3. Science and the Studies of Man

3 Science and the Studies of Man ELISEO VIVAS I These notes intend to show that the disciplines fashionably called at present "the behavioral sciences" are not scientific in the sense that the physical and the biological sciences are scientific. It is in the latter sense, in the sense we employ it in speaking of the exact, the natural sciences, that I shall use the term "science." The so-called behavioral sciences I shall refer to as the disciplines or studies of man. It is a pity that we cannot call them collectively "anthropology," thus providing ourselves with a much needed term to refer to all the disciplines whose subject matter is anthro pos and the institutions that actualize and secure his values.! But since I do not hold that the only valid knowledge is the scientific, but believe that there is philosophical knowledge of a substantive nature and that there is moral and religious knowledge and, in a qualified sense, even aesthetic knowledge, it is not my intention to disparage the studies of man. These disciplines attain truth of their kind and have worth irrespective of whether or not they employ the methods of the sciences.

Although in view of the Zeitgeist it would be naive to expect the differences between the studies of man and the sciences to be acknowledged, nevertheless it is important to be clear about them because the studies of man, when they are thought of as scientific, tend to develop a number of objectionable symptoms. Their lan50 Science and the Studies of Man 51 guage tends to become gobbledygook. 2 The matter accepted as· the object of inquiry tends to be confined to those aspects of man and his activities that can be handled quantitatively or at least objec tively. This would not necessarily be productive of harm were not the assumption widely and uncritically accepted that the real is only that which can be brought to the attention of the scientist. This assumption is operative in academic psychology with harmful consequences. We are told by men superbly equipped mentally that man has no mind. The psychologist initially understands what the statement means. Mind is not an entity in the sense in which the liver or the lungs are entities. But soon the statement is taken out of its context to mean that man's minding is a process, that can be understood adequately by analogy with complex "thinking"

machines. The upshot is that subjective experience, what Santayana called "the inward landscape," is first denied existence as a valid object of inquiry and finally denied existence tout court. Those who accept these denials do not stop to think what effects they have on scholarly thought. Consider, for instance, that neither Freud nor Rhine (whatever the ultimate judgment concerning the validity of his speculations or experiments) could have even started on his work had he taken the behaviorists seriously.3 Along with the acceptance of these denials comes the habit of looking upon man as we look upon the other animals, simultane ously failing to realize the consequences of our change of attitude. But we cannot maintain our self-respect if implicit in our approach to ourselves and others lies the conviction that man is only that which science says he is. And one of the consequences of a loss. of self-respect is that the fiber of actual living is coarsened. 4 Other objectionable symptoms appear when we overlook the dif ference between the studies of man and the sciences. A false and sometimes an utterly absurd quantification is introduced into sub ject matter that is not quantifiable. The triviality and the egre...

gious absurdity of the results thus obtained do not daunt the man bent on such specious feats, since he does not take the slightest pains to inquire what makes one subject matter quantifiable and another not. This question, apparently, is not one that can be sen· sibly asked, since, not being quantifiable, it is not itself a scientific 52 Scientism and Values question. It must be, therefore, what misologists refer to as a "phil osophic" question-by which is meant one that no s,ensible man would bother his head about. Still another objectionable symptom appears when we overlook the difference between science and the studies of man: the latter become irrelevant to the human situation, since they are taken to be value-free, pure. As a result .a number of consequences follow. The distinction made by Aristotle between the theoretical and the practical sciences is erased, and the studies of man become irrelevant to the human situation, which presumably they were initiated to elucidate. When it is acknowledged that they can be applied in the way that the pure sciences can be applied, a facti tious problem appears, viz., the relation between fact and value, between the pure science and the valuable ends that they are ap plied to secure. The ends are taken to be external to the science and therefore considered arbitrary and unattainable by rational suasion.

