethics, and we are suddenlyconfronted with a moral dimension of science that never appears inphysics. The so-called &dquo;sin of the physicists,&dquo; charged against the in-ventors of the atomic bomb, has to do with the social use made of aproduct of science, not with the exercise of a self-fulfilling prophecythrough the promulgation of an implicit model of man. It seems reason-ably clear that the fit of verification operations to the conception of thedomain to be studied is far less tight in psychology and sociology thanit is in biology and chemistry. The investigation of men, since it iscarried out by men, has a significant probability of changing the objectof inquiry, and the changes are subject to moral evaluation. Somethingquite different from the discovery of the laws of the timeless world-machine is at work here, and it challenges the fundamental idea thatthe methods of &dquo;natural&dquo; science can be imported wholesale to extendour knowledge of ourselves, particularly of ourselves as judging, evalu-ating beings

This consideration brings us to a second major problem. In a worldin which the tension between democracy and totalitarianism has a grimand commanding reality for most of us, Professor Skinner has pursuedfar more bravely and candidly than most the implications of the view



214

of &dquo;natural&dquo; science for our social life. Briefly, he bluntly concludesthat it is increasingly &dquo;at odds with the traditional democratic concep-tion of man&dquo; and that as deterministic explanations

... , become more and more comprehensive, the contribution whichmay be claimed by the individual himself appears to approach zero.Man’s vaunted creative powers, his original accomplishments in art,science, and morals, his capacity to choose and our right to hold himresponsible for the consequences of his choice -none of these is con-spicuous in’ this new self-portrait.

Or, as Skinner has put it on another occasion, &dquo;Men may be free todo as they please, but they are not free to please.&dquo;

Such may well be the case, but the thing to note is that Dr. Skinner’sstatement is a proclamation of .faith, not a demonstration of truth. Asa proclamation of faith, it is entirely legitimate, but it leaves ampleroom for other faiths like that of democracy, which assumes a measure,however restricted it may be, of free choice and individual responsi-bility in the . conduct of human affairs. Meanwhile, the competitionbetween behavioral science, conceived in Skinner’s terms, and demo-cracy merits closer examination. I .

. Technologized, behavioral science - fulfilling the usual scientificobjectives of description, prediction, . and control - leads to culturalengineering. Through operant conditioning and psychopharmacology,through advertising-cum-pmpaganda and carefully controlled forms ofchild rearing, and through subliminal suggestion and hypnopedia, theconduct of men is to be shaped into forms congruent with the demandsof some fair new world. Furthermore, they are to want the benefits ofsuch manipulation; through the . management . of their motives, theywill feel no pain, only joy in being dwellers in utopia.

But who are to be the cultural engineers, and according to whatprinciples are they to decide the human moulds into which the rest ofus are to be poured ? Whoever they are, how are the motivators to bethemselves motivated? These questions are not merely factitious, andthey point again to the serious discontinuity between science as appliedto the nonpersonal world and science as applied to persons. When manis both the object of science and the class to which the scientist belongs,then whatever power may be generated is not the property of man buto f particular men in relation to other particular men. It becomes aninstrument of control in the hands of the few..How is this instrument of control to be wisely exercised? In one

conception, the trick would lie in analyzing the specific behaviors thatdefine a democratic repertoire and then, by managing the nature andcontingencies of reinforcement systematically shaping a population of&dquo;democratic personalities.&dquo; Leaving aside for the moment the questionof why the conditioners would bother with such an exercise, one isentitled to doubt that the specific operants appropriate to a democraticway of life are knowable. Given a social frame of reference like that ofdemocracy, it. can be argued that specificity in the behavioral reper-



215

toire is precisely what is not a central desideratum. Rather, thc aims ofteaching and learning in this context must be phrased in some kind ofvague but hardly meaningless language like the application of criticalintelligence to interpersonal and- societal affairs. Instead of specificresponses, this kind of objective puts a premium on a highly generalbehavioral flexibility, controlled by a process called reflective thought,informed by the imagination of possibilities as yet unrealized, and sub-jected to relatively articulate criteria of value. For the moment at least,the hypothesis is tenable that such a goal is not only difhcult to achievethrough cultural engineering; it is essentially incompatible with sucha method.

If, for example, we examine the element of value in our tripartiteformulation, we may ask if the conditioners are to construct a societyin which a strong sense of, say, honor is to mediate the relationshipsamong men. The idea of honor, however, is derivable from neither theCartesian world-view nor the verification procedures of science. If ithas meaning, it comes from a scanning of human experience and anact of judgment by a person using the imperfect but distinctive instru-ment of his species - his critical imagination and intelligence. LikeGeorge Eliot’s conccption of justice, honor is not &dquo;without us as a fact,but within us as a great yearning,&dquo; and, acting upon that yearning,each of-us in his quest for honor may find and consider many objects.In the course of our seeking, we progressively clarify our functioningnotions of honor (or justice, or integrity, or any of the great moralideals that are unique to men); and regardless of the consensus weachieve among us, our normative conceptions are still very much ourown by virtue of our special experience in the search for the conductand the style of life that best satisfy the yearning within our individualbreasts. A strong and operating sense of honor (or justice) is almostcertainly learned; but there is space to doubt that it can be directlytaught, and one again suspects that its conditioning or engineering isquite unlikely.But if one argues that traditional values, frankly muzzy as they are,

provide a poor base for deciding the contours of the good society, thenwe can quite properly shift our ground. If we -assume, a little dubi-ously, that all men fundamentally want and prize the same things,we can draw up a list of central human desires : food, drink, amuse-ment, sexual gratification, aesthetic experience, opportunities to acquireknowledge, health and longevity, etc. When the list is settled upon,then the problem becomes the sheerly technical one of how to condi-tion men in the behaviors that most probably assure the attainmentof these objectives. Ignoring the singular lack of success so far in thehistory of psychology in formulating lists of basic wants, we can stillworry. If these motives are indeed -the fundamental ones, on whichones are the cultural engineers acting in turning the rest of us intomore effective pursuers of what we like? Or to the extent that theirtask imposes a restriction on the degree to which they enjoy these basicgratifications, what reinforcement supports their altruism? It cannot be



216

because of obligation or responsibility; like honor, these terms rcf~er tovalues and lie outside the strict scientist’s lexicon. Neither can it bebecause of an affectionate concern for humanity, for humanity is whatthey are trying to shape, not a tradition to which they hold themselvessubject. Could it be for the straightforward delight of wielding power?Quite possibly. But if so, then man has certainly not &dquo;won dominionover himself&dquo; - that catchphrase which confers public popularity onthe behavioral sciences in this tense age. Rather, a few men, possessedof the potent means, have won dominion over other men, and thetriumph of social science becomes the groundwork for oligarchy.

It is possible, of course, that the oligarchs may be benevolent,although &dquo;benevolence&dquo; is once again one of those terms of value thatseem so hard to avoid despite the positivistic interdict against them.The probable benevolence of the cultural engineers is suspect, however,on two counts. First, there is the evidence of history, which turns upfew if any instances of men who, having placed themselves outside thereach of their fellows’ law and above the shared traditions of civility,have used large powers benignly. It is hardly an accident that thewords dictator and despot connote precisely the exercise of force andcontrol beyond the limits set by conventional concepts of humaneness,wrung a little vaguely but with many tears and much thought fromthe racial experience. Second, for those who, like the cultural engineers,are liberated from the illusions of value and the myths of moral tradi-tion, there is little basis left for preferring one of their impulses toanother except the relative strength of the impulses themselves. Freedof personal conscience and social loyalty, decisions with respect to thegoals of conditioning become whimsically subject to whatever yen isuppermost at the time in the Triebe of the conditioners - things ofthe very chance that it is the business of science to minimize if noteliminate. The newly found control of man as a part of nature, then,turns out to be the control of many men by a few men, and those fewmen turn out, in turn, to be remarkably &dquo;natural&dquo; - that is, essen-tially subject to their own rawest impulses. Where is the analogue tounlocking the mysteries of the world-machine for the sake of greaterhuman ease and extended human dominion?

This analysis is reminiscent, of course, of Emerson’stwo laws discrete, .

Not reconciled, -Law for man, and law for thing;The last build town and fleet,But it runs wild,And doth the man unking.

The implied objection cuts deeper, however, than the humanisticcaveat against the anti-democratic character of a completely deter-ministic science applied to human affairs. Such a science is likely tobe a defective one; for while it is certainly true that man is a part ofnature and therefore obedient to the &dquo;law for &dquo;thing&dquo; that runs the



217

great machine, it is simply inaccurate to say that he is nothing but apart of nature in this Cartesian sense. We have already reminded our-selves that nature is a notion of man’s own making. We can nowextend this observation by contending that the concept of nature is infundamental ways a product of man’s experience of what is differentfrom himself.Out of this experience of difference comes the condition which, in

Norbert Wiener’s view, makes possible the surest and most spectacularsuccesses in natural science - the high degree of isolation of observedphenomena from the observer that obtains, for instance, in astronomyor particle physics. In the social disciplines, on the contrary, observersare inevitably and inextricably bound up with their observations. Con-sequently, says Wiener,

.