In moral philosophy and in the philosophy of religion, the con sequences of erasing the distinction between the theoretical and the practical sciences are even worse. Philosophers of a positivist and those of a linguistic orientation insist that their task is to carry on a philosophical analysis and not to "preach" or "moral ize." The latter is considered demeaning, although sometimes the need for it is verbally conceded. The immediate result of this doc trine is a kind of institutionalized schizophrenia, according to which the. philosophic analysis of moral decisions is kept in one compartment of the mind, hermetically sealed and inviolate, while the actual life of the philosopher goes its way untouched by what he knows or professes to know about morality. At a time when we could use the maximum of intelligence in solving our practical problems and still not have enough, philosophers take pride in demonstrating, on the basis of an antiquated psychology and sim plistic dichotomies, that moral conflicts cannot, ultimately, be re solved rationally. If this were truly the case, one could not adduce the disadvantages of this view as reasons for not accepting it. But one would expect that responsible human beings would explore Science and the Studies of Man 53 the alternatives in a wholehearted way and not be complacent about what they take to be the truth, when it is so obviously one that cannot improve our desperate pr.actical situation.

II To show that the disciplines of man are not sciences, all one needs to do is to point to the fact that while the physical and the biological sciences are each one science, or a constellation of disci plines more or less interdependent in respect to subject matter and in the process of reduction to one science through the exten sion and simplification of their laws, this is not the case with the studies of man. There is no such thing as Marxist physics as dis tinct from capitalist physics. Pontecorvo can defect to Russia, but the knowledge of physics he takes with him was developed in the Western world. This is, true also of biology. When Lisenko, for reasons external to the science of genetics, proposes. theories that are in harmony with his political beliefs, there are means of show ing that his results are false-if, indeed, they are, which is some thing experts decide. But this does not hold for the disciplines of man. Among them we do not find a science or several'sciences, but innumerable schools at bitter war with one another, aiming, as it seems to the outsider, for total victory and the unconditional sur render of the loser. At best these factions lack any kind of rela tionship with one another; at worst, and not infrequently, they actually contradict one another.

Take psychology. The work of the Gestalt psychologists has not been integrated with that of Hull and of Tolman and of Lashley and Eysenck and the hundreds of schools of psychology that make up the chaotic domain of that discipline. When we turn to depth psychology the factionalism is even more obvious, the partisanship among the various schools more rife and more embittered, and the possibility of integration seems less likely. Recently a psycholo gist named Ruth Monroe published a book entitled Schools of Psychoanalytic Thought) An Exposition) Critique) and Attempt at Integration. 5 The one thing we can say in favor of this work, with.

54 Scientism and Values out fear of contradiction, is that Dr. Monroe's amiable modesty is not false, for all she succeeded in doing was to make the attempt at integration. We have not yet heard that as the result of her at tempt Freudians and Jungians. have united with Adlerians and with the followers of Rank and of Sullivan and of Horney and of Fromm and the other schools in a grand ecum.enical fellowship of integrated love and intellectual cooperation. This is also true of sociology and of anthropology. Malinowski has his school, and so has Radcliffe-Brown and Kroeber and any one else who is anyone and some who are not. In 1931, Radcliffe-Brown wrote: It is impossible to reconcile the different theories with one another, or even to discover principles of method about which there is general agreement. To say nothing of theories of the derivation of culture from a lost Atlantis or a lost Pacific continent, we are offered a choice between the Egyptian theory championed in its latest form by Pro fessor Elliot Smith, or the theory of culture cycles of Graebner, or the somewhat different theory of Father Schmidt, or that of Frobenius, and I know not how many more. Each school goes its own way, build ing up its own hypothetical structure, not attempting to seek out points on which agreement can be reached with others. The procedure is often that of disciples of a cult rather than that of students of a science.6 And a little later Linton referred to the same situation. Falling back on the youthfulness of the science, he tells, us that anthropol ogy is "unsure of its objectives" and that "this has resulted in the development of a number of different schools." Although these statements are over twenty years old, they apply to the contempo r.ary situation. 7 Obviously, where there are schools and no effective means ot mediating among them and of integrating the results, there is no one science, and where there is no one science, there is, properly speaking, no science. If it is any comfort to the students of man, we can say that their disciplines constitute a protoscience, an Urnaturwissenschaft) out of which, it is· hoped, a science will come in the fullness of time. Against hope there can be no argument.