Whether our investigations in the social sciences be statistical ordynamic ... they can never ... furnish us with a quantity of verifi-able, significant information which begins to compare with that whichwe have learned to expect in the natural sciences.... There is muchwhich we must leave, whether we like it or not, to the &dquo;unscientific,&dquo;narrative method of the professional historian.

If we take &dquo;professional historian&dquo; here as an omnibus category thatalso includes poets. and philosophers, artists and theologians, literarycritics and students of politics, then we may understand Wiener assaying that science has no monopoly on the angles of regard fromwhich it is fruitful to examine the human condition, i.e., the conditionof the only inhabitant of the globe who is inveterately given to self-scrutiny and self-evaluation. Any attempt by men to study themselvesthat does not attend fully to these tendencies toward self-scnitiny andself-evaluation is at once a contradiction in terms of a denial of thebasic experience of difference on which the scientific world-view isfounded. When man treats himself as he treats heat, light, and elec-tricity, he denudes himself of the very traits that make him distinctivein the universe, and his efforts at understanding are therefore sharplycurtailed. If he loses his identity as a member of the old, proud pageantof human history, he also loses the sources of provocative insights abouthimself.

In many ways, the difficulty here seems chargeable to the peculiarsusceptibility among the behavioral sciences, especially in psychology,to logical positivism. Established as an essentially descriptive portrayalof the logic of natural scientists, psychologists, eager for full member-ship in Solomon’s House, have taken this philosophical position as aprescriptive set of procedural rules. Whatever the advantages of thisact, one outcome has been the strengthening of a kind of mystique ofempirical research. According to this positivistic myth, the only prob-lems and materials which are defined as significant arc those which thecurrent canons of investigative method and the current quantitativetechniques can handle. Conversely, any question which cannot be dealtwith in positivistic terms is put aside as technical &dquo;nonsense.&dquo; The result



218

has been a trivial but long-standing flirtation with reductionism and avoluntary wearing of intellectual blinders. If we know something aboutanxiety, we know next to nothing about joy, zest, or love. Our attackon the riddle of the schizophrenias, a poignant set of puzzles defined bysocial evaluations not unmarked by heartbreak, still proceeds throughanagram-solutions and differential reaction times. The urgent prob-lem of population control is as yet untouched by a psychologists, andwhat passes for the psychology of art ordinarily is offensive to artists.While we have spilled ink by the hogshead in reporting studies oflearning, we are only now coming to grips with the processes by whichchildren acquire skill in language or an interest in biology, and theformal contribution of psychology to the improvement of race relationsis small and far more dependent on the liberal spirit of psychologiststhan on the solidity of the knowledge produced by their science. Per-sonal responsibility is inadmissible as a trait concept, and there havebeen few investigations of character, despite Peck and Havighurst,since the Hartshorne and May studies of more than thirty years ago.And if we have some glimmerings of usable insight about our behavior,we are still very much in the dark about the qualities of our experienceand the way it interacts with our overt conduct.

But to recite this only illustrative catalogue of shortcomings forwhich a too ready acceptance of positivism may be responsible is in noway to impugn quantitative methods or empirical approaches to thehuman scene. As an aid to our understanding of ourselves, they areindispensable, and as a means of explaining the actions of men, theyarc powerful if strikingly limited. Psychology’s great opportunity liesnot in discarding its sturdily expanding methodological apparatus, butin informing it with the humanistic vision, the quest for an even fullerstatement of the &dquo;law for man&dquo; as against the &dquo;law for thing.&dquo; Whatthis transformation most profoundly demands is a revised focus on thesource of problems. Rather than coming from the structure of a sciencemodeled on physics, problems could more fruitfully be derived fromdirect experience - of self, of interpersonal relations, of society, ofeducation and art, of science and religion, etc. If this is the stuff whichpoems are made on, it is also the basis of humane scholarship definedas the critical examination of human experience and behavior in thelight of history and in a context of explicit values. It is quite conceiv-able that psychology, concerned more with humane scholarship thanwith the status of a formal science, could become the first of thehumanistic disciplines to apply systematic empirical observation to thecomprehension of the human condition.

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Psychology: natural science or humanistic discipline?