Science and the Studies of Man 55 But at the moment we must admit that the presence of these fac tions and divisions is clear proof that conflicting differences of opinion-for we cannot call them scientific hypotheses~annot be subjected to the same kind of verification and invalidation to which scientists submit their hypotheses. I do not mean to assert that som.e, aspects of man and of his insti. tutions are not susceptible of scientific treatment or of something that makes the brave effort-all the more admirable because it is so pitifully unsuccessful-to approximate the rigorous techniques and procedures of the sciences. There is a great difference, for in stance, between Hobbes' or Hume's psychology and som.e are.as· of contemporary psychology. And there is a great difference between the accounts of primitive peoples brought back by missionaries prior to the development of anthropology and the studies of con temporary anthropologists. It is easy, on the other hand, to exag gerate the difference between us and our prescientific ancestors, and the reason is that we think of our studies of man as scientific and of theirs as not scientific. But in quite a responsible sense the H istoria general of Fr. de SahagUn has been called a rigorous, lin guistic and ethnographic account of early sixteenth-century Mex ico.8 Still, when one has said the most that can be said for the sci entific status of contemporary studies, of man, the difference be tween them and the sciences remains. What aspects of man and of his activities can be treated in a manner approaching that of the sciences and what aspects cannot is; a question that cannot be an swered in an a priori manner; it is a strictly empirical, casuistic question. But it is not a question that I expect to hear asked seri ously in my lifetime by students of man. There are not many men in any generation who have the courage to challenge the Zeitgeist.

When scientific status is uncritically claimed for the studies of man, the result is what, following Hayek, is known as "scientism." And scientism is endemic in our culture--or so, for the moment, it seems to be. But scientism is not yet absolutely pandemic, and a number of students of man can be cited who are fully aware that their disci plines are· not scientific in the sense in which I am using the term in these notes. Let me cite two instances among the several that 56 Scientism and Values have come to my attention. In an article entitled "Social Scientist: Man Between," Robert Redfield, with the wisdom and modesty those who enjoyed the privilege of his friendship expected of him, acknowledged the differences between the social scientist and the student of the humanities. 9 In psychology, Abraham Maslow has courageously and, in my outsider's opinion, successfully tried to inquire into phenomena in which the imitation of the methods of the physicist is simply inconceivable.

When I say that physics and biology are sciences, I do not mean that in any given science at a given time there are not stubborn, unresolved problems about which scientists are in doubt. These problems no doubt exist, and they are no doubt the source of dis agreements. But these disagreements seem to arise for the most part, at least in the Western regions of the science, so to speak, where the explorers are opening the land and no settlement has yet taken place. Nor do they seem to be the source of the kinds of schools or factions that we find in the studies of man. I am aware that in biology there are unresolved problems that seem to be cause for factionalism and cannot be said to be frontier problems: there is a minority that holds that teleology and vital ism are unresolved problems-if they are two, and not essentially one. The outsider is in no position to judge the merits of the solu tions proposed for these problems when they are formulated within the domain of biology. All he can do is suspend judgment on the ground that if these problems have been resolved success fully, it is difficult to see why reputable scientists continue to re ject the solutions offered. May not the reason be that these stub born problems are philosophic, and not scientific, and seem to arise from causes similar to those to which the factionalism of the disciplines of man can be traced, viz., the effort to deal with bio logical subject matter in the way in which the physicist deals with his? However that may be, when allowance is made for these dis agreements, it still can be said in fairness that the factionalism that is the normal condition in the studies of man does not exist in anything like the same degree in biology .10 The preceding argument should carry conviction, although it is external to the disciplines themselves. When it is advanced, stuScience and the Studies of Man 57 dents of man make two replies. With Linton they plead the youth of their studies. When one remembers the rapidity of the develop ment of classical mechanics from Galileo to Newton, all this old excuse does is to remind one of Oscar Wilde's epigram about the United States: "America's youth is its oldest tradition." The sec ond reply is that what gives a discipline its status as a science is the use of the scientific method, and since the studies of man use this method, they are sciences. It is fair to reply to them that it is a strange kind of subject matter that, when treated scientifically, pro duces no better results, in terms of agreement, than philosophers produce. It is also fair to add that it is a question whether in some of the disciplines of man scientific method in any but the most rudimentary sense can be said to be applicable. Indeed, it might not be useless to ask whether ((the scientific method" (as, distinct from a variety of generalized techniques, procedures, and manners of observation and correlation) is not the most successful canard palmed off by philosophers on philosophically naive scientists but let me hasten to add that I would not dare ask this question, for only madmen dare outrage the pieties of their fellow beings.

We must consider another difficulty that prevents the studies of man from achieving the status of a science. The difficulty is not encountered by all the studies of man; it is encountered only by those that must reckon with value. Let us first note the obvious fact that the student of man cannot always exclude value from his discipline. The social scientist (whether anthropologist or sociologist), the political theorist, the depth psychologist, and the student of personality turn their work into sheer triviality if they ignore the values of men. I know that Freud asserted that the psychoanalyst is not interested in the morals of his patient. But I take it that it is generally recognized today that this is one point on which Freud was in error. For there seems to be a close link between neuroses and morality, as Freud himself clearly saw. I have not forgotten that since Spinoza's day many philosophers have professed to be able to observe moral phenom ena scientifically-by which they mean, as the physicist observes falling bodies. Hume alleged that his method was that of the physi cist and called on philosophers to follow his lead. And in our day, 58 Scientism and Values as I have noted above, numerous moral philosophers-particularly the positivists, those known as analytic philosophers, and the soit distant "metamoralists" -make the same assertion. I do not deny that some observers are more objective than others. But the prob lem is not as simple as those who allege that values can be observed objectively seem to think it is.

One fact that complicates the objective observation of values is that the student has no means of observing values. but that which is employed by anyone at any time, be he Tom, Dick, or Harry. When Fortune characterizes Dobu culture, Ruth Bunzel observes the Zuni, and Margaret Mead the Arapesh, they observe the values that give these cultures their distinctive qualities in the very way in which we observe one man's honesty or another's vanity. When Miss Mead's observations are criticized, as they were by Thurn wald, because they were hurriedly gathered, she elaborates her method and takes photographs and thus seeks to show that her observations are valid. In other words, the anthropologist may em ploy highly elaborate methods in order to make sure that he has interviewed a representative number of members of the commu nity he studies and that he has not, in haste, attributed to it traits that are not there. But ultimately the judgment, "The Pueblos are Apollonian," is grounded on the same procedures of observation that enable me to say that Jphn is honest and Dick is vain. Photo graphs, adequate sampling, statistics, psychographs, personality tests, and the rest of the apparatus the anthropologist employs to avoid misreading the value traits he observes seek to validate the grasping of a value or complex of values. But this must first be grasped, nor can the observer grasp it in any other way than you or I grasp it. If another anthropologist had disagreed with Fortune -as I understand one did-about Dobu, the discussion would have to be carried on in precisely the same terms we would carry it on if you were to disagree with me about Tom's honesty. You would point out certain actions of Tom that you have observed.

These are purely behavioral observations. You might say that he invariably returns money loaned to him, even when the lender forgets about the loan, and that you saw him return money to a cashier who had "shortchanged" herself. And I would have to Science and the Studies of Man 59 agree with you, or I would have to cite other actions of T'om which, I would assert, override your judgment. This is to say that when we discern value, we point to it, and when someone else does not discern it where we point, we give the physical features to which, as I am wont to put it, value is "anchored." It should be noted, however, that value is not identical with the physical traits to which it is anchored. And the reason for this is that two men can agree thoroughly on the physical traits of an object and disagree on its value. I doubt whether D. H. Lawrence and Hemingway would have disagreed about what actually goes on in a bullfight: what the picador and torero and the horse and the bull did, how they behaved. But we know how deeply these two writers disagree about the moral and aesthetic values of bull fighting.

It is true that the physicist also starts with objects and events of ordinary experience, which is to say, with observations that can be made either with the naked senses or with instruments that are extensions of these. In this respect he cannot be said to differ from the student of man. But sooner or later he finds ways of going beyond the initially observable data and of correlating his subject matter with scales and other instruments of measurement. How he does this beyond elementary physics I do not exactly know except in the vaguest way. But that he does it I believe I know. It is necessary to bear this in mind, for it points to the difference be.. tween the objectivity of the scientist and that which the student of man can achieve. Scientific data, even when not quantifiable, are thoroughly public, are objective in the sense that there need be no question concerning their presence within the purview of observation. The values observed by the student of man cannot be freed from inherent vagueness. When we speak of the Apollonian character of a !=ulture, we cannot be certain that all of us are talking about the same thing--even if, after reading Miss Benedict, we backtrack and read Nietzsche also.ll These considerations are not intended to deny that there are cases in which value can be correlated with objective, value-free data--money or work done or some other physical event or feature of things objectively observable--but the limitations of such cor60 Scientism and Values relations .are too obvious to need going into them. Again, we may be able to discover a man's or a group's values by means of psycho logical tests. But aside from the fact that the reliability of these tests is at the moment a controversial matter (for in principle they need not be unreliable), their radical defect, from the standpoint of our discussion, is that they cannot dispense with the definition of the value and its observation and its relation to behavioral traits expressed in the answers to the tests. We cannot judge the presence of a value without apprehending it to be present, and we cannot apprehend it except through the act of intuition through which it makes itself present to us as an intelligible ob ject. From the standpoint of the kind of objectivity which is repre sented by the judgments that make up the sciences, the study of value is, so to speak, born with an original sin that no methodo logical baptism seems to be able to absolve it from. Let me add, however, although only in passing, that this does not make value judgments hopelessly subjective, mere expressions of affective re sponses which in principle are beyond rational suasion. They can achieve, and often do, a remarkable degree of objectivity. But what kind of objectivity is achieved and what degree and by what means are not questions that I can address myself to in this paper.

This does not exhaust our difficulty. The preceding remarks refer to the difference between the objects of science and the ob jects with which the student of man is concerned. But there is another difference, and that is located in the nature of the observ ers. This difference is pointed out by Robert Redfield in the paper referred to above. I shall let Redfield speak for himself: The dif ference between what I call a scientist and a student of man, lies, for one thing, in the fact that the latter observes values, and he ... enters imaginatively into the minds of the value·-carrying human beings he studies. To understand another's value, I exercise my own valuing nature. Moreover, I come to see that this valuing of mine, as I work, is a part of my problem of observation and analysis. It has to be thought about and controlled. The social scientist no longer sees himself as a special kind of machine studying other things conceived as machines, but as· a human being bringing to his study value judgScience and the Studies of Man 61 ments of which he may take account in accomplishing his. work.

Today one hears, without a sense of shock, one anthropologist say to another, "a value-free anthropology is an illusion." 12 This is well said. All of it is true. But as regards Redfield's pic ture of how the student of man sees himself, one may be allowed to express doubts. Redfield was no man to fall into imprudent exaggerations. Nor can I match my superficial and scanty knowl edge of anthropologists with Redfield's. But his statement leaves me ,vondering whether he was pointing to a fact or expressing a hope. For I have heard anthropologists claim for their discipline the status of a science. And I have also heard sociologists make the same claim. And to my dismay, it has come to my attention that students of politics, whom until recently I had ignorantly taken to be free from scientism, are introducing into their discipline the methods and the procedures the employment of which turns a discipline into scientism.

But if Redfield's statement describes correctly the attitude of anthropologists toward their discipline, something follows, the importance of which cannot be exaggerated: We are in a position to return, if not to the identical distinction, at least to a distinc tion similar to that made by German philosophers between the sciences of nature and those of the spirit. If and when and to the extent that this distinction becomes accepted, scientisIJl will be dead. But these are not the only obstacles that prevent us from giving the studies of man the status of a science. Were we able to appre hend values with the same degree of objectivity that we apprehend the traits observed in the objects of the sciences, and were the stu dent of man capable of keeping his own valuations out of the subject matter observed, and were we able to make invariant corre lations of an adequate nature between values and physical struc tures, our observation of the values espoused by an individual and a group would have, as regards susceptibility to scientific treat ment, one inherent and ineradicable limitation. In principle pre diction is impossible about v.alues to be espoused in the future.

Only on a simplistic assumption of a thoroughgoing cultural or 62 Scientism and Values some other kind of determinism could prediction be depended upon. Having said this much, I shall drop the point, for a full elu cidation of it would plunge us into the difficult problem of free dom, and from such a plunge we cannot be sure to return. Another obstacle that prevents us from giving the studies of man the status of a science"-or perhaps another formulation of the point just stated-is that some predictions in the field of these studies can be nullified or realized by the operative force of the prediction upon the matter which is the subject of study. Thus, the prediction that the stock market will fall tomorrow could lead to its fall-if stockholders took the prediction seriously. And the announcement that a given neighborhood will turn into slums could lead, if taken seriously by the inhabitants of the neighbour hood, to just the condition predicted.